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+text: By Colletta SmithConsumer affairs correspondent There has been a spike in demand within the last twelve months, according to manufacturers. Non-medicinal CBD is now on sale in High Street shops across the country, including chemists. But the National Pharmacy Association says the products need clearer information and better checks on content. CBD - cannabidiol - isn't marketed as medicinal cannabis. It doesn't have a psychoactive element that makes the user high. Some studies indicate it can help with childhood epilepsy seizures, and other people think it helps them too. Ubiquity Cannabidiol oil is being added to a range of products - from water, to chocolate, to make-up, tea and coffee. Manufacturers claim sales in the UK are as much as £300m at the moment. It's illegal to print any health claims on the products, but it's a grey area as to who checks the ingredients, or the amount of CBD oil actually contained in each product, many of which can be very expensive. Jasmine Shah from the National Pharmacy Association, which represents hundreds of independent pharmacies, says an increasing number of pharmacists are stocking CBD products, despite the fact that she says "at the moment there is very limited research on the safety and efficacy of these products". She says pharmacists would like "clear authoritative guidance which makes it easy for healthcare professions, consumers and patients to make informed choices". Regulator response CBD is classed as a food supplement, so it's governed by the Food Standards Agency. Because it's a brand-new type of food there's a grace period, where it's allowed to be sold in stores, but the FSA has now asked manufacturers to give specific information about the product. Manufacturers will have to include important scientific details like what it contains, purity levels, manufacturing practices, as well as providing detailed information to demonstrate it is safe for people to consume. The FSA says that despite ample time and repeated requests to CBD manufacturers they've not heard enough from any company in this multimillion pound industry to give them authorisation yet. That leaves those selling the product in a difficult position. Ms Shah doesn't think that selling CBD in pharmacies gives the products extra legitimacy. She says "It's for each pharmacist to decide whether its suitable to stock a CBD product or not, but in terms of the safety and efficacy of it more research is required." The Association for the Cannabinoid Industry is a new group representing around 20 CBD brands. It says members are "unequivocally committed to achieving Novel Foods status via the Food Standards Agency". But the FSA appears to be losing patience with the industry and said it expects "companies to comply with the novel foods process, which includes submitting safety information about their products". "The FSA is considering the best way to ensure CBD food-related products currently on the market move towards compliance," it added. In the meantime, customers buying any CBD product have no guarantees if the product is safe, or indeed if it contains any CBD oil at all.	Pharmacists are calling for better regulation of products claiming to contain cannabis derivative CBD.
+text: Major incident status has been declared at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading while power is restored. Firefighters were called at 11:30 BST on Thursday after a power supply cupboard inside the coronary unit overheated and caused a small fire. Hours earlier crew dealt with a flood in the basement, caused by a burst underground pipe. No-one was injured. Mary Sherry, chief operating officer for Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, said: "Our A&E is formally 'closed' to anything other than life-threatening conditions." Members of the public are asked to go to an urgent care centre, a walk-in centre or A&E at Wexham Park, Stoke Mandeville, Frimley or Basingstoke. 'Full power' Ms Sherry said: "Our staff have been working hard through the night to ensure areas impacted by yesterday's power outage and isolated fire are back to normal. "The hospital is currently in major incident status due to the uncertainty of when full power will be restored to Battle Block and North Block." The water supply has been restored to the hospital and power is back on in the North Block. There are still power issues on the north side of the Battle Block, due to water damage. Patients from Coronary Care Unit were moved to Lodden Ward because of the smoke from the fire, and patients are being moved from Battle Block. The British Red Cross posted on Twitter: "We are assisting at Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading, following a flood and fire yesterday. Team providing support to staff and patients." South Central Ambulance Service said: "We are still conveying all patients in life-threatening conditions to Royal Berkshire Hospital, but all other patients will be conveyed to alternative local emergency departments."	The accident and emergency department of a Berkshire hospital has been closed after a flood and fire on Thursday.
+text: In his first public remarks since his father, King Juan Carlos, decided to abdicate, 46-year-old Prince Felipe said he would dedicate all his strength "to continuing to serve Spaniards". Parliament still needs to officially approve the crown prince's succession. But he could become King Felipe VI as early as 18 June. He will inherit the throne at a time when Spain is struggling with high unemployment and growing demands for Catalonian independence. 'Difficult periods' Prince Felipe made his speech during a cultural award-giving ceremony in north-east Spain. "In difficult periods such as these we are going through, past experience in history shows us that only by uniting our desires, putting the common good ahead of individual interests and promoting the initiative, curiosity and creativity of each person, can we manage to advance to better scenarios," he said. King Juan Carlos announced his abdication on Monday. The king was seen as popular for much of his 38-year reign, but recently many Spaniards have lost confidence in him. His popularity has been dented by a long-running corruption investigation into the business dealings of his youngest daughter and her husband. Support fell further when it was discovered that Juan Carlos had been on a lavish elephant-hunting trip to Botswana in April 2012, in the middle of Spain's financial crisis. But Prince Felipe and his wife, the former TV journalist Princess Letizia, have been largely untainted by these scandals, and score much higher in opinion polls than other members of the Spanish royal family.	Spain's king-in-waiting, Prince Felipe, has said he wants to promote his country as "united and diverse'' when he takes the throne.
+text: Police have fired shots and used tear gas to disperse the demonstrators - some of whom were trying to break into the national assembly. This is the third rally in a month demanding that President Ibrahim Boubakar Keita stand down. There is discontent over a long-running jihadist conflict, an economic crisis and disputed legislative elections. A new opposition coalition led by the conservative Imam, Mahmoud Dicko, this week said it had dropped its demand for President Keita to step down. But it is still insisting on further reforms after rejecting concessions from the Malian president including the formation of a unity government. What's the latest in Mali? Many thousands of protestors have been out on the streets of Bamako, the BBC's Africa regional editor Will Ross reports. Some of them briefly made it into the building of the national broadcaster, ORTM, which was then forced off air. Roads were blocked with burning barricades. Some looting has taken place and there are reports of young men trying to break into the national assembly. Two sources told the Reuters news agency that at least one person was killed outside the assembly. Why are people protesting? This demonstration is the third since June. Protests started after the opposition coalition rejected concessions from President Keita designed to end a political stand-off over a disputed legislative election in March. The opposition this week said the movement had dropped its demand for President Ibrahim Boubakar Keita to step down. But it still called this protest because it wants more reforms. Keita secured a second five-year term in 2018 but he has faced increased opposition over a rise in jihadist violence and an economic crisis. Malians will hope this instability does not play into the hands of the jihadists who are behind the escalating violence in the north and centre of the country.	Protesters in Mali have forced the state broadcaster off air during large demonstrations in the capital Bamako.
+text: The call by Imperial Tobacco came at the start of a judicial review at the Court of Session of measures passed by the parliament in January. Imperial is also trying to stop a ban on vending machines selling cigarettes. The firm told the court the provisions were outside the legislative competency of Holyrood and were not law. Imperial argued the measures, contained in the Tobacco and Primary Medical Services (Scotland) Act, related to matters reserved to the Westminster parliament under consumer protection provisions. It also claimed the relevant sections modified a rule of Scottish criminal law which was "special to a reserved matter" and that it would alter freedom of trade provisions in the 1707 Act of Union between Scotland and England. Imperial's action is being contested by Scotland's senior law officer, the Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini, who maintained the firm was not entitled to the orders it sought. Junior counsel for Imperial Tobacco, Brian Gill, told the court the company did not accept "the various assertions made and opinions expressed about smoking and health either by the Scottish government or members of the Scottish parliament" during the passage of the Bill, or by the Lord Advocate. 'Drastic ban' Mr Gill said: "The effect of Section 1 (of the Act) is to criminalise the display of tobacco products or smoking-related products which is a currently lawful display. What is created is a wholly new offence in Scottish criminal law." He said it amounted to "a drastic outright ban". He also argued the provision over cigarette vending machines also created a criminal offence. "The Scottish Parliament has taken a deliberate legislative decision to create these new offences," he said. The Scottish government has announced the display ban would come into effect for larger retailers next year and for smaller shops in 2013. The Lord Advocate said the introduction of the bill was "part of a government programme to improve Scottish public health by reducing smoking". She said smoking was estimated to be responsible for 13,500 deaths each year and many more hospital admissions. Ms Angiolini maintained the sections of the legislation containing the bans did not relate to a reserved matter and were within the legislative competency of the Scottish parliament. The hearing continues. The judge, Lord Bracadale, is expected to give a decision at a later date.	A tobacco giant has called on a judge to set aside Scottish parliament plans to ban the open display of cigarettes in shops.
+text: By Chris PageBBC News Ireland Correspondent No-one lives in the family home at the moment, but local people took part in a one-and-a-quarter mile (2km) long procession to a Hindu Temple to pray for Mr Varadkar when he was elected as the leader of Republic of Ireland's biggest party, Fine Gael. Politics, to some extent, runs in the family. Two of Mr Varadkar's uncles were imprisoned for campaigning - peacefully - for Indian independence. Ireland became a republic in the late 1940s, around the same time as Britain withdrew from India. The countries were two of the British Empire's most turbulent territories, but until the last few years, no-one thought they would be united in the person of the taoiseach. Ashok met his wife, Miriam, while working in a hospital in the UK. She was a nurse from County Waterford in Ireland and after a spell in India, they settled in Dublin, where Leo was born in 1979. His political ambitions were clear from a very young age. When he was eight, a shopkeeper asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. Leo replied that he wanted to be the minister for health. He demonstrated his commitment to getting that job when he was at university, first standing for election while he was studying for a medical degree at Trinity College in his home city. Ten years ago he was elected to the Irish parliament. While moving through ministerial positions - including health - he gained a reputation as a "sharp-shooting, straight-talking media darling", in the words of one journalist. He chimed with the mood of modern Ireland, as the embodiment of deep social change. When Mr Varadkar was a young child, stereotypes of Ireland still prevailed abroad - novels and films had featured thatched cottages drenched in drizzle and church steeples shrouded in mist. The reality was different, but the country was one of the poorest in Western Europe and there were relatively few immigrants. But in the 1990s, the Celtic tiger became a global phenomenon. Low corporate tax rates and financial deregulation meant the Irish economy became more associated with Apple and Google than with agriculture and Guinness. With wealth came secularisation. While the change was more obvious among younger people in the cities, it affected the whole nation. The Roman Catholic Church, which had been the most powerful force in the country, was weakened by child abuse scandals and divorce and homosexuality were legalised. When Mr Varadkar became the first Irish cabinet minister to come out as gay in 2015, he said: "It's not a big deal for me any more and I hope it isn't for anybody else - it shouldn't be." That has basically proved to be the case. The international headlines about Mr Varadkar have focused on his sexuality, ethnicity and age. But in Ireland itself, those factors haven't been mentioned much during the race to succeed Enda Kenny as prime minister. Instead the debate has focused on economics. While he leans to the left on social issues, Mr Varadkar's opponents are trying to portray him as a right-wing ideologue because of his economic policies. During his party leadership campaign he said Fine Gael should represent people who get up early, although more recently, he has positioned himself in the political centre ground, saying he wants "a republic of opportunity". If you ask your average person in Ireland what is most surprising about Mr Varadkar's ascent to high office, they'll probably say it's the fact he's under 40. In this much stereotyped and once socially conservative country, there has been a rapid revolution in attitudes.	I don't think there was any dancing in Dublin to mark Leo Varadkar's installation as taoiseach (prime minister). But there was some in Mumbai, from where his father, Ashok, hails.
+text: Greater Anglia is rolling out a £1.4bn fleet, but passengers in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire have been affected by disruption. It said it had experienced a "much higher" number of faults than usual. The East Suffolk Travellers' Association (ESTA) said the problems were "completely unacceptable". Over the last five days, branch lines have faced cancellations and delays as Greater Anglia rolls out an entire new fleet to replace old trains. Passengers on the Ipswich-Peterborough line have experienced axed services, with replacement buses, for three days in a row. Peter Coghill, from the ESTA, said: "Greater Anglia have an incredibly ambitious programme and that has meant a changeover period. "In the meantime we are left with this rather appalling level of service." Chris Bayfield, from Wickham Market in Suffolk, said his daughter had been late for work after her train was cancelled five times in seven days on the Ipswich-Lowestoft line. "We are very limited for public transport in this area - it's a lifeline really and if it's not operating properly it is causing a lot of inconvenience," he said. Greater Anglia started replacing its 169 trains in September and plans to have them all running by the end of 2020. It said it had rolled out 18 new trains, with 17 old ones taken out of service and would have a "wider pool of back-ups" as it introduced more new trains. A spokeswoman said: "We are very sorry about the cancellations. "This is partly due to faults on a small number of our old and new trains. Some of our services have also been delayed by signalling problems. "Replacing all of our old trains with brand new modern trains is a very complex project, which has required extensive testing across every route." She added a "few glitches" had led to delays and cancellations, but it was working with Swiss manufacturer Stadler to get them fixed.	A rail operator has been criticised for its "appalling" service by a passengers' group following a series of cancellations.
+text: US Health Secretary Alex Azar said the tests were needed to meet a court deadline to reunite families, as the agency's usual methods were too slow. Mr Azar, whose agency oversees migrant detention centres, said about 100 of the children were aged under five. Activists fear the DNA data can be used by the government for other purposes. Critics also say that the children are too young to consent to a DNA test. The agency is bound by a court order to reunite children aged four and under by 10 July and children aged five to 17 by 26 July. Mr Azar said the agency's traditional method of using birth records to match parents and children would take too long, adding that in order to comply with the deadline, normal vetting processes may need to be truncated. Mr Azar added that of the 11,800 minors in the care of the health department, "under 3,000" had been reported as separated from their families. He noted that some children may have become separated either before or after crossing into the US. Immigration activists say the that DNA data can be easily abused once it is collected by the US government, and may be used to track a migrant's whereabouts. Jennifer Falcon with the immigration advocacy group Raices, tweeted that the decision was "further proof the administration has no idea how to reunite families", that were separated after illegally crossing the US border under President Donald Trump's "zero-tolerance" immigration policy. Also on Thursday, CBS News reported that a federal policy loophole allows two child migrant detention centres - the "Tent City" in Tornillo, Texas and a shelter in Homestead, Florida - to evade child welfare inspections required of other shelters. The Tornillo and Homestead detention centres are on federal land, and are therefore not subject to oversight by the local state government, according CBS News. Over the previous weekend, and during the Fourth of July holiday on Wednesday, protesters took to the streets to oppose Mr Trump's decision to separate families. A US immigrant from DR Congo was arrested for attempting to scale the Statue of Liberty in New York, and has been charged with several offences including trespassing.	US officials have ordered DNA tests on some 3,000 migrant children in an effort to reunite families who have been separated at the US-Mexico border.
+text: Poulton Vics FC, who play in Cheshire FA's Wallasey and District League, have seen 10 games postponed since December. A club spokesman said Wirral Council, which runs the league's pitches, had sometimes called off matches "before checking" conditions. The council said the season had been extended to help with the backlog. A club spokesman said games had been postponed without the council waiting "for the referee to make the call" and that due to the number of players who "work Monday to Friday and also shift work", some had now been asked to either take annual leave or arrange cover so that they could play. He said that the club was "frustrated" and had "a paper-thin squad for an important run-in of games". "We believe more common sense needs to be applied to help move [games] early in advance to pitches with better drainage in anticipation of wet conditions." The side are not alone in suffering a fixture pile-up - in the nine-team league, the number of games played by any side ranges from Wallasey Mens FC, who have completed 13 of their 16 games, to Nelson FC, who have only played six. In a statement, the league's organisers asked teams to be "patient" as the fixture secretary had "such a difficult task rescheduling fixtures". A Wirral Council spokesman said games were called off when "weather conditions, usually heavy rain, leave outdoor grass pitches unfit to play on". He said arrangements were in place for teams to "try to rearrange outstanding fixtures", with the football season being "extended for league fixtures from 29 April to 13 May" at the majority of its pitches. He added that two sites, Arrowe Park and Plymyard, would remain open for a further week for league fixtures and any team wanting to use them should contact the council.	An amateur football team may have to play four times each week for the rest of the season after claiming several games were called off "unnecessarily".
+text: It plans to open 17 new stores in the second half of the year, adding to the 18 opened in the first half. The retailer will also expand its international operations, with 20 new stores in other countries, including India, Australia, and Saudi Arabia. Pre-tax profit for the six months to 29 February was up 3% to £66m. But the interim results showed that sales fell 3.1% to £665m. Sales of entertainment products - which are mainly popular DVDs - plunged 47%. WH Smith is limiting the space it devotes to DVDs and new stores generally offer none at all. Chief executive Kate Swann said: "We expect the trading environment to be challenging." "However we are a resilient business with a consistent record of both profit growth and cash generation and we have opportunities for growth in the UK and internationally," she said. The travel business reported an 8% rise in operating profit to £27m. Ms Swann said she did not expect a boost from the London Olympic Games as transport restrictions would make it more difficult to stock stores.	WH Smith is planning further expansion for its travel business, which operates shops in airports, railway stations and motorway service areas.
+text: The price rise is to offset additional costs faced by Guernsey Electricity after a cable link failure to France forced it to produce on-island power. The company said the rise would cost customers between £3 and £10 per month. Deputy Jan Kuttelwascher said ongoing problems meant the price will "not come back down any time soon". Mr Kuttelwascher said: "It will be five or six years before any new cable can actually be laid due to all sorts of regularity issues." The undersea cable link with Jersey had allowed the island to import power from France. Mr Kuttelwascher said: "When we can actually start importing the electricity we will only be able to import about a quarter of our maximum requirements as Jersey is down to one electricity cable." Guernsey Electricity managing director Alan Bates said the "price rise of this size was not ideal" but the fault had led to increased costs, which are now being passed on to customers.	Islanders are being warned the 9% price rise in electricity, due to come into force at midnight, is likely to remain for several years.
+text: By Carolyn RiceTechnology reporter, BBC News The ICO says nearly half of all app users have decided not to download an app because of concerns over privacy. It wants developers to be clear about what data is being accessed and why. More than 320 million apps were downloaded on the busiest day of last year, Christmas Day, and that number is expected to increase this year. "The app industry is one of the fastest growing in the UK, but our survey shows almost half of people have rejected an app due to privacy concerns," said Simon Rice, principal policy adviser for technology at the ICO. "It is important that developers tackle this issue by making sure their apps look after personal information correctly." Alienating users The guidance from the ICO reminds developers that they must comply with the Data Protection Act and that users must be properly informed about what will happen to their personal data if they install and use an app. The ICO suggests that users should be given effective control over their privacy settings. Also the layout of a privacy policy could be better tailored to suit mobile devices with users shown brief but important information first, with the option to click through to another screen for more detail. Adam Joinson, a professor at the University of the West of England who has researched the link between privacy and new technology, said apps that had a privacy policy that was too generic risked alienating users. "By asking for too much information they're putting people off using the app. If developers were more canny they'd have fewer issues," he said. "Users could say, 'I'm happy for an app to have access to my photos but not my address book,' for example." App designers could be losing out financially because of unsuitable privacy policies which put people off using their products, said Mr Rice. Simon Lee, chief executive of app development firm Locassa, said the company tailored its data privacy depending on what the app did. "When we look at how the data is used, we must look at it from a user perspective and ask ourselves, 'Would I be happy with this?' If the answer isn't a resounding 'yes' then there's a strong indication we shouldn't be doing it," he said. "The bottom line is that users trust us when they install our apps on their devices. We must be careful not to abuse that trust."	App developers should ensure they do not misuse customers' data, says the Information Commissioner's Office in new guidance.
+text: An announcement was expected from the executive but the issue was not discussed when ministers met on Monday. Ms Mallon said she only found out the issue was not on the agenda just before the meeting at Stormont. The Executive Office has asked for additional legal advice on the matter. "I have been raising this for a few weeks now," the minister told BBC Good Morning Ulster. The infrastructure minister met the unions, the PSNI and Translink, the chief scientific officer and set up cross-departmental groups ahead of the discussion. She said she had passed her paper round and "hoped it would be discussed" and an agreement on the matter would be found. The first and deputy first ministers have said they are looking at legal advice and will consider the issue again later in the week. However some who work on Northern Ireland's buses and trains feel that debate should have happened by now. Bus driver Michael Cunningham told BBC's Good Morning Ulster it was "disappointing". "We all thought it would be made compulsory and we have been asking for this from the start," he said, pointing to the fact that masks are already compulsory in the rest of the UK. "We want to see our passengers travel safely and people need a bit of confidence to get back on the buses and start using buses again," he said Enforcement and implementation The question of enforcement is a key issue in bringing in the legislation. Alistair Taylor, the Metrobus representative from the GMB union, said because it was a legislative matter that responsibility must lie with the executive. He said as transport services already have policies such as no alcohol or smoking, it could work in a similar way - that the details of people who do not comply are relayed to the authorities. "You can't put front-line staff in a confrontation with customers," he added. "I think the mandatory implementation of the masks would protect us, the drivers and the passengers," he added. The minister said it would be "light touch enforcement and education". "It's very much about education and engagement. We have worked very hard to get a protocol in place," she said. "We have seen in Scotland and England that there has been a direct and immediate change in people's behaviour with the introduction of mandatory coverings - they have moved from about 10% of passengers up to 80%. "The public are complying at very high levels with this because they recognise that it's important in keeping other passengers' safe." "I don't understand why Northern Ireland is behind," she added. She said she hoped there would be clarity and agreement on Thursday. Currently, the executive strongly recommends the use of face masks when indoors, but it is not yet compulsory. In June the World Health Organization (WHO) changed its advice on face masks, saying they should be worn in public where social distancing is not possible to help stop the spread of coronavirus.	Infrastructure Minister Nichola Mallon has said she is "not entirely sure" why plans to make wearing face masks on public transport compulsory in NI have been put on hold.
+text: L'Auberge du Pont de Collonges, known simply as Paul Bocuse, had held its crème de la crème rating since 1965 - a world record. But the Michelin Guide said the food quality was "no longer at the level of three stars". It will now have two. The family of Bocuse - a culinary icon in France - said they were "upset" by the decision. The Michelin Guide's head Gwendal Poullenec visited the restaurant near Lyon on Thursday to deliver the news. "Obviously, there was a lot of emotion," he told the Washington Post in an interview, adding that there had been "a variation in the level of the cuisine, but it remains excellent." Bocuse, who died in 2018 aged 91, was a household name in France. He was the head of an international food empire and known as the "pope" of cooking in his home country. The restaurant's loss of a highly coveted third star has shocked France and drawn confusion and outrage from food critics around the world. Food critic Périco Légasse called it "an absurd and unfair decision". "Michelin cannot be so stupid," he said on radio station FranceInfo, arguing that critics agreed the quality of food had improved since Bocuse's death. "Today its discredit is total, the institution is dead," he said of the Michelin Guide. This is the most recent controversy surrounding the Michelin Guide, which has made efforts in recent years to stave off criticism that is biased towards French cuisine and overvalues formal dining. In December, French chef Marc Veyrat lost his court case against the guide after it stripped him of a Michelin star. Bocuse died in a room above the restaurant on 20 January 2018. About 1,000 people attended his funeral, with more mourners watching the ceremony on big screens set up outside the cathedral. French President Emmanuel Macron at the time described him as the "incarnation of French cuisine". "Although upset by the inspectors' judgment, there is one thing that we never want to lose, it is the soul of Mr Paul," the restaurant and Bocuse's family said in a statement. "From Collonges and from the bottom of our hearts, we will continue to bring the Sacred Fire to life with audacity, enthusiasm, excellence and a certain form of freedom."	The restaurant of famed French chef Paul Bocuse has lost its three-star Michelin rating, stirring controversy.
+text: The number of people who are out of work now stands at 96,000 with the rate of unemployment remaining at 6.6% - better than Scotland, Northern Ireland, London and other parts of the UK. Youth unemployment also dropped, the Office of National Statistics said. Figures for the UK stand at 2.12 million not working, the lowest level in nearly six years. First Minister Carwyn Jones and new Welsh Secretary Stephen Crabb welcomed the latest figures. Conservative MP Mr Crabb said: "There is still more work to be done so it is essential that we stick to our long-term economic plan which is bearing real fruit now for Wales. "As the new Welsh secretary I am clear that I want every part of Wales to share in this economic recovery." Labour's Mr Jones said the announcement on the reduction in youth unemployment comes on the day the Welsh government marks the 10,000th person to have secured a job through its Jobs Growth Wales (JGW) programme. "With youth unemployment falling faster in Wales than any other part of the UK, it is clear that JGW is having a major impact in creating opportunities for young people across the country," he said.	Unemployment in Wales has fallen by 6,000 in the three months to May, official figures show.
+text: The artwork in Banbury station was painted to mark the 150th anniversary of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's broad gauge railway. Chiltern Railways wants to put a new Costa Coffee shop in place as part of a redevelopment of the concourse. Banbury Civic Society said it should stay as it was a gift to the town. The mural by artist Nigel Fletcher was commissioned by Railtrack in 2001. Chad Collins, of Chiltern Railways, said: "The station has seen a huge increase in passenger numbers and yet the facilities have not been improved to match that. 'Awareness of heritage' "I understand the sentimental aspect but we are looking to make improvements to the station which will benefit the town. "We have always said that we will either protect the mural or donate it to an organisation that are able to preserve it." Rob Kinchin-Smith, of the Banbury Civic Society, said the rail company's decision lacked an "awareness of heritage". "It's special because it was presented as a gift to the town. It was painted by the artist to fit this location. "It presents a gateway to the historic town of Banbury, commemorating railway history."	Campaigners have criticised plans to move or cover up a mural at an Oxfordshire train station to make way for a coffee shop.
+text: By Helen BurchellBBC News Urban myths abound when it comes to the damage caused as jets break through the sound barrier, but, in reality you are more likely to lose some plasterwork, a window pane or possibly watch your dry stone wall collapse - if you are unlucky. Figures obtained by the BBC show 17 sonic booms have been acknowledged by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in the UK since 2009. The explosive sound certainly keeps the emergency services busy reassuring callers that "a bomb has not gone off nearby", but apart from the shock and surprise, exactly how much harm does a sonic boom do? The MoD said 15 claims for damage following a sonic boom have been made in the past five years and a total of £1,844.53 had been paid in compensation. Breaking glass The latest recorded event took place over Peterborough on 5 June, and was also heard in parts of Lincolnshire. The MoD confirmed its Typhoons from RAF Coningsby had been responding to reports a civilian aircraft had lost radio contact with air traffic control. The aircraft were, it said, authorised to go supersonic for "operational reasons". The sonic boom, which released a high-energy shockwave, shattered windows in Peterborough and dislodged roof tiles in Deeping St James. Compensation claims were made against the MoD in both cases, figures released under a Freedom of Information (FoI) request by the BBC, revealed. Sonic booms have been confirmed in the skies above Berwickshire, Powys, Anglesey, Ceredigion, parts of Yorkshire, Northumberland, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire since 2009. 'Startled' animals Damage claims lodged through the MoD's official channels consisted mainly of broken windows to private properties, a car and a greenhouse. Plasterwork in a church in Alnwick in Northumberland was damaged as a result of a sonic boom in 2012, although a claim a boom later that same year had caused a dry stone wall to collapse in Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire was rejected by the MoD. The ministry paid out a total of £1,670.53 in that year. What causes a sonic boom? •When an aircraft approaches the speed of sound (768mph or 1,236km/h), the air in front of the nose of the plane builds up a pressure front because it has "nowhere to escape", said Dr Jim Wild of Lancaster University. •A sonic boom happens when that air "escapes", creating a ripple effect which can be heard on the ground as a loud thunderclap. •It can be heard over such a large area because it moves with the plane, rather like the wake on the bow of a ship spreading out behind the vessel. Of the 15 claims for damage submitted, the MoD settled five and rejected - or "repudiated" - seven. One claim was dropped and two are still active. It might seem the MoD has got off fairly lightly in monetary terms, compared to other cases across the world. Damage caused when a Thunderbird caused a sonic boom over Tucson, Arizona, in April 2012 resulted in damage claims for the US military totalling $22,000, according to the Air Force Times. Again, this was mainly shattered glass, although much research into other potential damage has taken place in the States. Claims animals are adversely affected by the sonic booms seem difficult to prove, however. A number of investigations into the effects on both farmed and wild animals between the 1960s and 1980s concluded they were just "startled" - in much the same way we are when we hear an unexplained "thunderous explosion", which turns out to be a sonic boom. More than 180 dairy cattle herds within a few miles of several US air bases were studied for 12 months with no evidence found of reduced milk production, according to a 1960 study by Parker and Bayley. The milk yield of dairy cows in an area of frequent sonic booms, Edwards Air Force Base in California, was found to be "similar to the yield of control dairy cows", according to further research carried out by Casady and Lehmann in 1967. 'Meteorological conditions' Two decades later, a series of investigations published by the National Ecology Research Center into the effects of sonic booms and simulated sonic booms on several species, confirmed the "startle reaction". When exposed to a simulated sonic boom, a sea lion reportedly "left the beach and went into the surf", it was noted. The effects of sonic booms have even been monitored on tortoises by one researcher. It found no significant increase in the animals' heart rate or metabolism. So, while animals seem relatively unfazed by sonic booms it seems likely the occasional window pane in the UK will continue to shatter in the future. An MoD spokesman said: "Supersonic training is prohibited overland in the UK for both RAF and USAF fast jet crews. "The majority of incidents where supersonic booms were heard would either have been aircraft completing training over the North Sea, where meteorological conditions led to the sound travelling overland, or RAF Quick Reaction Alert aircraft responding to intercept unidentified aircraft. "It is very rare for accidental supersonic flight during operational training overland, and we apologise for any inconvenience caused when this happens." Meanwhile, people in Anglesey and Lincolnshire are still waiting to find out whether their own broken windows and dislodged roof tiles will be deemed a genuine victim of confirmed sonic booms earlier this year.	Could a sonic boom really stop a cow producing milk or a chicken laying an egg?
+text: The figures are lower than the electoral rolls ahead of the two previous elections in 2004 and 2008. It was also short of the Home Department's target of 35,000 names on the roll, which closed on 29 February. It had been estimated there were about 45,000 people eligible to vote, so about a third of the island had not signed up. Paul Whitfield, chief officer of the department, said: "There aren't significant differences although it's slightly down." He said the target had been set to "motivate staff" due to the "demanding challenges both economically and politically" of getting people to sign up. The department said it was confident all islanders were aware of the creation of a new roll and those who wished to be listed on it had sufficient time and options to complete and return a form. The six-month campaign to get islanders to sign up included forms sent to every household, a dedicated website, door-to-door visits, TV, radio and bus adverts, school visits, road shows and messages printed on 810,000 milk cartons Mr Whitfield said: "We've seen nearly 200 young people of the age of 15, who aren't even entitled to vote this time round, register as part of the process." The biggest drop in registered voters compared to the last new roll, created in 2004, was in the west district. The area, which includes the parishes of the Forest, St Pierre du Bois, St Saviour and Torteval, saw nearly 500 fewer people sign up and went from being the district with the most registered people to the fourth largest.	A total of 29,745 people have signed up for Guernsey's electoral roll, ahead of the 2012 general election.
+text: Lance Birchall, from Stoke-on-Trent, restores unloved trainers but said some were still being needlessly binned. He decided to take on pairs for free rather than seeing them thrown away and will donate them to homeless people in the city. "I can do absolutely any trainer," he said. "It will help people who don't have anything." The 25-year-old said he had always collected trainers and set up a business restoring older shoes to their original condition. "I start off with a dry clean, going over them with a brush, followed by a deep clean and a steam," he said, adding the process is repeated until they look "as good as new". After setting up his business, he said he got messages from people saying they were just going to throw their shoes away if nothing could be done to repair them. "There are some pairs you can't get up to a sellable standard," Mr Birchall said. "So I thought, if people are chucking all these trainers in the bin, I can take them in, do the best job I can and then give them to the hostels around Stoke. "I want to use my skills to help people that are less fortunate and give something back to the people." He set up a GoFundMe page for donations to pay for the restorations with any additional money going towards other essentials for Stoke-on-Trent's homeless community, such as meals and sleeping bags. Since setting up the scheme, which he called Soles of Stoke, at the start of the year, Mr Birchall has been sent about 50 pairs of shoes that would otherwise be destined for landfill. Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk	A man is giving unwanted trainers a new lease of life and donating them to people in need.
+text: By Helen BriggsEnvironment Correspondent Laurence Tubiana, French special representative for the 2015 Paris climate conference, used a surprising analogy in a news conference at the Bonn climate talks when asked what sort of agreement might be struck. After almost two weeks of negotiations in the German city, progress towards a new international climate deal, set for inking in Paris, appears to be moving slowly. If all goes to plan, the baby will come bouncing into the world on 11 December, no doubt accompanied by the chinking of glasses by heads of state. And although failure is not a palatable option, the complexity of the task ahead presents enormous challenges. Beside the meandering Rhine, at the World Conference Centre in Bonn, a milestone of sorts was reached, with the release of draft text that forms the basis of the agreement in Paris. The text from the last UN climate meeting in Geneva in February has been worked on in sessions, and slimmed down to 85 rather than 86 pages. In a last-minute compromise, the two delegates chairing the talks have been given permission to shape the text further over the next month. The hope is that they will produce something that can be taken back to governments. Pick up the pace Negotiators say progress has been made, but environmental groups and charities are keen for them to pick up the pace. Ironically, although there was much talk at Bonn about streamlining the text of the nascent agreement, slimmer is not necessarily better. If little consensus can be reached among the 200-odd countries involved in the process, it could result in a slimline document containing little that is legally binding. If so, it will be up to those outside the framework of the United Nations to push climate change up the agenda. Business, investors and civil society are all adding momentum to calls to limit global warming to 2C. Issues such as equity and finance for developing countries are big stumbling blocks but there is growing optimism that another 10 days of talks scheduled for later in the year might shift diplomacy into a higher gear. Admittedly, no-one I spoke to in the gleaming corridors of the UN campus had an answer to what the historic agreement might be in essence. And there is much rhetoric about the Paris settlement being the start of the process, not the end. Sorry for the cliche, but the birth of an international commitment to curb climate change after 2020 is promising to be a long and complicated labour.	"It's like having a baby, you don't know what it will look like until it is born."
+text: Sophie Parkinson died at her family home in Liff, outside Dundee, in 2014. Her mother, Ruth Moss, told the first day of the fatal accident inquiry that Sophie had looked up ways to end her life online. The inquiry is being held remotely due to coronavirus restrictions. The High School of Dundee pupil died in March 2014. Mrs Moss told the inquiry: "She was a really lovely girl, really kind, it's hard, she died. "It's true to say in the last few months of her life Sophie was exceptionally difficult to manage. "She wasn't getting any better. I wanted her to get better." Sophie's mother, who now lives in Edinburgh, explained: "I could speak to CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) but nothing was done. "It's fine to listen but you have to act. CAMHS was ambivalent. "I think that's the problem with the whole of Sophie's case. Unless you dive deeper into the reality, it's fine." Richard Pugh, for NHS Tayside, told the FAI that two "safety plans" had been created during Sophie's care. However Mrs Moss said she was not involved in drawing them up, and that there was no "collaborative process". 'Very very worried' Mr Pugh suggested that Sophie's case was taken "seriously". Mrs Moss said: "The problem I have is with the content and quality of the interactions. "In spite of Sophie deteriorating and being high risk there was minimal input in a quality way. The high school was very very worried about Sophie. "I am convinced nobody in CAMHS thought Sophie would take her own life. I do not see that theme." Speaking of Sophie's iPad and phone, Mrs Moss said: "She had looked up ways to kill herself. "She said what she was going to do." 'Taken her more seriously' Mrs Moss told Steven Quither for the Crown: "They should have taken her more seriously. "With a normal standard of care Sophie would still be alive today." David Adams, for Mrs Moss, asked what her main issues were, and she said the safety and risk assessment of her daughter. Mrs Moss said communication between herself and CAMHS was "very flawed". Asked to describe her daughter, she told Mr Adams: "Sophie was really kind, she was very sensitive, very clever, and she was beautiful. "Unfortunately towards the end of her life she became very difficult to manage. But deep down she was a great girl." The inquiry, being held before Sheriff Lorna Drummond QC, continues. If you or someone you know needs support for issues about emotional distress, these organisations may be able to help.	The mother of a 13-year-old schoolgirl who took her own life has told a fatal accident inquiry she believes she would still be alive if health professionals had done more to help.
+text: Laura KuenssbergPolitical editor@bbclaurakon Twitter In a different time, and with a minister with enemies, she'd most likely have been out on Friday. This time the Tory party was fighting hard to keep her. But beyond the mess-ups, perhaps part of the issue was also that the home secretary was not necessarily in tune with her predecessor's attitude on immigration - the Home Office's most politically charged brief. It is hard to understand that she wasn't aware of a widespread culture of targets. But no one is suggesting that she deliberately misled MPs last week. So, it is pertinent to ask how much focus she gave to the immigration brief at the Home Office, or whether she was happy to delegate to trusted colleagues and focus on other areas. Those who have worked at junior levels in the Home Office as ministers sometimes joke that they'd never want the big job given how complicated it is. Home secretaries, however tightly they grip everything, can never be sure they won't trip up. But don't forget Ms Rudd's persona was also vital in the delicate Brexit balance of the cabinet. She was a Remainer, and trusted by the PM. A grown up, who was as open as politically possible about the case she would make for the softer end of Brexit privately, hinting at it in public too. Given the fraught politics of the moment, replacing her is not just a matter of promoting a minister who looks competent, but making an appointment that does not tear the already strained Tory truce. And beyond all that, Ms Rudd's departure gives Theresa May not one, but several new potential headaches. It gives an impression of shaky government days before the local elections. Ms Rudd could give the Tory rebel Remainers more authority on the backbenches. And continuing questions about the Windrush fiasco may now be aimed more sharply at the prime minister herself. There are good reasons why Number 10 initially tried to resist this resignation. The pressure on the individual may be gone, but the wider impact may not yet have begun. Stretching to close one gap opens another. Ms Rudd was an important figure in cabinet, not just because she occupied one of the great offices of state, but because she was widely liked inside her party, at the more modern end of the Tory spectrum and a vigorous Remainer whose voice gave ballast to that side of the argument at the top table. The decision to go was - I'm told - entirely hers. Both Number 10 and her other political friends in government tried to persuade her to stay, it's said. It was her judgement that it was untenable to stay it's suggested, because she couldn't be sure that nothing else would emerge from the Home Office filing cabinets that might have made staying on in the job even more awkward than it already was.	Was Amber Rudd's resignation inevitable? Certainly there has been a mismatch between what she told MPs last week and the evidence that emerged.
+text: Figures released by China's consulate general in Edinburgh say the two countries did almost £1.5bn (£1,458m) worth of business in 2011. This compares with less than £700m (£678m) in 2001. Whisky sales alone generated £57m worth of sales in China in the year to June 2011. Health care and renewable energy have been identified as growth areas. China recently opened its vast market to Scottish salmon and is already the world's fifth largest consumer of the fish. 'Enormous opportunities' The rapid expansion in trade is mirrored by increases in the number of Chinese students studying at Scottish universities. The Chinese authorities say student numbers rose by almost a third between 2010 and 2011 to 6,145. China's consul general in Scotland, Li Ruiyou, has predicted "enormous opportunities" for Scottish health care and renewable energy firms in China in the future. In a speech to mark the 40th anniversary of China sending an ambassador to the UK, Mr Li said: "China and Scotland are highly complementary in these industries. "And I strongly believe that the enthusiasm and momentum for wider and deeper collaborations between China and Scotland will bring more fruits for both sides." China is to invest billions of pounds in medical research and development over the next few years. It has also pledged to produce 15% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.	Trade between China and Scotland has more than doubled in the past decade, according to the Chinese government.
+text: The Oscar-winning director has been spotted filming his "Beatles-inspired" movie in Suffolk, Essex and Norfolk over the past couple of weeks. Broadcaster Emma Freud, partner of Curtis, tweeted to say that 5,000 extras were being sought for a "brilliant concert on Gorleston beach". Ed Sheeran, Lily James and Himesh Patel are due to star in the film. Filming for the scene will take place between 10:00 BST and 14:00 on 27 June. Freud told BBC Radio Suffolk that Curtis had written a scene involving 5,000 people, "in the complete knowledge that CGI exists, that we would only need to have about 150 people and do the rest in digital". "When Danny Boyle came onboard he looked at the script and said 'fantastic, we'll get 5,000 people to be on Gorleston beach. I'm a real director, I do things properly'." Freud confirmed that Sheeran is in the film but has yet to shoot any scenes. However, he will not be involved in the Gorleston beach concert, she said. Full details, including the title, of the film have yet to be announced, but Sasha Gibson, a spokeswoman for the production company Working Title, said it was "Beatles-inspired and a new comedy". The company is also seeking an audience for a "concert scene" in Liverpool on 5 June. Boyle's credits include the two Trainspotting films, Slumdog Millionaire and producing the opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics. Curtis's television and film writing credits include the BBC's Blackadder and Bridget Jones's Diary. The movie has recently shot in Frinton-on-Sea, Halesworth, Lowestoft, Gorleston and Acle. The movie is due for release in September 2019.	Five thousand extras are being sought to appear in a film written by Richard Curtis and directed by Danny Boyle.
+text: The student said he needed hospital treatment after he was blindfolded for several hours and tortured. No-one at Punjab University responded to his cries for help, he said. The five bloggers disappeared after they condemned extremism and the role of the military in Pakistan. The university authorities say they are investigating the latest incident. The ExpressTribune said that Suhail Ahmad was abducted by more than 14 members of the student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami group who forced their way into his Lahore hostel room on Monday evening. Pakistan pressed over 'abducted' activists Pakistan's bewildering array of militants The student told the newspaper that a blanket was put over his head throughout his ordeal and that no security guards responded to his pleas for help. He said he was only released when senior Jamaat-e-Islami members intervened on his behalf. Last week hundreds of people held protests across the country to demand the authorities trace the activists, who disappeared earlier in January. No group has said it is holding them. Pakistan's parliament has expressed grave concern over their fates. The government says it is investigating the case of one of the four, Salman Haider, who has campaigned against enforced disappearances in Balochistan. Supporters of the men accuse the security services of having secretly arrested them. The BBC's M Ilyas Khan in Islamabad says that the disappearances have alarmed liberals in Pakistan, where the military has long promoted a hardline Islamist narrative as a bulwark to protect its financial and security interests. Salman Haider, a well-known poet and university professor, was last seen in Islamabad on 6 January, two days after bloggers Waqas Goraya and his cousin Asim Saeed went missing in Lahore. Two other bloggers, one named as polio sufferer Ahmed Raza Naseer, are also reported to have disappeared in or near Lahore. Pakistan is one of the the world's most dangerous countries for reporters and human rights activists, and critics of the powerful military have been detained, beaten or killed.	A Pakistani student has said he was abducted and badly beaten by hardline Islamist students after posting tweets in support of five liberal bloggers who have gone missing.
+text: It follows a rise in vandalism, overnight camping and littering at Carmarthenshire beauty spot Morfa Bychan beach. National Trust Cymru said the site of special scientific interest was being put at risk. A "high volume of visitors" is expected this bank holiday across Wales. National Trust Cymru has appealed to the public not to park overnight near the Morfa Bychan beach, ahead of the bank holiday weekend. It said the secluded beach's plants, wildlife and ecology were being put at risk by "wild" camping, rubbish dumping and human waste. As the bank holiday weekend approaches, there's an appeal for the public to follow the Countryside Code, stay at authorised campsites and take their litter home to protect the ecology of some of Wales' most scenic spots. 'Destroying a unique habitat' Stuart McDonnell, area ranger for National Trust Cymru in Carmarthenshire, said the vandalism which was "destroying a unique habitat" was "disheartening" for his team. "These places are jewels to come to but unfortunately the people who are coming here have no respect for the land or the wildlife," he said. The gate from the car park to the beach is usually locked, but has been vandalised several times over the last year by "wild" campers using portable angle grinders to gain access to the spot. National Trust Cymru's rangers have also had to deal with rubbish, toilet waste and left-over BBQs and said they have seen evidence of illegal felling in the area surrounding the beach. The gate from the car park to the beach has been vandalised numerous times over the last year, with footpath gates and posts "chopped up and used for campfires". The trust is working with local agencies, including the local MP for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire - and Secretary of State for Wales, Simon Hart, to highlight the issue. Mr Hart said he was delighted that people wanted to enjoy the beach, but added: "It is being spoiled by a selfish few. "Local residents regularly pile up the rubbish and the National Trust is very good about collecting it - one autumn we even cleared away an old trampoline and a dead caravan. "We think there are sufficient laws to deal with it - we've just got to get the evidence and give the police every possible chance of dealing with it." But Rebecca Williams, director of conservation with National Trust Cymru, said fines or stricter measures would be "difficult" to implement. "Fines are difficult - it means having people here overnight, putting their safety at risk, so we need to work with the local community to raise awareness of the impact the damage is having," she said. National Trust is also looking for volunteers to act as what they call "coastodians" to help look after places like Morfa Bychan with regular beach cleans. 'Leave nothing but footprints' Morfa Bychan beach is the latest in a long list of sites across Wales which have seen a rise in vandalism and "wild" overnight camping. Richard Owen, from Natural Resources Wales, reminded those enjoying Wales' landscapes this weekend to "leave no trace" of their visit and ensure enjoyment outdoors is not done at "the expense of nature". "The scenes of abandoned campsites, damaged habitats, verge parking, as well as litter, are totally unacceptable and a blight on Wales' reputation as home to some of the world's greatest landscapes," he said. 'Snowdonia is a protected area' Meanwhile, in north west Wales, plans are in place for a busy bank holiday weekend. Snowdonia National Park Authority, local councils and North Wales Police, said they had learned lessons after seeing an increase in litter and illegal camping, after restrictions were eased after the first lockdown last year. They said they were "anticipating a significantly high volume of visitors" to the area over the bank holiday and urged visitors to respect the rules and not put a strain on resources. Emyr Williams, Snowdonia National Park Authority's chief executive, said there would be extra shuttle bus services in Snowdon's Yr Wyddfa and Ogwen areas, temporary and permanent signage and pre-booking at Pen-y-Pass. "We need to remember that Snowdonia is a protected area where people live and work and we also recognise the countless hours the dedicated hard-working team of volunteers give to the area and appreciate their hard work and generosity," he said. Supt Neil Thomas, of North Wales Police, said when lockdown rules lifted last year, the force saw "dangerous, irresponsible and illegal parking which posed a risk to public safety" in many beauty spots, including Ogwen and Pen-y-Pass. "Patrols will continue throughout the bank holiday weekend and we'll continue to work with our partners to ensure the rules are being followed," he said. He urged anybody considering visiting areas such as Snowdonia to be responsible and think about where they park. 'Busiest summer ever' Meanwhile, Chris Cousens, RNLI water safety lead in Wales, said they were expecting this summer to be "the busiest ever" for lifeguards and volunteer lifeboat crews in Wales. He urged people to "respect the water, think about their own safety and know what to do in an emergency" as well as enjoying being on beaches. The RNLI warning to swimmers and coastal walkers follows a survey predicting unprecedented numbers of people on Wales' beaches, with an estimated 30 million visitors expected in the coming months as people opt for 'staycations'. In a survey commissioned by the RNLI, 75% of 16 to 64-year-olds expect to visit a UK beach or the coast between April and September, with around half of that number likely to do so three or more times.	High numbers of people expected in Wales' beauty spots over the bank holiday weekend are being urged to respect areas and "leave no trace".
+text: Rhys Hunt, 21, was one of 18 people injured at the charity gathering in Stevenage in July. The manual labourer spent two months in a wheelchair and said he had suffered a "tough" few months regarding money. He believes he may have "played more video games than in my whole life" since the crash but expects to be back at work in the New Year. Mr Hunt, from Hatfield, was standing in the central reservation area of Monkswood Way with his girlfriend and a friend during the event on 18 July. Video footage shows two cars colliding at a junction and then one striking people standing at the roadside, while the other hits spectators in the central reservation. All of the injured people had been released from hospital three weeks afterwards, and Mr Hunt has previously said he felt everyone involved in the crash was "lucky to be alive". Five months on he said that while he has "sorted" his initial struggle to pay bills, "boredom" was becoming a problem. "Ever since I got my first job, I'm so used to waking up in a morning, going to work, coming home and relaxing," he said. Mr Hunt said recently he tried to do some sanding on his girlfriend's floor but when he stood up afterwards he "had no weight bearing on my right leg at all". He is now taking legal action against the driver that hit him, and if successful, said he would give some money "to people who have helped me in my wheelchair, people that have helped for me while I have been in need".	A bystander hurt after being run over at a car cruising event said he is "bored" of being unable to work.
+text: By Rachel SchraerBBC Reality Check At the moment, there are five official grounds for divorce which apply in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Three involve attributing blame, and mean that divorce proceedings can start straight away - the whole process can then be completed within three to six months: The other two, which do not involve blame, take longer: separation for two years with consent and separation for five years if one of the parties does not agree to the divorce. The government says that a law ensuring divorcing couples no longer have to blame each other for the breakdown of their marriage will "help reduce family conflict". To try to assess whether reducing the waiting time leads to more divorces, we can look to Scotland where no-fault divorce after one year of living apart was introduced in 2006. Up to that point, Scottish divorce law was mostly the same as in England and Wales, according to law professor Liz Trinder. When the new law was introduced, there was a spike in the number of divorces - from 10,875 in 2005 to 13,012 in 2006, but this quickly fell back down again. Since then there has been a downward trend in the number of divorces - although this comes at the same time as a longer-term downward trend in the number of marriages. In 2017 there were 6,766 divorces - half as many as 10 years earlier, just after the law changed. The new rules for England and Wales could reduce the waiting time for no-fault divorce to below Scottish levels. The government is proposing changes to the law which will make no-fault divorce as quick as fault-based divorce, but will also introduce a new minimum time-frame of six months to finalise divorce in England and Wales. If the long-term divorce rate in Scotland was unaffected by reforms to the law, the reasons people were giving for divorce did change. The proportion of divorces where unreasonable behaviour or adultery was given as a reason fell considerably. The Office of National Statistics found that in 2015 in Scotland, just 6% of divorcing couples relied on the fault-based grounds of adultery or unreasonable behaviour. In England and Wales, it was 60%. But in Scotland there was already less reliance on fault-based grounds before the law changed - used for 20% of divorces, compared with three times as many in the rest of Britain. A cheaper "simplified procedure" was introduced in Scotland in 1982, only available to people using grounds of separation. This made separation the easiest grounds for getting a divorce. In England and Wales, the fastest route at the moment is by alleging unreasonable behaviour or adultery. Unreasonable behaviour is consistently the most common grounds for divorce, although adultery comes in behind separation as a reason given. A team of researchers - including Prof Trinder - in a report for the Nuffield Foundation found that in England and Wales, rather than deterring divorce, the element of fault "simply enables a quick exit from a marriage". That is, the data available suggests those wishing to divorce will use whichever grounds are available to do so as quickly and as easily as possible. Looking further afield than the UK, many recent studies have also found no effect or just a temporary effect of no-fault divorce on divorce rates. Read more from Reality Check Send us your questions Follow us on Twitter	Couples in England and Wales will be able to end their marriages more quickly without blaming each other. But could speeding up the process mean more divorces?
+text: The fire engine was responding to an emergency call when it flipped on to its side at the junction of the A139 and Bypass Road in Billingham at 21:00 BST on Tuesday. One of the five crew was trapped for a time, and three were taken to hospital with non-life threatening injuries. Cleveland Fire Brigade said an investigation was under way. Chief fire officer Ian Hayton said: "One [firefighter] sustained a broken wrist, another a broken collarbone and the third broken ribs. "We are currently undertaking an investigation to determine the cause or causes of this incident." Related Internet Links Cleveland Fire Brigade	Three firefighters were injured when their vehicle overturned on a roundabout in Teesside.
+text: Naomi Long received the threat following loyalist outrage at a council decision to limit the flying of the union flag at the City Hall. The flag had been flown every day but is now flown on designated days. On Wednesday, an Alliance party office was destroyed and the home of two councillors attacked. The party said that Ms Long, who is also her party's deputy leader, was warned by police in the early hours of Friday to leave her home and go to her constituency office. A Sinn Fein councillor on Belfast City Council, Jim McVeigh, has confirmed he has also received a death threat. Earlier this week, Alliance, Sinn Fein and SDLP councillors voted to limit the flying of the flag while the DUP and Ulster Unionists opposed the move. 'Not deterred' Speaking at Stormont on Friday, Ms Long said: "I will not let that threat deter me from serving my constituents. I will not let it influence decisions that my party takes. "We will take our decisions based on principles, based on furthering our beliefs and objectives in delivering a shared future and we will not be deterred from that by violent people. "We need mature political leadership from those who, over this week, have been whipping up tensions, stirring up dissension and pointing fingers of blame at people on these issues. "That is not without consequence. People need to stand up now and say that violence is wrong and they need to defuse this situation and allow Northern Ireland to go forward as it should." Earlier in the week threats were also made against Alliance councillor Laura McNamee and Sinn Fein MLA Gerry Kelly. A police spokesperson said the PSNI did not comment on an individuals security but said any reports of threats that had been made against any member of the public would be investigated. First Minister Peter Robinson has condemned those responsible for issuing a death threat against Naomi Long. 'Sinister motives' "Such threats are an affront to democracy and an attack on us all. As someone who in the past has been visited many times by the police to be told of death threats issued against me, I know how difficult and testing a time this is," he said. "My thoughts and prayers are very much with Naomi at this time and I would call upon all concerned not to allow themselves be used by those who have very sinister motives. Regardless of political difference, public representatives should not be attacked or threatened in any way." The Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness has also condemned the threats "The death threat against the East Belfast MP Naomi Long is to be condemned in the strongest possible terms and needs to be withdrawn immediately. "This is the work of fascists who cannot accept the democratic decision of Belfast City Council," he said. "Threats remain against Alliance councillor Laura McNamee, Sinn Féin's Gerry Kelly and councillor Jim McVeigh. Each and everyone of these threats must be lifted." There have been protests since Monday when Belfast City Council voted to fly the union flag on designated days only. Nationalists at Belfast City Council had wanted the union flag taken down altogether, but in the end voted on a compromise from the Alliance party that it would fly on designated days. The vote was 29 to 21, with unionists accusing Sinn Fein, the SDLP and Alliance of attacking their cultural identity.	The Alliance party MP threatened with death has called for "mature political leadership from those who whipped up tensions" in Belfast this week.
+text: By Francesca WilliamsBBC News People like 36-year-old Lee Hall from County Durham, who does not "understand politics at all", for example. "I wouldn't know who to vote for," he says. "I wouldn't know how to." It is not uncommon for journalists, out gathering opinion, to find people who do not know there is an election on, which party is in power or who the prime minster is. Martin Hearn, 31, from Middlesbrough, sees how lack of knowledge might put people off voting but when "information is so easy to get hold of these days that it does seem like a weak excuse". But "people have lost faith in politicians and don't know who to trust or what to believe", he says. And the "press and other media outlets" do not help. In some cases, neither do election leaflets, delivered to your door and full of useful election "facts". A leaflet from Redcar Liberal Democrat candidate and local councillor Josh Mason gives the impression his party came a much closer second at the last general election, locally, than it did. It also makes the claim that UKIP "can't win" in Redcar - showing a grey bar half the size of the Liberal Democrat's yellow bar - although the two parties had an almost identical share of the vote (18.4% and 18.5% respectively). Mr Mason excuses this by saying the "leaflet does not depict a graph". "The image depicts the order in which the parties finished and is not, in fact, a representation of the number of the votes cast," he says. Lack of trust in sources of information - politicians, political parties, media and social media - is a problem, says Dr Stuart Fox from Cardiff University. But trust has "never been that high", even among people who do vote. What is "far more important" is lack of interest, he believes. Data from political research and education charity the Hansard Society suggests older, white, more affluent and further educated people are more likely to vote. They are also more likely to call themselves politically knowledgeable. The research suggests the reverse is also true: younger, poorer and less educated people are less likely to vote and they claim lower levels of political awareness. Dr Fox says "undoubtedly" there is a link between lack of knowledge and unwillingness to vote. "They're too scared" to try to inform themselves, he says. They can be interested but "quite daunted and intimidated by the whole process and can't find information that they feel is accessible or useful for them", he adds. But, he cautions, some claim lack of knowledge when, in fact, they are just not motivated to take part. In some countries, where voting is compulsory, motivation is beside the point. North Korea, for one, claims a turnout of more than 99% and makes it easy by having only one candidate. In more democratic Australia, voting is also compulsory - but at least there is a choice of candidates - and polling stations have "massive queues", says BBC librarian Leanne Nijemeisland, who moved from Melbourne to the UK. "Not like here," she says, wryly. "From a very young age you're taught how important it is to vote; there's this whole culture." Non-voters "really, really aggravate" her and lack of knowledge is "not a good enough excuse", she says. "You just have to take an educated guess. "I don't trust politicians either, but you just have to go on what you think on the day based on the information you have." Memorable Margaret Thatcher "Do you know what year it is? Who the prime minister is?" A doctor would run through the standard list of questions to gauge whether a patient is confused. But even those who are not have struggled to name some of the UK's leaders. A North East hospital consultant describes how perfectly compos mentis patients often could not name John Major. Gordon Brown was also forgettable. One No 10 incumbent - recalled clearly enough for medical reassurance - was often simply described with a shudder as "that man". Another doctor - a psychiatrist - said patients would name Margaret Thatcher automatically, long after she had left power. Jake Smith, a 22-year-old postgraduate student at Cardiff University, believes a debate on introducing compulsory voting to the UK is "long overdue". He argues the compulsion would extend to the politicians themselves, forced "by electoral necessity to pay attention to those groups which previously did not vote". Marking a "none of the above" option, if there was one, would give a voice to those who wanted to protest, on top of the option of spoiling a ballot paper. A campaign in Australia for this option on ballot papers has so far proved unsuccessful though Marianne Lloyd, who lives in Melbourne, might appreciate it. Dr Lloyd feels "powerless" and frustrated at having to choose "usually between a number of highly incompetent morons". "You're forced to weigh up who is the lesser evil in the grand scheme of things," she says. "Bearing in mind that election promises are often broken and you can totally be wrong with what you thought was that lesser evil." Although Australian voters must attend a polling station they are not forced to pick a candidate - but most do. The proportion of "informal" votes - spoilt, blank or otherwise invalid - was just over 5% in the last federal election, the equivalent to the UK's general election. There are those, like Dr Fox, who argue that introducing the same system in the UK would be a "massive improvement". David Rumble from Durham, who is in his 20s, says he would "probably put a little bit more effort into researching what party to vote for" if the law made him. But he thinks all politicians are "pretty much the same" and has no intention of voting if he does not have to. Dr Fox thinks another solution to lack of engagement would be any political education in schools that is better and starts earlier than the "woefully inadequate" and "inconsistent" current offering. Young people rarely think voting is a civic duty, he says. Whereas their grandparents believed, even if you were ill-informed or did not care, "you were a citizen of this country, you had a responsibility to vote". If the voting age was also reduced to 16 - as proposed in the Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green party general election manifestos - schools would have more of an incentive to teach politics, Mr Smith believes. Although some question the "quality and impartiality" of political education in schools, it could be an effective way to boost knowledge, he says. As Leanne Nijemeisland points out, in Australia it's "an exciting thing when you're at school, you're coming up to the age where you're allowed to vote". And "if you don't go and vote, you don't get to moan about it later", she says.	In a world of fake news and alternative facts, what hope is there for the 15 million people in the UK who do not know enough to vote?
+text: Concerns about pollution from Covanta Energy's Rookery Pit site led a group of locals to seek a judicial review. But Mrs Justice Lang rejected their claim that there was a risk of "toxic metals" being discharged into the public drinking water. The Environment Agency issued a permit for the plant, at an old clay pit near Stewartby, Bedfordshire, in January. Local residents have been campaigning against the incinerator for nine years. They claim "toxic dissolved heavy metals" could leak into nearby Stewartby Lake, which feeds into the River Ouse and water deemed fit for public consumption. 'Scientifically inaccurate' They also said US-based Covanta Energy was "wrong" to say waste material would "not be expected to dissolve" in the wording of the permit and claimed that as a result, it was issued "upon a mistake of fact and/or erroneous science in respect of the discharge of potentially harmful heavy metals". Mrs Lang agreed that the language used was "confusing and scientifically inaccurate" but said she did not believe it had swayed the Environment Agency's decision when issuing the permit, adding: "It is elementary science that heavy metals dissolve in water." She also told how the Agency's officers have "scientific expertise" and said it was "implausible" they would have made this mistake. Both the Environment Agency and Covanta Energy conceded the error but denied there was any risk to the public. The incinerator will be capable of converting about 585,000 tonnes of household and business waste into 65MWe of electricity per year.	A legal challenge against a controversial incinerator has been dismissed by the High Court.
+text: By Steven BrocklehurstBBC Scotland news website The Austrian emigre composer, often credited with creating the lush symphonic sound of Hollywood's golden age, has had a revival in fortunes in recent years. Benedetti is such a fan that her love of his music became the starting point for her new album. Korngold wrote his first orchestral score at the age of 14 and had a major international success with his opera Die tote Stadt at the age of 23. He moved to Hollywood in the 1930s, became a pioneer in composing film scores, and was responsible for two Oscar-winning films. Benedetti, from West Kilbride in Ayrshire, told BBC Scotland's Movie Cafe that Korngold had lived in a "highly-intellectual" environment in Vienna. When he emigrated to the United States he applied that to something that he thought was useful - writing music to suit films. The 25-year-old violinist said: "There was a lot of stigma and reservations about a composer who was so eclectic and so varied and who was actually trying to break down the barriers. "But he said that whether it was a film or an opera, it was all depicting an emotion." Korngold's Violin Concerto, which was not a film score, takes up about 25 minutes of Benedetti's new album of music inspired by the silver screen. She also includes two arias from his opera Die tote Stadt. "The idea for the album is Korngold's music, that's the concerto and the two arranged arias, and everything else has either been written for film or used in film. "One decision we made early on was that we weren't going to pick my favourite film music and play it on the violin. "It was going to be only music written originally for the violin. So that did narrow down the choices." The disc begins with the theme from Schindler's List, written by John Williams, "probably the most famous violin music ever written for film". Benedetti, whose career took off at 16 when she won the BBC Young Musician of the Year, says: "The film score was originally recorded by one of the greatest violinists of our time, Itzhak Perlman, and he very much brought to the forefront of the classical music world the music of John Williams and film music. "It was a key moment, the idea of an extremely serious classical soloist endorsing that style of music." Another track is Mahler's Piano Quartet, used in Scorsese's Shutter Island. "I just love that when a director decides to feature great classical music that is already in existence," Benedetti says. Benedetti says she gets lots of requests to play on soundtracks, but it is difficult because her schedule is set years in advance and the performance is often put together quite late in the film-making process. However, she did record the original soundtrack for David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises and she has re-recorded the concertino for this CD. Totally different Coming up for Benedetti is a prestigious appearance at Last Night of The Proms and a major tour of Australia, New Zealand and Asia. This comes after a summer which included appearances at the Edinburgh International Festival and Scotland's largest pop music festival, T in the Park, which she described as "absolutely extraordinary". Benedetti says: "I thought it would be somewhat similar to the likes of Proms in the Park, but it was just totally different. "Such an electric, vibrant, young, pop-orientated feel. "I could not believe that all those people about to listen to McFly and Keane were able to take in and have the peace and attention on classical music, which was not what they were expecting. "They were receptive and really kind and had a great time."	One American music critic is said to have described Korngold's violin concerto as "more corn than gold", but Scotland's superstar violinist Nicola Benedetti is an unabashed champion of the composer and his work.
+text: Neither candidate gained the 50% needed to secure victory outright in the first round on Sunday. Analysts say the race between left-wing Mr Humala and conservative Keiko Fujimori could polarise the country. But the candidates tried to reassure voters of their wider appeal. Brazilian model Peru is enjoying an economic boom and both candidates focussed on how to maintain growth while tackling widespread poverty. Former army officer Ollanta Humala, 48, tried to calm the nerves of investors, some of whom had expressed worry over his possible election. Mr Humala, who came second to President Alan Garcia in the 2006 election, said he would uphold concessions given to private companies and respect the independence of Peru's central bank. Speaking on Peruvian radio, Mr Humala said he wanted to take his cues from Brazil's economic programme. "We recognise there is a successful process underway in Brazil, which has accomplished economic growth that combines social inclusion with respect for macroeconomic equilibrium," he said. A father's legacy Keiko Fujimori, 35, the daughter of former president Alberto Fujimori, tried to win over those voters who did not support her father. Alberto Fujimori is still respected by many for fighting the country's Shining Path guerrilla and putting an end to hyper-inflation. But he is rejected by many others for the human rights abuses which landed him with the 25-year prison sentence he is currently serving. Ms Fujimori has defended her father's record, saying that he laid the basis for Peru's current economic boom. She promised to follow the economic model he introduced, while improving social programmes offering food to the needy and expanding infrastructure in poor areas of the country.	The two candidates to go through to the second round of the presidential elections in Peru, Ollanta Humala and Keiko Fujimori, are wooing voters for the second and final round on 5 June.
+text: Inspectors who went to Swan Pit Crematorium in Gnosall, Staffordshire found pets remains stored in large chest freezers. The owner, 52-year-old Allan McMasters, admitted five charges of fraud by false representation. He was ordered to pay compensation and costs of £7,000. Each victim will get £500. He was also given a 12-month community order with 200 hours of unpaid work. For updates on this story and others from Staffordshire Staffordshire County Council said one cat owner had discovered the ashes she was given were actually those of a dead horse. Some owners received no ashes at all, the court heard. Inspectors managed to trace the owners of some of the pet remains found as they were micro-chipped. Dogs, cats and an iguana were discovered in the freezers while the bodies of horses were lying in the crematorium grounds. District Judge Jack McGarva at Cannock Magistrates' Court said conditions at the cemetery were "a hazard to those who worked there or had to go there". McMasters, of Audmore Road, also pleaded guilty four animal by-product offences, relating to failing to dispose of horse carcasses properly.	A pet crematorium owner has been ordered to pay hundreds of pounds in compensation after owners were given ashes not of their pets.
+text: On a beach in Hordeia on the northern coast of Somalia, I asked a former pirate what attracted him to piracy in the first place. The man, who wanted to remain anonymous, told me he was originally a fisherman and that was his main source of income but things changed when an illegal trawler destroyed his net. "I had a boat and a net on it, then a trawler cut our fishing nets and pulled them away. I was left with an empty boat," he recalled. He and a fellow fisherman tried to shout and call the trawler crew, but it was in vain. It angered them. "They passed over our nets and pulled them away. Our fishing equipment was destroyed." The former pirate's story was not unusual. In the second half of the last decade what began as a defensive act against big trawlers, quickly morphed into a lucrative illegal business that raised global concern. As he and other fishermen lost their trade, they turned to piracy, hijacking ships and passengers for ransom. Dramatic cliff It also drew in former militiamen who fought with warlords during Somalia's long civil war. I wanted to know more about his days as a pirate but he became unsettled and ended the interview abruptly. What appeared to make him uneasy was a Spanish Special Forces soldier who had wandered over. Security around the beach was tight as a helicopter hovered in the sky. The helicopter was part of the European Union Naval Force (EUNavfor). It gave a clue as to what has changed in recent years that has dramatically reduced the threat from piracy. A decade ago, pirates operated freely and there were plenty of hideouts for them along the coastline, like Eyl, a small, scenic port town in Somalia's semi-autonomous region of Puntland. As I approached Eyl, I saw the town by the beach right in front of a high, dramatic golden-brown cliff. The cliff seemingly shelters the town from wind and dust blowing from the mainland. Dangerous sea passage Locals told me about the time years ago when pirates flooded the market with money, causing the cost of living to rise sharply. Armed, they also terrorised the local community, but they rarely killed anyone. They also held some of the sailors they captured hostage as they demanded huge ransoms, sometimes of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The possibility of huge riches seemed to have been the main driver of piracy off the Somali coast. But it was the lack of an effective central government since the collapse of the Siad Barre regime in 1991, and the subsequent disbandment of the Somali navy, that enabled it to happen. Somali territorial waters saw a rise in smuggling, illegal fishing by foreign trawlers, illegal dumping and later piracy. The route through the Indian Ocean past the Somali coast became known as one of the most dangerous sea passages in the world. But 10 years ago, the European Union, Nato and others began to deploy naval forces to the region shortly after the UN Security Council allowed warships to enter Somali territorial waters. Pirate attacks have now all but stopped, after reaching a peak in 2011. I wanted to see how this change had come about and spent seven days on the ESPS Castilla, a Spanish naval ship that is part of EUNavfor. On the second day onboard, breakfast was cut short and we were guided to the ship's bridge. A boat had been spotted in the distance. "We don't think it's anything suspicious but we carry out 'friendly approaches' as part of patrolling the sea," explained an officer. After a quick briefing, five or so marines geared up and descended from the warship onto a waiting boat. We followed on a second boat, keeping our distance. Rich fish stocks As soon as the Spanish boat had pulled alongside the fishermen, a quick search was conducted. "The vessel is from Yemen but the crew are mostly from Somalia," the officer on our boat explained after listening to the radio communication. Finally, we were allowed to board the fishing boat. The fishermen, about eight of them, were by then relaxed and making jokes as they drank water from bottles given to them by the special forces. "There's a good market for fish in Yemen that's why we sell our catch there," explained Osman Ali. He said he used to fish off the coast of Tanzania, but was attracted further north because of the rich fish stocks in Somali waters. "But I have not seen pirates," he said nervously and quickly changed the subject. All the fishermen operating here know each other and if there is a security problem they quickly alert their colleagues and move to safer waters, he added. "Sometimes we meet bad people who steal our tools and fish, but the presence of the warship has made things better," Mr Ali said. Boat blown up On another day, news came through that a freight ship came under attack 300 nautical miles east of Somalia's capital, Mogadishu. A small boat, or skiff, got within 50m (164ft) of the ship and fired. But the onboard security returned fire, scaring off the small boat. Read more: The Castilla was too far away to intervene, but the next day the skiff was traced to a bay that is a known pirate base, just off the Somali coast. Spanish forces towed the skiff into sea and later blew it up. It was only the second incident reported in 2018. Both attacks were unsuccessful. As for the town of Eyl, a revolt had forced the pirates out. Back to fishing Eyl Police Commissioner Mohammed Dahir Yusuf exuded confidence about the town's ability to deal with any resurgence. "Any illegal boats are dealt with by the marine forces who catch them and bring them here, where they are dealt with." He was referring to the Puntland Maritime Police Force, around 800 men strong, and the largest such unit in the country. But its abilities are limited. "We don't have enough boats to take to sea," Mr Yusuf said. He added that the force only had two small boats, hardly enough to adequately patrol the vast sea and apprehend suspects. This is not the only challenge. Marco Hekkens, an adviser on maritime security to the EU's civilian mission in Somalia, said illegal fishing is continuing. EUNavfor can report suspicious fishing vessels to the authorities, but given Somalia's limited capacity to deal with them, hardly anything is done. Rear Admiral Alfonso Perez de Nanclares is also cautious despite the success in quelling piracy. "When the mission started we had about 40 hijacked ships, and more than 700 hostages," he told me. "Piracy has been contained but I really think the intention of going back to this business is still there. I think by working together [with the authorities] we'll be able to suppress and eradicate it." Back in Hordeia, before the reformed pirate got cold feet, he told me that he had gone back to fishing. But there continues to be a danger that the piracy cycle could be repeated.	Foreign navies have played a key role in curbing piracy off Somalia's coast, writes the BBC's Anne Soy.
+text: The prisoners, all Jordanians, were hanged at dawn on Saturday in a jail south of the capital, Amman. The five not found guilty of terrorism offences had been convicted of rape and sexual assault. It is the largest round of executions in Jordan in many years. The country had imposed a moratorium on capital punishment between 2006 and 2014. Correspondents say the change in policy was triggered by a rise in crime as well as the growing threat from jihadist groups such as so-called Islamic State (IS), which controls areas of neighbouring Syria and Iraq. The executed included those convicted for the attacks on the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad in 2003, on tourists at the Roman amphitheatre in Amman in 2006, on intelligence officers in the Baqaa refugee camp in 2016, and the killing of writer Nahid Hattar, also last year, Information Minister Muhammad Momani told the Petra news agency. Human rights group Amnesty International condemned the executions. "The horrific scale and secrecy around these executions is shocking," Samah Hadid, deputy director at the group's Beirut office, said in a statement. "This is a major step backwards for both Jordan and efforts to end the death penalty - a senseless and ineffective means of administering justice." Jordan is one of several Middle Eastern countries that have retained capital punishment.	Jordan has executed 15 prisoners, including 10 convicted of terrorism charges, officials say.
+text: By Matt McGrathEnvironment correspondent The new administration plans to ban fracked gas imports from the US, make steep cuts in emissions and end new drilling for oil and gas. Agreed in talks with two larger parties, the plan now needs the support of two thirds of Green members. But there is opposition, with some saying it is not progressive enough. The results of voting are expected on Friday evening. Ireland's reputation as a clean and green country has been tarnished in recent years by the inability of successive governments to tackle carbon emissions. Compared to the rest of the EU, Ireland is the fourth largest emitter per capita. An agreed EU target to cut carbon by 20% by this year was missed by a country mile. The main problems have been in transport and agriculture, with a growing national dairy herd increasing by more than a quarter in the past five years. Voter concern over climate change saw a significant improvement in Green Party representation in parliamentary elections held in February this year. With no one winning an overall majority, the Greens' 12 seats made them a key partner in coalition talks, with the two largest traditional parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Delayed by the Covid-19 crisis, negotiators eventually produced an agreed programme for government. The issues of climate change and sustainability are at the heart of it. The proposed cuts in emissions will be enshrined in a Climate Action law, which will define how five-year carbon budgets will be set. This idea, which would see Ireland's emissions cut by 51% by 2030, is similar to existing legislation in the UK, and has been welcomed by scientists. "The achievement of the 7% annual cut in emissions would be a scientifically acceptable solution at least in the short- and medium-term for Ireland, given that we have been flatlining our emissions and failing to meet the targets we have signed up to," said John Sweeney, emeritus professor of geography at Maynooth University. "It has a very strong influence if you embrace the carbon budget principle. And I think that's what will drive the achievement of reductions here so I am quite happy from a scientific point of view." As well as banning the importation of fracked gas from US shale production, the programme would stall any future oil and gas drilling in Irish waters. The programme is likely to be approved by members of the two bigger parties - but the Greens' high bar of two thirds support makes the whole project uncertain. Some experts believe that failure to support the deal would be a calamity, as the programme, they argue, would usher in the greenest government in the history of the state. "It's completely transformational," said John Gibbons, an Irish journalist and long time climate commentator. "What this delivers is a quantum shift in Ireland's climate response. A ban on fracked gas is incredibly important, as is the ban on oil and gas exploration, this is saying to the multinational fossil fuel industry, Ireland is now off limits." Despite the potential gains, within the Green movement there is considerable opposition from members who feel that it doesn't address issues of social justice, housing and economic strategy. "There's a new generation of activists that believe in climate justice and they don't feel that you can separate issues around housing, issues around finance, issues around taxation from environmental concerns," said Neasa Hourigan, who is a new Green party TD (Member of Parliament). While she helped negotiate the programme for government, she is now urging members to reject it. "Until you address everything in terms of the fabric of how we operate as a society, then really what you're doing is just compartmentalising something into one area and that's not going to effect real climate action," she told BBC News. "It has to be system change instead of climate change." With opposition from young people and members of the party in Northern Ireland, Green leaders have turned to Hollywood, enlisting actor and environmentalist Mark Ruffalo to encourage members to back the deal. With the result said to be down to a handful of votes, there are worries that opponents of the programme based in the jurisdiction of Northern Ireland may scupper a plan that won't directly impact them. Some commentators are urging Green members to keep their eye on the bigger picture. "In a climate emergency when your house is on fire, you deal with the emergency and then when that's stabilised we'll get onto all the other good stuff," said John Gibbons. "This is the best chance, it's out of sight in terms of anything that's ever been on the table." Follow Matt on Twitter.	Ireland stands on the brink of putting climate change at the heart of its government if Green Party members vote in favour of a new coalition.
+text: Estrella Catalan, 52, died at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital (NNUH), where she had worked for 18 years, on 5 February. The hearing was told Christian Catalan isolated in his room at the family home after testing positive in December. Days later, Mrs Catalan was admitted to her son's ward as a Covid patient. Norfolk coroner Jacqueline Lake recorded a conclusion of death by natural causes. She heard evidence that both mother and son wore PPE at work, and said "in the balance of probabilities" Mrs Catalan had not contracted the virus in the workplace. "She was given a risk assessment due to the pandemic and found to be of lower increased risk," said Mrs Lake. "The hospital said she worked in areas that didn't have suspected or known cases of Covid, though she did work in A&E." The hearing was told she was offered enhanced PPE, had worn a mask, single-use apron and gloves, and "adhered to infection control". In a statement read at the remote hearing, her son said he was "exposed to many patients who were positive with the virus, while wearing full PPE". He described the hygiene routine he and his mother used "to protect ourselves and the family at home", and said he, his parents and brother "rarely went out". On 20 December, he developed mild symptoms of a temperature and fatigue, and said his mother had stayed at home from that day, as a precaution. He tested positive on 22 December and for 10 days isolated in his bedroom, the inquest heard. 'Wonderful' nurse Mrs Catalan developed similar symptoms on 26 December and she and her husband, Melvin, tested positive two days later. "As I got better my mother started to deteriorate and on 29 December had more severe symptoms of Covid - shortness of breath, chest pains, a high temperature and extreme fatigue," said Mr Catalan. She was admitted to the Covid assessment ward but within days had deteriorated and required more oxygen support on a ventilator in intensive care. She died of a stroke, due to Covid, the inquest heard. Mrs Catalan had featured in a BBC report in January, during her treatment, and said she was keen to recover to enable her colleagues to help other patients. After her death, hundreds paid tribute to the "wonderful" nurse, including Prince William. Last Friday, her funeral procession stopped at the hospital for one final goodbye from colleagues. Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk Related Internet Links Norfolk Coroner	A nurse who died with Covid-19 fell ill within days of her son, who worked as a student nurse on a Covid ward at the same hospital, an inquest heard.
+text: But actor Shayne Ward, who plays the character, says it has already helped people considering suicide. There's been a huge reaction online too, with one fan tweeting: "We need to listen, people need to talk about it. Thanks for raising awareness." The charity Samaritans worked with Corrie on the script and says it's important to highlight the issue. Wednesday night's episode saw Aidan's friends and family struggle with their grief after discovering he had killed himself. The soap has been praised for raising awareness of mental health issues and male suicide. Shayne says he has been overwhelmed by the response he has received. He told the Sun: "A lot of people who are considering attempting suicide have got in touch to say 'I'm calling somebody now. I was attempting it and you've helped me'. "The response has been truly overwhelming." Viewers also shared their thoughts and feelings about the show on social media. One person wrote: "Storylines don't get much tougher than this and #corrie are doing a fab job." "Coronation Street is hitting me hard tonight so gone out for a walk. Well done for tackling such a hard storyline," another said. Other fans tweeted they were in tears watching the soap. The producers of Corrie say the plot "is designed to give people who hide their feelings of desperation a chance to start a conversation". They've been working closely with mental health charities on the storyline - including Samaritans and Calm. Lorna Fraser from Samaritans told Newsbeat: "Someone calls the Samaritans every six seconds. "Showing a story like Aidan's in soaps is really important and people do usually calls us to say they've been touched by the storyline." If you've been affected by any of the issues in this article, you can find help at BBC Advice. For details of organisations which offer advice and support, click here. In the UK you can call for free, at any time, to hear recorded information on 0800 066 066. Follow Newsbeat on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 every weekday on BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra - if you miss us you can listen back here.	It's been a tough week for Corrie fans - watching the storyline involving Aidan Connor taking his own life.
+text: Havana by Camila Cabello was first released in August 2017, but sold 19 million copies worldwide last year, the IFPI says. A large proportion of those were "equivalent" sales - made up of streams on audio and video platforms. In total, five of the top 10 biggest worldwide songs of 2018 were released the previous year. Singles by Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee alll made the top 10 in their second year of release. Former Fifth Harmony member Camila also broke other records with her song, including Spotify's most streamed song ever by a solo female artist. It's been played 888 million times on the service and 2.6 billion times in total worldwide. Frances Moore, chief executive of IFPI, said: "Havana truly was the stand-out hit of the year. Momentum behind the track continued to build and build at an extraordinary rate as it consistently topped charts and leading playlists. "Camila Cabello is a perfect example of an artist who has drawn on her musical roots to produce her own unique sound that is capturing the hearts of fans all over the world." Second on the list was God's Plan by Drake, which did come out in 2018, but in January - so it had a good run. Ed Sheeran's Shape of You and Perfect came in at third and fourth, and you've guessed it, both songs came out in 2017. Other songs riding on their second year of success include Despacito, by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee and Something Just Like This by The Chainsmokers and Coldplay. Both Despacito and Perfect were boosted by having multiple versions available. Sheeran recorded several versions of Perfect, including duets with Beyonce and Andrea Bocelli, while Despacito was given a boost by a remix featuring Justin Bieber. Top 10 in full Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	The biggest global song of 2018... was actually a song released in 2017, new industry data shows.
+text: Caroline Community Radio played French Kiss by Lil Louis on 17 December at a "time when children were particularly likely to be listening", Ofcom said. The communications regulator said the song was "not appropriately scheduled". Ofcom's report said the Essex-based station's licensee confirmed it was "undertaking a review of its database". The regulator said the song, which reached number two in the UK charts in 1989, contained no lyrics but included "prolonged sounds of sexual moaning lasting two minutes and 20 seconds". Caroline Community Radio broadcasts on FM to the Maldon area of Essex from studios in Burnham-on-Crouch, and is also available online. The report said that "given the radio station's target audience, the likelihood of children listening was low". The licensee said it had been in the process of transferring its music library from one computer system to another. They added that "some scheduling restrictions that it had applied to songs had not been carried across to the new system". A report said the licensee "did not wish to offend its listeners and confirmed that it was undertaking a review of its database to ensure all song information is correct". Ofcom ruled that the broadcast was in breach of rule 1.3 of the Broadcasting Code, which states that "children must ... be protected by appropriate scheduling from material that is unsuitable for them". Caroline Community Radio is an independent organisation, but its website said it had connections to the famous pirate radio station Radio Caroline, including use of its name. Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk Related Internet Links Ofcom Caroline Community Radio	A radio station that played a song containing "prolonged sounds of sexual moaning" at breakfast time breached the broadcasting code, a watchdog ruled.
+text: By David ShukmanBBC News science editor For months we've been told to wash our hands and maintain social distancing to beat coronavirus. But scientists and engineers say we also need to think about the air we breathe inside buildings. Good ventilation matters in five ways. 1: If it's stuffy, walk away When you walk into a room and the air feels stale, something is wrong with the ventilation. Not enough fresh air is being introduced, which increases your chances of getting infected by coronavirus. Recent research shows that in confined spaces there can be "airborne transmission" of the virus - with tiny virus particles lingering in the air. According to workplace regulations set up before the pandemic, everyone should get 10 litres of fresh air every second, and that matters more than ever now. So if a place seems stuffy, just turn around and leave, says Dr Hywel Davies, technical director of the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers. He says that it's vital to have a flow of clean air: "If you've got someone who's infected in a building, and you're bringing in plenty of outside air, you're diluting whatever infectious material they're giving off. You're reducing the risk of other people becoming infected." 2: Look up at the air conditioning From offices to shops, air conditioning is welcome on hot days - but check the type of unit. The simplest is a slender white box mounted on walls or ceilings, known as a split air conditioner. This draws in air from a room, chills it and then blows it back out again. In other words, it's recirculating the air. This is no problem for a quick visit but may be a risk over a period of hours. A study of a restaurant in China blamed this type of air conditioner for spreading the virus. One customer was "pre-symptomatic" - in other words, he was infected but did not realise because he had yet to develop symptoms. Scientists reckon he released the virus as he breathed and talked, and it was pushed around the room by swirling air currents from the units on the wall. The result was that nine other people became infected. Dr Davies points again to the importance of fresh air: "If there had been a good supply of outside air, very likely fewer people would have become infected - if any." 3: Ask about the 'fresh air ratio' In a modern building where the windows are sealed, how can you get enough fresh air? You're relying on a ventilation system in which stale air is extracted from the rooms and piped to an air handling unit, often on the roof. There, fresh air can be pulled in from outside and mixed with the old inside air, before being sent back into the building. Given the risk of coronavirus infection, the professional advice is to maximise the fresh supply. "Having 100% outside air or close to 100% is a good thing," says Prof Cath Noakes of the University of Leeds and chair of the environmental panel of the government's SAGE advisers, speaking in a personal capacity. "The more fresh air, the less you're running the risk of recirculating the virus through the building." The precise mix is decided by the building's managers, who may be working for the owners or the tenants. . The drawback to running 100% fresh air is the cost - the incoming air has to be heated in winter and cooled in summer, all of which requires energy. 4: Get the office management to check if there's virus in the filters A modern ventilation system will have filters but these are not fool-proof. In the US, researchers investigating the Oregon Health & Science University Hospital found that traces of coronavirus were trapped by the filters but some had somehow slipped through. Prof Kevin van den Wymelenberg, who led the project, believes that swabbing the filters could reveal if there's someone infected working in a building. In South Korea, a call centre on the 11th floor of an office building saw one person infect more than 90 others. If the filters had been checked more frequently, the presence of the virus might have been spotted sooner. Prof van den Wymelenberg says data from filters can "show us where to punch and when to punch" in tackling infections. 5: Watch out for draughts Talk to any expert in the field and they will say that fresh air is the key. But one specialist in modelling the movement of air says it's not that simple. Nick Wirth used to design Formula 1 racing cars, and now advises supermarkets and food-processing companies on how to manage air flow to keep people safe. He worries that if someone sitting beside an open window turns out to be infectious, they could shed virus to others downwind. "If you open a window, where is the air going to go?" he asks. "We don't want people in a direct line of that airflow. "More fresh air in general is better but if it's flowing horizontally and full of virus it could have unintended consequences." I put this scenario to Prof Cath Noakes. She says the benefits of plentiful fresh air diluting the virus will outweigh any risks. An open window might lead to more people receiving the virus but in smaller, less risky amounts, in her view. It's no surprise there are disagreements - there's a lot we still don't know about the virus. But the air we breathe is bound to be part of any effort to make buildings safer.	Good ventilation could be the key to avoiding coronavirus as winter approaches and people spend more time indoors.
+text: France acted to halt lorry movements in the wake of fresh concerns over the spread of a new strain of coronavirus. UK ministers and officials will discuss the move at the government's Cobra emergency committee on Monday. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps urged the public and hauliers not to travel to ports in Kent, saying "significant disruption" was likely in the area. Kent Police has put Operation Stack into force on the M20 towards Dover to queue lorries caught up in the disruption. The force said it had implemented the closure of the coast-bound carriageway of the motorway between Junctions 8 and 11 as a "contingency measure". The Department for Transport has said that Manston Airport in Kent is being readied to take up to 4,000 lorries to ease congestion in the county. The Port of Dover is closed to traffic leaving the UK "until further notice" due to border restrictions in France, port authorities said in a statement. "Both accompanied freight and passenger customers are asked not to travel to the port," it said. "We understand that the restrictions will be in place for 48 hours from midnight." Freight coming to Britain from France will be allowed, but there are fears lorry drivers will not travel to avoid being stuck in the UK. Unaccompanied freight, such as containers or lorry trailers on their own can still be transported, but vans, lorries and trucks are banned. Hauliers are advised to find other routes into the continent. About 10,000 lorries a day travel between Dover and Calais during peak periods such as Christmas. Border restrictions could mean disruption to food supplies, as well as difficulties in meeting orders of British goods in continental Europe. "Tonight's suspension of accompanied freight traffic from the UK to France has the potential to cause serious disruption to UK Christmas fresh food supplies - and exports of UK food and drink," Food and Drink Federation (FDF) chief executive Ian Wright warned. "Continental truckers will not want to travel here if they have a real fear of getting marooned. "The government must very urgently persuade the French government to exempt accompanied freight from its ban." Stockpiles ready Freight industry lobby group Logistics UK said it was concerned about the welfare of drivers going from the UK to France, and said they should have access to regular testing. It appealed for calm from shoppers, and said it was "maintaining close contact with UK government to ensure that supplies of fresh produce are available throughout Christmas and the new year". The British Retail Consortium (BRC) joined the FDF in appealing to the government to find a solution, but also added that there should be no immediate shortages. "Retailers have stocked up on goods ahead of Christmas which should prevent immediate problems," the BRC said. While the situation will be discussed at the government's Cobra emergency committee on Monday, meetings are being had between ministers and officials on Sunday night, according to BBC political correspondent Nick Eardley. He added that the government does not think the restrictions will affect the delivery of Covid-19 vaccines to the UK. Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has called on the government to extend the Brexit transition period as it deals with the new coronavirus variant, saying it was a "profoundly serious situation" which "demands our 100% attention". The current transition period is due to expire at the end of the year and the EU and UK are still negotiating a trade deal. Without it both sides will have to collect expensive tariffs that the Office for Budget Responsibility says could harm the UK's economy. Labour's Rachel Reeves, shadow minister for the Cabinet Office, called the development "deeply worrying". "The country needs to hear credible plans and reassurance that essential supplies will be safeguarded, including our NHS, supermarkets and manufacturers with crucial supply chains," she said. Flight bans French transport minister Jean-Baptiste Djebbari said France was suspending all traffic from the UK from midnight for at least 48 hours. A number of countries have banned or are considering stopping flights from the UK following the emergence of a new variant of coronavirus. Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Turkey and Canada are all halting flights, and other nations are considering the move. Trains to Belgium are also not operating. Eurotunnel suspended access to its Folkestone terminal on Sunday night for traffic and freight heading to Calais. Coronavirus cases in the UK have risen by 35,928 - nearly double the number recorded last Sunday, figures show. Public Health England medical director Yvonne Doyle said the "sharp" rise in cases was of "serious concern". It comes as Health Secretary Matt Hancock warned that the new variant of the virus was "getting out of control". The new strain of the virus was first detected in September. In November around a quarter of cases in London were the new variant. This reached nearly two-thirds of cases in mid-December. It is thought to have mutated in a way to increase the ability of the virus to infect cells, but it is not thought to more deadly than other variants.	The port of Dover has been closed to all vehicle traffic leaving the UK for the next 48 hours.
+text: Abril Pérez Sagaón was shot dead in a car on Monday in front of two of her teenage children. Juan Carlos García has not commented publicly. The couple were in the middle of a divorce battle and Mr García had been freed on bail after a prior allegation of violence against her. Ms Pérez said he had beat her with a baseball bat when she was asleep in January and she formally accused him of attempted femicide (murder of a woman because of her gender). Mr García was held in pre-trial detention for 10 months, but the judge released him at the start of November, downgrading the charge to domestic violence. According to Mexican media, the judge - named as Federico Mosco González - questioned the intent of the alleged crime, saying that if Mr Garcia had wanted to kill her, he could have done so as she was sleeping at the time. How did Ms Pérez die? She had a restraining order against her husband and was trying to get custody of their three children. El País newpaper said she had moved out of Mexico City but, according to relatives, she was briefly back in the capital on Monday to attend a meeting linked to the custody battle. A motorcyclist ambushed her vehicle while she was on her way to the airport afterwards. No charges have yet been issued, but the killing has sparked fierce debate in Mexico about the wider problem of gender violence. Activists have long accused authorities of not doing enough to protect women in abusive relationships. Many also insist the term "femicide" is necessary to give murders of women more visibility and ensure sentences fit the crime. The same judge who freed Mr García is now also under scrutiny for another decision: the release of a doctor accused of raping a female patient. Mexican media say Mr González insisted the evidence was insufficient. Ms Pérez was killed on 25 November, the date the United Nations has designated the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Events to mark the day were held across Mexico before news of this particular case was public. During the demonstration in Mexico City, key landmarks were defaced with feminist slogans, sparking outrage. Some feminists said officials were more worried about monuments than women's lives. In August, a protest against sexual assault cases involving police officers also became heated and bus shelters were smashed. The demonstration was held after several police officers in Mexico City were suspended as part of investigations into the alleged rape of two teenage girls.	The former head of Amazon Mexico is wanted for questioning after his wife was apparently killed by a hitman in Mexico City.
+text: The Future for Public Service Television Inquiry, chaired by Labour peer Lord David Puttnam, also called for more devolution in BBC budgets. BBC Scotland announced a trial of an hour-long news programme in February, that could replace Reporting Scotland. However, the corporation has yet to announce a final decision on the issue. Speaking to BBC Radio Scotland's Good Morning Scotland programme, Lord Puttnam said the current provision for Scottish audiences fell short. He said: "We looked carefully at it and we don't think the present system has fully taken on board the settlement that exists - that basically it's not reflective of the current constitutional settlement with Scotland. "And it certainly won't be reflective of the settlement, if - as seems absolutely possible - Scotland increases its relationship with Europe or solidifies its relationship with Europe in a post-Brexit world." 'Cap in hand' Lord Puttnam said BBC Scotland's news output should reflect the world to Scots "as seen from Scotland". He added: "There's no question that the world as viewed from Edinburgh and Glasgow is a different world as viewed from London. Those editorial decisions ought to be located in Scotland because they affect Scotland." On funding, Lord Puttnam said it was time for control of funding for Scottish programming to move to Scotland. He said: "One thing I discovered as a movie producer, unless you control your own budget, you will never make your own programmes. "You cannot continue to go cap in hand from Scotland to London, or from Manchester to London for that matter, and hope that the budget controllers will give you the type of freedom and be able to make the type of programme that you want to make." The report, commissioned in November 2015, also called for the licence fee to be replaced by a more "progressive option", including the possibility of a supplement to the council tax. On Tuesday, BBC director general Tony Hall spoke to the Culture Media and Sport Committee at Westminster. Speaking about a possible Scottish Six, he told the committee: "The current method of delivering news between six and seven is very popular, it's very popular with audiences in Scotland, the teams do a very good job. "So whatever changes we make must be in the knowledge that actually it's got to be as good as - if not better than - what we are doing at the moment." The so-called Scottish Six has been a long-running controversy within Scottish broadcasting, with previous proposals being ruled out by the BBC's then-director general Mark Thompson in 2006. The proposals are in response to criticism that the BBC's main Six O'Clock News programme, which is broadcast from London, often features stories - for example on education and health - that have no relevance to Scottish audiences.	A report into the future of public service broadcasting in the UK has given backing to the idea of a BBC "Scottish Six" TV news programme.
+text: The car was travelling along the A49 in Church Stretton at about 09:30 GMT when the tree toppled onto the bonnet of the car and the rest of the road. An 80-year-old man, a front seat passenger, was taken to hospital with a cut to his neck and chest pains. His wife, sat in the back, was unhurt. The 75-year-old driver was also taken to hospital with neck and chest pains. Latest on Storm Doris disruption in Shropshire The storm is causing major travel disruption around the UK, with severe weather warnings in place for some of northern England, East Anglia, north Wales and the Midlands, More than 4,000 homes are currently without power in Shropshire and the high winds have also grounded the Midlands Air Ambulance.	Two men have been injured when a tree fell on their car as high winds hit Shropshire.
+text: Two - Number of times a winning singer has returned to defend their title on home ground. This year it's Germany's reigning champion Lena, pictured above, singing Taken By A Stranger. Six - friends of Iceland's Sigurjon "Sjonny" Brink have stepped in after the singer-songwriter died in January, having already submitted his song Coming Home. 43 - no, 42 - no, 43 again - Number of participating countries. Slovakia planned to drop out, worried about the expense of entering. But having missed the withdrawal deadline, it dispatched sisters Daniela and Veronika Nizlova - performing as Twiins - to Duesseldorf to sing I'm Still Alive. Three - Singers in 3JS of the Netherlands, named Jan, Jaap and Jaap. Get it? And when there are three of you, you are never alone. Perhaps hence the title of their song, Never Alone. Sadly, 3JS didn't make it to finals. But were not alone in failing to do so. Two - Pairs of identical twins in the 2011 contest. The aforementioned Twiins, of Slovakia, didn't make it past the semis, but Ireland's Jedward - John and Edward Grimes - will perform their song Lipstick on Saturday. 13 years - Length of Italy's absence from the contest. But now it's back, with Raphael Gualazzi singing Madness of Love. Big Five - Italy's return rounds up the number of guaranteed finalists from four to five. The others are Spain, Germany, the UK and France, in recognition of the money they pay towards the cost of staging the event. 20,000 - Size of bet in euros, placed by an Austrian man in Vienna, wagering that his country would reach the finals. On Thursday, Austria did indeed make it through and the bookmaker, William Hill, paid out 28,000 euros (£25,000). "We are used to accepting big bets from our UK-based punters but a 20,000 euros bet on the Eurovision is all but unheard of," a spokesman said. 66,000 - Spectators inside Duesseldorf's Esprit Arena watching the contest in person, and an estimated global TV audience of some 100 million people - including Australia, on almost exactly the opposite side of the world. 12 million - Number of Russian expats living in Eurovision countries. They helped Dima Bilan to victory in 2008. This year, this diaspora could be valuable supporters of Russia's back-flipping, day-glow-trainer-wearing Alexei Vorobyov, with the song Get You, written by RedOne, Lady Gaga's Moroccan-born songwriter.	On Saturday, 25 countries will compete in the final of the 56th Eurovision Song Contest. Here are 10 significant numbers that sum up the 2011 event.
+text: Officers using an unmarked lorry caught the man while he was driving on the A15 near the Humber Bridge on Wednesday. Another lorry driver veered on to the hard shoulder of the M18 near Doncaster while using wet wipes on his hands. The drivers were detected as part of a three-day operation undertaken by Humberside Police. PC Barry Gardner said either incident could have led to a serious or fatal accident. He said the drivers could face a fixed penalty notice and a fine of up to £60 or be asked to attend a driver awareness course. "We've seen lots of different issues. Motorists using their mobile phones, drivers wearing no seatbelts, eating with two hands," he said. "Probably the worst was yesterday [Wednesday] on the M18 where a driver was opening a packet of wet wipes, diligently cleaning his hands, but while he was doing that he was right across on to the hard shoulder. "Had there been a vehicle broken down, which there was five miles further down, he would have hit that and no doubt would've killed the person stood outside. "So it is important that we're looking at stopping this type of behaviour and improve road safety." He said the force had dealt with more than 50 offences during the operation.	A driver of a lorry containing hazardous chemicals has been caught eating yoghurt with a spoon during a police clampdown on motoring offences.
+text: By Robbie MeredithBBC News NI Education Correspondent That is according to figures published by the Department for the Economy (DfE). Of 14,035 students who started higher education in 2016-17, 65.5% stayed in Northern Ireland to study. The most popular destinations for those who left to study were Scotland and the north-west of England. John Moores University in Liverpool was the most popular for those studying elsewhere in the UK, with 1,775 Northern Irish students in 2016-17. Other universities popular among Northern Ireland students were in Dundee, Glasgow, Edinburgh and the University of Northumbria. Fall in part-time students The most recent figures show that almost half of 18-year-olds in Northern Ireland enter higher education. A total of 48.2% entered higher education in 2015-16, which contrasts with fewer than a third 25 years ago. Over the past decade, there has been an increase of over 4% in the number of Northern Ireland students studying elsewhere in the UK. Previous figures have shown that fewer than a third return home to work after graduation. There was a slight decrease of just over 1% in the number of students in higher education in Northern Ireland in 2016-17. There were 54,570 students enrolled in higher education in 2016-17, a drop of 675 on 2015-16. There was a 2.6% decrease in first-year undergraduates in higher education, from 17,250 in 2015-16 to 16,800 last year. That was mainly down to a significant fall in the numbers of students beginning part-time courses, as full-time enrolments rose by around 7%. 100 countries represented The figures for individual subjects also show significant gender gaps in some areas. Over four in five medical students are female, while they also account for over 70% of education enrolments. In engineering and technology, over four in every five students are male, along with over three-quarters of computer science students. While over four out of five students in higher education are from Northern Ireland, there are now students from more than 100 countries here. Aside from the rest of the UK and the Republic of Ireland, there are significant numbers from China, Malaysia and the United States.	Over a third of students from Northern Ireland began their degree at a university elsewhere in the UK last year.
+text: Twenty-two people were killed in the explosion at the end of a concert at Manchester Arena on Monday night. Chris Parker, 33, said he comforted a seriously-injured eight-year-old girl and a woman who died in his arms. Jessica Parker said she saw her son on the news and had last seen him in person at a funeral five years ago. She said she had believed her son was living with his girlfriend. Manchester attack: What we know so far Three more arrests in arena bomb probe Who were the victims? "I had no idea he was homeless," said Ms Parker. "I just want to get back in contact now, to help and support him. He's had a troubled life but underneath he's got a good heart and he's very brave. "The explosion knocked him [off] his feet but he ran back in because he realised that people needed help." Ms Parker, from Sprowston, Norfolk, said she hoped to travel to Manchester on Thursday to look for her son. "I am extremely worried about him. I want him to contact me but if he doesn't want me there then fine," she said. Mr Parker had been begging in the arena foyer when the bomb went off. He comforted a seriously injured little girl and helped a woman in her 60s who was badly hurt. He told the media on Tuesday: "She passed away in my arms. I haven't stopped crying." A fundraising page set up to help Mr Parker has raised more than £34,000.	The estranged mother of a homeless man who helped victims of the Manchester bomb attack has urged him to contact her.
+text: The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust have been asking members of the public on its plans for New Place, the site of the home where the bard died in 1616. Conservations work would also be carried out on Nash's House - next door to New Place - and and the gardens nearby restored, said the trust. A spokeswoman from the trust said the plans are estimated to cost £3.5m. The trust said Shakespeare lived at New Place when he was not in London and where he spent the last 18 years of his life. It was demolished in the 18th Century. Ideas for the revamp of New Place include creating an outline of the structure of the house over its foundations "to create a sense of the shape and scale of it," said the trust. Disabled access and restrooms would be improved at Nash's House, where visitors currently enter to get to the site of New Place and is named after the first husband of Shakespeare's granddaughter. Temporary site closure Once plans are finalised, the trust plans to apply for funding later this year with a view to work starting in the autumn of 2014. The site would be shut until 23 April 2016 - the date of Shakespeare's birthday - in order for the work to be carried out. Mark Armstrong from the trust said: "Our aim is to create an exceptional space as a lasting legacy to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. "We want to involve all parts of the Stratford community - and everyone with an interest in this important site at the heart of our town - in helping us shape the future of New Place." Members of the public can give their opinion on the plans online and in person at the last on three consultation session on Friday.	The site of Shakespeare's last home in Stratford-upon-Avon is to be revamped in time for his 400th anniversary.
+text: By Jamie McIvorBBC Scotland correspondent Scotland's colleges have merged in the past few years to create just 20 so-called "regional supercolleges". Unions have warned about budget and job cuts, and there have been concerns about pay-offs at some institutions. Holyrood's Public Audit Committee has raised a number of concerns about the impact of college mergers. The committee chairman said the Scottish government and the Scottish Funding Council had not provided detailed figures to demonstrate efficiencies. Colleges have gone through a big shake-up in recent years affecting budgets and staff, the structure of institutions and their very role within the education system. They now focus primarily on full-time courses, mostly for young people, which lead to recognised qualifications. Colleges had a budget of more than £580m in 2013-14. The amount they get from the Scottish government fell 12% in real terms over two years. Between 2011 and 2014, the number of separate institutions fell from 37 to 20 through a series of mergers while the number of staff fell by 9%. The Scottish government expects the reform programme to deliver £50m of efficiency savings each year from this financial year. Among the concerns raised by the committee over the impact of college mergers were The two colleges that displayed "significant shortcomings" in their severance arrangements process were North College Glasgow and Coatbridge College. The Public Audit Committee is still considering reports from the Auditor General on both these colleges. Senior staff at the former Coatbridge College have been accused of colluding to give themselves overly generous severance payments before a merger. The committee previously heard how £849,842 was paid to seven staff. 'Yet to be convinced' of savings The chairman of the Public Audit Committee , Labour MSP Paul Martin, said: "We know that assessing costs and expected efficiency savings is a major challenge for mergers. "The committee was assured by the Scottish government that the lessons identified by the Auditor General from previous public body mergers had been learned. So it is disappointing that the Scottish government and Scottish Funding Council have not yet been able to provide detailed figures to demonstrate efficiencies. "The £50m figure for savings has frequently been referred to but we have yet to be convinced and we have sought clarity on the timescale for achieving this saving. Given the cost of the mergers and particular concerns around some severance payments made we have asked the Scottish government to provide greater detail on the merger costs and the achieved savings. "Further, the committee understands why arm's length foundations are being used by colleges, but calls for greater transparency in how they are being used by extending FOI legislation to cover them. "We acknowledge the Auditor General's finding that the merger planning process was generally good but we require more evidence of the benefits claimed." A Scottish government spokeswoman said: "We will consider carefully the Public Audit Committee's conclusions and recommendations. We particularly welcome that the report recognises that planning for mergers was good and the sector has responded well to a period of significant change. "With the latest figures showing that colleges delivered record levels of student retention, successful completion and a 34% increase in students progressing from college to university with advanced standing, they are continuing to meet learning targets and offer positive experiences. "As with any reform programme of this scale, there remains work to be done to realise the full benefits. This report and the one published recently by Audit Scotland are helpful in highlighting where improvements can be made. We will work closely with the SFC and colleges to ensure we build on this substantial early success." College governance itself is outside the committee's remit but the report's committee comes amid ongoing concern about the situation at one Glasgow college. The principal of Glasgow Clyde College, Susan Walsh, has been suspended since February. It had been claimed there was a culture of bullying at the institution, but Ms Walsh's supporters are adamant she is not a bully. Some staff and students have expressed concern they have been given little information about the situation. The Scottish government recently warned the college's board could be suspended.	More information is needed before a major shake-up in Scotland's colleges can be judged a success, according to a committee of MSPs.
+text: He was speaking on the day 930 RAF and 920 Army personnel are being told they are being made redundant - including 750 compulsory redundancies. The Army and RAF will eventually cut 7,000 and 5,000 posts respectively. Shadow Defence Secretary Jim Murphy said the cuts went too far and were the result of a rushed defence review. But Mr Fox blamed the "incompetence" of the Labour government for the cuts and said the UK would still have strong forces. He said: "The extra money we have allocated for the equipment budget from 2015 will allow our defence capability to grow in the second half of the decade." He said the previous Labour government "left the nation's finances broken" and a "£38bn black hole" in the defence budget. The tough measures would bring the budget largely into balance for the first time in a generation, he said. "Of course redundancies are always sad news, but we will continue to have strong and capable forces and we appreciate the hard work of our brave armed forces," said Mr Fox. 'Free of conscience' The MoD is looking to shed 22,000 posts over the next four years - more than half through redundancies. The Army employs just over 100,000 service personnel while the RAF has 40,000. The MoD has said personnel receiving the operational allowance, because they are serving in Libya and Afghanistan or are preparing for, or have recently returned from operations, will be exempt from the cuts unless they apply. And the BBC has been told that no RAF pilots or ground crew involved in operations over Libya will be forced to leave in this round of redundancies. Armed Forces Minister Nick Harvey told BBC Breakfast: "I have put the question inside the ministry (of defence) and I have been told that nobody currently involved in the Libyan operations on the RAF will find themselves being made compulsorily redundant. "It is possible that one or two of them may have volunteered, in which case they may or may not depending whether they are people we think we can spare." But Mr Murphy said: "They say it isn't through choice, but the government has decided to cut the deficit as quickly as it has, and this is a consequence of a deficit reduction plan that's going too far and a defence review that went far too quickly." He said the deficit could be reduced more carefully in a way that did not leave the UK without an aircraft carrier, a decision which had left "people across the world scratching their heads". He added: "I think that it's a politics and policy free of conscience and free of right and wrong and that's the type of thing that's absolutely ludicrous." Former head of the Army Gen Sir Mike Jackson told the BBC's News Channel he was concerned about the impact the cuts would have on Britain's future military capability. "The defence review laid out a force structure to be achieved by 2020. Between now and then there are some risks being taken, in my view," Sir Mike said. "For example, we will not have a carrier strike capability for the next eight/nine years or so." He said getting resources and commitments into balance would likely be "quite a challenge". "I'm assured that the arithmetic will balance out in terms of manpower and commitments but of course we live in an uncertain world, no-one forecast, for example, the commitment to Libya which has taken place over the last few months and there will be other unforeseen eventualities I have no doubt." Conservative MP and former Army colonel, Patrick Mercer, agreed the cuts were going too far. Gurkha cuts "We've never needed our combat forces more than we need them at the moment. The future is extremely uncertain," he said. In the Army, 870 soldiers volunteered for redundancy, but only 660 have been accepted. Director of manning for the Army, Brigadier Richard Nugee, told the BBC there were some areas of the Army - such as full colonels - where there had been a greater number of applications for redundancy than expected. "But there were a lot of areas in the Army where we didn't have enough applicants and we had to take non-applicants and so it varied by different parts of the Army," he said. Brig Nugee said while it might have been easier to make redundant all those that had volunteered it might not have been the right thing to do operationally. More than half of 260 compulsory redundancies - 150 - will be Gurkhas. In the RAF there were 620 applications for redundancy, 440 of them have been approved. The Royal Navy will announce details of its redundancies later this month. Members of the armed forces accepted for voluntary redundancy will serve six months' notice, while those forced out will serve a year. Gurkha Justice Campaign founder Peter Carroll strongly criticised the redundancies, calling them "short-sighted" and said it risked "undermining the 200-year history between Britain and Nepal." "It is particularly unfair that such a large number of Gurkhas are going against their own wishes. These are people who, as individuals, have given many years of loyal service to the UK," he said. Eviction Servicemen and women and their families have been contacting the BBC with their reaction. One person who works at RAF Lossiemouth said a huge split had occurred in the air force between those who wish to leave and those who are being forced. They said the MoD was forcing people out of their jobs by refusing to renew the contracts of those whose original nine-year contract had come to an end, a decision which was "more disgusting than voluntary redundancies". The wife of a serviceman whose active service has seen him deployed to Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan, said: "On the final day of service all those made redundant will not only be unemployed, many with no transferable skills, but they also then have only three months in their homes before facing eviction. "I don't believe Mr Cameron and those involved in making the decision to cut the Armed Forces are fully aware of the true cost and impact that the stroke of their pens will have on those who have served them so proudly." And someone who is serving in the Falkland Islands said people on duty there were also in the frame for redundancy.	Cuts being made to the armed forces will mean Britain's defence capability can grow later in the decade, Defence Secretary Liam Fox has said.
+text: We've answered a sample of the questions we received from readers on this subject. Did the prime minister mislead the Queen? The Supreme Court does not go as far as Scotland's Court of Session, which said that the PM had "an improper purpose" when he advised the Queen to prorogue Parliament. However, the Supreme Court judgement said: "It is impossible for us to conclude on the evidence... that there was any reason - let alone a good reason - to advise Her Majesty to prorogue Parliament for five weeks." Could Boris Johnson face criminal prosecutions? - Gordon Pearson The Supreme Court case was not about criminal law, but constitutional law, says BBC home affairs correspondent Dominic Casciani. As such, the PM broke the rules that govern how the UK functions, by breaching Parliament's right to hold the government to account. If someone complained to the police about misconduct of public office, the police would have to assess it accordingly. However, the bar to prove a criminal offence is very high and there is no suggestion the prime minister broke the law in this way. Is it possible to impeach the PM? There is a procedure giving MPs the right to impeach a member of government, as Labour MP Liam Byrne has suggested. However, Parliament says that "for all practical purposes the procedure of impeachment is obsolete". The last time an impeachment case was prosecuted was in 1806, but the attempt was unsuccessful. In 2004, a cross-party group of MPs, including Boris Johnson, tabled a motion to impeach Tony Blair for his role in the Iraq war. This motion was never debated. Could there still be a Queen's Speech? Despite the ruling, Mr Johnson says he still wants to hold a Queen's Speech. The speech marks the start of a new session of Parliament, where the Queen reads out a list of laws the government hopes to pass over the next year or so. The Supreme Court ruling does not prevent Mr Johnson from suspending Parliament again, as long as it does not stop it from carrying out its duties "without reasonable justification". So if Mr Johnson wants a Queen's Speech on 14 October (as originally intended), he could prorogue Parliament a day or two beforehand so that preparations can be made. Will Boris Johnson now face a no confidence vote? - Christine Philips That will depend on when and if Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn calls one. If the leader of the opposition introduces the motion, convention means the government will provide time for a debate to take place. So far, no such move has been announced. If one more MP votes in favour of, than against, a motion, "that this House has no confidence in Her Majesty's Government," then either an alternative government must be formed within 14 days or a general election is triggered. A complicating factor is that, if a vote of no confidence was successful now and a general election was triggered, it could mean Brexit taking place during the election campaign. It's still widely expected that there will be an early election at some point, but the timing is very unclear. Can the government appeal to the European court? No, even if it wanted to, it couldn't. The European Court of Justice only rules on issues relating to the interpretation of EU law and disputes between member states. Because this is a domestic constitutional issue, the European court has no jurisdiction. As such, the government has no further opportunities to appeal against the decision, as the Supreme Court is the highest in the UK. How did each of the judges vote on the issue? Supreme Court president Lady Hale said the decision was unanimous, meaning all 11 justices agreed that the prorogation was unlawful. The justices are appointed by the Queen on the recommendation of a panel of legal experts from each of the UK's nations. Applicants must have been a High Court judge for at least two years, or a practising lawyer for 15. Does this open the way for all decisions by government to be challenged in the courts? It's already the case that decisions by government can be challenged in the courts. One of the functions of the judiciary is to oversee the appropriate use of power by public bodies, including the government, through a process called judicial review. The courts can't challenge every government decision, only those that fall into the grounds for judicial review - that is, if a body is failing in its legal duty to act in a certain way, or it is acting in a way that goes beyond its legal powers. In this case it ruled that there was "no doubt that the courts have jurisdiction". What difference would five weeks make to MPs solving the Brexit deadlock? The Supreme Court doesn't say it would. What it does say is that one of Parliament's main responsibilities is to scrutinise the government, particularly at important moments, such as in the run up to Brexit. By proroguing Parliament for five weeks "without reasonable justification", the government had prevented Parliament from carrying out this job. Isn't the House of Commons in recess for three weeks anyway, for party political conferences? - Jami Burrows, Ipswich Recess does not happen automatically. MPs get a vote on it - unlike whether Parliament is prorogued. Because of prorogation, MPs did not vote on whether to break for the political conferences. As they are not on recess, they can return to Parliament - and Commons Speaker John Bercow says this will happen on Wednesday. Does this decision mean that bills thrown out during the shutdown can be reinstated? Yes it does. Parliament effectively goes back in time to 9 September, the day before prorogation took place. All the bills which were thrown out will be reinstated. This includes the trade bill and four other Brexit-related bills relating to immigration, agriculture, financial services and fisheries. It also brings back five other bills concerning, for example, domestic abuse, animal cruelty and divorce law reform. The bills will now pick up from the stage they had reached. Could the Queen have said "no" to the prime minister on prorogation? Josue Martinez, USA There is very little discretion for the Queen when it comes to decisions such as prorogation, says the BBC's royal correspondent Jonny Dymond, as she acts on the advice of the prime minister. "That advice, if you will, is with a capital A - she is effectively being told to prorogue."	The UK Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that Prime Minister Boris Johnson's suspension of Parliament broke the law .
+text: Seventy-five modern and vintage models travelled through the city centre before going to a heritage motor festival near Chichester. The Lord Mayor started the drive, which will include a visit to London's Mayfair Hotel, site of the first Jaguar launch in 1935. The individually-numbered cars from across the years include the E-type. They will make the 175-mile journey in two days. Most of the cars are privately-owned and driven by their owners. They will be joined by some of the most famous cars from Jaguar's own heritage collection and a selection of its latest models.	A grand parade of Jaguar cars has gone through Coventry to mark the 75th anniversary of the brand.
+text: They will allow motorsport promoters to apply for permission from local authorities to close public roads in England to stage races. The government said the move "could be a real boost" to tourism. The final decision on whether a race is safe to proceed would be made by councils, police and other local bodies. Motoring fixtures from small-scale local events to international races, such as a city-based Grand Prix, could get the green light. Transport minister Andrew Jones said: "This could be a real boost for the economies of an area. "The examples would be in cycling. We had the Tour de France here, we had a Grand Depart in Yorkshire a couple of years ago and roads were closed as part of that event and thousands of people came to watch it. "It had a huge impact, not just for boosting cycling in the UK, but for boosting tourism wherever it went." A public consultation in 2014 on changing the law to allow motor racing on English roads met with an "overwhelming positive" response, he added. Pollution impact Mr Jones denied the new rules could send the wrong message when there is fierce debate over traffic pollution in England's cities. A spokesman for London Mayor Sadiq Khan said: "In considering whether to support a Grand Prix in London, the mayor would need to see what the impacts are on air pollution." Khan's spokesman went on to say that the mayor was in discussion with Formula E over whether a race involving environmentally friendly electric-powered cars could be held on London's streets. Under the new laws, local authorities will be allowed to suspend the Road Traffic Act for authorised motorsports events, without the need for an individual act of parliament. 'Move forward' The new rules would mark a "seismic shift for UK motor sport," according to the Motor Sports Association (MSA), which has campaigned to bring closed-road events to the UK. "We can now take motorsport to the people, and in turn those local hosting communities have the opportunity to benefit from the economic boost that these events may provide," said MSA chief executive Rob Jones. Silverstone hosted the first Formula One world championship in 1950 and has been the permanent home of the British Grand Prix since 1987. But many international cities host motor racing circuits held on temporarily closed public roads, like the Circuit de Monaco, Baku City Circuit in Azerbaijan and Marina Bay Street Circuit in Singapore. Three times Formula One world champion Lewis Hamilton, in pole position for Sunday's Chinese Grand Prix, has said a street circuit in Beijing would be "epic". Former Formula One world champion Nigel Mansell welcomed the new rules, calling them a "great move forward" for motorsport.	Monaco-style Grands Prix events could be hosted on English roads under new laws coming into force on Monday.
+text: Visitor numbers have "plummeted" since Lancashire went into "very high alert" on Saturday, said Blackpool Council. Normally, three millions visitors head to the Golden Mile in the last two weeks of October for the illuminations. Bookings were "dire" says Blackpool Council's Alan Cavill who fears new measures could cost the town £130m. 'Nobody's here' Colin Sinderson operates Blackpool Cinderella Carriages along the promenade. He said: "It's dead. We're down 90% on our takings. Nobody's here." Under tier three, people are advised to avoid travelling into and staying overnight in very high alert level areas. Pubs, which do not serve substantial meals have been forced to close, as well as casinos, bingo halls, bookmakers and betting shops. "The government advice is what it is," Alan Cavill, director for communications and regeneration at Blackpool Council said. "We are open... and all we can say is that you are safe when you come here." But he admitted that visitor numbers had "plummeted" with 70% of cancellations reported at hotels and attractions. He added it was noticeably quiet for people walking through the town's illuminations since the tougher measures came into force and following Nicola's Sturgeon's warning for people in Scotland not to travel to Blackpool. "Businesses have stocked up, took on extra staff ready for a bumper two weeks. "It's dire. It is more like the end of the season in November than the busiest two weeks of the year." "It's incredibly upsetting." He said Blackpool Council was writing to the government along with Blackpool MPs Paul Maynard and Scott Benton calling for more financial help. President of Stay Blackpool, Claire Smith, said the tougher restrictions were "devastating" and would put many hotels and bed and breakfasts out of business. "Without a shadow of a doubt many will close - and never reopen." Why not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk	Having the highest tier of Covid restrictions imposed during Blackpool's "busiest" fortnight has been "catastrophic", said tourism bosses.
+text: John "Kenny" Collins, 77, Daniel Jones, 63, Terry Perkins, 69, and Brian Reader, 78, were ordered to pay the money back during a confiscation ruling at Woolwich Crown Court. The gang stole goods after drilling a hole in the wall of a vault at Hatton Garden Safe Deposit in Easter 2015. The raid has been branded the "largest burglary in English legal history". It is thought two thirds of the valuables remain unrecovered. Judge Christopher Kinch QC said the men jointly benefitted from an estimated £13.69m worth of stolen cash, gold and gems. The breakdown of the amounts ordered by the judge on Tuesday, based on the individuals' "available assets", are: Handing down his ruling, the judge said: "A number of these defendants are not only of a certain age, but have in some cases serious health problems. "But as a matter of principle and policy it is very difficult to endorse any approach that there is a particular treatment for someone who chooses to go out and commit offences at the advanced stage of their lives that some of these defendants were." Collins, Jones, and Perkins pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit burglary and were each jailed for seven years in 2016. Reader, who was too ill to attend the initial sentencing, was later jailed for six years and three months. Tom Wainwright, representing Reader, said an increase in his sentence "does not have to be very long for it to mean, in reality, he will serve the rest of his life in custody". The barristers for Jones and Perkins said their clients would have to serve the default sentence as neither will be able to raise the funds. 'Criminal lifestyle' Carl Wood and William "Billy the fish" Lincoln, 60, of Bethnal Green, east London, were given six and seven-year sentences respectively for the same offence as the rest of the gang, as well as one count of conspiracy to conceal, convert or transfer criminal property. Wood, 60, of Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, has already ordered to pay more than £50,000. Plumber Hugh Doyle, who helped the burglars, was ordered to pay £367.50 for his "general criminal conduct" at the court on Tuesday. Doyle, of Enfield, was convicted in 2016 of providing access to a yard where goods from the raid could be moved between vehicles. The judge said Doyle, 50, had not received any benefit, payment or reward for his participation in raid, but that he had been deemed to have benefitted £27,194.44 from the proceeds of a "criminal lifestyle". He said Doyle had "limited assets" and ordered him to pay the sum within 14 days.	The four ringleaders behind the Hatton Garden raid must pay a total of £27.5m or serve another seven years in jail.
+text: The change also means gatherings of up to 30 people, inside or outside, can take place in the island from Thursday. Hospitality businesses can reopen with table service only and all businesses must follow public health guidance. Sark, which is home to about 500 people, is yet to record a case of coronavirus since the pandemic started. The Channel Island went into lockdown for the second time on 23 January after an outbreak of Covid-19 was confirmed in Guernsey. Its entry into the first stage of lockdown exit was previously accelerated to 15 February, three days ahead of Alderney and one week before Guernsey followed on Monday. 'Strict border controls' Stage two of the Bailiwick of Guernsey's exit from lockdown framework requires only nightclubs to remain closed, but no such businesses exist in Sark. However, a ban on public singing and playing of brass or woodwind instruments remains in place. Chair of the Civil Contingencies Authority Peter Ferbrache announced this stage could last just one week, with Sark set currently to enter stage three and have all internal restrictions lifted on 4 March. This would mean the end of all social distancing and indoor face covering requirements. The island is able to do so because "strict border controls" exist between Sark and Guernsey, he explained. Arrivals in the other islands of the bailiwick from Guernsey must self-isolate for two weeks, under rules imposed by Sark's government, the Chief Pleas and the States of Alderney. Deputy Ferbrache added the further move to stage three is "conditional on things going well", but he was "as sure as you can be" they would. Follow BBC Guernsey on Twitter and Facebook. Send your story ideas to channel.islands@bbc.co.uk. Related Internet Links Exit from Lockdown - States of Guernsey Sark Chief Pleas	Pubs, restaurants and non-essential shops in Sark can reopen this week as part of the second stage of the States of Guernsey's lockdown exit strategy .
+text: Ruling for the first time specifically on e-cigarettes, the CAP said adverts must not target under-18s or non-smokers, and must not show tobacco "in a positive light". While the advertising of e-cigarettes on TV is currently allowed, the device itself must not appear on screen. The committee said the new rules would be reviewed after a year. Advertising of tobacco products is banned in the UK, except in the trade press. A CAP spokesman said e-cigarettes were previously "caught" by these rules - written before e-cigarettes existed - because they were held and used like cigarettes. This meant advertising was allowed, but e-cigarettes could not be shown on screen. Range of views The rules state that adverts must not: The CAP said a consultation before the new rules were created took into account a range of views about e-cigarettes and their "potential to re-normalise smoking, as well as the case being made for their public health benefits". 1. On some e-cigarettes, inhalation activates the battery-powered atomiser. Other types are manually switched on. 2. A heating coil inside the atomiser heats liquid nicotine contained in a cartridge. 3. Liquid nicotine becomes vapour and is inhaled. The "smoke" produced is largely water vapour. Many e-cigarettes have an LED light as a cosmetic feature to simulate traditional cigarette glow. CAP director Shahriar Coupal said: "We've moved quickly to put in place appropriate and clear regulation around e-cigarette advertising. "While the debate about e-cigarettes continues our commitment is to make sure they are advertised in a responsible way and that children are protected". E-cigarettes can already be shown in non-TV advertising, and this will continue when the new rules come into force next month. The CAP writes and maintains UK advertising rules, which are enforced by the Advertising Standards Authority.	Electronic cigarettes can be shown in UK TV adverts from 10 November, the Committee of Advertising Practice says.
+text: By Douglas FraserBusiness and economy editor, Scotland It's the view of the advisory panel asked to develop a recovery plan for the economy by the Scottish government. Chaired by former Tesco Bank boss Benny Higgins, it reports later with a focus on unemployment, inequality and education. Its recommendations include calls for action on investment in infrastructure The 60-page report includes proposals that would affect regulation, changes to tax, the role of the voluntary sector and the threat to the arts. BBC Scotland has seen some of the 25 recommendations, which call for: The report, titled "Scotland needs a robust, resilient and wellbeing economy" will be published the 12.30 coronavirus daily briefing in St Andrew' s House. The reference to wellbeing is in tune with the Scottish government's intention of shifting to a measure of economic activity that captures a wider range of outcomes than the conventional economists' approach to output. The report will reflect this through its approach to deploying not only financial assets but also social, natural and human capital. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, is thought to be preparing a stimulus package for the recovery of the UK economy, to be published in coming weeks, and going beyond the immediate pressure to handle the health, economic and educational crises. In addition to Mr Higgins, other members of the advisory group are: Professor Sir Anton Muscatelli, economist and principal of Glasgow University; Anna Vignoles, education professor at Cambridge University; Dame Sue Bruce, former council chief executive; Professor Dieter Helm, expert in environment economics at Oxford University; Professor John Kay, economist and businessman; Grahame Smith, general secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress; Dame Julia Unwin, ex-chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.	Banks are being asked to find new ways to finance struggling business customers, taking on more responsibility to ensure they survive.
+text: By News from Elsewhere......as found by BBC Monitoring The New Paper website said it had found "a thriving online community dedicated to hacking and modifying these apps". It also found some people offering their services to drivers who didn't know how to do so themselves, saying that one advertisement charged 200 and 350 Singapore dollars ($146 and $256, £117 and £205) a month for Gojek and Grab, two of the many ride-hailing services available in Singapore. New Paper journalist David Sun told The Straits Times that one way such modifications or hacks worked was to enable drivers to not accept rides, or to cancel them, without being penalised. This means that drivers could collude in not accepting fares in specific areas, an action which drives up fare prices, which are based on passenger demand. Drivers then accept passenger requests at the more expensive rates. You might also like: In addition to the higher costs to passengers, Sun said such apps also posed security and privacy risks. "It's not just consumers who are affected, even the Grab drivers who use such apps have put themselves at risk," he said. "I'm buying a modded app off somebody who has hacked it, I don't know what's going on in the back end. There could be malicious code there that could be taking my data." Singapore is considering regulating private-hire fares and forcing ride-hailing companies to make clear how they set their fares, especially during peak-hour "surge pricing". Grab and Gojek did not reveal the number of drivers who have been caught using such apps, but both companies said they were aware of such practices and would not hesitate to penalise drivers who did. Reporting by Tse Yin Lee Next story: Russian street art covered with asphalt 'by mistake' Use #NewsfromElsewhere to stay up-to-date with our reports via Twitter.	Some drivers on popular ride-hailing apps in Singapore have been caught hacking or using modified versions of the apps to increase passenger fares and their earnings.
+text: Emma Jenkinson, who teaches at a primary school in Gloucestershire, beat seven other people to win the competition in Newmarket. "Jigsaws are a solitary hobby so you don't know how good you are," the 31-year-old said. Ms Jenkinson finished the 1,000 piece puzzle in 171 minutes. Competitors at the event, which was held at St Mary's Church as part of the 3rd Annual Jigsaw Festival, were each given a copy of a puzzle called "****** as a Newt". Ms Jenkinson, who teaches at Bledington Primary near Chipping Norton, said. "It was harder than I thought it would be, but it was do-able. "I do the edges first and then go for large expanses of colour, but everybody did it in a really different way." 'Not Andy Murray' Ms Jenkinson, who said she does two or three jigsaws a month at home, drove to Suffolk for the championship. "I've done jigsaws for as long as I can remember and it appealed to me to take it to a competitive level. "Friends and colleagues, although they thought it was a bit out-of-the-ordinary, encouraged me to enter. "I never thought I'd be a British Champion in anything and I'm delighted, even though there were only eight entrants." The prize was getting to keep the jigsaw and £50, which Ms Jenkinson said would cover her travel expenses, night at a bed and breakfast and £5 entry fee. Organiser Judy Paxton introduced the competition at the festival after her research showed, to her knowledge, that there was no British championship in existence. "The winner was much faster than everyone else and we will introduce a second and third prize next year," she said. The new champion said: "It's not on a par with Andy Murray winning Wimbledon or anything, so I wasn't expecting this level of interest. "Hopefully more people will enter next year and the competition will now keep growing after its debut."	The winner of what organisers say was the first British Jigsaw Championship said she was delighted but shocked to be crowned champion.
+text: By Kevin PeacheyPersonal finance correspondent The company has agreed to pay refunds by 30 October for any holidays cancelled before September. Those cancelled last month or this month will be refunded by 20 November. By law, package holidays cancelled by an operator should be refunded within 14 days, but some people have waited three months to get their money back. 'Unreasonable' Virgin Holidays has received 53,000 refund requests since the start of March, totalling £203m - a situation which it said had put the company under "extraordinary pressure". The company said it had 1,300 claims left to process, which it said would be done by the end of the day. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it had received hundreds of complaints that people were not receiving refunds for holidays cancelled owing to the pandemic. It said many customers had been forced to wait for an "unreasonably long time", with some told the refunds would take three months. If Virgin Holidays fails to hit its deadlines, the regulator said it was prepared to take the company to court. This included refunds for Virgin Holiday Cruises. Your Virgin refund nightmares Holidaymakers have spoken to the BBC in recent months over the stress of getting refunds from Virgin Holidays. Newlyweds David and Natalie Rogers, from Dudley, saved for two years for their dream honeymoon safari trip in Kenya but coronavirus ruined their plans. "We were quite angry about having to wait on hold [to Virgin Holidays] for over eight hours, and a message on the line saying that travellers should have already received a voucher for their missed holidays. It just felt like we'd been forgotten about," they said. Lynn and Martin Fox had remortgaged their home to pay for a holiday of a lifetime with their two children in Florida. "If only they [Virgin Holidays] would have been honest with us and communicated with us, we would have been happy. If they put a date on the refund, we could have planned. But the phone cut off calls and emails were ignored," Mrs Fox said. Hannah Nash and her family paid nearly £7,000 for a holiday to Disney World in Florida but struggled to get a refund. "The stress is making me ill. These are not small amounts for normal people," she told the BBC in June. Andrea Coscelli, chief executive at the CMA, said: "Our action means that Virgin Holidays customers should receive all their money back without further delay. "We are continuing to investigate package holidays in relation to the coronavirus crisis. Should we find that any business is not complying with consumer protection law, we won't hesitate to take action." The regulator has issued similar warnings to other companies including Sykes Cottages and Vacation Rentals. A spokesman for Virgin Holidays said: "We have gradually reduced refund timeframes and are now 98% through the refund queue. "Our focus now is on rebuilding trust with our customers, recognising that it has regrettably taken much longer than normal to process their refunds. We thank them sincerely for their patience throughout." What are my rights? Regulation of holidays and flights is divided between the CMA and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). The CAA has now announced that refund credit notes (RCNs) will have greater protection than normal until the end of the year. RCNs were handed out by some companies instead of refunds early in the coronavirus crisis, as the businesses found themselves stretched by the level of claims. Customers must be given a cash refund if they ask for one. RCNs can be used to book another holiday, or a refund is given when the note expires. They have been temporarily protected under the Atol scheme, which is government-guaranteed and administered by the CAA. Protection has been extended to cover any issued between 1 October and 31 December. It will apply to all relevant vouchers issued by Atol holders operating within the UK. This means that the refund will be honoured, and can be drawn from a central pot, even if the provider goes bust.	Virgin Holidays has been ordered to meet refund deadlines following Covid-related cancellations or face court action by the regulator.
+text: Papal Nuncio Antonio Mennini said that although he had made mistakes, the cardinal had done a lot of good work for the church. Cardinal O'Brien resigned in February after three priests and a former priest alleged improper conduct in the 1980s. He has since left Scotland for "spiritual renewal, prayer and penance". The Papal Nuncio said that "notwithstanding his mistake" the cardinal had done "a lot of good for the church". He added: "We cannot judge the cardinal only for these very serious events, because in every person there is black and white, we have positive and negative." He said it was hoped that a replacement to Cardinal O'Brien as Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh would be appointed next month. Three bishops He said finding a replacement was a priority for the church. Bishops will also be appointed to fill vacancies in Paisley and Dunkeld by the end of the summer, he added. The Catholic Church currently has only three bishops in place serving its eight dioceses. Cardinal O'Brien was Britain's most senior Roman Catholic cleric until he stood down as the Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh.	The Pope's representative in the UK has praised the work of disgraced Cardinal Keith O'Brien.
+text: Joint Warrior is one of Europe's largest military training events and is held twice a year. This year's first round of training took place in April and involved Norwegian stealth missile boats. The second round will be held from 7-17 October and will see activities in the Clyde, southern Scotland and Highlands. The maritime contingent, many of them operating off the north coast of Scotland, will involve ships from France, Denmark and Norway with personnel on the Danish vessel HDMS Absalon leading the operations. Royal Navy ships taking part include HMS Monmouth, HMS Portland, HMS Somerset, HMS Sutherland, HMS Cattistock, HMS Brocklesby, HMS Bangor and Type 23 frigate HMS Northumberland. RAF Tornado GR4 aircraft and maritime patrol aircraft from the US, Canada, France and Germany will fly out of Lossiemouth in Moray. Typhoon jets will operate from RAF Leuchars in Fife.	Dozens of warships, military aircraft and thousands of soldiers, sailors and aircrew are to take part in a major exercise in Scotland.
+text: By Natalie ShermanBusiness reporter, New York The company sold 52.2 million iPhones in the three months to March - only a touch below expectations, despite waning global demand for smart phones. Revenues at Apple's services business that includes Apple Music and the App Store jumped almost a third to $9.1bn. Apple has about $145bn in the bank, but plans to return the cash to investors. After the announcement, Apple shares rose 3% in after-hours trading on Wall Street. Although the share buyback helped push the shares higher, overall the quarter was "impressive", said Ben Stanton, an analyst at Canalys. "It looks like on pretty much every front Apple has had a win," he said. The company, flush with a huge cash pile on strong earnings boosted by the US tax cut plan of 2017, also announced a 16% boost to its quarterly dividend. That came on top of $22.8bn in buybacks executed in the prior quarter, Apple faces battery pledge complaints Overall Apple reported a 3% rise in the number of phones sold, while revenue from phones jumped 14%, reflecting more expensive models. Some analysts had questioned whether demand for the most expensive iPhone would hold up after the initial rush. But Apple said the iPhone X was the best-selling model in every week of the quarter - despite costing almost $1,000 or £1,000. The average selling prices came in at $728, below analyst expectations of $742, which finance chief Luca Maestri blamed on clearing stocks of older models. On a call with financial analysts, chief executive Tim Cook dismissed concerns about soft demand for smart phones, pointing to the millions of people who still do not own one. "We still believe that over time every phone sold will be a smart phone, so it seems to us... that's a pretty big opportunity," he said on a call with investors. The iPhone continues to account for the bulk of Apple's revenues at just over 62% of the total. Sales of iPads rose 2% to 9.1 million units compared with the same period last year, while Mac sales slipped 3% to 4.07 million. Apple's services unit added 30 million subscriptions in the past 90 days alone, bringing the total to 270 million. Mr Stanton said that growth underlined a shift in strategy to develop businesses outside its core products: "This is the future of Apple." 'Very optimistic' Overall profits in the quarter were $13.8bn, up a quarter from the same period in 2017. The firm's revenue hit a record for the March quarter, which follows the Christmas rush and is traditionally one of the company's weaker periods. Sales growth of more than 20% in Japan and the greater China market - a critical area for the company - helped to lift the numbers. Mr Cook said Apple had the three top-selling phones in China and brushed aside concerns about how a brewing tariff fight between the US and China, where many of its phones are made, could hurt the company. "I think there's a lot of things that bind the countries together and I'm actually very optimistic," he said. Apple bought shares worth $23.5bn in the three months to March. It has purchased about $200bn of stock since 2012. The new plan to buy back even more stock comes after the US changed its tax laws last year, lowering its corporate rate to encourage companies to return cash piles to America. Apple also said it would increase the quarterly dividend by 16%. The next generation of software for the iPhone, iPad and other product lines will be shown off at its annual developer conference, WWDC, next month.	Apple is returning another $100bn (£73bn) to shareholders from its huge cash pile as solid iPhone sales helped revenues rise 16% to just over $61bn.
+text: It is understood the man was Gerard Mulligan, from Lisburn, County Antrim, and that he took his own life at the high security jail on Saturday evening. Mr Mulligan had been on remand charged with murdering his father, Gerald Mulligan, at his home in Limehurst Way, Lisburn, in September. The PSNI, coroner and Prisoner Ombudsman have launched investigations into the prisoner's death. The Northern Ireland Prison Service has not confirmed the inmate's identity or released any details about how he died, but said the man's next of kin have been informed. Acting Prison Service director general Phil Wragg said: "I would like to extend my sympathy and that of the Northern Ireland Prison Service to the family of the prisoner who has died in Maghaberry. "My thoughts are with them at this difficult time." The prisoner's father was found dead in the boot of a car near his home on 26 September and he was arrested shortly afterwards.	A 44-year-old man has died in custody at Maghaberry Prison, County Antrim.
+text: She also criticised plans by Chancellor George Osborne to introduce what he called a "living wage", saying the proposals did not go far enough. And she called for "protest-free buffer zones" around abortion clinics to prevent women from being "intimidated or threatened". The other leader candidates are Jeremy Corbyn, Liz Kendall and Andy Burnham. Mr Osborne pledged to lift the minimum wage from the current hourly rate of £6.50 to £7.20 from next April, gradually rising to £9 by 2020. At the general election, Labour pledged to lift the minimum wage to £8 an hour by 2020. Labour leadership contest At-a-glance profiles of the four contenders But Ms Cooper said the chancellor's figures should be higher and in line with those put forward by the Living Wage Foundation, which currently recommends £7.85 an hour, and £9.15 in London. She said the rise should be rolled out first to social care workers, and that it could be paid for by closing tax loopholes for large firms and hedge funds. For adults aged 21 and over the national minimum wage of £6.50 an hour, but for those aged 18 to 20 it is £5.13. Miss Kendall has also campaigned on the subject, calling for new powers to create a "real living wage society". Repeating her "buffer zones" call, which she made last year, Ms Cooper warned against "US-style abortion wars" in the UK. She added: "No matter how strongly protesters feel about abortion themselves, they don't have the right to harass, intimidate or film women who need to make their own very personal decision with their doctors." Meanwhile, Miss Kendall and Mr Burnham have released new campaign videos in the battle to replace Ed Miliband as Labour leader. In her "open letter to the Labour Party", Miss Kendall says she is the candidate with the broadest appeal and says Labour needs to "regain the trust of voters who've turned their backs on us". "I wasn't born into the Labour Party, I chose it," she said. "Just like we're going to have to persuade millions of Britons to do at the next general election." Mr Burnham's video features testimonies from his friends and family.	Care workers should have a higher minimum wage, the Labour leadership contender Yvette Cooper has said.
+text: By Charlie JonesBBC News Myer Rudelhoff's four-month-old son George spent three nights in Basildon hospital, in Essex. He had patchy skin, swelling on his lips, a high temperature and could not keep fluids down. She said: "I thought it was a sickness bug. I had no idea it was caused by coronavirus." Diarrhoea, vomiting and abdominal cramps in children can be a sign of coronavirus according to some researchers, but the officially recognised symptoms are a fever, cough and loss of smell or taste. Mrs Rudlehoff, who lives in Basildon, noticed her son had a temperature on New Year's Eve but put it down to teething. George began vomiting the following evening and on 2 January she called NHS 111, who told her to take him to hospital. She said: "I really did not want to go. I was so scared about him getting the virus there, I had no idea he had it. "He got so poorly so quickly when we arrived and was really lethargic. They took a swab and, when they said he was positive, I burst into tears. It was such a shock." The mother-of-two said she presumed it was not Covid-19 because he did not have a cough, though he did develop a mild one a few days later while in hospital. She said the staff were "amazing" and she wanted to reassure parents "not to be afraid to go to hospital" if their children were ill. Nurses told her they had treated several other children with the same mottled skin and sickness and asked her to share her story to raise awareness of these symptoms. Mrs Rudelhoff's post on Facebook was shared nearly 7,000 times within three days. In the post, she said she felt "upset, angry and frustrated" because she had taken the illness very seriously but George had still managed to catch it. He was the only member of the family who tested positive. George was discharged from hospital and was making a good recovery at home, she said. Dr Kilali Ominu-Evbota, paediatric consultant at Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust, said: "It's great to hear that George is now back home and on the road to recovery. "George's family did the right thing and we encourage parents to seek medical advice with their GP or via the NHS 111 service in order to get the correct treatment for their child." Basildon has an infection rate of 1,265 cases per 100,000 people - compared to the average England rate of 606.9. Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk Related Internet Links Symptoms of coronavirus (COVID-19) - NHS	The mother of a baby who was treated in hospital for Covid-19 has urged parents to be alert to symptoms such as mottled skin and sickness.
+text: Police deployed water cannon for the first time in six years after coming under attack again in Belfast. Crowds rioted on both sides of gates that separate a loyalist area and a nationalist area in west Belfast. Petrol bombs, fireworks and stones were again used to attack police, who have faced rising disorder since 29 March. Assistant Chief Constable Jonathan Roberts said that on Thursday night there was "sustained violence directed towards police officers on both sides of the interface over a period of hours". He said the majority of injuries to officers were to hearing due to fireworks being detonated close to them, one female officer suffered a broken bone in her foot. Two men, aged 24 and 32, have been charged with riot, in connection with disorder in Lanark Way in west Belfast on Thursday. They are due to appear at Belfast Magistrates' Court on Saturday. The 32-year-old man was also charged with possession of a petrol bomb in suspicious circumstances. Political meetings NI Secretary Brandon Lewis has met political leaders at Stormont to discuss the latest night of disorder and violence in Belfast. The five main party leaders were on the call, along with Simon Byrne, the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. BBC News NI understands all politicians reiterated their support for the police and agreed to hold further discussions about bringing the trouble to an end. Some of the parties are also holding separate meetings with the Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney on Friday. Kerbs and bollards were ripped up, their remnants turned into weapons. Police responded by regularly firing their water cannon, but the soaking didn't seem to stop many of the rioters. On the nationalist Springfield Road side, police Land Rovers moved up towards the rioters, weaving their way through traffic which was basically stuck in the road for a couple of hours. Police came under attack too in the Shankill Road area from petrol bombs and stone throwers. We asked a few people from the community to speak, but they were reluctant. After midnight the streets were largely clear, but many people are feeling a fresh and familiar sense of worry that there could be renewed potential for more disorder, more disruption and more destruction. The recent disorder began with petrol bombs and sporadic attacks in a number of mainly loyalist areas, but the unrest spread to a Belfast interface. On Wednesday night, the fighting escalated into sectarian clashes over a so-called peace wall in west Belfast. Crowds attacked police and each other at the junctions of Lanark Way, off the mainly loyalist Shankill Road, and the mainly nationalist Springfield Road. The peace wall divides predominantly Protestant loyalists - who are in favour of keeping Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom - from predominantly Catholic nationalists who want to see a united Ireland. A gate that divides the two communities was smashed open and, during several hours of disorder, police officers and a press photographer were attacked and a bus was hijacked and burned. The group which represents loyalist paramilitary groups has said none of them has been involved "directly or indirectly" in any of the recent street disorder in parts of Northern Ireland. The Loyalist Communities Council, whose membership includes the UDA and UVF, says people have a right to protest against the Brexit Irish Sea border, but it should be "entirely peaceful". It also urged people not to get drawn into violent confrontations. In a statement, it said it is seeking an end to all violence and to solve concerns about the Brexit deal. 'Appeal for calm' On Thursday night, SDLP councillor Paul Doherty joined a number of political, community and youth representatives on the Springfield Road after crowds of youths gathered in the area. "We stood at the main interface area creating a barrier almost between these youths and the gate at Lanark Way," he told Good Morning Ulster. "They attempted to breach the gate several times, but when it was clear that they weren't going to gain access to this area they proceeded to attack police further up the Springfield Road." He added: "From being on the ground last night and trying to engage with these young people, I'm also noticing that they're coming from all over Belfast, really, to be involved in these acts of violence." Sinn Féin councillor Claire Canavan said it was "the actions of the previous night that brought the young people out onto the street on the Springfield Road". "I would appeal for calm going forward into the weekend." Billy Hutchison, a Progressive Unionist Party councillor for the Greater Shankill area, said fewer people were involved in the disturbances on Thursday night, compared to Wednesday. "I think a lot of things that have been said over the last five or six days have been around for a long time," he told BBC News NI. "We need to start thinking about the language we use, we need to start thinking about the information we give out in our communities and we need to support the communities. "I'm hoping that we're over it and I'm hoping that people will see sense. It [violence] doesn't further the unionist cause, it doesn't further our neighbourhoods." Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) Micheál Martin have spoken over the phone and called for a calming of tensions. The US has also appealed for calm, with the White House saying it was concerned by the violence. When the disorder began last week in loyalist areas of the Northern Ireland it was linked to a decision not to prosecute Sinn Féin leaders for breaching Covid regulations at a funeral last June and tensions over the Irish Sea border imposed as a result of the UK-EU Brexit deal. The violence in Carrickfergus and Newtownabbey over the Easter weekend was linked to police operations targeting the South East Antrim UDA, a paramilitary group involved in organised crime. Speaking on Friday following two nights of violence at the west Belfast interface, ACC Roberts said of the hundreds who took part some were "operating independently", while some would be close to or involved in paramilitary organisations. "It is not our overall assessment that those organisations as a group are directing young people to get involved or orchestrating the disorder," he added. Mr Lewis, who travelled to Belfast on Thursday, has denied that the UK government has abandoned unionists through the new Brexit arrangements. Ireland's Foreign Affairs Minister, Simon Coveney, said Dublin and Westminster will support Stormont parties in stabilising the unrest. 'Utterly reckless' In a tweet on Thursday night, Justice Minister Naomi Long said it was "utterly reckless and depressing to see more violence at interface areas tonight". "My heart goes out to those living in the area who are living with this fear and disturbance." Writing on social media, Labour's shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Louise Haigh called on Prime Minister Boris Johnson to "urgently rebuild trust that he has squandered in Northern Ireland".	Nineteen officers were injured on Thursday night, bringing the number hurt in a week of violence across Northern Ireland to 74.
+text: The cable-stayed crossing will link Pontypridd's new Taff Vale development with Ynysangharad War Memorial Park. The town is already famous for its 18th Century Grade I-listed stone bridge built by William Edwards. Robert Bevan, Rhondda Cynon Taf cabinet member for enterprise, said the bridge would be a new local landmark. Fresh work to transform the Taff Vale site has has been long awaited since a former 1960s shopping centre and tax office branded as an eyesore was partially demolished in 2011. However, the developer which planned to build a new shopping centre there went bust in 2012, prompting the council to step in itself with plans for an office-led development. Mr Bevan said "fantastic progress" had been made since planning permission had been granted for a new scheme just over a year ago, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service. The plan for a new bridge over the River Taff was backed by the council's planning committee on Thursday. Mr Bevan said the footbridge would provide an important pedestrian link from the Taff Vale development to the park, and would increase accessibility to the National Lido of Wales.	The go-ahead for a new £2m footbridge has been a hailed as a major milestone for the revival of a south Wales valleys town.
+text: It concerns assessments of risks from tankers approaching and berthing at Milford Haven. The Environmental Impact Assessment Directive requires risks to be assessed and findings made public. South Hook LNG said authorities were dealing with the matter and it would assist if appropriate. Dragon LNG has also been asked to comment. BBC Wales has also asked the government agencies involved to comment over the notice, made to Britain. Mark Andrews, corporate affairs director at Milford Haven Port Authority, said: "In preparation for the arrival of LNG, Milford Haven Port Authority has, over a number of years, commissioned and produced extensive risk assessments in full compliance with all UK safety standards. Consequently, LNG vessels are regularly and safely handled at the port. "Milford Haven Port Authority continues to work with UK authorities in their dealings with the European Commission on how these matters are communicated." The notice is a preliminary step which could lead to action in the European Court if a member state does not comply. "The failure in question concerns the assessment of potential risks from LNG tankers approaching and berthing at Milford Haven," said Joe Hennon from the commission. In February, Plaid MEP Jill Evans said she and residents petitioned the European Parliament , highlighting their concerns. "The European Commission is clearly losing patience with the UK government's failure to produce information about important safety aspects at Milford Haven," she said. 'Major step forward' The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) say the issue is not their responsibility. The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) has been asked to comment. Companies South Hook LNG and Dragon LNG operate from different terminals, a few miles apart. A South Hook LNG spokesperson said: "We understand that the relevant authorities are dealing with this matter and we will assist if appropriate to do so." Dragon LNG has also been asked to comment. Meanwhile, campaigners have welcomed the news. Gordon Main, spokesman for local campaign group Safe Haven, said: "Today's news from the European Commission marks a major step forward for Safe Haven's nine-year campaign for LNG marine safety to be addressed in Milford Haven. "For 10 long years people living in the shadow of these developments have been asking, day after day, year after year, for shipping safety information to be made public. "At last it looks as though they will get their way." A Welsh government spokesperson said: "As the case involves two local planning authorities in Wales we will assist the UK government in responding to the concerns raised."	The European Commission has issued a formal notice over failure to comply with safety rules at Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) terminals in Pembrokeshire.
+text: By Jane DreaperHealth correspondent, BBC News The UK government has contributed £70m to the Affordable Medicines Facility for malaria (AMFm). Oxfam says there is no evidence the programme has saved the lives of the most vulnerable people. The body behind the AMFm says an independent study shows it has improved access and reduced drug prices. The scheme was introduced three years ago by the Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria. It acts as a global subsidy to provide greater access to combination therapy for malaria, particularly through private-sector drug retailers in developing countries. The idea is to reduce the use of older treatments that carry a higher risk of resistance, and to untap the potential of the private sector in reaching remote communities. More than 200 million people contract malaria every year and 655,000 die from the disease - most of them are young children. The scheme is being piloted in seven countries including Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria. Its future will be considered at a meeting of the Global Fund's board next month. Oxfam has criticised it as "risky and dangerous". The charity's senior health policy advisor, Dr Mohga Kamal Yanni, said: "It is dangerous to put the lives of sick children in the hands of a shopkeeper with no medical training, and to pursue a scheme that doesn't help those people who need it the most. "There is no cheap option or short cut to combat malaria. "The AMFm is a dangerous distraction from genuine solutions like investing in community health workers, who have slashed the number of malarial deaths in countries such as Zambia and Ethiopia. "The Global Fund board must act on the evidence and put a stop to the AMFm now." The Global Fund said Oxfam's claims were "simply untrue". In a statement, it said: "Some Western aid groups oppose a pragmatic approach that includes any involvement of the private sector. "But the reality of this programme is that it is getting life-saving medicine to people who need it most from the private sector outlets where they already seek treatment. "Before the launch of AMFm, life-saving malaria treatments cost up to 20 times as much. "An extensive study has shown that AMFm has increased availability and reduced prices for high quality anti-malarial drugs." The UK's Department for International Development (DfID) allocated £40m to the scheme in its first two years, and boosted it by £31.6m this year. AMFm is also supported by the Canadian government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. A DfID spokesman said: "DfID is helping to halve the number of malaria deaths in the most badly affected countries by 2015 in a number of ways, including improving access and availability of life-saving drugs. "Studies have shown that quality drugs have got through to remote areas - and that more vulnerable groups, including children under five in rural areas and from the poorest backgrounds, are now being reached."	The charity Oxfam has cast doubt on an international scheme that aims to boost the provision of the most effective treatment for malaria.
+text: The Lacock Cup was owned by the Church of St Cyriac in Lacock and used by its congregation for over 400 years. It was loaned to the British Museum in 1963. The church was given permission to sell the chalice in December 2012. It was jointly bought by the British Museum and the Wiltshire Museum in 2013. It will be on show at Salisbury Museum until May as part of a national tour. David Dawson, from the Wiltshire Museum, said the English silver and partially gilded drinking cup was a "unique survival". "There is no other cup of its type that has survived from the medieval times. "So it's a unique survival from the mid-15th Century. It's just amazing," he said. 'Stunning craftmanship' The British Museum said the chalice was one of the "most significant pieces" of secular English medieval silver and was in "near perfect condition". "The Lacock Cup is a stunning piece of craftsmanship and has a unique history," it added. "In the medieval period the cup was used for feasting. In the post-Reformation era, the cup became a sacred vessel: a chalice for communion wine in a Protestant church. "While this cup is of a type known to be popular in the late Middle Ages, most examples were destroyed due to changing fashions and consequently few pieces remain. "It was the cup's donation as a chalice to the church [of St. Cyriac] that enabled it to survive destruction. "A rare survivor, with a unique history, the cup is in near perfect condition today, despite its central role in the community, where it has been used and venerated for centuries."	An "extremely rare" 15th Century silver chalice worth £1.3m has gone on show in Salisbury.
+text: It said 221 of 1052 registered services have one or more suspected cases. The figure for homes with confirmed cases has increased since Tuesday morning, with officials giving different figures as the day has developed. More than 2,000 care homes in England have seen outbreaks of the virus. Health Minister Vaughan Gething told a press conference on Tuesday afternoon that there had been 75 care homes with confirmed cases. In the morning, chief medical officer Frank Atherton said there had been 61 as of yesterday. Number expected to rise But a statement from Care Inspectorate Wales said the number was 81 in adult care homes, and three in Wales' 207 care homes for children. There are 55 children's homes with one or more suspected case. Earlier Mr Gething said he expects the number of confirmed cases to rise. Asked how many tests have been carried out at care homes in Wales, he said he could not give a number immediately, but would make the figure publicly available. Within the last week, he said, 128 tests had been carried out in care homes. Earlier, Wales' chief medical officer, Frank Atherton said there have been cases of infection "clusters" in some homes. Speaking on BBC Radio Wales Breakfast with Oliver Hides, he said the virus "really has a predisposition to spread in closed environments." There have been concerns about how the sector will cope with the disease without more provision of personal protective equipment (PPE). At Tuesday's Welsh Government news conference, Mr Gething said difficulties in obtaining PPE were not the result of the UK-wide procurement of the equipment, but due to a global change in the market which has affected both the availability and price of goods. Mr Gething said the UK-wide system guaranteed Wales a share of PPE, based on its population. But he also said "orders from England" were "helping to crowd out the market" for obtaining personal protective equipment (PPE) for Welsh care homes. He told journalists that, at last week's meeting of health ministers across the UK, he had asked for "assurance in the delivery of that". "And that I think requires some operational rules because I did raise examples of where companies are told supplies [are for] Wales and wouldn't deal with them," he said. Mr Gething said the collapse of normal market conditions and supply chains meant that care homes and local authorities were not able to go out and procure supply in the way they would normally do. "That's why over forty per cent of the pandemic stock that the NHS has held has been released to local authorities for the social care sector," he said. Mr Gething said the UK-wide procurement approach was in Wales' best interests because Wales is a small country and the arrangements "are delivering significant supplies into Wales". He added it was "important they continue to work but it's important that we understand the rules that everyone is operating by to make sure people are reassured about fairness here in Wales, and indeed the other three nations within the UK."	A total of 81 adult care homes in Wales have had one or more confirmed cases of coronavirus, according to Care Inspectorate Wales.
+text: By Marie-Louise ConnollyBBC News NI Health Correspondent Richard Pengelly was speaking as the department gave an update on the transformation of health and social care in NI - which began two and a half years ago. Mr Pengelly said the public should not expect change to waiting times soon. He said only "a very large injection of cash" could do that. "We were very clear at the launch of the transformation strategy two and a half years ago that it will not eradicate waiting lists," he said. 'Large injection of cash' "The only way we will do that is by a very large injection of cash and we would estimate that to be somewhere between £700m and £1bn. "What the transformation agenda will mean, if we eradicate those waiting lists, we will never again accumulate such a wait." It has been two and a half years since the publication of 'Delivering Together', the 10-year plan which aimed to change the way services are delivered. Then health minister Michelle O'Neill said the plan would improve a system at "breaking point". Speaking to BBC News NI on Wednesday, Mr Pengelly said that even having a minister in place would not make any difference to the waiting list figures. "Even if the money was available, a minister still needs the tools at their disposal to be able to make a difference," he said. "It will still take many years to resolve that problem." The transformation process includes changing how breast assessment and stroke services are delivered across Northern Ireland. Both are currently subject to public consultation. Mr Pengelly said the department's mind is not already made up and could be changed. He urged the public to get involved. "We will gather evidence throughout the consultation. We will take an evidence based decision. There will be no dogma in this," he said. "I will not be convinced that change is not required to our system - our system is failing the public and we need to do things differently." With talks involving nursing unions over pay due to get under way, Mr Pengelly said it wasn't a simple debate. 'Working miracles' He insisted that unless money was taken from other areas of health and social care, some £20m - at present the money required to help reach a deal - was not available. However he said nurses were working miracles keeping the system running. "The staff have worked miracles to keep us going. We said two years ago to be fair to the staff and the public who deserve good health care that we need to transform the system," Mr Pengelly said. "If we don't transform the system it will inevitably start to collapse. "I can't say when or how, but collapse is inevitable." The British Medical Association welcomed the update. "Pressures in our system continue to increase and our waiting lists are still unacceptably long, so it is vital that the momentum and the commitment to changing our health system is maintained," said Dr Alan Stout, chairman of the BMA's Northern Ireland GPs' committee. "There will be difficult and challenging conversations and debate about the best way for services to be delivered. "This is to be welcomed as we need to be clear about how and where we deliver all services in the future."	Eradicating hospital waiting lists in Northern Ireland could cost up to £1bn, the Department of Health's top civil servant has said.
+text: BBC NewsWashington, DC The increase will roll out in increments, reaching the new level in 2017. Behind the local celebration of the new wage standard, however, a larger national debate continues over the economic rationale behind minimum-wage increases - particularly ones enacted on a municipal level, since prospects for a nationwide wage increase seem dim. Last year, Seattle fast food workers walked out on their shifts and began a strike to protest against low wages, sparking a citywide movement to increase Seattle's lowest wage. The strike began at the same time as the Seattle mayoral race, eventually becoming a centrepiece in the city's elections - a voting platform that candidates, like the current mayor Ed Murray, could not ignore. In the neighbouring city of Seatac, voters in November approved a ballot measure raising its own minimum wage to $15. After he was elected into office the same month, Mr Murray stayed true to one of his principle campaign promises and successfully pushed for an increase. As local politicians celebrated their legislative success, however, outside critics, like chairman and editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine Steve Forbes, have voiced their views on the increase, arguing that this policy shift represents a negative turn for the city. Forbes argued that Seattle was "wounding itself" by raising the minimum wage. The increase, he writes, "will destroy jobs, especially for young people, and bankrupt numerous small businesses that operate on tight profit margins". Despite these potential consequences, he concedes that Seattle's decision to raise the minimum wage reflects "the frustrations and anger that erupt when an economy is stagnant". "Seattle will say goodbye to many of its low-skilled workers, most of whom serve the retail and leisure and hospitality sector," former chief economist of the Department of Labor Diana Furchtgott-Roth writes in the New York Times. With the potential loss of low-skill jobs, others argue that the minimum wage increase could lead to a larger economic equality gap as unskilled workers in Seattle could face challenges in finding work. "It will deepen the tendency towards labour market polarization as a non-trivial number of workers, starting with those who command a market wage of $9.32 or less, will find themselves locked out of formal employment," writes Reihan Salam for the National Review. Aside from the growing online debate, some critics are taking their complaints to the courthouse. The Washington DC-based International Franchise Association plans to sue the city of Seattle as a result of the minimum wage hike. The association views that the increase is discriminatory because it requires smaller, franchise businesses to raise wages for their workers at the same rate as big businesses. Supporters counter that the minimum wage increase will not hurt businesses, but rather attract workers to Seattle, thus fostering a stronger standard of living. Former Clinton administration Secretary of Labour Robert Reich says that higher wages will bring more workers into the workforce, including some who wouldn't have been interested in the previously lower wages. "That means they'll end up with workers who are highly reliable and likely to stay longer, resulting in real savings," he writes in the New York Times. Additionally, Reich says, it's not just workers who will benefit from the increase in minimum wage: More money in the pockets of low-wage workers means more sales, especially in the locales they live in - which in turn creates faster growth and more jobs. A major reason the current economic recovery is anaemic is that so many Americans lack the purchasing power to get the economy moving again. Taking on trickle-down economists who champion economic policies supporting the rich rather than the poor, Seattle entrepreneur Nick Hanauer says that this increase will help further the already thriving economy of Seattle. "A city in which restaurants pay workers enough so that they can afford to eat in restaurants, doesn't have fewer restaurants. It has more of them," he writes for the New York Times. "A $15-an-hour wage isn't a risky and untried policy in Seattle. It is the natural evolution of common-sense economic thinking." As the debate comes to a head, perhaps only time will tell if the minimum-wage hike was a good decision for Seattle and potentially for other cities that are considering similar minimum wage increases. As Quartz's Tim Fernholz points out, Seattle's minimum wage increase is not only unprecedented in the United States (outside of little Seatac), it would be the highest effective rate across the globe as well. Last month Swiss voters could have set the record with the equivalent of a $25 (£15) minimum wage, but they overwhelmingly rejected the measure. It's impossible to fully predict the greater effects that the increase may have on the city and the globe. That said, it's difficult to deny that Seattle will present a good opportunity as a petri dish for economists and politicians alike to gain a new understanding of the real-life effects of raising minimum wage. (By Annie P Waldman)	Seattle City Counciln has raised its minimum hourly wage to $15 (£9), setting the city on the path to providing workers within its jurisdiction with the highest such rate in the country.
+text: Ash Scotland considered costs such as the economic impact of illness caused by smoking as well as lost productivity through workers taking smoking breaks. The charity said the public cost was in contrast to the £940m the Scottish government received from tobacco tax. It said tobacco duty needed to be increased and funding boosted to cover smoking prevention services. Ash Scotland said that lost productivity as a result of workers on smoking breaks, absenteeism among smokers and the lost output due to early deaths totalled more than £692m. An additional cost of £60m was also identified in lost output due to deaths from people being exposed to second-hand smoke in the home. The study also estimated that treating diseases caused by smoking cost the NHS £271m. It added that a further £34m was spent cleaning up tobacco-related litter from the streets while the cost of fires caused by smoking in commercial properties was put at £12m. 'Major costs' The charity's chief executive Sheila Duffy said the cost of smoking was "too high a price for Scotland to pay". She said: "Not only does smoking devastate our health, with over 13,300 adult deaths every year and thousands of others affected by smoking-related illness, it also has a negative impact on our economy." She added: "Taking into account NHS costs, productivity losses, premature death, costs of smoking-related fires in commercial properties, and clearing smoking-related litter, even on the conservative figures used, there is real cost of tobacco use to Scotland's economy of £1.1bn. That is a huge cost for us to bear." Ms Duffy said the cost of smoking was greater than the money received from tobacco duties, stating: "The Scottish government estimates it receives £940m in tobacco-specific duty, leaving a deficit of at least £129m. "Revenues gained do not cover the costs of tobacco for Scotland and neither, of course, are they designed to." The Ash Scotland chief executive called for cash to be put into services to help smokers quit and also said tobacco duty should be increased. Ms Duffy argued: "It is time we all realised that smoking is a drain on our finances and comes at a cost to all of us. "We need to be tougher on the tobacco industry, increasing the duty on tobacco, holding tobacco companies to account and requiring greater transparency, and we must continue to fund prevention and cessation services to help smokers to quit and stop young people from starting. "That is the only way we can stop the major costs of tobacco to our public health and our economy." Simon Clark, director of the smokers' group Forest, said: "Whatever the anti-smoking industry might claim, smokers make a huge financial contribution to the economy through tobacco duty and VAT. That's a fact. "The alleged cost of smoking is based not on facts but on guesstimates and calculations that have little relevance to reality."	Smoking costs Scotland's economy nearly £1.1bn a year, anti-smoking campaigners have claimed.
+text: The bird, named Bud, was found with a damaged wing on Mull last August and rescued by the Scottish SPCA. The charity worked with Raptor World and the RSPB to help it overcome the injury and a subsequent leg break. Bud was freed on 13 March - the first time the Scottish SPCA has returned an injured golden eagle to the wild. Colin Seddon, manager at the charity's National Wildlife Rescue Centre in Clackmannanshire, said the juvenile golden eagle had been found by a farmer on Mull. "Bud was found to have soft tissue damage to his wing which took a long time to heal and unfortunately once he had fully recovered he broke his right leg in a freak accident," he said. "The break was repaired by a vet using an external fixator and as the healing process was very long Bud was kept with us over winter. "We had to carefully choose the best time and place to release Bud and following discussions with David Sexton of the RSPB and Stewart Millar from Raptor World, we decided to take him back to a location close to where he was found." Mr Seddon said they had to wait for a "reasonable weather window" to release Bud. "We didn't want to release him in a period of heavy rain as he may not have been able to hunt," he said. "We also had to avoid strong winds because, as an inexperienced flyer, Bud would have been blown away from the release site where support food and monitoring is being provided by the RSPB." Mr Seddon added: "Bud is the first ever golden eagle we've been able to release back into the wild and everyone involved is extremely pleased with the outcome. "It is rare for us to rescue golden eagles as there are so few of them in Scotland and because they tend to live in remote areas they often die before they are found if they become sick or injured."	A golden eagle that was found injured on the Isle of Mull has been released back into the wild after almost eight months of care by an animal charity.
+text: Hundreds of players battled in the streets to get the hand-painted, cork-filled ball to goals three miles apart. The game - which began at 14:00 GMT on Shrove Tuesday - is played over two days. It will finish on Ash Wednesday. Dave Spencer was said to have goaled at Sturston shortly after 21:00 GMT. He was the first goaler of the day. The game's players are divided into two teams - the Up'ards and the Down'ards depending on whether they were born north of the River Henmore (Up'ards) or south (Down'ards). Shops boarded up windows and businesses closed early ahead of Tuesday's action. Local builder John Tomkinson "turned up" the ball to begin the game's first day. Butcher Nigel Brown is due to take that honour on Wednesday. One of the few rules of the game, which resembles a disorganised rugby scrum, is not to murder opponents. Tap three times Tina Martin, who sells Shrovetide memorabilia in her shop, Crew Deck, said many people return year after year - even though the event can be "baffling" to understand. She said: "I've listened to conversations outside the shop and you can hear people saying 'What on earth is going on?' They don't understand what's happening." Before each match begins, about 500 people sit down to a Shrovetide lunch and listen to speeches. Goals are mill wheels set in huge stone plinths on the banks of the Henmore Brook at the sites of two former mills. To score, a player must stand in the Henmore and tap the ball three times against the wheel. Scoring means you will be carried back into the town by your team shoulder high and cheered by hundreds of spectators. The game received royal assent in 1928 when the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, threw the ball. Prince Charles started the game in 2003.	As the first day of the annual Shrovetide football game drew to a close in the Derbyshire town of Ashbourne, the Up'ards are believed to have 'goaled' - or scored.
+text: I'd always thought of fasting as something unpleasant, with no obvious long term benefits. So when I was asked to make a documentary that would involve me going without food, I was not keen as I was sure I would not enjoy it. But the Horizon editor assured me there was great new science and that I might see some dramatic improvements to my body. So, of course, I said, "yes". I am not strong-willed enough to diet over the long term, but I am extremely interested in the reasons why eating less might lead to increased life span, particularly as scientists think it may be possible to get the benefits without the pain. How you age is powerfully shaped by your genes. But there's not much you can do about that. Calorie restriction, eating well but not much, is one of the few things that has been shown to extend life expectancy, at least in animals. We've known since the 1930s that mice put on a low-calorie, nutrient-rich diet live far longer. There is mounting evidence that the same is true in monkeys. Growth hormone The world record for extending life expectancy in a mammal is held by a new type of mouse which can expect to live an extra 40%, equivalent to a human living to 120 or even longer. It has been genetically engineered so its body produces very low levels of a growth hormone called IGF-1, high levels of which seem to lead to accelerated ageing and age-related diseases, while low levels are protective. A similar, but natural, genetic mutation has been found in humans with Laron syndrome, a rare condition that affects fewer than 350 people worldwide. The very low levels of IGF-1 their bodies produce means they are short, but this also seems to protect them against cancer and diabetes, two common age-related diseases. The IGF-1 hormone (insulin-like growth factor) is one of the drivers which keep our bodies in go-go mode, with cells driven to reproduce. This is fine when you are growing, but not so good later in life. There is now evidence suggesting that IGF-1 levels can be lowered by what you eat. Studies on calorie restrictors suggest that eating less helps, but it is not enough As well as cutting calories you have to cut your protein intake. Not entirely - that would be a very bad idea. It's about sticking to recommended guidelines, something most of us fail to do. The reason seems to be that when our bodies no longer have access to food they switch from "growth mode" to "repair mode". As levels of the IGF-1 hormone drop, a number of repair genes appear to get switched on according to ongoing research by Professor Valter Longo of the University of Southern California. Intermittent fasting One area of current research into diet is Alternate Day fasting (ADF), involving eating what you want one day, then a very restricted diet (fewer than 600 calories) the next, and most surprisingly, it does not seem to matter that much what you eat on non-fast days. Dr Krista Varady of the University of Illinois at Chicago carried out an eight-week trial comparing two groups of overweight patients on ADF. "If you were sticking to your fast days, then in terms of cardiovascular disease risk, it didn't seem to matter if you were eating a high-fat or low-fat diet on your feed (non-fast) days," she said. I decided I couldn't manage ADF, it was just too impractical. Instead I did an easier version, the so-called 5:2 diet. As the name implies you eat normally 5 days a week, then two days a week you eat 500 calories if you are a woman, or 600 calories, if you are a man. There are no firm rules because so far there have been few proper human trials. I found that I could get through my fast days best if I had a light breakfast (scrambled eggs, thin slice of ham, lots of black tea, adding up to about 300 calories), lots of water and herbal tea during the day, then a light dinner (grilled fish with lots of vegetables) at night. On my feed days I ate what I normally do and felt no need to gorge. I stuck to this diet for 5 weeks, during which time I lost nearly a stone and my blood markers, like IGF-1, glucose and cholesterol, improved. If I can sustain that, it will greatly reduce my risk of contracting age-related diseases like cancer and diabetes. Current medical opinion is that the benefits of fasting are unproven and until there are more human studies it's better to eat at least 2000 calories a day. If you really want to fast then you should do it in a proper clinic or under medical supervision, because there are many people, such as pregnant women or diabetics on medication, for whom it could be dangerous. I was closely monitored throughout and found the 5:2 surprisingly easy. I will almost certainly continue doing it, albeit less often. Fasting, like eating, is best done in moderation. Michael Mosley presents Horizon: Eat, Fast and Live Longer on BBC Two at 21:00 BST on Monday 6 August. Watch online afterwards via iPlayer (UK only) or browse Horizon clips at the above link.	Scientists are uncovering evidence that short periods of fasting, if properly controlled, could achieve a number of health benefits, as well as potentially helping the overweight, as Michael Mosley discovered.
+text: There were 1,575 donors, an 11% increase on the previous year. Ben Glean from Grimsby, who died aged 18, was one of those donors. He suffered a cardiac arrest from undiagnosed type 1 diabetes. His mum Karen said: "I knew what Ben wanted because we'd had the conversation, which made it easier for me. "In my darkest time there was a light to be shone for someone else." He'd told his mum he was in support of donation but had not yet got around to joining the NHS Organ Donor Register. His kidneys were transplanted into two men in their 30s and his liver into a man in his 50s. His corneas were also used for two sight-saving transplants. "The intensive care unit was absolutely incredible," said Karen. "They were completely honest with me and answered countless questions. There aren't words enough to thank those amazing nurses for the respect shown to my son, even after we knew there was no hope of him recovering. "The tears of the nurses and doctors showed me how much they cared, and our goodbye to Ben was special because of them." Describing his last moments Karen said: "I'd crawl through the machinery and wires to play with his curly hair, to stroke his beautiful eyebrows and to whisper in his ear. "I must have told him hundreds of times I loved him and I begged him to come back even though I knew he could not. "Ben was kept comfortable and warm, his face cleaned, his hair brushed and he looked so peaceful and cared for. This is my last memory of my baby boy." Proactive approach The record figures are being attributed to a proactive approach and the introduction of specialist nurses across the NHS, who are there to support donor families and ensure the donation is properly co-ordinated. This has helped ensure fewer missed opportunities because families block donations, or the necessary equipment is not available. Sally Johnson, NHS Blood and Transplant director of organ donation and transplantation, said the improvement had been magnificent. She said the figures "would make any country in the world proud," but added that a "deadly shortage of organ donors remains". "Around three people who could benefit from a donated organ still die each day." Fewer than 5,000 people a year die in circumstances where organ donation is possible. The figures come at a time when the NHS is debating whether England should follow Wales and introduce an opt-out donation scheme. The NHS has yet to publish the results of a public consultation which ran for 12 weeks until 6 March, and the feedback is being analysed. Wales introduced an opt-out system in December 2015. However, a study published two years into the scheme, showed that it had not increased the number of donors in the country. Scotland is bringing forward legislation to provide an opt-out system and the issue is also being debated in Northern Ireland. However, recently a leading transplant surgeon said the province was "not ready" for such a system to be introduced.	A record number of people donated organs in the UK last year, with the highest increase in 28 years.
+text: By Helier CheungBBC News Fu Yuanhui, one of China's swimming stars, became an overnight social media sensation thanks to her frank post-race interviews and exaggerated expressions. Now, she's become a talking point online again - for breaking a sporting taboo by talking about her period. China missed out on a medal in the women's 4x100m medley relay on Sunday, coming fourth. After the match, team-mates Lu Ying, Shi Jinglin and Zhu Menghui were interviewed by a reporter - but Fu was initially nowhere to be found. It turns out she was crouched behind a board, doubled over in pain. When the journalist asked her (in Chinese) if she was OK, Fu said: "I didn't swim well enough this time," and apologised to her team-mates. "It's because my period came yesterday, so I felt particularly tired - but this isn't a reason, I still didn't swim well enough." It was a poignant moment for many Chinese viewers, who took to social media to express their support for her. "I really admire Fu Yuanhui, for swimming while she was on her period - women can be affected during their periods, especially with period pain... she felt guilty for coming fourth, but Fu Yuanhui we're still very proud of you," user TAO wrote on Sina Weibo. Tampons are relatively unknown in China It's also sparked a discussion about tampons - which are not widely used in China. According to one industry survey, only 2% of women in China use tampons - compared to 42% of US women. Many women weren't familiar with how to use them, or had not heard of them before, the survey by Cotton Inc said. "Someone accused Fu of lying, asking how she could have gone in the water on her period," weibo user Dvingnew wrote. "Chinese people have prejudices about tampons - women in their 30s around me are ignorant about tampons, and full of fear about tampons." And there may also be cultural factors at play too - some Chinese women have been told to avoid using tampons because it could stop them from being virgins, despite health experts pointing out that the two things are unrelated. One poster defending tampons wrote: "Who told you virgins can't use tampons?...Come on, it's the 21st Century." According to reports, China's first domestic tampon brand may be launched soon - which may encourage more women to swim while on their periods. So can menstrual cycles affect sporting performance? The subject of competing while menstruating is "definitely a taboo", Georgie Bruinvels, a sports scientist, tells the BBC. "A lot of [elite] sport coaches are men, and that makes it harder for women, who don't want to say 'I'm on my menstrual cycle'. "We need incidents like this to raise the issue" and encourage more research, she says. Ms Bruinvels surveyed over 1,800 sportswomen as part of her work as a researcher at the Female Athlete Health Group - a collaborative project between St Mary's University and University College London. "More than half the sportswomen I surveyed said they felt their menstrual cycle affected their performance." While there is not enough research into the impact of periods on sport, Ms Bruinvels says, one potential factor she was researching was iron deficiency. "Menstruation is the leading cause of iron deficiency in the developed world, but many women are not aware they have it. "There could be an impact on the amount of time you can exercise, and the maximum amount of oxygen" an athlete can use, and she recommends that sportswomen who feel they've been affected get their iron levels tested.	Competing in the Olympics is stressful at the best of times - but imagine doing so while having your period.
+text: State media have contrasted the Russian government's "deft" handling of Mr Snowden's case with the constant "embarrassment" suffered by Washington. "So far, the US has exhausted its tricks, but there is still no outcome on the extradition of Mr Snowden. It can be described as suffering constant embarrassment in this drama. In contrast, Russia has handled things with ease," says Xinhua News Agency. Some newspapers are questioning double standards from the US about its global cyber-surveillance operations. "The US still has to give a truthful explanation to all the countries and regions whose networks and computers were infiltrated. The US must stop acts that violate human rights in other countries and interfere in other countries' affairs," says the Wen Wei Po, a Beijing-backed Hong Kong newspaper. "What is ironic is that if Bradley Manning, Mr Snowden and Julian Assange were pursued by other governments, such as China and Russia, the White House and Foggy Bottom would be applauding them and calling them not just whistleblowers, but heroes and fighters for human rights," comments Chen Weihua, deputy editor of China Daily USA. Meanwhile, an official Xinhua news agency signed article warns that China will face a collapse "even worse than the Soviet Union" if democracy is allowed. "Angels, opinion leaders and public intellectuals have been fabricating rumours and fabricating negative news on society every day on microblogs to create an apocalyptic scene of China's imminent collapse, denigrate the existing socialist system and propagate a model of European- and US-style capitalist constitutionalism," the article says. "They have constantly fanned public hatred towards the current political regime," it adds. Hong Kong's South China Morning Post notes that the Xinhua article, which was signed "Wang Xiaoshi", appears to have originated on 15 July with a post on a personal blog registered to someone by the same name. It was widely circulated on mainland news portals. The Global Times also warns against growing support for Western-style "liberalism" and constitutionalism in Chinese society. "It is increasingly difficult for Western doctrine to provide an accurate interpretation, let alone guide us... We must not underestimate ourselves and be fooled by the West. The power of Western discourse does not mean that they really hold the truth," says the newspaper. 'Debunking' online rumours Elsewhere, six of China's biggest internet service providers, including Sina Weibo, Sohu and Baidu, have launched a joint internet platform for debunking "online rumours" and "false information". "This is a laudable step. Rumours can impose severe side effects on the social regulation. They can cause widespread panic, disturb the order of society and damage the government's credibility," says the Global Times. The State Information Internet Office has also closed down 107 "illegal news and information websites" since May this year. One of the closed websites was used by a whistle-blowing journalist to expose a sex video tape scandal that led to the downfall of many officials in Chongqing. "Many netizens have strongly criticised the State Information Internet Office for suppressing freedom of speech in a similar way to the "Burning of the Books and Burying of Confucian Scholars' during the Qin Dynasty", Hong Kong's Oriental Daily News notes. The Southern Metropolis Daily and The Beijing News say many internet users are accusing authorities of covering up the suspicious death of a watermelon street seller in Hunan on 17 July. Witnesses claim that urban inspectors or chengguan struck the vendor, Deng Zhengjia, on the head with a metal weight while trying to shut down his stall. However, internet users are questioning an autopsy released on Thursday that says Mr Deng's head injuries caused by an unspecified "external force" were "relatively minor" and "non-fatal". Finally, the Southern Metropolis Daily welcomes First Lady Peng Liyuan's debut in US magazine Vanity Fair's best-dressed list. "Peng is not the first Chinese leading lady to make the list, but she has raised plenty of eyebrows by beating America's first lady, Michelle Obama," the South China Morning Post adds. BBC Monitoring reports and analyses news from TV, radio, web and print media around the world. For more reports from BBC Monitoring, click here. You can follow BBC Monitoring on Twitter and Facebook.	Media in China see further embarrassment for the US after whistleblower Edward Snowden gets temporary asylum in Russia.
+text: Dame Sally Davies said when she reaches for a glass of wine she questions whether she wants the wine or to raise her risk of breast cancer. Speaking at a science and technology committee hearing, she urged other people to do the same. It comes as official UK figures show alcohol-related deaths are rising. Making choices Although alcohol-related deaths have fallen since peaking in 2008, experts are concerned the rates are going up again. Data published by the Office for National Statistics show there were 8,697 alcohol-related deaths registered in the UK in 2014 - 14.3 per 100,000 of the population. This compares to 14 deaths per 100,000 in 2013. Dame Sally said: "I would like people to make their choice knowing the issues and do as I do when I reach for my glass of wine and think, 'Do I want my glass of wine or do I want to raise my risk of breast cancer?'. And I take a decision each time I have a glass." Recent changes to official guidelines recommend both men and women should have no more than 14 units of alcohol spread over a few days. The changes came about because of mounting evidence that there is no safe limit in terms of health risks such as cancer. Previously limits were set at 21 units for men and 14 units for women per week. Tom Smith, of charity Alcohol Concern, said: "These latest figures show that alcohol-related deaths are back on the rise. "The figures also highlight the dangers of middle-aged drinking, with the highest number of alcohol-related deaths among 55 to 64-year olds." Dame Sally Davies was speaking at a committee meeting to discuss the new guidelines among other health issues. Public Health England experts say they are putting together a report on how to reduce the harms caused by alcohol.	England's chief medical officer says people must take personal responsibility for their drinking and consider cancer risks with each glass.
+text: By Angela Harrison Education correspondent, BBC News They include a Montessori school, schools where meditation and yoga are part of the timetable and private schools joining the state sector. They are small in number compared with the total number of schools in England - the first 24 open this month - but they are bringing in changes and their impact could be big. In future any new school being set up will probably be a free school. Local authorities will no longer build schools themselves, so the free schools programme will be the gateway for "education providers" - including faith groups and those behind existing academy chains - to establish new schools. Parents and teachers are also being encouraged to set up schools or lobby for them in what the government says should be a "community-led" programme. Free schools were a key part of the Conservative election manifesto and they reflect dramatic structural changes to the way England's schools are set up and run. There is a lot of controversy around the changes, with critics saying they will lead to the break-up of the state education system and that the free schools will draw money and pupils away from other schools. Local accountability will be lost, they say, together with the role of councils in planning school places. Liberal Democrat tension Opponents also believe the changes open the door for businesses to play a bigger role in England's education system. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg attempted to put those fears at bay earlier this week when he ruled out allowing free schools to be run for profit. There is tension between the coalition partners on the schools. Mr Clegg's Liberal Democrats voted against free schools at last year's party conference, but the Conservative Education Secretary Michael Gove has in the past said he is "relaxed" about the idea of groups making profits from running schools, although the government has no plans to change the law to allow this. The free schools are part of wider changes. While the government wants new groups to come forward to set up schools, it also wants all good existing schools to become academies - and like the free schools, these will be funded directly by Westminster and be outside of local authority control. That conversion process began soon after the general election, and figures out earlier this week showed that since this time last year, more than 1,000 schools have switched to become academies. What are the other changes coming in with free schools? Like academies, free schools have more freedom over the timetable and curriculum than other schools, and over the pay and conditions of staff. They are also free to hire teachers who are not qualified. Some are advertising smaller class sizes - 24 or under - and Saturday morning sessions, while some have changed the usual pattern of school holidays. Extra classes At the E-ACT free school in Redbridge, east London, the summer holiday will be cut to four weeks. The primary school is also offering breakfast and after-school care for pupils, running from 0800 to 1800. Many other schools in England have also offered this kind of "wrap-around" care for some time, but E-ACT - one of the groups sponsoring new academies and free schools - says its sessions will be different in that they will include additional "learning and development classes" led by teachers. It says the freedom to vary teachers' pay and conditions from those used across the general state school sector has enabled it to do that. This freedom is another reason that teaching unions dislike the move towards free schools and academies, fearing national agreements will be tossed aside and their members' rights eroded. However, the National Union of Teachers says that so far there have not been many complaints about this happening in the new schools. The union's general secretary, Christine Blower, said: "We don't notice a big move away from pay and conditions. We have not had people coming forward to us saying 'they are not prepared to talk to us'. "We have had some discussions with schools where they will stay roughly in line with pay and conditions." In one case, Ms Blower said, a school had said it would only employ qualified teachers. Another broad change the free schools usher in is in the variety of schools now being funded by the tax-payer. For critics, like the other big classroom teachers' union the NASUWT, this means a "reckless experiment", in which children will suffer. The key aims of the programme, the government says, are to improve standards of education in England, particularly for poorer pupils - and to give parents more choice. It says half of the new free schools are in deprived parts of the country, although this has been disputed, with opponents saying they will mainly serve middle-class areas. 'Naive' In some cases free schools have come about after academy chains (those behind existing academy schools) have identified a shortage of school places in an area and approached the local council to suggest it sets up a school there. There are severe shortages of primary school places in London and the Midlands. Hammersmith and Fulham Council in west London says its new primary free school - Ark Conway - came about because of a three-way partnership between the local authority, the Ark academy chain and parents. Parent Emily Philips had approached the council with the idea of setting up a school in the north of the borough where she lives because she was worried that her daughter - who was then two - would not get a school place nearby. She had spoken to other parents and gathered support for a new school a few years ago, "setting the wheels in motion". The Ark group came along, she said, after the free school legislation came in and she began to felt the "overwhelming reality" of what would be involved in setting up a new school. In retrospect, she feels she was "naive" to think she could have set up a school herself. All the same, she felt thrilled on her first tour of the renovated library that has become her daughter's first school. "To walk in to this building - it is amazing," she said. The government expects hundreds more free schools to open in the next four years. It will be some time before there is evidence about how they are doing. England's schools inspection service, Ofsted, says all new schools are inspected within two years of opening. At the same time, children at the new schools will do the same tests and exams as those at other state-funded schools - and all eyes will be on those results.	They are opening in former office blocks and libraries and Grade II listed buildings, being set up in England by religious groups and groups behind existing academies as well as by some parents and teachers.
+text: HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) has inspected the force four times since a damning report in November 2016. The new report found that while the Met has made progress, "consistently good" outcomes for children are not achieved. The Met said it was "aware of the urgency of improving our services". During the latest inspection, HMICFRS rated 191 of a sample of 214 child protection cases as either "requiring improvement" or "inadequate". 'Drastic alterations' At times, cases were found to be compromised due to poor investigations, volume of work and an absence of "robust supervision". The report gives one example where it took 11 days for officers to visit a 13-year-old girl who called police after a 12-year-old boy threatened to distribute a half-naked picture of her unless she sent him more images. Nevertheless, the Met was found to have made a number of improvements since 2016, such as appointing a named officer lead for child protection. HM Inspector of Constabulary Matt Parr said the Met had made "drastic alterations" and "by and large, the force is moving in the right direction". However, he said the force "must maintain its momentum and focus on ensuring the changes it is making are leading to a better service". Commander Richard Smith said "progress continues to be made in numerous areas". "We are aware of the urgency of improving our services further, but we also know that delivering real and sustainable improvements... will take time to achieve," he said. Inspectors said they would re-visit the force during the next 12 months.	The Metropolitan Police Service still has "significant weaknesses" in the way it deals with cases involving children, a watchdog has found.
+text: Parent company Sahaviriya Steel Industries (SSI) said it expected "zero recovery" from the Redcar operation. The Teesside furnaces and coke ovens were closed with a loss of 2,200 jobs in October. Its liquidation meant SSI recorded an overall third quarter loss of 33,122m baht (£600m). Group Chief Executive Mr. Win Viriyaprapaikit, said: "At present, the company on a conservative basis expects zero recovery after the completion of the SSI UK liquidation." Global demand Redcar was founded in 1917, producing steel that was used to build iconic structures such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Auckland Harbour Bridge. SSI bought the plant from Tata Steel in 2011. Mr Win said that SSI had been hit by a collapse in demand worldwide and in the last quarter alone sales from its upstream business, which included Redcar, fell 15%. He said: "Global steel over-capacity and demand imbalance since late 2014 and the continuous decline in steel prices resulted in a huge operating loss for the group this year."	The Thai owner of the Redcar steelworks has said that it lost almost 29bn baht ($800m, £530m) from the liquidation of the Teesside plant.
+text: By Kevin PeacheyPersonal finance reporter We asked you, via the BBC News Affordable Living UK Facebook group, alongside survey information from flatshare website Spareroom.com. What emerged was a picture of uncertainty from tenants about their landlords' long-term plans, but also a feeling of freedom should they need to move for a new job or for somewhere better. Here are some of the responses. The pros 1. Flexibility One of the biggest positives for many tenants was the ability to give relatively short notice, then move to a new home. "I get to live independently and have the ability to move with more ease," says one tenant. At a time when many young people are on short-term contracts or work on a freelance basis, such nimbleness can be vital for employment. "I am still settling into a career in academia," says one post. "Until I know where I am going to end up, renting is best. It is good to know that when I am moving to a new area, I am not making a massive commitment." 2. Maintenance is the landlord's problem The boiler breaks down or the roof leaks and all that is required is a call to the landlord. Among the many expressing relief is one who says: "You don't have to think about house insurance and massive maintenance costs, although this does assume the landlords are doing their job." Another says that, as a tenant, you do not have responsibility for the "big issues". 3. Getting to know you Nearly a third of those asked in a survey of more than 13,000 flat sharers by Spareroom.com said that they chose to live with others as it was more sociable. A number of people say that renting a room is a good way of meeting new people in a new area, or simply to help find their way around. "It is useful to get to know a new area or country," says one. The cons 1. Money matters The vast majority (83%) of respondents in the Spareroom survey said that they rented in a house-share for financial reasons. Yet, the costs involved in renting are a regular gripe. "You're paying someone else's mortgage" is a common refrain. Rent levels are a worry for many, particularly those in more expensive areas of the country. Fees. which many see as unreasonable, are facing a crackdown from the government, similar to a ban already in place in Scotland. That cannot come soon enough, according to many tenants. "I pay a fee to renew every six months. I have no idea what that covers," says one. 2. Questionable landlords There is concern about the number of landlords who fail to ensure that the property is maintained properly. The general view is that some bad landlords has given the sector a bad name. Deposits are controversial. Some argue that a landlord expects too much, potentially withholding deposits for general wear and tear, or old things being thrown out. "I can't wait for the day when I don't have to argue about why a three-and-a-half-year-old tin of paint the landlord left in my kitchen cupboard is no longer there," says one tenant. Others worry that not every landlord is putting deposits into ring-fenced account. Across the UK, landlords must put deposits into a government-backed tenancy deposit protection scheme. Different schemes operate in different parts of the country. 3. Insecurity Nearly half of those asked in the Spareroom survey said that being in control of when they move home is a key attraction of buying. While renting does offer flexibility, one of the big fears among tenants is being told by their landlord that they will have to move. One tenant sums it up by saying there is "constant uncertainty of [landlords] wanting to sell and therefore having to find somewhere else to live". This has been tackled, to an extent, in Scotland where new rules require longer notice periods and other measures designed to increase security.	Renting a room or a home from a private landlord is a reality for millions of people in the UK - but is it a positive or negative experience?
+text: Gunner, from Bridgnorth, Shropshire has Mucopolysaccharidosis (MPS Type 1) which means he cannot break down his body's natural sugars. There are no matches in his family nor on the UK register. To give the best chance of the treatment working, the transplant needs to be performed before Gunner's second birthday in October. Gunner's mother, Holly said: "It's just a constant rollercoaster of emotions, we're trying to focus on the positives rather than the statistics." He was first diagnosed with MPS in March after struggling with his breathing and an umbilical hernia. Holly said the diagnoses were "devastating" but they are trying to accept the "new normal". He is being treated at Birmingham Children's Hospital, where he has weekly enzyme infusions. "He looks fine externally, but internally it [MPS Type 1] could potentially block his vital organs, damage his brain," she said. Gunner's parents and sister Daisy, four, all had blood tests the week after his diagnosis but none were a match. "I was in complete shock when I found out there was no matches in the UK. "We decided we had to do everything we can to find him a match and make everyone aware of the system," Holly added. The family are also raising money for blood cancer charities Anthony Nolan and DKMS to help add new donors to the stem cell register. "It only takes one person to sign up, even if they just think 'I could do it, should I, shouldn't I', we just urge them please do, because you could potentially give us our son for so much longer," Holly said. Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk Related Internet Links Anthony Nolan DKMS MPS Society	The parents of a baby boy with a "devastating" rare genetic condition are trying to find a bone marrow donor.
+text: Vaughan Gething said he wanted any change to guidance on the mandatory use of face coverings to be made before schools reopen next Tuesday. In Scotland secondary pupils will have to wear masks in school corridors. And the UK government performed a U-turn and changed its guidance against using face masks in schools in England. "I've asked the children and schools advisory group of our scientific advisory group to consider the current guidance here in Wales," Mr Gething said at Tuesday's weekly briefing. "They will look at any additional risks and benefits [to] children, young people and staff from the wearing of face coverings in school settings." On Tuesday, the Welsh Government's scientific advisory group was asked to review the risks of using masks in schools following an update in guidance from the World Health Organization and the changes in Scotland. Mr Gething said the advisory group would provide ministers with updated advice later on Tuesday, and he hoped to deliver any decision to change the rules in Wales by the end of Wednesday. He said the Scottish government had announced changes after schools had "essentially been open for two weeks", and that it was important any changes were announced sooner rather than later. Mr Gething added it was important any decisions were "proportionate" and "appropriate to their setting, and local population". What do parents think? Julie Richards, whose 14-year-old daughter is due to return to Ysgol Garth Olwg in Pontypridd next week, said she supported the idea of wearing masks to school. "For me, my daughter's going into Year 10 - it's a very important year," Ms Richards said. "She can't afford to have another six months out of school." Another mother said that while she agreed with children wearing face masks on school buses, she did not think children should have to wear them in corridors or communal areas. "It's just quite uncomfortable," said Tracey Elsam, a healthcare worker whose daughter goes to school in the Vale of Glamorgan. "I'm not worried about [wearing a face mask] causing damage to her health, it's just discomfort." "Our background rate is low, so we must consider the balance of harm, especially for children and young people with additional needs," he added. Adults and background transmissions play a "significant role" in school outbreaks, he said, so control measures like social distancing and staggered starts, reducing mixing and staying in smaller groups would need to be observed. In a statement, the Welsh Government said its advice, which would be "kept under constant review", was that face coverings should be worn "where it may be difficult to stay 2m away from others".	A decision about whether children will need to wear face coverings to school in Wales will be made on Wednesday, the health minister has said.
+text: By Jon KellyBBC News Magazine The killer stepped in front of the prime minister, blocking his path. Then John Bellingham stretched out his arm, pressed a pistol to the leader's chest and pulled the trigger. Bellingham was a disgruntled merchant. The death of his victim, Spencer Perceval, on 11 May 1812 in the House of Commons was the only occasion on which a British premier was assassinated. But the murder set a grim template over the following two centuries for a series of lone gunmen who attempted to further their own views by picking up a firearm and training it on their nation's ruler. In the century after 1865, four US presidents died in such a manner. Although not technically a lone gunman, Gavrilo Princip altered the course of Western history by assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. It was an event that sparked World War I. The lives of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, US civil rights leader Martin Luther King and Swedish premier Olof Palme were all cut short by a gun-wielding individual, as was that of Indian leader and activist Mohandas Gandhi. Perceval was not, of course, the first ruler to die at the hands of an assassin. Shakespeare immortalised the conspiracy that led to the stabbing to death of Julius Caesar. Numerous other emperors and kings met their deaths in a similar fashion. But they usually fell at the hands of someone with privileged access - a member of the inner circle. Nor was Perceval the first leader to die from an assassin's gunshot. The first Earl of Moray, Scotland's regent, is thought by historians to be the first head of state to have been killed by a firearm, in 1570. But Perceval's death came at a watershed moment. Advances in breech-loading and flintlock technology in the 18th and 19th Centuries made the task of assassination far easier. Unlike in the days when Roman conspirators had to get close enough to Caesar to stab him to death, the advent of the rifle meant loyal bodyguards were no longer a guarantee of safety. And Bellingham can, like Princip and John F Kennedy's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, be seen as a dark manifestation of the age of the individual. "Bellingham was quite an intense character, he was an obsessive," says historian Andro Linklater, author of Why Spencer Perceval Had to Die. "He craved respectability. He was wrong-headed but logical. "It's a very modern personality type - that curiously cold, obsessive, self-obsessed view of the world." In this vein it's possible to view the rise of the lone gunman - inspired by the 19th Century anarchist, proto-terrorist doctrine of the "propaganda of the deed" - as a perverse counterpoint to the steady growth of democracy across the West during the same period. Just as ordinary citizens were winning the right to make their voice heard by their rulers, so too deranged loners had an opportunity to target the most powerful in society thanks to the accuracy of the rifle. As democratic elections made it important for leaders to be able to go out among their electorates, the rise of accurate, deadly firearms gave those same leaders pause for thought. The likes of Bellingham and Oswald - and those categorised as "spree killers" like Anders Behring Breivik - have always had a key tactical advantage. While terrorist networks and conspiracies can be infiltrated, the solitary gunman with a grudge cannot - and authorities face the challenge of spotting them in the first place. According to former Special Branch counter-terrorist detective David Lowe, now an expert in crime and security at Liverpool John Moores University, this fact alone makes them, in several key respects, more dangerous. "If you don't have intelligence, the only way you can tackle the threat is constant surveillance," he warns. "It's all about trying to spot this individual - keeping a watching brief for that one person who isn't behaving as everyone else is. Ultimately, you need an element of luck." Consequently, the fear that such individuals could strike at any time has remained widespread. In the era of the lone assassin, politicians' capacity to interact with the public they are supposed to represent is curtailed by the requirements of security and surveillance - a phenomenon given no better expression than the Popemobile, the bulletproof vehicle designed to shield the Pope from attack. This sense of unease is one that popular culture has proved adept at exploiting. Wolfgang Petersen's celebrated film In The Line of Fire - which pitted John Malkovich's deranged yet clinical gunman against Clint Eastwood's Secret Service agent - demonstrated how fresh the trauma of Kennedy's assassination remained 30 years on. Even more enduring is Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal, subsequently turned into a film starring Edward Fox as the mysterious Englishman hired to kill the French president. As he wrote the book, Forsyth envisioned readers would identify with his detective hero. But the author found, instead, the assassin's allure as a kind of anti-James Bond was far greater. "I thought I'd created a big, bad villain in the Jackal," Forsyth says. "But when it came out, of course, no-one wanted to know about the nice, soft, gentle policeman. Everybody watching the film is gunning for Edward Fox." The reality of gunmen like Oswald or Robert Kennedy's killer Sirhan Sirhan is far less glamorous. It can be hard to believe that these unremarkable people were able to accomplish the assassination of a closely guarded person. Little wonder then that conspiracy theories about assassinations have been so enduring given the shockwaves they have inflicted. "You can see the attraction of a better explanation than some pathetic character like Oswald having killed the president," says Sir Adam Roberts, emeritus professor of international relations at Oxford University and president of the British Academy. "It's difficult to accept that history is chaotic." If there is any consolation to be had, Roberts believes, it is the lack of success they have at fulfilling their stated goals. "I would say they almost never achieved their objectives," he says. "Gavrilo Princip started World War I, but he didn't intend to; he just wanted to kill an archduke. He couldn't believe the mass carnage that had been caused by his act." Lone gunmen, he adds, tend to share the mistaken belief that society's ills lie solely with the figurehead at the top. "In fact tyranny, or whatever form of government you have, usually has a broader social basis. The idea that one cleansing act of violence will transform the political landscape has been disproved time and time again because it has messier results." It's not a conclusion Bellingham, who was executed a week after Perceval's assassination, lived long enough to draw. The aftershocks of the killing, however, are still being felt.	Two hundred years ago, an assassin gunned down Prime Minister Spencer Perceval in the House of Commons. His death ushered in a threat that security services have struggled to deal with ever since - the lone gunman.
+text: Henry VII - or Henry Tudor - was born at Pembroke Castle in 1457, the son of Margaret Beaufort and Edmund Tudor. He went on to become the first Welshman to sit on the English throne. The 2.4m (8ft) high bronze statue was delivered on Thursday and will be unveiled on the Mill Bridge in Pembroke during a ceremony on Saturday. Local people and oil refinery Valero have contributed £20,000 towards the cost of the statue, with Pembrokeshire council also contributing a total of £20,000. It was modelled in clay by sculptor Harriet Addyman before being cast in bronze. People in the town hope a Henry VII centre can eventually be established in Pembroke and money has been secured for a feasibility study. Town councillor Linda Asman said she had been "inspired" to pursue the idea after visiting the Richard III Visitor Centre in Leicester. She said people were "really interested" in the idea. Backed by a small force of French soldiers, Henry Tudor landed at Mill Bay in Milford Haven in August 1485 and called on the Welsh to rally to his banner. He went on to defeat Richard III at the battle of Bosworth Field and to bring a measure of peace and stability as king. Some Welsh poets referred to him as Y Mab Darogan - the Son of Destiny - who would lead the Welsh from oppression. His chief supporter in Wales was Rhys ap Thomas, whose homes included Carew Castle, near Pembroke.	A Pembrokeshire town steeped in history is preparing to unveil a new bronze statue which commemorates its most famous son.
+text: The 40-year-old singer, who lives in the US, formally registered to stand earlier this month. But the Haitian constitution requires candidates to have lived in the country for five years prior to an election. The electoral council, which ruled against Mr Jean's candidacy, has also been deliberating on the applications of other potential candidates. The country is still recovering from January's earthquake, which killed an estimated 230,000 people and left more than one million homeless. Electoral council spokesman Richard Dumel said officials had accepted 19 candidacies and rejected 15 others. Following the ruling, Mr Jean issued a statement saying he respectfully disagreed with the council's decision but accepted it and urged his supporters to do the same. "We must all honour the memories of those we have lost - whether in the earthquake, or at any time - by responding peacefully and responsibly to this disappointment," he said. "I want to assure my countrymen that I will continue to work for Haiti's renewal. Although the board has determined that I am not a resident of Haiti, home is where the heart is - and my heart has and will always be in Haiti." Haitian President Rene Preval met with the former Fugees frontman on Thursday. Speaking to the Associated Press news agency, the singer said he felt the meeting with Mr Preval - who is barred from standing for another term in the 28 November elections - had gone well. The musician had argued that his appointment as a roving ambassador for Haiti in 2007 exempted him from the residency requirement. Earlier this week, Mr Jean revealed he was in hiding after receiving death threats over his presidential bid. Around the BBC BBC - Music - Wyclef Jean Related Internet Links Wyclef Jean	Haitian hip-hop star Wyclef Jean has been told he is not allowed to run in the country's presidential election.
+text: By Katherine SellgrenBBC News education reporter The Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education (Acme) says the number of pupils taking the GCSE early has more than doubled in the past two years. It blames a target-driven culture and head teachers putting the interests of their school above those of pupils. The Department for Education (DfE) says schools can make their own judgements. Official figures for England, Wales and Northern Ireland show almost 10.9% of those sitting GCSE maths (83,179 pupils) in 2010 were aged 15 or younger, compared with less than 4.5% (32,908) in 2008. Acme says this rise is being driven predominantly by schools in England keen to improve their rankings in school league tables - a grade C or above in maths is part of the official accountability measure used by the government (five A* to Cs, including maths and English). It says the trend can leave pupils demotivated and disengaged by what can often be an early experience of failure. In a quarter of schools that enter pupils for GCSE early, students stop studying maths once they achieve a grade C, which can affect university applications, especially for popular courses at prestigious universities, Acme says. Acme acknowledges that, for a small number of high-achieving individuals, early entry can be successful as long as there is a suitable programme of further study that progresses them towards A-level. But it says the educational interests of the vast majority are not served by early entry GCSE mathematics. "If any students are to be entered early, they must be confidently predicted to achieve an A*." Given the negative impact on students' motivation and mathematical capability, the UK economy is also likely to suffer, Acme says. The report urges the government to ensure all pupils continue to do maths until the end of Key Stage 4 (age 16). It says the DfE should publish data to measure the impact of early entry on progression after the age of 16 and use this to issue guidance to schools. It recommends Ofsted school inspectors monitor the justification for early entry for maths. And it wants to see league tables in England revised, so as to minimise the incentives for early entry. 'Worrying' Acme chairman Professor Dame Julia Higgins said: "We are seeing a worrying increase in the numbers of students being entered early for GCSE mathematics, to the detriment of almost all students. "It's no longer a case of a careful selection of the brightest students being pushed through early - it's whole cohorts now, whether or not it's in their long term interests as individuals. "The pressure on schools to improve their standing in the league tables provides an incentive to act in the school's best interests rather than those of the individual students. "The government must act now to define more clearly the requirement that all students study mathematics to the end of Key Stage 4, irrespective of whether a GCSE has been achieved earlier." A spokesman for the DfE said: "It's right that schools are free to make judgements about when their pupils are ready to take GCSEs. "Ministers expect these decisions to be taken in pupils' best interests - so that the brightest are stretched and fulfil their potential and those that need support can achieve a good standard in maths. "We will reform league tables to get rid of any perverse incentives."	Maths education in England is being damaged by schools entering pupils early for their mathematics GCSE, experts say.
+text: Moseley Road Baths opened in Balsall Heath in 1907 and is the oldest of three Grade II* listed swimming baths operating in Britain. Campaigners from Friends of Moseley Road Baths want the council to bid for Heritage Lottery money to help fund its restoration. The authority has said budget cuts mean it cannot afford to run the baths. Many original features Councillor Lisa Trickett said: "As a swimming pool run by the council with public funding then yes, we have major problems in terms of the future of Moseley Road Baths. "At this point in time it could cost £20m, £24m to put it right in the most basic sense." In December, the Labour-run council said it did not have the funds to match a £3m promise made by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition to refurbish the baths, which would have been used alongside a Heritage Lottery Fund bid. A spokesperson, at the time, said the situation would be reviewed at a later date, which may enable another bid for Heritage Lottery Funding. The small pool is currently open, but the gala pool shut a decade ago because of safety concerns. The building still has many of its original features, including more than 60 individual changing cubicles. A blog on the Friends of Moseley Road Baths website, said that the council confirmed it would remain open "for as long as is feasible" until Sparkhill Baths reopen in March 2015. Rachel Gillies, from campaign group, said: "We talk about the Olympic legacy, well let's ensure that children have got that opportunity to learn a life-saving skill. "Unless we invest in our neighbourhoods then we will see this wonderful building become derelict."	A historic swimming baths in Birmingham could close in 18 months unless the community can fund it.
+text: Ashers bakery was ordered to pay £500 for refusing to make a sponge cake with a pro-gay marriage slogan on it. A Belfast court found that customer Gareth Lee had been discriminated against on the grounds of his sexual orientation. He was backed in the case by the NI Equality Commission. The commission paid almost £39,000 in legal fees. In a statement, the McArthur family who run Ashers, said: "After much careful and prayerful consideration given to legal advice, we have decided to appeal the judgement handed down last Tuesday. "We continue to insist that we have done nothing wrong as we have discriminated against no individual, but rather acted according to what the Bible teaches regarding marriage. Last week a judge said that, as a business, Ashers was not exempt from discrimination law. The firm was found to have discriminated against Mr Lee on the grounds of sexual orientation as well as his political beliefs. The judge said she accepted that Ashers has "genuine and deeply held" religious views, but said the business was not above the law.	The Christian-run bakery at the centre of a discrimination case over a so-called 'gay cake' has decided to appeal.
+text: By Conor MacauleyBBC NI Agriculture & Environment Correspondent Friends of the Earth Ltd lodged papers at the High Court in Belfast. It wants a judge to review the decision of the Environment Minister Mark H Durkan not to issue a stop notice to the sand companies. The notice would have meant an immediate end to dredging on the lough. Earlier this year, Mr Durkan did issue an enforcement notice, ordering an end to the practice. But the sand companies appealed it to the Planning Appeals Commission, meaning the work could continue pending the outcome of the appeal. There is no appeal process when a stop notice is issued - it can only be challenged in the courts. Around 1.7m tonnes of sand is sucked out of Lough Neagh every year by barges. Internationally important It supplies around a quarter of the construction in Northern Ireland. Two years ago it emerged there was no planning permission for the extraction - which is considered a type of mining under planning regulations. The lough is an internationally important bird sanctuary with EU protection. Friends of the Earth said this placed a legal requirement on the department to protect it. "Sand dredging should therefore cease through the issuing of a stop notice and should only resume if planning permission is granted and it's demonstrated that it will not cause damage to the lough," a spokesman said. In response to the legal action Mr Durkan said he did not think he had made the wrong decision, but it would now be "for the court to decide". "It's Friends of the Earth's or anyone's prerogative to challenge any decision a minister makes, but I believe I have taken responsible and sensible action to date," he said.	An environmental charity is taking the Department of the Environment to court over what it claims is a failure to protect Lough Neagh from the activities of sand dredging.
+text: Royal Mail has suspended its guaranteed next day delivery service while Amazon is among retailers warning items will be delayed. And a group representing some petrol stations said there were difficulties getting fuel to some areas - mainly in parts of Scotland. But with fewer vehicles on the road, demand for fuel has fallen. 'Huge backlog' Royal Mail said that more than 90% of postal delivery rounds went out on Thursday with the "vast majority" of branches open. Additional trucks and rail services had also been used to move mail to distribution centres as close as possible to the area for delivery, it added. "I apologise to those customers who have experienced delays to their deliveries as a result of the severe weather," said Royal Mail's managing director, Mark Higson. One parcel carrier, Global Freight Solutions, said the weather had caused a "huge backlog" in shipments and that it had some three million parcels awaiting delivery. Online retailer Amazon website warned that deliveries may be delayed by one or two days for customers living in a snow-affected area. And it said it could give no indication of when normal services would resume. 'Impact' "Challenging" road conditions were making it difficult to supply petrol and diesel to some areas , even though the refineries themselves were operating without major disruption the government warned. "Fuel supply companies are working hard to maintain supplies of road transport fuels but are facing challenging conditions in some parts of the country," a Department of Energy and Climate Change spokesman said. But they added road transport demand should be low due to the weather conditions. The Independent Petrol Retailers Association said that up to 500 independent petrol retailers in Scotland and the east of England risked running out of petrol and diesel by the weekend. Filling stations in rural areas away from the main trunk roads were particularly vulnerable, it said. BP also said that parts of Scotland had been worst hit with deliveries of petrol to stations from Grangemouth in Scotland "severely impacted" by the bad weather. Shell said it had kept "the vast majority of our company owned petrol stations stocked" and that would continue to deliver fuel when it was considered safe to do so. And Tesco, one of the UK's biggest petrol retailers said that all its tankers were operational and that no stations were closed or reporting shortages. Like other supermarkets, Tesco reported no problems with food supply shortages or of panic buying. However, big chains did report a surge in business. Marks & Spencer said there had been a 121% increase in demand for thermal clothing in the past week. Meanwhile Asda said it had sold about 100,000 units of de-icer for car windows. Global Insight analyst Howard Archer said that the timing of the weather was "particularly bad and worrying for retailers in particular". "The crucial Christmas shopping period is now getting into full swing and an extended period of people not being able to get to the shops could be highly damaging for them," he said.	Delivery firms, retailers and petrol suppliers say snow across the UK has hampered services.
+text: Brian TaylorPolitical editor, Scotland@tannadiceladon Twitter Rival parties are to be condemned, to be lampooned, to be satirised. Their name is a hissing and a by-word. At the SNP conference in Edinburgh, that rule has generally been obeyed. Today, for example, Nicola Sturgeon described the UK Conservative government as a "vacuum filled by incompetence." But she made an exception to this rule on another occasion. And it was an exception pursued by several other speakers. In short, one detected a pattern. Ms Sturgeon said it was wrong to view Scotland as "No voters or Yes voters". Wrong to consider fellow Scots as "Remainers or Leavers". In a modern version of Jock Tamson's Bairns, she told delegates that they should view even those who are critical of the SNP as fellow citizens. Strategy in humane politics Perhaps especially those who are critical of the SNP. Nationalists, she said, should make their case with "decency, respect and dignity". So far, so familiar. But there is more to this than the customary appeal for humane politics. This is also about strategy. It fits with the first minister's proposal to hold talks with other party leaders about devolved powers and to establish a Citizens' Assembly to take the public pulse. SNP strategists look at the contemporary condition of politics. Febrile, brittle, divided. Fragmented by Brexit chaos. They have concluded that, in such circumstances, it will not do to be too overtly partisan, even about the issue which motivates the SNP, independence. Ultimately, of course, independence is a polarised, bi-partisan choice, to be decided in a referendum. But, in these preparatory stages, the SNP wants to avoid the appearance of an overly partisan approach. You can win a constituency election with a relatively small share of the vote, if your opponents split the votes which rival yours. But you can only win a referendum if you get 50% of the vote plus one. That, for the SNP, means taking along with you people who are not currently convinced. It means being more consensual. It means precisely the offers made this week in Nicola Sturgeon's Holyrood statement. And in speeches here at the Edinburgh conference by Mike Russell, John Swinney and others.	Party conferences are, by definition, partisan affairs. Opportunities to say how wonderful your own offer is and, by contrast, what a shower your opponents are.
+text: Ronald Webb, 76, of Brook Road, Bath, appeared at Bristol Crown Court for sentencing after being found guilty earlier this month. He was also given a 10-year restraining order preventing him from contacting the victim. The victim, who is now in his 40s, reported the incident to police in 2017 after carrying the secret for 30 years. The court heard Webb had befriended children in Swindon in the 1980s by forming a football team called Old Town United. A group of them went to his home one lunchtime, where he showed them pornography. When the victim had gone to use the toilet, Webb forced the door open and sexually assaulted him. Webb has been placed on the sex offenders register indefinitely.	A man who sexually assaulted a 13-year-old boy over 30 years ago has been jailed for four-and-a-half years.
+text: Natalie Rance acquired Acanthamoeba keratitis (AK), an organism which eats away at the cornea, in April 2017. The 24-year-old was infected after swimming in a pool with her lenses in. She said dealing with AK was the worst pain she had ever experienced in her life. "I couldn't even describe it," she said. "It was months and months on end in absolute agony 24/7. There was no rest from it." Ms Rance, who has worn contact lenses since the age of 11, said she only found out about the risks of wearing lenses in water after getting the infection. "I vaguely remember being told about something that lived in water but I was a bit naive as to where the organism occurred," she said. "I didn't realise quite how ubiquitous it was and you have this presumption that UK water is safe and that it would be in river water or other dirty water - not safe UK tap water." Bristol Eye Hospital said it sees five cases of the disease every year and there are about 125 across the UK. Four out of five cases happen in contact lens wearers. Ms Rance lost the majority of sight in her left eye and had a corneal transplant in December. She said she was nervous about swimming again. "When I was first going in the water, I was incredibly nervous and when I did get in, it was like everything that had happened to me came out and I got really very emotional," she said. "Once I'd got over the initial nerves, I was able to go under the water and swim around with the seals [off the Isles of Scilly], which made it all worthwhile."	A student who had to have a cornea transplant after contracting a rare infection is warning people not to wear contact lenses while swimming.
+text: Ionut Ilie (34) and Ancuta Schwarz (30) were arrested three years ago as part of a joint investigation involving the PSNI and Swedish police. Ilie was arrested in Romania and Schwarz was arrested in Belfast. They were taken to Sweden, where they were imprisoned on the same set of offences, involving the same victim. During the court proceedings in Sweden, the victim, who is in her 20s and was trafficked from her home in Romania, revealed how she thought she was being brought to Ireland for legitimate work. In fact, she was forced to work in brothels in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, before being moved to Sweden. After the Swedish sentences had been served, Ilie and Schwarz were extradited to Northern Ireland earlier this year. At Belfast Crown Court on Tuesday, they pleaded guilty to charges of human trafficking, controlling prostitution and money laundering and were each sentenced to two years. The pair were ordered to serve eight months in prison with the remainder spent on supervised licence. Prior to Tuesday's sentencing, they spent six months in custody in Northern Ireland. PSNI Det Ch Insp Douglas Grant, from Serious Crime Branch, said officers carried out an arrest and search operation in Belfast in April 2013, as a result of which 13 trafficking victims were rescued. Welcoming the sentences, he said: "Working with law enforcement colleagues in various parts of Europe, we believe we have halted the activities of an organised crime gang involved in controlling prostitution and human trafficking in Northern Ireland, Sweden and Romania."	A Romanian man and woman have been jailed on charges of controlling prostitution and people trafficking in Northern Ireland.
+text: Traders have been hit by a drop in sales since former Russian agent Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, were attacked. Wiltshire Council leader Baroness Jane Scott said the rescue package was agreed in Westminster on Monday. On Tuesday Defra declared the city officially safe outside police cordons. Commenting on the funding, Baroness Scott said: "It will enable us to carry on with the things we're doing, rate relief and small amounts of money to help with rent." At a meeting earlier on Tuesday, Wiltshire Council heard how some Salisbury businesses lost 90% of their takings. The average amount lost since the nerve agent attack was about 20%. Compensation is also available for individuals who can prove they lost earnings as a result of cordons. The meeting also heard decontamination of sites would start when investigations finished, which could be as early as next week. Other steps being taken include finding new drop-off points for coach tours that normally stop outside The Maltings, where the victims were found on a bench. Baroness Scott said she hoped there were would be more grants to help build up a long-term plan to revive trade. The council will work with Visit Wiltshire to create a new marketing campaign to attract tourists back into the city. Baroness Scott said: "We need to make sure there's lot going on in this city, that we're telling people it's safe and there's money to market the city in the future." The council introduced free parking at its car parks in the city on Saturday as a temporary measure. The Old Ale House in the city has seen a 20% drop in trade since the attacks, but business partner Shane O'Neill said the free parking was helping. "We are seeing a lot more foreign tourists coming in which is a real benefit to us because they've been avoiding the place. It's been really difficult," he said. Naomi House charity shop in The Maltings has seen a 70% drop in sales. Manager Audrey French said: "For the last three weeks, we've been really been struggling to get any custom in, any footfall past the shop or anything, because of the cordoned area. "On Saturday, the trade did pick up quite significantly which was lovely, but we have a long, long way to go." The impact of the free parking has also been felt by other businesses. Suzie Mason from Casa Fina said: "It was like a tap being turned on - it was fantastic. "People have been really supportive but we just need that to carry on. We need a long-term solution."	Businesses in Salisbury are being offered compensation from a £1m government fund to help them recover after the poisoning of a former spy.
+text: Karel Gott released almost 300 albums, starting in the mid-1960s, selling tens of millions of copies around the world. Gott was popular behind the Iron Curtain and became known as the "golden voice of Prague", but he also found fame in Western Europe, especially in Germany. He died late on Tuesday after a long and serious illness, his wife said. Gott announced last month he had acute leukaemia. He released his last album in 2018 and was still popular in Germany, Russia and the US, as well as at home where he was seen as the king of Czech pop music. His working life began as an electrician in Prague before he was discovered as a singer in the city's dance cafes. During the communist era, he performed at home and abroad, including in the West, which was uncommon for Czech musicians. He sang in a variety of languages besides his native Czech, including Russian, English, German and Italian, moving to Las Vegas in 1967 where he picked up tips from Frank Sinatra. Following the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Prague, Gott continued to remain popular, despite many singers being banned from the stage for political reasons. The same year, he represented Austria in the Eurovision Song Contest, performing the song Thousands of Windows. No-one knows how many records he sold, but the number is well above 30 million. His 1977 album Karel Gott sold 4.5 million copies alone in the Soviet Union. He also appeared in 30 films, usually playing himself, Tass news agency reported. He was renowned in Germany for singing the title song of an animated cartoon TV series Biene Maja (Maja the Bee) and he sang a German cover version of Lara's Theme from the hit film Doctor Zhivago. In his six-decade career, he was voted the most popular Czech singer 42 times in an annual poll. Czech President Milos Zeman said the singer's death was "extremely sad news for our whole country." Flags flew at half-mast on Wednesday and the government said he would have a state funeral.	A Czech singer who sold millions of records and was known as the "Sinatra of the East" has died aged 80.
+text: Invisible Children's half-hour film on the use of child soldiers by Kony's Lord's Resistance Army has been viewed nearly 40 million times on YouTube. The group aims to bring Kony to justice at the International Criminal Court, where he is charged with crimes against humanity. Critics, however, have questioned the methods of the non-profit group. The hashtags #stopkony and #kony2012 were among top trending topics on Twitter on Wednesday as the campaign took off. A number of celebrities, including P Diddy and Rihanna, tweeted links to the video. Kony's forces are accused of atrocities in four African countries: Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic and South Sudan. US President Barack Obama in October 2011 announced he was sending 100 special forces soldiers to Uganda to help track down Kony. However, Invisible Children was accused of spending most of its raised funds on salaries, travel expenses and film-making. Bloggers also pointed out that NGO watchdog Charity Navigator had given the group only two out of four stars for financial accountability. And an article in Foreign Affairs which accused Invisible Children and other non-profits of having "manipulated facts for strategic purposes" was circulated on the web. Invisible Children posted a blog to answer the criticism. Jedediah Jenkins, of Invisible Children, told the Washington Post that criticism of the group was "myopic". Peace deal rejected Joseph Kony and his close aides have been wanted by the ICC in The Hague since 2005. Their campaign of terror began in northern Uganda more than 20 years ago when they said they were fighting for a biblical state and the rights of the Acholi people. The LRA is listed by the US as a terrorist organisation and now operates mainly in neighbouring countries. The group is notorious for kidnapping children, forcing the boys to become fighters and using girls as sex slaves. Kony refused to sign a peace deal with the Ugandan government in 2008 when it could not guarantee the withdrawal of the ICC arrest warrants.	A campaign by US activists to capture alleged Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony has gone viral on the web.
+text: Knitters from the Project Wrap It Up group hung items from the gates of the Worcester Guildhall overnight. They said the council told them it would give the wrong impression to visitors from China and ordered them to take down the knitwear by 13:00 GMT. The council said the gesture was the wrong way to help rough sleepers but the yarn-bombers defended their move. Carys Thurlby, one of the yarn-bombers, said she was "disappointed" to see them come down as the knitters were only trying to help homeless people during the colder weather. She said the council told them if the scarves stayed up it "wouldn't give the right impression" to the visitors from China who were arriving for a meeting. The scarves will now be distributed to rough sleepers by Maggs Day Centre. Nina Warrington, a director with Worcester City Council, said they wanted rough sleepers to "engage with the right agencies" to help them find the right support. "I think it's a really, really kind gesture, but the way the city council works is to support people coming off the streets," she said. "This doesn't necessarily do that, [it] won't necessarily go to the right people."	A group of "yarn-bombers" had to take down scarves they left out for homeless people after a council objected.
+text: What prompted the coup? The military says it has taken control of the government and suspended the constitution in order to restore order and enact political reforms. Thailand is currently in a political mess. The country has been in the grip of unrest for months, with the opposition saying the democratically elected government must go because it is corrupt. A number of people have been killed in the violence. Observers say it is very hard to see how the problems can be resolved any time soon. What is happening on the ground? The cabinet has been ordered to report to the military and gatherings of more than five people have been banned. A nationwide curfew is in force between 22:00 and 05:00 local time. The broadcast media have been told to suspend all normal programming. A military statement said army chief Gen Prayuth would head a ruling military body - the National Peace and Order Maintaining Council - but that the upper house of parliament and courts would continue to function. Political party leaders, including opposition leader Suthep Thaugsuban, were taken away from a venue where they had been holding talks with the army after troops sealed off the area. Shortly after the coup announcement soldiers moved rapidly on the "red shirt" camp on the outskirts of Bangkok, as well as towards the anti-government demonstrators' camp in the centre of town. Troops fired into the air to disperse the pro-government protest camp but there are no reports of major violence. Have there been coups before? Many observers were sceptical when the army insisted its declaration of martial law on 20 May did not amount to a takeover. Two days later they were proved right. There have been numerous military coups in recent decades - this is the 12th since the end of absolute monarchy in 1932. The last coup before this one was in 2006, when then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was toppled by the army after being accused of corruption. The army is often accused of being sympathetic to the cause of his opponents in the current anti-government movement. Thailand army's pivotal role in politics What could happen now? Many Thailand watchers fear the army move could enrage government supporters. The BBC's Jonah Fisher in Bangkok says those people who voted for what is still the elected government will feel extremely frustrated by what has happened. Most people are expecting the "red shirts", the broad protest movement linked to the government, to rally and are extremely concerned about the possibility of confrontation, he adds. There are also worries about the economy - Thailand's currency the baht sank after the coup announcement. The stock exchange says it expects to keep operating as normal. The government has been trying to organise a date for a new general election - those moves have been thrown into great uncertainty. What are the roots of the crisis? There is a deep political divide in Thailand - between mostly rural, often poor, supporters of Mr Thaksin, and an urban middle class who object to what they see as his continuing influence in Thai politics. There have been regular protests by both sides ever since Mr Thaksin was ousted in 2006, but in the past few years the focus has been on the current Thaksin-aligned Pheu Thai government. The protests began to escalate into violence last November, after the lower house passed a controversial amnesty bill which critics said could allow Mr Thaksin to return from exile without serving time in jail. The anti-government camp claims that at least 28 people have died since then. The situation deteriorated still further earlier this month, when a controversial court ruling removed Mr Thaksin's sister Yingluck from her position as prime minister, saying she had acted illegally by moving her national security chief to another position. Profile: Yingluck Shinawatra Where is Thailand heading after protests? Who are the two sides? The anti-government protesters are a disparate group, united by their opposition to Mr Thaksin. They are being led by Suthep Thaugsuban, a former deputy prime minister who resigned from the opposition Democrat Party to lead the rallies. The protesters say the Pheu Thai government has been buying votes with irresponsible spending pledges, aimed purely to bolster its support base, and thereby creating a flawed democracy. They want the government dissolved and an interim administration appointed to oversee political reform. In contrast, the red shirts have been largely supportive of the government's policies, and have warned that they will turn out in large numbers if the government they elected is forced from office. They have held a number of rallies, but have for the most part remained off the streets. Observers fear that if they were to decide to protest again, an escalation in violence would follow. The red shirt leader, Jatuporn Prompan, has said his group could accept martial law, but "would not tolerate a coup or other non-constitutional means" to take power. Profile: Suthep Thaugsuban and Thailand's protesters Thai 'red shirts' warn of civil war	Thailand's army has seized power in a coup after months of political turmoil. BBC News looks at why this has happened.
+text: Italy's budget for 2019 has a clause enabling Venice to impose the fee, which will especially target day-trippers arriving on cruise ships. Tourists already pay a similar "landing tax" when they visit Italy's tiny Aeolian Islands. Venetians have long complained that mass tourism is swamping the city, adored for its picturesque canals. Hundreds of cruise ships moor in Venice every year, allowing over a million passengers to see the city's sights. Venice Mayor Luigi Brugnaro said the "landing tax" would generate much-needed income to keep the city clean. It is expected to be set at €2.50 to €5 per person, but at peak times in the summer it could rise to €10. Venice plans to have the tax in place for the 2019 high season. It will apply only to tourists, but it is not clear whether it will replace a city tax already levied on hotel occupants. That tax brings in about €30m annually, but the "landing tax" could generate more - an estimated €50m. Cruise passengers are easily identified, Italian officials say, but it may prove harder to tax day-trippers arriving by air, road or rail. Local residents, workers and students will be exempt. For years there have been protests by Venetians who say mass tourism is spoiling the city's character. Claudio Scarpa, head of the Venice hotel managers' association Ava, said "the principle is that whoever visits from morning to evening, contributing just a tiny amount to the revenue from tourism, but imposing costs on our services, must understand that it's not all there for free".	Venice has won approval to introduce an entry fee of up to €10 (£9; $11.50) for short-stay tourists.
+text: Pre-tax profits rose to £50.3m - up from £49m in 2015. The Cardiff-based society, which is the largest in Wales, said it exceeded £8bn in assets for the first time and helped more than 3,500 first-time buyers get on to the property ladder. It said the results were "one of its strongest years ever". Group chief executive Graeme Yorston said its model "continues to withstand difficult and sometimes uncertain periods". He acknowledged it had seen a decline in the use of its branches but maintained the society would "remain committed to the high streets". The society also said its Nemo secured loans business delivered a pre-tax profit of £11.6m, despite a decision to stop accepting new customers at the beginning of 2016.	Principality Building Society has announced a rise in its profits for 2016 following a dip the previous year.
+text: The four line drawings were found hidden inside books during conservation work at Melford Hall in Suffolk. Potter, the creator of Peter Rabbit and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, was a regular visitor to the Long Melford stately home and cousin to the Hyde Parkers who lived there. The images are set to go on display to the public. Three of the drawings were found by house manager Josephine Waters. She said: "I was moving a bookcase together with a colleague and whilst we were going through some of the books we discovered a drawing tucked inside, it was classic Potter style and we immediately knew it was one of hers. "It was an absolutely spine-tingling moment. I remember all the hairs on the back on my neck stood up as we realised what we'd found. Working with a collection like this, it was a dream come true." A fourth picture was discovered by Lady Hyde Parker, who lives at Melford Hall with her husband, Sir Richard, where Potter took regular holidays between 1899 and 1916. Ms Waters said: "We do not know the exact dates for all the drawings, but they give us a glimpse into the world of Beatrix beyond the children's stories and help us to imagine more about who she was as a person, and particularly who she was when she was on holiday and drawing for her own entertainment." Melford Hall is also home to the original Jemima Puddle-Duck toy, thought to have inspired the children's story. The exhibition - Beatrix Potter's Melford - will start on 13 July and run until the last weekend of October.	Previously unknown drawings by Beatrix Potter have been found during cleaning work at a National Trust property.
+text: The Labour MP says she plans to tell the House of Lords communications select committee on Tuesday that the current system is "skewed towards BT". Rival Virgin Media has already accused the government of subsidising BT. BT says that others are welcome to bid for funds. Open networks Counties around the UK have been allocated a share of £530m of government cash. The aim is for them to match the funding and appoint firms to roll out super fast networks in their areas. But the process has been slow. So far, just two contracts have been awarded - in Lancashire and Rutland. Both have gone to BT. BT rivals Fujitsu and Cable & Wireless have withdrawn from the process in many areas - leaving the telecoms firm as sole bidder in some places. In a letter published by the Guardian newspaper , Virgin Media chief operating officer Andrew Barron said it was not in consumers' interests for BT to win all the contracts. "If we agree competition is the best way to encourage further sustainable investment, and that embedding dominance in markets is bad for consumers, we must also accept that providing the vast majority of available public funding to an incumbent is not in the UK's best interests," he said. The money would be better spent funding alternative networks such as 4G and wi-fi, he added. In response, BT called on Virgin Media to open up its network to rivals. "BT would be more than happy to compete directly with Virgin for BDUK funds but we doubt that will happen. That is because Virgin have steadfastly refused to provide open wholesale access to their network - a key BDUK requirement - and because they have shown no interest to date in supplying rural areas with broadband," a BT spokesman said in a statement. "This is in contrast to BT who offer broadband services on a wholesale basis to 99% of UK premises. Fujitsu have announced their intention to bid for funds and so there will be a competitive process. We are already seeing this in several parts of the UK." Sums Ms Onwurah told the BBC that she was not impressed by BDUK - the group set up by the government to oversee the government's broadband strategy. "BDUK does not regard competition as its responsibility. We risk sleepwalking into another monopoly," she said. "BT is in an advantageous position because it has an existing network. Fujitsu is always going to have higher costs," she added. Virgin Media has publicly thrown itself behind Fujitsu plans. Project failure Andrew Ferguson, editor of broadband news site ThinkBroadband, said the system set up by BDUK was not perfect, but at least it was getting broadband to rural areas faster than before. "Certainly the way the funding has been set up does favour the large telecoms companies, and particularly those that have a big presence and wholesale service already up and running. Short of excluding the BT group from bidding, almost any system would have seen them getting a large chunk of the projects," he said. But he argues that is not such a bad thing. "If the money had been spent on new start-ups, then it is possible that some projects would have failed, requiring further investment by the public purse to avoid collapse," he said.	The government risks "sleepwalking into another monopoly" in the way it is allocating funds for rural broadband, shadow business minister Chi Onwurah has warned.
+text: He told the BBC the ex-Barcelona and Chelsea striker had recently visited him on a trip home. Eto'o, who now plays for Qatar Sports Club, heard about the 67-year-old's plight after a documentary showed him sleeping on the streets of Douala. Owona is now in hospital and waiting to have surgery on a hernia. 'Very kind man' BBC Pidgin's Leocadia Bongben in the capital, Yaounde, said the former Indomitable Lion sounded weak but grateful on the phone. "Eto'o is a very kind man, very kind," he told her. He added that the 37-year-old, a four-time African footballer of the year, had given him about $1,000 (£750) as well as promising to give him a new house. "I have been homeless with no food to eat," Owona said. The visit took place on Sunday 19 August at a hospital in the city of Douala, where Owona had been admitted after the documentary aired on Cameroon's Equinoxe Television earlier in the month. It showed footage of the former Union of Douala player sleeping rough and explaining that he had spent all his savings on medical treatment for his wife and children. You might also be interested in: After his wife and two children died, he was destitute and had been unable to find help - despite letters to government ministers asking for financial and medical assistance. But after the television programme, African Synergy, a charity set up by Cameroon's First Lady Chantal Biya, stepped in to organise his admittance to hospital. The former footballer told the BBC he also had painful wounds on his feet, making it difficult for him to walk. Hard times for veterans During the documentary, Owona had said his favourite footballing memory was seeing former President Amadou Ahidjo breaking security protocol and running towards him to celebrate his two goals scored against Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1972. It was an Africa Cup of Nations match, which Cameroon won 5-2, giving them third place in the tournament. "If former President Ahidjo were alive, I would not be suffering like this," he told the BBC. Joseph Kamga, another former Cameroon international, told the BBC that Owona was not the only Indomitable Lion veteran to be facing hard times. "The situation of some of my team-mates is beyond description," said Kamga, who played at the 1982 World Cup in Spain. But Owona's situation has spurred the sports authorities into action, he added. The Cameroon Football Academy is now discussing a project to help former players become coaches or go into football management, our reporter says.	Cameroon's ex-football captain Norbert Owona, who has been homeless for two years, has thanked Samuel Eto'o for promising him a new house.
+text: The debunked conspiracy theory was apparently highlighted on social media initially by a group of schoolteachers. The book History of the 20th Century in Flash Cards is aimed at undergraduate students. On its website, the publisher said the phrase should never have appeared. "This phrase which echoes conspiracy theories devoid of any factual basis should never have been used in this work. It doesn't reflect the editorial position either of Ellipses publications or the author," it said (in French). The textbook is described as a complete course on the last century in French, European and world history. It was written by Jean-Pierre Rocher, a teacher of history and geography and a graduate of the Sciences Po university in Paris, and aimed at Sciences Po undergraduates as well as students preparing for France's elite "grandes écoles". Although the book came out in November, it was not until the daughter of one of the secondary school teachers bought a copy that one of them spotted the reference to the CIA. On page 204 the author explains the context of the creation of the jihadist group, al-Qaeda and the "quadruple terrorist attack of 11/9 2001 on New York and Washington". He then makes the following statement. "This global event - no doubt orchestrated by the CIA (secret services) to impose American influence on the Middle East? - hit the symbols of American power on its own territory." The teacher immediately shared his concerns on a teachers' Facebook group whose spokesman, Bruno Modica, told Le Monde "it blew up very quickly". "There were 122 comments; this inserted clause of his conveys a conspiracy theory you can hear in our classrooms, from some pupils' mouths; but to find it written by a teacher and in this type of publication is unacceptable." Find out more about 9/11 The story was picked up by the Conspiracy Watch website, which complained that the sentence falsely suggested that there was some sort of controversy surrounding 11 September. It pointed out that a survey carried out by Ifop in December 2018 had found that 21% of people under 35 backed the idea that the US government was implicated in the attacks, and that this was the age group targeted by the textbook. More than 18 years after 19 al-Qaeda jihadists hijacked planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, a man dubbed the architect of the attacks is due to appear in a US military court this week. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is being held at Guantanamo Bay and was a close ally of Osama bin Laden; 2,997 people lost their lives in the attacks. French publisher Ellipses said the author of the textbook was keen to delete the words in parenthesis and that it was adding a correction online and in all books that had not yet been sent to bookshops. In a statement to the BBC it said opinions could "of course be freely expressed in our books but under no circumstances can an inaccurate or unfounded fact be presented as an objective truth".	A French publisher has apologised after a history textbook that appeared in bookshops in recent weeks suggested the 11 September 2001 attacks were probably "orchestrated by the CIA".
+text: By Victoria GillScience reporter, BBC News A global study, involving more than 30 scientists, assessed the conservation status of more than 500 individual species. This also revealed that 75% of species have populations that are declining. The findings are published in the journal Science Advances. Professor Jo Setchell from Durham University, a member of the team, explained that the main threats were "massive habitat loss" and illegal hunting. "Forests are destroyed when primate habitat is converted to industrial agriculture, leaving primates with nowhere to live," she told BBC News. "And primates are hunted for meat and trade, either as pets or as body parts." Other threats - all driven by human behaviour - are forest clearance for livestock and cattle ranching; oil and gas drilling and mining. "The short answer is that we must reduce human domination of the planet, and learn to share space with other species," Prof Setchell commented. No alternative The study also cited poverty and civil unrest as a driving force for hunting - in the poorest parts of the world many people are being driven to hunting primates in order to feed themselves. "We need to focus on the development of these parts of the world and make sure people have an alternative source of protein," said Prof Serge Wich from Liverpool John Moores University. He pointed out that the loss of primate species represented the loss of forests that are essential for the future of our own species. "These forests provide essential services for people," he told BBC News. "They help in being carbon stocks to mitigate climate change; they help in providing clean water and providing pollination services for people, so they can grow their crops." The researchers also pointed to some personal choices that people could make as consumers, particularly in the west, to avoid contributing to tropical deforestation. "Simple examples are don't buy tropical timber, don't eat palm oil," said Prof Setchell. But more broadly, "we need to raise local, regional and global public awareness of the plight of the world's primates and what this means for ecosystem health, human culture, and ultimately human survival. "In industrialised nations, we must decrease our demand for resources that we don't need, and stop confusing wants with needs." Dr Christoph Schwitzer, from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature is also director of conservation at Bristol Zoological Society. He told the BBC that it was his "strong belief" that "with a concerted effort by the world's governments and conservationists, primate declines can be halted and populations stabilised". He added that changes in consumer behaviour could help, for example "choosing FSC-certified wood and paper products, and making sure palm oil comes from sustainable sources". Dr Schwitzer added: "Protected areas [of habitat] and efficient law enforcement will be key." Follow Victoria on Twitter	The world's primates face an "extinction crisis" with 60% of species now threatened with extinction, according to research.
+text: The failure to secure the position deepens the country's political crisis after two inconclusive elections. Mr Rajoy, leader of the conservative Popular Party (PP), secured the backing of 170 representatives in the 350-strong assembly after failing to win support from the opposition. The loss increases the likelihood of a third election within a year. Mr Rajoy, 61, needed a majority of at least 176 votes in parliament, but secured only the votes of the PP's 137 lawmakers with the backing of 33 others. Those who voted in favour of a second term for Mr Rajoy include the anti-corruption Ciudadanos (Citizens) party and a small party from the Canary Islands. The Socialists, anti-austerity alliance Unidos Podemos, and regional parties from the Basque Country and Catalonia voted against him. Mr Rajoy could still become prime minister in a second vote on Friday, in which a simple majority is needed. But this would require one or more of the other parties to abstain. Mr Rajoy came to power in 2011 and is credited with steering Spain back from the brink of economic meltdown with harsh doses of austerity. But unemployment remained stubbornly high and the PP got mired in a corruption scandal.	Spain's acting Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, has lost a parliamentary bid for a second term in office.
+text: Eilidh MacLeod, 14, was one of the 22 people killed by a terrorist's bomb following an Ariana Grande concert. Her friend Laura MacIntyre survived but was badly injured. Barra parish priest, Father John Paul MacKinnon, said: "The island just does what it does, it comes together. It unites." Eilidh's parents were expected to attend a remembrance service at Manchester Cathedral. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, Prime Minister Theresa May and Prince William were among those who joined families of victims at the service. It was shown on a big screen at other venues around the UK, including Glasgow Cathedral. Eilidh and her friend Laura both attended Castlebay Community School in Castlebay, Barra, and shared a keen interest in music. Eilidh's love of music included playing the pipes with Sgoil Lionacleit Pipe Band. The two friends were attending the Grande concert with thousands of other pop music fans, having travelled to Manchester for the event with members of their family. Father MacKinnon said that following news of the attack there had been a sense of dread in the community. He said: "I felt in my own heart that something bad was just about to come. "And it did, and it was devastating." Father MacKinnon said Eilidh had lived her life "with a smile on her face and a smile in her heart". He said: "Those 14 years were short, but filled with so much. Here on the island we never take for granted the years we have." The priest added: "We have faced tragedy and we face it the same way we always do it, together." He described Laura's recovery from her injuries as "remarkable" and said: "We all prayed for a miracle with Laura." Annag MacLean, former head teacher at Castlebay Community School, said the loss of Eilidh and the injuring of Laura had a massive impact on the school. She said: "It was a horrendous situation to be in for anybody, for any school, for any family, for any community. "Routine gets people through those awful times because you practically do those things on automatic pilot. "We tried to keep things as normal as they could possibly be in such horrendous circumstances." She said other communities in the islands rallied behind Barra, adding: "As for our own community we did what Barra always does, we pulled together around the families involved."	Residents of Barra have told how the community was brought closer together following the death a young islander in the Manchester Arena attack a year ago.
+text: The actress, who appeared in the 2011 film of Bronte's Jane Eyre, said she was "delighted" to be offered the role. "It will be an honour to work with the society to promote [the Brontes'] legacy," continued the 81-year-old. Chair John Thirlwell said the society was "thrilled" and could "think of no better person" to be its president. Dame Judi, who was born near York, will be officially voted in at the society's annual general meeting in June. Her appointment follows a tumultuous period for the organisation and last year's resignation of its former president, Bonnie Greer. The society is currently celebrating the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Bronte's birth, on 21 April 1816. The author, whose other works include Shirley and Villette, was the older sister of Branwell, Emily and Anne Bronte. Next week's centenary will be marked by events at the Bronte Parsonage Museum, as well as a service at Westminster Abbey in London. The Bronte Parsonage in Haworth, West Yorkshire, was the home of the Bronte family from 1820 to 1861 and gifted to the Bronte Society in 1928.	Dame Judi Dench has been appointed the new honorary president of the Bronte Society as it marks the bicentenary of Charlotte Bronte's birth.
+text: The data also shows that nearly twice as many biological girls than boys were referred to London's Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust last year. Consultant clinical psychologist Dr Bernadette Wren said young people now had more freedom to define themselves. She told BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour a "social revolution" was happening. The statistics show that there were a total of 1,398 referrals to the clinic last year, 913 of whom were female and 485 male. In 2009/10, the first year for which figures are available, there were a total of 97 referrals - 40 were female, 56 were male and there was one referral for counselling for the child of a transsexual parent. The number of referrals increased by 50% in ever subsequent year until 2015/16, when there was a 100% rise in referrals, from 697 in 2014/15. 'Freedom available' Asked if boys were being unrepresented in the figures and not getting referred, Dr Polly Carmichael, a fellow consultant clinical psychologist at the clinic, said: "I think the sheer number of young people being referred to the service, a 100% increase this year, it's hard to think there would be a gender difference in terms of who is being referred. "Particularly because some of the hypothesis in the past around more natal males to natal females being referred was around the way in which the natal male body developed and how that perhaps made it more difficult for them socially if they identified as a female gender. And so I can't see that's changed in any way so it seems unlikely there is under-representation." Dr Wren said in the past, more boys tended to come forward than girls, because girls found it easier to be "boyish" in what they wore or how they styled their hair, but that society was now more accepting. She added: "We live in a world where people alter their bodies, surgically or otherwise, and this freedom is available for people as they get older. "Maybe we just have to be acknowledging that that is a liberty that people have, that these things are possible, technologically, and people will avail themselves of those things. "It's not really for us to approve or disapprove. What matters is what they make of their lives in the end and whether they lead rewarding lives. "We're trying to make sure that nothing happens too precipitately. But in the end, we maybe have to see through this social revolution and see how it transpires." 'I felt it was the right thing to do' Sasha, who was born a girl, was treated at the Tavistock Clinic as a teenager and now refers to themselves as being of non-binary gender. In their early teenage years, Sasha began to feel it would be easier to become a boy and was eventually referred to the Tavistock Clinic. "For most of my life, I felt as though I didn't fit in and I was never entirely sure what that was about. But when I began thinking about my sexuality and gender identity, I felt as though there were certain paths that would be more suited to the way I felt. "I anticipated being a man as feeling happier within myself. That was probably the key thing that drove me forward in terms of pursuing treatment. I felt it the right thing to do on a very instinctual level." Sasha, not their real name, started hormone blocking treatment at the age of 18, and went onto testosterone a year later. They had a double mastectomy and felt at that stage they had achieved what they wanted to "surgically and physically". Now, Sasha says they do not fit in "with the traditional binary discourse of being male or being female". "It's quite a difference as to when I was referred to the Tavistock," added Sasha, but said they did not regret anything that happened. "The decisions I made were absolutely right for what I needed then. I believe now, on looking back, that there may have been more options to be a bit more flexible in thinking about my gender identity that I didn't quite pick up on at the time," they said. While Sasha is happy with the physical changes to their body, they said sometimes they wished they had "taken things a little bit slower or waited until I was a little bit older". She said one of the most difficult things for the clinic was to persuade young people to get on with their lives "without necessarily jumping into physical intervention in ways that we might feel is a bit premature given the state of their thinking". "That's the tough thing because I think there's a lot of pressure out there to help them believe that physical intervention will sort all of their difficulties out. "We think that for some young people, physical intervention really, really helps them and is what they were always going to do at some point or other, and I think for others, we feel they need to take more time over it." 'Hard work' There is also a small number of girls who come forward because they have a "hatred" of the sexual characteristics of the female body, she added. "I don't think the explanation is that we're suddenly flooded with these young people," she said. "I don't think there are any grounds for saying that. "It's quite hard work to come to our clinic. We put them through an assessment process and none of these young people are doing this lightly. "But we do need to consider whether there are some ways in which being male and having a male body is particularly attractive in 2016, the beginning of the 21st Century, whether there are any ways in which the social landscape shapes and influences how people feel about their role in life, their body and how they're going to live in that body for the rest of their lives."	The number of young people referred to England's only gender identity clinic for under-18s has doubled in the past year to nearly 1,400, figures show.
+text: Andrew Cave, from the Federation of Small Businesses, said the future looked gloomy for the young unemployed. The latest figures showed youth unemployment rose to a fresh record high, with more than one in five 16 to 24-year-olds out of work. Prime Minister David Cameron said the figure was a matter of "great regret". Growing issue The latest official statistics showed that youth unemployment rose by 66,000 to 965,000 in the three months to the end of December, the highest level since comparable records began in 1992. The youth unemployment rate was 20.5%, compared with a general unemployment rate of 7.9%. Mr Cave said that the figures, which extended the record numbers recorded a month earlier, were "devastating" for young people. "It is quite clear that there is a two-track economy opening up," he said. "We are hearing that big business and the banks are returning to profit, but small business and particularly young people are being shunted into the sidelines to a certain extent." The record number of just under a million includes students in full-time education who may be looking for part-time work. The unemployment level for 16 to 24-year-olds not in full-time education was 691,000 - the highest since 1994. There are also 793,000 people in the 16 to 24 age group who are economically inactive, and are not in full time education. They do not appear in the unemployment figures as, by definition, they are they are not looking for work. 'Betrayed' The matter was the subject of verbal clashes between Mr Cameron and Labour leader Ed Miliband at Prime Minister's Questions. Mr Miliband accused the government and Mr Cameron of "betraying a whole generation of young people". "Why does he not change course?" he asked. Mr Cameron said that the unemployment figures, and particularly youth unemployment, were a matter of great regret. However, he said this had been a problem for more than a decade, "in good years and in bad". The government was tackling the issue by improving the welfare system, the education system, and back to work programmes, he said. Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, said there had been a long history of youth unemployment in the UK, but it had got considerably worse in the last couple of years. He said the number of people in work aged over 25 had gone up in recent years, but the opposite had happened to those aged 16 to 24. Boost Meanwhile, a charity has said that improving youth employment would have a positive effect on the UK economy. "There are now enough unemployed young people to fill every football stadium in the Premier League, with almost 200,000 left queuing outside," said Martina Milburn, chief executive of youth charity The Prince's Trust. "If we fail to help them into work, it will have a devastating impact on young people, their families and the economy. "A new report published by The Prince's Trust and Citi Foundation shows that disadvantaged young people helped into work or self-employment could boost the UK economy by millions." The government has been promoting apprenticeships, vowing to give apprentices equivalent "esteem and status with university graduates". Earlier this month, Business Secretary Vince Cable said he hoped UK firms would create 100,000 more apprentices by 2014, pledging £1.4bn in 2011-12. A new National Minimum Wage of £2.50 per hour for apprentices was introduced on 1 October 2010, if they are aged under 19.	Young people are being "shunted into the sidelines" as they face a growing threat of unemployment, a business group has warned.
+text: Dan Tucker's Wiltshire Air Ambulance helicopter was targeted during a landing near Trowbridge in September, the fourth attack this year. Claire Tucker put an appeal on Facebook begging people not to use them, and it was seen by thousands of people. "I had messages of support from viewers all around the world," said Ms Tucker. "Even Australia's Flying Doctors contacted me to say they've had laser pen attacks and are pushing for a ban there too." During the last attack on 7 September, Mr Tucker was hit by a laser which refracted around his helmet visor, leading the crew to abort their training mission. Lasers can temporarily dazzle pilots, which could lead to them losing control of their aircraft. Mrs Tucker wants to ban sales and imports of the devices, as well as restricting advertisements for them on UK-based websites. "There are some parts of Wiltshire they won't fly over for training purposes at night because they know they will be lasered," she said. Wiltshire Air Ambulance confirmed its pilots had taken a "conscious decision" to reduce training in areas known for laser attacks to protect its pilots. "With lockdown, people are getting bored and what do they do? They go online and buy these things," said Ms Tucker. "People don't realise the damage they can cause." Wiltshire Police are investigating the last attack but have yet to arrest a suspect.	The wife of a paramedic whose husband's helicopter was hit by a beam from laser pen has started a petition to ban sales of the devices in the UK.
+text: Figures highlighted by Iain Duncan Smith show jobless benefits rose 20% in the last five years, compared with an average 12% rise in private sector pay. He said benefits should no longer automatically increase with inflation. But Labour opposes the cap and said jobseekers allowance had failed to keep pace with wages over the past 10 years. MPs are due to debate legislation on Tuesday which is designed to break the link between benefit rises and inflation. Instead there will be a three-year cap of 1% - which is below the expected rise in the cost of living - on most working-age benefits and tax credits for three years from 2013/14. Child benefit, housing benefit and universal credit will be capped for two years from 2014/15. Labour, which will fight the 1% cap, says that jobseekers allowance has risen by 32% over the past decade, whereas wages have gone up by 36%. 'Tightening belts' These are not new figures from either the government or the Labour Party. BBC political correspondent Ross Hawkins said: "Both sides know it's vital for them to persuade the public at large that they have got this right." Chancellor George Osborne told MPs in his Autumn Statement last month that the incomes of those on out-of-work benefits had risen "twice as fast as those in work" over the last five years. Mr Duncan Smith said that working families had been tightening their belts after years of pay restraint while watching benefits rise - and that, he said, was not fair. Increases had cost the taxpayer £6.3bn since the start of the 2008 recession, he said. "The welfare state under Labour effectively trapped thousands of families into dependency as it made no sense to give up the certainty of a benefit payment in order to go back to work. "This government is restoring fairness to the system and universal credit will ensure it always pays to be in work." Shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne said cuts to tax credits had pushed millions of working families into poverty and now meant thousands of part-time workers were "better off on benefits". 'Not justified' Mr Byrne told BBC Radio 4's The World at One: "The lion's share of the savings from this bill will actually come from people's tax credits - on top of the £14bn that has already been carved out of tax credits, this bill is going to take about another £4bn out. "Now that's going to hit hard-working people very hard and at a time when you're giving a £40,000 tax break to Britain's millionaires, that just doesn't seem justified." He said Labour would reverse the cut in the top rate of income tax from 50p to 45p. But Conservative Party chairman Grant Shapps told the same programme the top rate tax cut was a "red herring" and pointed to the removal of millions of people on lower pay from income tax. He said taxpayers should not feel that they are having to pay for people on benefits to get a higher increase than people actually working. "This is an argument about fairness and what Labour need to work out is if they're going to say: 'Well, we don't agree with this, we think that these benefits should carry on going up twice the speed of average earnings'. That's fine. How are they going to pay for it?" As tensions rise ahead of the vote next week, Lib Dem leader and deputy PM Nick Clegg also entered the debate, telling The Times that Labour was "learning the tricks of opposition" but "to oppose everything is to offer nothing and the country will not be duped". He said opposing the 1% benefits cap meant Labour "believe welfare claimants should see a bigger rise than the 1% that public sector workers will get on their wages - which they support".	It is unfair for benefits to rise at a faster rate than wages, the work and pensions secretary has said ahead of a key Commons vote on capping benefits.
+text: Following Ireland's vote in favour of repealing the Eighth Amendment, NI is the only part of the UK and Ireland where abortions are illegal. A termination is currently only permitted if there is a serious risk to a woman's life or her health. Supreme Court judges said the existing law in Northern Ireland was incompatible with human rights law, but dismissed an appeal by the Human Rights Commission on technical grounds. Here's how leading figures in politics and legal circles have reacted. Northern Ireland Secretary Karen Bradley "The government is carefully considering the judgment and its implications. "No formal declaration has been made by the court and the appeal has been dismissed, but the analysis and comments from the court on the issue of incompatibility will be clearly heard by the House of Commons and politicians in Northern Ireland. "This is clearly a complex area of law, an extremely sensitive subject matter which raises a number of different issues to consider." Lord Kerr, Justice of the Supreme Court "The courage of these women in giving unsparing accounts of their experiences is wholly admirable." Lord Kerr said that, by a majority of five to two, "the court has expressed the clear view that the law of Northern Ireland on abortion is incompatible with Article 8 of the Convention in relation to cases of fatal foetal abnormality and by a majority of four to three that it is also incompatible with that article in cases of rape and incest". He added that while this is not a binding decision it was "worthy of close consideration by those in whose power it lies to decide whether the law should be altered". Darragh Mackin, solicitor for Sarah Ewart and Amnesty International "Until such times as the legal framework caters for what are very basic human rights, our client, Sarah Ewart, has made it clear that she will continue to take the case to the highest level to ensure that no woman has to go through the traumatic experience in which she was so forced. "All eyes are now on those respective bodies to ensure that immediate action is taken to bring this vacuum of human rights protection to an immediate end." Labour MP Stella Creasy "Watching MPs saying how sad they feel about situation in Northern Ireland but shrugging their duties to act to protect human rights set out in Good Friday agreement makes you wonder if they have even read it and responsibilities it gives UK parliament." Sinn Fein Vice President Michelle O'Neill "Court judgment today is further evidence of women being failed by the system - a need for urgent reform. "Next steps: repeal 1861 and end the criminalisation of women. "Bring forward compassionate healthcare legislation that supports women." DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson "This is a devolved matter and any attempt to change the law without the consent of the Assembly would be a breach of the devolution settlement. "We welcome the clear position taken by the Government in respecting the right of the Assembly to legislate on abortion, reflecting the will of the people of Northern Ireland." Green Party MLA Clare Bailey "The Supreme Court has confirmed that abortion laws breach human rights. "Westminster must act to remedy this. "The pressure is mounting and tide turning - we will not be left behind." SDLP leader Colum Eastwood "The view from the Supreme Court is clear - politicians can no longer duck our responsibilities to properly analyse and legislate on difficult issues. "It's my strong, personal, view that it is completely unsustainable for us to have a different law from the south on abortion."	The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by human rights campaigners over the legality of Northern Ireland's abortion law.
+text: Two vehicles fell into the River Tarn north of Toulouse when the bridge near the village of Mirepoix-sur-Tarn fell down at around 08:00 (07:00 GMT). Five people were also seriously injured including two rescuers and local people who had tried to save victims. An investigation has been opened. There has long been concern at the state of the country's bridges. The girl was travelling in a car with her mother when the bridge collapsed, according to local authorities. Her mother was dragged from the water by bystanders, Toulouse public prosecutor Dominique Alzeari said, but she herself perished. A truck also fell into the river and the body of its driver was found during a day-long operation, involving helicopters and dozens of emergency services personnel. First reports that a third vehicle - a van - also fell into the water now appear to be wrong. Witnesses have told the BBC's Chris Bockman in Toulouse that a school bus crossed less than a minute before the structure collapsed. How safe was the bridge? Eric Oget, mayor of Mirepoix-sur-Tarn, has suggested warnings about the bridge's weight restriction - displayed at either side of the crossing - might have been ignored by drivers. "From time to time I have actually seen very heavy vehicles using the bridge," Mr Oget told the BBC. "We have always been vigilant in carrying out checks with the municipal police, to stop them when we see it, but there are times when we do not see them." The bridge - 155m (170 yards) long and almost 7m wide - dates back to 1931 and was described by Mr Oget as a "very important crossing point" in the region. It was renovated in 2003 by Haute-Garonne council and last inspected late last year, showing no structural problems. Some 25,000 bridges around France are in need of urgent repair work, according to a Senate report from June. Senator Herve Maure, who oversaw the audit, told AFP news agency on Monday: "The state of our bridges poses a real danger. If a bridge which is not listed as dangerous collapses, what is the situation of those bridges which were clearly identified as dangerous?"	A 15-year-old girl and a truck driver were killed when a suspension bridge collapsed in south-western France.
+text: By BBC TrendingWhat's popular and why As it has in every major election since 2008, Facebook is offering users the option of broadcasting their civic-mindedness. On Tuesday, the site pointed Americans towards a special "I voted" widget on their profile page. Clicking on the widget is not just frivolous boasting. According to an experiment conducted during the 2010 US election, the button was responsible for getting an additional 340,000 people to the polls. The experiment was somewhat controversial because not every voter saw the same thing on their Facebook feed. Some users saw the button, some saw a general informational message and others saw nothing at all - and users weren't informed about the experiment. It gave rise to the idea that by targeting specific types of voters, Facebook could potentially alter the result of an vote. But during subsequent elections, Facebook says it's showing the widget to all potential voters. As of 19:00 Eastern Time on Tuesday, Facebook said more than 7.5 million people had used the "I voted" function. In 2012 the total number declaring "I voted" was around 9 million, and those voters skewed young, female and Democrat. The company also revealed the top policy issues discussed on the social network on Election Day. The top five? Government ethics, religion, racial issues, crime and the economy. Blog by Mike Wendling More US election coverage from BBC Trending: Could vote-swapping help Clinton? What if you could swap with someone planning to vote for a third-party candidate in a more relevant part of the country - making your ballot influential but still allowing the third-party voter to register their dissent?READ MORE You can follow BBC Trending on Twitter @BBCtrending, and find us on Facebook. All our stories are at bbc.com/trending.	Facebook is influencing the election - but perhaps not in the way you might think.
+text: The statistics were released by Johns Hopkins University in the US. The taoiseach (Irish PM) said the new south-east of England variant of the virus "has had a significant impact on transmission" in Ireland. Mícheál Martin denied his government had given mixed messages by opening up parts of the economy before Christmas. On Monday the country recorded eight more deaths and 4,929 new cases. Speaking on Monday, he said public compliance with the highest possible level of restrictions in Ireland was already weakening in the two weeks just before the Christmas break. He told the Newstalk radio station that the Irish government "never contemplated" sealing the border with Northern Ireland as a way to restrict the growth of the virus. Such a prospect never seemed "realistic" to him, he added. He said he would encourage people out walking to wear masks. Mr Martin said he was told by the country's chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan that the new variant of the virus accounted for 45% of the most recent 92 samples that underwent additional testing, compared with 25% of those tested in the week to 3 January and 9% two weeks earlier. Meanwhile, the president of the Irish Hospital Consultants' Association described the situation in the Republic of Ireland's acute hospitals as "truly a national emergency". Professor Alan Irvine told RTÉ's News at One the acute hospital system was "under the greatest pressure that it's ever been in living memory". He said 1,000 people had been admitted with Covid-related illnesses to acute hospitals since 2 January and admission figures were doubling, in both intensive care and general acute beds, every week. Prof Irvine warned if the trend continues: "The system really will not be able to cope, so it's truly an emergency in the acute health system." Hospital apology amid Covid surge The health service has been under pressure created by the pandemic, with a hospital in County Donegal apologising to patients for long waiting times on Sunday. Some patients had to wait in ambulances outside Letterkenny University Hospital on Sunday. The hospital said a large number of confirmed or suspected cases of Covid-19 required treatment, limiting the number of available beds. There were up to seven ambulances waiting outside the hospital at 21:00 local time, according to Irish national broadcaster RTÉ News. The hospital said the delays meant people could not be admitted to a dedicated Covid-19 zone. Clinical teams assessed patients in the ambulances outside to ensure they were treated in order of priority, said the hospital. The Irish Nurses and Midwives Association (INMO) said it was "exceptionally concerned" about the situation. As of 14:00 local time on Sunday, there were 1,452 Covid-19 patients in Irish hospitals and 125 of those were in intensive care units.	Concern has been raised in the Republic of Ireland after figures showed it has the world's highest number of confirmed new Covid-19 cases per million people.
+text: Around 30,000 suspected diazepam tablets were recovered during the planned searches and two replica firearms were also found. A 29-year-old woman was arrested in Belfast and a 27-year-old man was arrested in Tempo. They are currently assisting police with their enquiries. Seven other people will be interviewed at a later date. Following the searches, PSNI Det Ch Insp Shaun McKee urged members of the public not to use pharmaceutical type drugs unless they had been supplied by a healthcare professional.	Police have arrested two people in a number of searches in connection with the possession of drugs.
+text: Joe Cusker, 59, of Cambuslang, South Lanarkshire, died on Thursday in Glasgow Royal Infirmary. He had been in the Clutha bar when the Police Scotland helicopter crashed into it on 29 November. News of Mr Cusker's death came as Bond Air Services, which operated the EC 135 helicopter, grounded the model. Flights of the EC 135 were suspended briefly after a fault was found on a Bond helicopter operated for North West Air Ambulance. Bond has said the grounding was not related to the Glasgow crash, and the aircraft were later allowed to return to the air after checks were carried out. Mr Cusker's death was confirmed on Thursday by Police Scotland. Dep Ch Con Rose Fitzpatrick said: "It is with great sadness that I can confirm the number of people who died when the helicopter came down on the Clutha Vaults pub has increased to 10. "Our thoughts are with families at this difficult time and we will continue to provide support to them as we have done for all of the bereaved." In a message posted on Twitter, Mr Cusker's step son, David McClemont, said: "On behalf of my family I'd like to thank all the ICU staff at The Royal for the care and support they gave my stepdad Joe Cusker". First Minister Alex Salmond said: "I am sure that everyone in Scotland will join with me in expressing our deepest condolences to the family and friends of Joe Cusker, the 10th person who has died as a result of the Clutha Vaults helicopter crash. "Our thoughts and prayers are with everyone who has lost a loved one following this terrible tragedy and with those who remain in hospital." Mr Cusker, who was a voluntary member of the management committee at Rutherglen and Cambuslang Housing Association, is the seventh person inside the bar to have died. He had served with the association for about 10 years following his retirement from a career in the housing sector. Geraldine Baird, who chairs the management committee said: "Joe was a dedicated committee member and a valuable member of our management team. "He was very committed to helping people in housing need and will be greatly missed by us all." The six others who died inside The Clutha were Robert Jenkins, 61, Mark O'Prey, 44, Colin Gibson, 33, John McGarrigle, 57, Samuel McGhee, 56, and Gary Arthur, 48. The three helicopter crew who died in the tragedy were pilot David Traill, 51, and PCs Kirsty Nelis, 36, and Tony Collins, 43. More than 30 people were taken to hospitals across Glasgow after the crash. NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said five remained in hospital and were being treated for a range of injuries. A spokeswoman said: "Two patients are receiving treatment at Glasgow Royal Infirmary while a further three patients remain at the Queen Elizabeth Spinal Injuries Unit at the Southern General Hospital. "The range of injuries being treated include bone fractures, spinal injuries, lacerations, chest injuries and head injuries."	One of the people seriously injured in the Glasgow helicopter crash has died in hospital, bringing the death toll from the tragedy to 10.
+text: The law, aimed at tackling alcohol misuse by charging 50 pence per unit, is being challenged by the Scotch Whisky Association. The European Commission has also raised concerns about its legality. Advocate General, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, has said UK ministers will not "sit on the sidelines". He is due to discuss the UK government's position on minimum pricing at a legal conference in Edinburgh later this week. The coalition government has proposed a minimum price of 40p per unit of alcohol in England and Wales and plans to begin a consultation on the issue. Minimum pricing legislation for Scotland was passed by MSPs at Holyrood earlier this year. Shoulder-to-shoulder Five European Union countries have raised concerns that the proposal may infringe free trade rules. The Scotch Whisky Association has sought a judicial review of the minimum pricing legislation in the Court of Session in Edinburgh. Lord Wallace, a former leader of the Liberal Democrats, is due to speak at the University of Edinburgh on Tuesday. In extracts from his speech, released ahead of the event, he said: "The proposal for England and Wales has the backing of the Royal College of Physicians and the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo). "It could mean 50,000 fewer crimes and around 900 fewer alcohol-related deaths per year in England and Wales by the end of this decade." He added: 'It would be open to the UK government to sit on the sidelines, and watch while the Scottish government seeks to fend off these challenges. But we will not do that. "When the case is first heard in the Court of Session later this month, the UK government will be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Scottish government, seeking to support and complement the arguments that they present, and in particular ensure that the court has the benefit of the UK government's experience and expertise in EU law." Research by Sheffield University has indicated that setting the minimum price at 50p would lead to 60 fewer deaths, 1,600 fewer hospital admissions and 3,500 fewer crimes in its first year. The Scottish government has said it will fight any legal challenges to the legislation. A spokesman added: "The Scottish government welcomes all support in our efforts to address Scotland's serious problems with alcohol misuse. "We are confident that we can demonstrate, under European law, that the minimum pricing of alcohol is justified in Scotland on the basis of public health and social grounds. "We believe that minimum pricing will save lives and reduce the harm caused by alcohol misuse and we also believe minimum unit pricing is the most effective pricing measure."	The UK government is to back the Scottish government when its minimum alcohol pricing legislation is challenged in the courts.
+text: Cardiff council's cabinet outlined its proposals after a public consultation. Other cuts include reducing the senior management team by a third, cutting £1.1m from youth services and offloading play centres. The drug and alcohol counselling service could become volunteer-led but seven libraries no longer face closure. Cardiff council leader Phil Bale said it was becoming impossible for the council to continue delivering services as they are. "We have been heartened by the many groups that have come forward offering to volunteer and to help provide services in different ways in the future. "But there's no getting away from the fact that austerity is driving us down a dark and miserable path that no one would choose to travel," he said. Cardiff council employs around 10,000 people, excluding teachers, of which there are about 6,000. In total, 587 posts are at risk but the council hopes that more than 200 jobs could be transferred to other providers who take on services. The cabinet will review the budget on 19 February before going to a vote at full council on 26 February. Steve Belcher, south Wales regional organiser for union Unison said the job cuts were a "person catastrophe". Proposed savings	Nearly 600 posts could go and council tax may rise by 5% as Wales' largest authority looks to plug a £41m budget shortfall in 2015/16.
+text: More than 4,000 children in Birmingham relied on the service from ATG, which went into administration in March. West Midlands Accessible Transport Ltd, part of National Express, will run it from September. Birmingham City Council said it was "really pleased" to have found a new provider for the "vital service". After ATG collapsed, Birmingham City Council's cabinet approved £1.4m funding over 12 weeks to keep the service running for school children. As well as supporting children getting to school, ATG also had 72,000 registered users for its 'Ring and Ride' door-to-door service for elderly or disabled people who have difficulty accessing public transport. National Express is also in discussions to take on this contract from Transport for West Midlands, which has financed the service since ATG collapsed. Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, on Twitter, and sign up for local news updates direct to your phone.	A new provider has been found to run school minibuses for children with disabilities and special educational needs.
+text: The judge rejected a prosecution recommendation to drop the charges on the grounds the player's father was responsible for his finances. Messi and his father Jorge are accused of defrauding the authorities of more than 4m euros (£3.1m; $5m). The pair, who deny wrongdoing, have five days to appeal against the ruling. It is alleged that they withheld the money between 2007 and 2009. The income related to Messi's image rights, including contracts with Banco Sabadell, Danone, Adidas, Pepsi-Cola, Procter and Gamble, and the Kuwait Food Company. The footballer and his father are suspected of avoiding paying Spanish tax by using companies in Belize and Uruguay to sell the rights to use Messi's image. The judge ruled: "In this type of crime, it is not necessary for someone to have complete knowledge of all the accounting and business operations nor the exact quantity, rather it is sufficient to be aware of the designs to commit fraud and consent to them." In August 2013 Messi and his father made a 5m euro "corrective payment", equal to the alleged unpaid tax plus interest. Messi has been four times Fifa World Player of the Year and is captain of Argentina. The court decision comes as Barcelona grapples with a separate prominent legal case. A Madrid court is hearing a lawsuit that accuses Barcelona of misappropriating funds from the transfer fee to buy Brazil striker Neymar from Santos in 2013. Club president Sandro Rosell quit in January, but insisted he had "acted correctly" over the transfer.	Barcelona and Argentina star Lionel Messi is to face trial for alleged tax evasion, a Spanish judge has ruled.
+text: Hundreds of staff in the CentreComm control centre had been due to walk out on Friday as part of a long-running campaign for a "decent" pay rise. The union said it had accepted an increased pay offer from Transport for London (TfL) during talks at Acas. TfL's director of bus operations Claire Mann said she was "pleased to have reached a final agreement". A 48-hour strike was previously held over the August bank holiday weekend during Notting Hill Carnival. Unite said the revised deal was for a "£350 non-consolidated offer for last year and the current financial year, as well as a 1% across the board consolidated increase for 2018/19". "Members have been reassured that TfL is not intent on constantly undermining their pensions," regional officer Hugh Roberts said. Up to 400 control centre staff including bus station controllers and revenue protection inspectors had been expected to take part in the action However, bus drivers were not involved and TfL had said the walkout would not have disrupted services. Related Internet Links Transport for London Unite	A one-day strike by bus controllers in London has been called off, the Unite union has announced.
+text: By Chris McLaughlinBBC Scotland sports news correspondent Hampden will host four fixtures, including Scotland's group matches against Croatia and the Czech Republic. European football's governing body Uefa has given all 12 host cities until April to present a plan on how many fans will be allowed inside each venue. But Mairi Gougeon says April could be too early to make a call. The Scottish government minister said: "It's not possible for me to say where we'll be in April. "We're in regular contact with the governing bodies, with the Scottish FA, so that they're fully appraised of where we're at." "There's still so much about the vaccine that we don't know." So far, one-third of Scotland's adult population have been given a first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, with more than 1.5 million jabs administered. First doses will be offered to everyone over 50 and those with underlying health conditions by 15 April, with the rest of the population by the end of July. The sport minister said she could not say whether vaccinating all vulnerable people with their first dose would be enough to see a return of some supporters when the tournament starts in June. "We could be in that position but again it depends on transmission rates and how everything works at that point," she said. Earlier this week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a possible return of up to 10,000 fans to English stadiums from 17 May but the Scottish government has so far resisted giving any specific dates. "I can see the frustration when the UK government have set out definitive dates and given provisional numbers regarding what they will permit, but the approach we are taking in Scotland is cautious and it's also realistic," Ms Gougeon added. Scotland will kick-off their first major tournament since 1998 with a game in Glasgow against the Czech Republic on 14 June. Croatia will be the opponents at Hampden on 22 June - with game against England at Wembley, in between, on the 18th. Ms Gougeon, who also looks after the Covid testing programme as part of her brief, took over from Joe Fitzpatrick who lost his job in December. She said she is determined to get people back playing organised sport as quickly as possible but again would not be drawn on any hint of a timescale. She also answered criticism from within women's football in Scotland that they can't even train while some men's part-time sides are carrying on with their league campaign. "All of that had been based on the tier system that had been in place but again I'm really keen to see that resume when it's safe for that to happen," she said. A proposal has been presented to the Scottish government that could see a resumption of the women's game, along with the lower SPFL leagues, next month but no decision has yet been made.	A successful Covid vaccination roll-out might not be enough to guarantee fans inside Hampden for the Euros in June, Scotland's sport minister says.
+text: It comes a week after the return of Catholic church services on 26 March. It means churches will be able to hold Easter services, with Easter Sunday falling on 4 April. Northern Ireland's four main churches voluntarily suspended in-person gatherings in January of this year due to the Covid-19 lockdown. All four of the denominations said they would continue to take measures to ensure compliance with Covid-19 regulations. Most services are taking place on Friday evening, but some were held on the afternoon of Good Friday, including at St Anne's Cathedral in Belfast, where a three-hour devotional service began at midday. On Thursday, the executive relaxed some of the regulations, allowing for the return of certain sport and limited numbers of people meeting outdoors in a person's garden. 'Cautious and careful' The Church of Ireland outlined its plan for reopening in a letter to bishops on St Patrick's Day, saying it was taking a "cautious and careful" return to services for Good Friday. "This news will be warmly welcomed, but is simply permissive rather than instructive," the Church said. It said the return was simply guidance to its member churches, and that many would prefer to continue with alternative provisions, such as drive-in or online services. Speaking to BBC News NI, a spokesperson for the Church confirmed the plans and said there would be in-person services across the Easter weekend, although congregants should consult their local church ahead of time. The Church said the Easter dawn service, which involves a gathering outside at dawn to mark the resurrection of Jesus Christ, would not be allowed under current Covid-19 restrictions. Rev Roy Cooper, from the Methodist Church, said services would return on Friday, but he was aware many of its members were still taking a cautious approach. He said in-person numbers would be limited, and he was aware of congregations where elderly people were waiting to have their second dose of the Covid-19 vaccination before returning to in-person services. "I suspect that some churches that are going back will be asking people to indicate that they are going to go on Sunday, because there are quite a lot of people who will want to go back on Sunday," he said. He said he foresaw online services continuing into the future. Rev Cooper added the reopening over the Easter weekend was "to let people know that this is the forward journey" towards a reopening, as long as there were no further resurgences in Covid-19 case numbers - and that preparations for social distancing and hand sanitising were being taken. 'A lot are returning' Rev Trevor Gribben, general secretary of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, said the Church's congregations were "really looking forward to gathering again for in-person worship". "While live-streaming and online services have continued, and these have been greatly appreciated, they are no real substitute for gathering in person to worship the Lord together with fellow believers," he said. He said while a small number of congregations had decided for local reasons to continue with online services, in Northern Ireland most would be able to meet for in-person worship on Sunday. Rev Gribben added the Church was "also very conscious of the fact that our brother and sisters in Christ in the Republic of Ireland will not be able to meet together". "With them we very much lament that fact and look to the day, in the not too distant future, when they also will know again the joy and blessing of worshipping together," he said.	Methodist, Presbyterian and Church of Ireland congregations have resumed in-person services across Northern Ireland.
+text: By Maddy SavageOrebro, Sweden The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats are on course to become Sweden's second-biggest party, after a campaign that has focused on migration and integration. "They have the most things that are right for me... they're for Swedes," says first-time voter Sandra Sundstrom, 18, as she stops at a party stall in Orebro, central Sweden. Not long ago Sweden had one of the most open, generous approaches to asylum in the world, and an electorate that supported it. But things changed swiftly with the migrant crisis of 2015, when Sweden took in a record 163,000 asylum seekers, proportionately more than Germany. The influx put a strain on housing, healthcare and welfare services. The centre-left government brought back border controls and toughened conditions for asylum and family reunification. In this small, politically divided city in rural central Sweden, canvassers hand out flyers on the cobblestones of the main square, Stortorget. "Many parties want to take in more people from other lands," complains Sandra, who is unemployed. "But the Swedish people can't have the work they really want." Sweden's unemployment rate is 6.8%, level with the EU average, but for foreign-born citizens it is 16.2%. Now all Sweden's traditional parties have hardened their tone to reflect concerns about integration and an increase in shootings, hand grenade attacks and arson attacks on cars in areas with a high proportion of immigrants. Who are the Sweden Democrats? But it is the Sweden Democrats (SD) who are predicted to almost double their 2014 share, with opinion polls suggesting they will secure the votes of one in five Swedes. For a nationalist party linked for years to neo-Nazis and other far-right groups it would certainly be a success. It only entered parliament in 2010. Meanwhile, there has been a fall in support for the ruling centre-left Social Democrats and the largest traditional opposition party, the centre-right Moderates. The SD's official line now is that it welcomes supporters from all backgrounds, although racist scandals persist. One municipal candidate shared a song on Facebook with the lyrics "Swedes are white and the country is ours", according to a report in tabloid Aftonbladet. "There are no Nazis in our party," says Per Soderlund, the party chairperson in Orebro. "If you look at our voters and our members, it's basically your average Joe. It's your neighbour." The SD core base is working class men. But growing numbers of women and more educated and higher-income voters are also backing their tough line. Too much pessimism? "I think many voters feel fed up, they want to give the finger to the big parties," says Ola Karlsson, who leads the Moderates in this part of Sweden. "It's easy to say we should have changed earlier, much earlier," he admits. Analysts agree that the big parties were slow to change their stance on immigration, but Orebro University political scientist Ann-Catrin Kristianssen believes they also failed to move the debate away from the "dark picture" painted by the Sweden Democrats. After all, Sweden's economy is booming and the state continues to provide a strong welfare safety net. "There are problems in some of the urban areas and no party is really denying that. But Sweden is a rich country and has a lot to offer its citizens. Why haven't they been able to paint this brighter picture?" she asks. 'A tough summer' And it has not been all about immigrants, because climate change has become a top issue for voters. Sweden has just had its hottest few months on record, hit by Europe's heatwave. Around 25,000 hectares of forest burned in wildfires and many farmers were forced to destroy livestock after their pasture land dried up. "It's been a tough summer," says Adam Arnesson, 28, who runs a farm just outside Orebro and usually votes for one of Sweden's smaller centre-right parties. "I'm thinking more about voting for the Greens because they are the only ones putting the climate in the centre." Support for the Green party, which had been struggling after various internal scandals, has crept up across Sweden. The Left party is making gains too, both on the environment and from centre-left voters dissatisfied with the mainstream parties' approach to migration. Some analysts think the heatwave could weaken support for the Sweden Democrats, who are popular in rural areas but do not prioritise climate policies. But many voters in Orebro remain undecided. "I will not vote for (the) Sweden Democrats, that's the only thing I know!" says Salmon Kidane, 20. And 70-year-old Ruth is unhappy that the Swedish idea of solidarity is losing traction, in a nation traditionally proud of its openness. "I'm afraid of those populist trends that are coming in Europe. I have a feeling we're going the same way in Sweden and I don't like that," she says. Few imagine the SD will get into government, as they are still too far from the traditional parties' agendas to even negotiate a coalition. But Ann-Catrin Kristianssen thinks the nationalists could "rewrite the political map" and Sweden's old "bloc politics" could well end.	Sweden has long enjoyed a reputation for moderation and balance, but is its political landscape about to change dramatically with Sunday's election, the tightest race in decades?
+text: The pair, believed to be Charlie Rowley, 45, and Dawn Sturgess, 44, were found unconscious at a house in Amesbury, Wiltshire, on Saturday. It is understood tests are being carried out on the substance at a government chemical weapons laboratory. Amesbury is about eight miles from the Salisbury Russian spy poisoning site. Former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with Novichok, a suspected military nerve agent, in March. The substance Novichok was identified by the defence research facility at Porton Down, which is understood to be carrying out tests on the latest substance. Investigators are trying to work out if the Novichok could have been prepared in Queen Elizabeth Gardens in Salisbury, and the Amesbury pair came into contact with its residue. The government's emergency committee, Cobra, has met in the Cabinet Office at an official level to discuss the events in Amesbury, which is being "treated with the utmost seriousness". A further meeting of the committee will be held on Wednesday evening to hear updates on the situation which was initially treated as a suspected drugs-related incident. The Met said counter terrorism officers are now working with Wiltshire Police "given the recent events in Salisbury". Wiltshire Police said it was "open-minded" about the cause after the pair, who are British nationals, were found at the house in Muggleton Road, Amesbury. Paramedics were called twice to the property, firstly in the morning after Ms Sturgess had collapsed and then later the same day after reports Mr Rowley had also fallen unwell. While it was not clear whether a crime had been committed, the force said, a number of places in Amesbury and Salisbury known to have been frequented by the couple had been cordoned off. It said the public can expect to see an increased police presence in and around Amesbury and Salisbury. "It was initially believed that the two patients fell ill after using possibly heroin or crack cocaine from a contaminated batch of drugs," Wiltshire Police said. "They are both currently receiving treatment for suspected exposure to an unknown substance at Salisbury District Hospital," it added. Mr Rowley and Ms Sturgess are believed to have attended a family fun day at Amesbury Baptist Church on Saturday afternoon before they were found unconscious in the property they had just moved into. Roy Collins, church secretary, said "nobody else has suffered any ill-effects" from attending the community event and "there was nothing going on that was nefarious". "There have been no reports of any other incidents," he said. "We are all quite puzzled and shocked - naturally the connection with Salisbury and recent events there mean there is a heightened public interest." Boots has closed its Amesbury store as "a precautionary measure" to allow police to carry out an investigation, a spokesperson confirmed. At the scene: Charlotte Callen, Home Affairs Correspondent Neighbours tell me the peace at this usually quiet new estate in Amesbury was broken at about 18:30 BST on Saturday evening. It was hot and many were out having barbecues when they heard sirens and saw flashing lights as first ambulances, then the fire brigade and police arrived in Muggleton Road. They saw seven fire engines and fire officers wearing hazmat suits at the scene. The house was cordoned off and the word here was that this was a suspected drugs overdose. This morning many are in disbelief that this has been declared a major incident and that so many reporters from national media have descended on their doorsteps. Two police cars and three officers are here as Wiltshire Police is yet again dealing with a major incident just a few miles away from where Sergei and Yulia Skripal were found. Wiltshire and Dorset Fire Rescue Service said seven vehicles and two specialist ones had attended Muggleton Road on Saturday evening. Crews in hazmat suits, which are worn to deal with dangerous or hazardous substances, were sent to the scene in what the fire service described as a "standard procedure response". Chloe Edwards, a 17-year-old college student who lives near the cordoned-off flat, said she was having dinner when "all these emergency vehicles turned up" and was told to stay inside. "They were putting on these green suits and we thought it was the gas as our electricity was turned off as well," she said. "We wanted to know what happened and with the Russian attack happening not long ago we just assumed the worst. "I am not sure how long they were in there but we couldn't get out of the house for two-and-a-half hours." Resident Jake Murphy said he was watching the football on Tuesday night when "all these police cars appeared". "I didn't know what was happening," he said. Justin Doughty, who lives opposite the police cordon, said none of the residents have been "told anything by the police". "We would have thought the police would have been more forthcoming and keep us in the loop." A government source said: "Senior Whitehall officials are being kept informed of what is going on on the ground as we seek to establish the facts of this case. "No definitive conclusions have yet been established." Wiltshire's Police and Crime Commissioner Angus Macpherson said the police had worked hard at "containing any risk that might be there". "There's no reason to think it's connected with matters of last month," he said. "I haven't seen anything in this incident yet that I would consider to be an overreaction in terms of previous incidents, it all seems fairly textbook." Public Health England said it did not believe there was a "significant health risk" to the wider public, although its advice was being continually assessed. The hospital was "open as usual" and advised patients to attend routine appointments unless contacted and advised to do otherwise.	A man and woman are in a critical condition after being exposed to an unknown substance, which counter terrorism officers are investigating.
+text: President Donald Trump has touted the medication form of chloroquine as a possible treatment for the virus. But the toxic ingredient taken by the Phoenix couple was a chemical commonly used to clean fish tanks. Shortly after ingestion, the couple fell ill, said Arizona-based hospital system Banner Health. The couple were both in their 60s. The woman told NBC News she had seen a televised briefing in which Mr Trump discussed the potential benefits of chloroquine as a treatment Covid-19. The drug has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treating malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis but is unproven for use against the novel coronavirus. "We saw his press conference. It was on a lot, actually," she said. "Trump kept saying it was basically pretty much a cure." "We were afraid of getting sick," she told NBC. There are at least 46,548 confirmed cases of the virus throughout the US, with at least 592 deaths. The couple had used chloroquine previously as a treatment for their koi fish and still had some remaining in their home. This additive is formulated differently than the drug used to treat malaria. They mixed a small amount of the substance with liquid to drink. Within 20 minutes, both fell ill. "I started vomiting," she said. "My husband started developing respiratory problems." Her husband could not be revived in hospital and she remains in critical care. "Banner Health experts emphasise that chloroquine, a malaria medication, should not be ingested to treat or prevent [Covid-19]," the health group said in a statement. Given the uncertainty around Covid-19, we understand that people are trying to find new ways to prevent or treat this virus, but self-medicating is not the way to do so." Last week, Mr Trump trumpeted the drug as a potential treatment, writing on Twitter that it had "a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine," when taken with the antibiotic azithromycin. "We're going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately," he said last week at a White House coronavirus press briefing. "And that's where the FDA has been so great. They've gone through the approval process - it's been approved." The FDA soon clarified that chloroquine had not been approved, saying there are currently no therapeutics or drugs approved by the body to "treat, cure or prevent Covid-19". On Sunday, Dr Anthony Fauci - the nation's top infectious disease expert - said on CBS News that the president had heard about the two drugs from anecdotal reports. "I… have said I'm not disagreeing with the fact anecdotally they might work, but my job is to prove definitively from a scientific standpoint that they do work," he said. Mr Fauci, who serves on the White House coronavirus task force, is widely seen as the face of the US response. Last week, Nigerian health officials also issued a warning regarding the drug's misuse after hospitals in Lagos, the nation's capital, began reporting patients suspected of chloroquine poisoning. At least three people are believed to be hospitalised and reports have spread of high demand of chloroquine leading to pharmacy shortages, partially fuelled by Mr Trump's comments. The World Health Organisation "has NOT approved the use of chloroquine for #Covid19 management," the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control said in a statement on Friday. "Please DO NOT engage in self-medication. This will cause harm and can lead to death."	An Arizona man has died and his wife is in a critical condition after both ingested chloroquine phosphate in an apparent effort to stave off Covid-19.
+text: Altogether 16,863 would-be councillors have thrown their hats in the ring, up from 15,782 four years ago. UKIP has seen the biggest boost to its candidate numbers, fielding nearly four times as many as it did in 2010. Voters in England and Northern Ireland will go to the polls on 22 May. Labour and the Conservatives are fielding the most candidates, with just over 4,000 each. The Liberal Democrats have 2,907 candidates, about 500 fewer than in 2010, although the general election that year may have increased candidate numbers. UKIP has 2,155 candidates, a massive increase on the 608 it fielded in 2010. The Greens have also seen an increase, with 1,854 standing for the party this year against 1,590 in 2010. Across England and Northern Ireland 4,279 seats are up for election, compared with 4,252 in 2010. The polls cover 161 councils comprising 19 unitary authorities, 36 metropolitan authorities, 32 London boroughs and 74 non-metropolitan districts. Although Labour failed to win the general election in 2010, the party did well in the local elections on the same day, gaining more than 400 council seats. But the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats lost more than 100 each. This month's council polls coincide with the European elections in 12 UK regions electing 73 MEPs, as well as five mayoral contests in Hackney, Lewisham, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Watford.	An extra 1,000 candidates are standing in this year's local elections in England compared with 2010 when the seats were last fought, figures from the Press Association show.
+text: Kamil Kopec, who admitted possessing a knife, critically injured the pair at an address in Hunderton Avenue, Hereford last July. The 28-year-old from Hunderton Avenue left the scene after the attack and was arrested at a nearby car dealership. Kopec changed his pleas at his trial at Worcester Crown Court, also admitting two charges of attempted murder. The mother, in her 30s, and baby were treated for serious injuries following the incident at about 03:00 BST before being taken to hospital for further treatment. West Mercia Police said at the time the attack was an "isolated incident". The force has not released any details since about the pair's condition. Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, on Twitter, and sign up for local news updates direct to your phone Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, on Twitter, and sign up for local news updates direct to your phone. Related Internet Links West Mercia Police	A man has been jailed for 21 years for the attempted murder of a mother and her baby.
+text: Durrell supports the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme financially and through an exchange system. It is unusual amongst orangutans and other great apes to have twins, and in this case both parents are blind. The mother, Gober, is an elderly female and is blind in both eyes due to cataracts. The father, named Leuser, was originally an illegal pet and had been released into the wild. Five years ago he was found near a village having been shot several times by an air rifle. Three local villagers were jailed but he lost his sight. Mother and father and the two new twins are all housed at the Batu Mbelin orangutan quarantine centre, near Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia. This is the only centre of its kind in the world and is managed as part of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme. Gordon Hunt, Durrell's Head of Mammals, will be visiting them next month. He will meet Dr Ian Singleton who works there now after spending nine years in Jersey at the Durrell wildlife park in Trinity.	An expert from Jersey's Durrell Wildlife Trust will be visiting a project in Sumatra where twins have been born to two blind orangutans.
+text: By Mark Daly & Calum McKayBBC Disclosure Fife father-of-two Sheku Bayoh, 31, died in 2015 after being restrained by police in Kirkcaldy. CCTV, other footage and documents obtained by the BBC casts doubt on some of the officers' accounts of the events that led to the death. Police Scotland said they could not comment while the case was ongoing. A BBC Disclosure programme screened on Monday night featured: 'We want to know how he died' In October, Mr Bayoh's family were told by the Lord Advocate there was not enough evidence to prosecute any of the officers involved. The Crown Office has not confirmed the decision publicly, and says the case remains open. Mr Bayoh's family are likely to ask for the decision to be reviewed but are now calling for a full public inquiry. His sister, Kadi Johnson, said: "We are still here suffering, his boys are suffering. "There was no need for Sheku to have died that day. We just want to know how our brother died, that's all." On the day he died, Mr Bayoh had been at a friend's house in the morning watching a boxing match. He had taken the drugs MDMA and another drug known as Flakka. The drugs dramatically altered his behaviour, and he became aggressive with a friend. He later left home with a knife from his kitchen, and neighbours called the police. He had discarded the knife by the time police arrived. Mr Bayoh, who was originally from Sierra Leone but had lived in Scotland since he was 17, was restrained by six officers and lost consciousness. He died at hospital soon after. Days after his death, the Scottish Police Federation (SPF) lawyer Peter Watson told the media that "a petite female police officer was subjected to a violent and unprovoked attack by a very large man who punched, kicked and stamped on her." The new evidence obtained by BBC Disclosure casts doubt on this account. What does CCTV show? A leading authority on police restraint and use of force, Eric Baskind, of Liverpool John Moore University, analysed the documents, which included the first statements given by the officers involved. The documents reveal that before Mr Bayoh's alleged stamping attack on the officer, three officers discharged their irritant spray into his face and a fourth drew her baton at him. Mr Baskind said: "What strikes me from the evidence of the officers is that they approach the scene with the intention of using force. "He's not running away, he's not, at that moment in time, creating a danger to anyone. "They get there, they screech to a halt, they get out of the cars with irritant sprays and batons. That to me doesn't seem measured. "That is not best practice. And all of those actions were very escalatory." The CCTV shows that Mr Bayoh hits the female officer, known as Officer D, knocking her to the ground. The officer had injuries consistent with being hit on the head. Mr Baskind said this could have been prevented, if the officers had approached Mr Bayoh "in a different way, in a calming way, to try and find out what was wrong". Police statements The SPF claim about the stamping incident is based on the testimony of two officers, known in the statements as B and C. Officer C said: "He stomped on her back with his foot with a great deal of force. He put his full bodyweight into the stomp and used his arms to gain leverage." In her own statement, Officer D does not say she was stamped on. There's no mention of it in the statements of three civilian witnesses who saw the incident either. The CCTV casts serious doubt on this claim. As soon as Officer D is knocked to the ground by Mr Bayoh, it looks as though the action immediately moves elsewhere, and Mr Bayoh is engaged by the other officers, and within five seconds, he is brought down. Officer D appears to get up and walk away with another officer's help. Mr Baskind said: "The quality of the footage is not very good, but you can certainly make out what's going on, and I can see no evidence at all of two stamping attacks on the officer on the ground, let alone two very violent ones, that is described in the papers. "It looks to me as though the officer's gone down, and pretty straight away Mr Bayoh is taken to the ground by others. "There certainly seems to me to be a significant discrepancy between what I can see on the footage, and what I've read in the papers." The BBC also obtained mobile phone footage of the incident, raising questions about how Mr Bayoh was restrained. Officer B, who is 6ft 4in and weighed 25 stone, told investigators he had Mr Bayoh pinned to the ground for "a maximum of 30 seconds". Another said the restraint had been, "appropriate, text book stuff, in line with their training." A civilian witness saw it differently. She told investigators officers were lying across Mr Bayoh for several minutes. She said: "I heard him screaming. It sent chills through me. I heard the man shout to get the police off him. They never moved." Mr Bayoh suffered 23 separate injuries including a cracked rib, head wounds consistent with baton strikes, and petechial haemorrhages, or burst blood vessels in the eyes, which can be a sign of positional asphyxia, or suffocation. Cause of death was noted as "sudden death in a man intoxicated…[drugs] whilst under restraint." After the death, the Police Investigations and Review Commissioner (Pirc) launched an inquiry. Under advice from the SPF lawyer, the officers refused to provide statements to Pirc for 32 days. BBC Disclosure has seen evidence which shows SPF advice to officers was to wait until the toxicology report was returned before giving statements. Did race play a part? The BBC has also seen evidence suggesting that Mr Bayoh's actions may have been distorted or exaggerated by police. An internal police document written less than an hour after Bayoh's death said that police attended reports of a male with a "machete" in the street, and that the "male strikes one with machete". None of the officers saw Mr Bayoh with a knife or machete, nor has there ever been any suggestion he struck one of them with a blade. Police did not respond to questions as to how misinformation like this got into an official police document. Deborah Coles, from the charity Inquest, which investigates deaths in custody, has been supporting the Bayoh family. She told the programme: "The pattern that we've seen is that the state narrative is very often, when somebody dies after restraint, there is an attempt to demonise or speak ill of the person who's died…to try and deflect attention away from the actions of the police officers concerned [by] painting a picture of a dangerous man carrying a machete." She added: "I think we cannot ignore the role that race may have played in this death…and their immediate resort to the use of force. "Racial stereotyping of black men as being…big, black, dangerous, informs the way in which they're treated, and the fact that they are over-policed." The Bayoh family's lawyer Aamer Anwar, told the BBC that racism had been "the elephant in the room". He said: "It always has been. It was the stories, it was the pictures, it was the stereotypical images of a large, black male crazed, acting erratically. It was all those things, the word "terrorist" being bandied about. "Sheku Bayoh's family believes that race is central to this. The black community believes that race is central to this." His sister Ms Johnson, told the BBC: "It has made me lose faith in the police and the justice system as a whole…I don't think he would have died if he hadn't met the police. She added: "He wasn't himself, the way he was acting, but then no duty of care was given to him…because he was a black man. That's how we feel." In 2015, the BBC revealed allegations that one of the officers involved in the restraint, PC Alan Paton, had a history of violence and racism. Inappropriate to comment Claire Baker, MSP for mid Scotland and Fife, said the allegations in the Disclosure programme were "shocking." She added: "I recognise the police do a difficult job…but something went wrong, which raises questions about whether the police's response was proportionate. "I think there should be a public inquiry." The Scottish government said it was considering a public inquiry. Police Scotland said it could not comment while the case remained open. A spokesman offered sympathy for the Bayoh family. The Scottish Police Federation, which represents some of the officers involved in the restraint, said it would be inappropriate to comment until all legal processes were complete, but it added that the BBC sought to publish "fundamental inaccuracies" about the case. Additional reporting by Sandeep Gill. Disclosure: Dead in Police Custody will be broadcast at 20:30 on Monday and will be available afterwards on the BBC iplayer.	New evidence uncovered by BBC Scotland has raised fresh questions about the way police officers treated a man who died in their custody.
+text: The Daily Star quoted him as saying at at an HBO party that there "will be a movie". Martin took to his online LiveJournal to respond: "Don't believe everything you read, boys and girls. Especially not online." He did, however, confirm that there was "great enthusiasm" for the notion. "The idea is still powerfully attractive. Not just to me, but to many people connected with the show. Actors, directors, producers, writers. How not?," he wrote. "It would be a great way to end." He went on to qualify that "(HBO) are in the TV business, not the feature film business. And those of you with long memories may recall all the rumours about a Sopranos movie...a Rome movie...a Deadwood movie. Rumours is all they were. And that's all this one is too, at least for now." HBO's president of programming, Michael Lombardo, confirmed the station's stance, as reported by Entertainment Weekly. "Certainly there have been conversations where it's been said, 'Wouldn't it be cool to do that?'," Lombardo said. "But when you start a series with our subscribers, the promise is that for your HBO fee that we're going to take you to the end of this. I feel that on some level [a movie would be] changing the rules: Now you have to pay $16 to see how your show ends." This is despite fans of the show already demonstrating their enthusiasm to experience the series on the big screen. The IMAX limited release of the series generated an impressive $1.9m (£1.25m) at the US box office for showing two repeats of the series in 205 cinemas across Super Bowl weekend. The fantasy series won a record 12 Emmys at last Sunday's ceremony. Game of Thrones returns to HBO for its sixth season in 2016.	Game of Thrones author George RR Martin has quashed rumours that a big screen spin-off is being made, although he admitted he would "love to see one".
+text: The city's new mayor, due to be elected in November, will be asked to sign off cuts of £25m from next year's budget - a 7% cut from the current £366m budget. Previously a sum of £10m had been agreed. The figures have been seen by BBC Radio Bristol's political reporter Robin Markwell. The draft budget is due to be released in December. A number of reasons are believed to be behind the proposed cuts, including less money due to come in from central government and more staff redundancy payments at the Liberal Democrat-led authority. Other reasons are thought to include the loss of a school academies grant and the cost of borrowing more money. It is understood one option being given serious consideration to help make the savings is to cut back on people's entitlement to care services. The figures are based on an assumption that council tax will rise by 2.5%. Council tax has been frozen for the past four years. The council is due to comment later.	Bristol City Council is facing budget cuts of £15m more than had been expected, the BBC has learned.
+text: Fire Brigades' Union (FBU) members walked out for two hours at 06:30 GMT - the ninth stoppage since September. Strikes took place across England and Wales. The UK government plans to raise firefighters' retirement age from 55 to 60 and increase their pension contributions. Matt Wrack, general secretary of the FBU, said: "Firefighters do not want to place the public at risk, and support on the picket lines suggests that the public understands that we cannot stand by and let this pension theft continue. "It's time the government came back with a realistic offer instead of the unworkable proposals they continue to peddle." The union said most firefighters who take home around £1,650 a month already paid £320 or more into their pensions, and from April 2014 this would rise for the third year in a row to over £340. The UK government maintains firefighters will continue to receive a good pension, and has criticised the industrial action. UK Fire Minister Brandon Lewis has said the decision to strike over the festive period was "completely cynical".	Firefighters in Wales staged a fresh strike on Friday in their long-running dispute with the UK government over pensions.
+text: The victims were Nepali nationals on their way to the Canadian embassy where they worked as security guards. The attacker waited for the bus as it left a compound, police said. The blast was followed by a separate bomb attack on a market in Badakhshan province that killed at least eight people and wounded 18. The Taliban said they carried out the Kabul bombing, the first such attack since the start of the holy month of Ramadan. The bomb went off shortly before 06:00 local time (01:30 GMT) on a main road leading out of the capital towards the city of Jalalabad. The guards were employed by a private security company, an official told AFP news agency. At least eight other people were injured. The incident follows a suicide attack on a bus near Kabul last month and an attack on a court in Ghazni in June. Both attacks were claimed by the Taliban in revenge for the execution of six prisoners. The Taliban have been waging an insurgency against the government since 2001. Nato ended its combat mission in December 2014, although about 13,000 training and counter-terrorism troops remain in Afghanistan. Peace efforts have stalled after the Taliban refused to participate in new talks with the Afghan government until foreign forces had left the country.	A suicide attack on a minibus in Kabul has killed at least 14 people and injured several more, Afghan authorities say.
+text: His pregnant wife left their home in Leeds to see family in India a year ago and he expected to join her shortly after, but a decision on his application was still pending. He began the process 12 months ago after living and working in the UK for 10 years but said he was eventually turned down over a tax discrepancy. He is now appealing. "They rejected it because they say my income isn't genuine even though I have paid my taxes for the past 10 years and have proof which I've sent to them," he said. "I'm yet to see my family in India because I can't travel as my visa was in process and now it's been rejected, I'm going through the judicial process. "Now I can't get work without a valid visa so I am living off savings." He said he could not travel to India for fear he won't be allowed back in the country, as his working visa has expired, nor can his wife come back into the country because she is dependant on his visa. The government said complex cases take "longer to process".	IT contractor Farooq Shaik says he is yet to meet his second son due to Home Office delays in processing his residency application.
+text: Three Frack Off group members attached themselves to a gas extraction rig near Southport, Merseyside, in November. Edward Lloyd-Davies, 39, and Lauren Pepperell, 26, both of Brighton, were given two-year conditional discharges. Barbara Cookson, 61, of Liverpool, received a 12 months conditional discharge. During the trial, security guard Patrick McKenna told the court he grabbed hold of Lloyd-Davies who struck him with his arm, while Cookson held on to his hand. Cookson and Lloyd-Davies were found guilty of aggravated trespass, assault by beating and obstructing a person engaged in a lawful activity. Pepperell was found guilty of trespass and obstructing a person engaged in a lawful activity. All three were ordered to pay £750 in court costs. They had been protesting at a site in Hesketh Bank operated by energy firm Cuadrilla which was given a licence in 2008 to extract gas by pumping water, sand and chemicals into shale rock at pressure. It coincided with the release of a report commissioned by Cuadrilla which found it was "highly probable" that shale gas test drilling triggered two earth tremors near Blackpool. The study also said the "likely cause" of the quakes was an "unusual combination of geology at the well site" and said conditions which caused the minor earthquakes were "unlikely to occur again". However, Frack Off claims the process is environmentally dangerous.	Anti-fracking protesters who halted test drilling by invading a site have been found guilty of trespass, assault and obstruction charges.
+text: By Cherry Wilson and Michael BaggsNewsbeat reporters She is part of a group that wants to put on a UK festival to celebrate LGBT Muslim culture. "We've had Bi Pride, we've had Black Pride, we have Trans Pride," she tells Radio 1 Newsbeat. "So now we've got Muslim LGBTQI Pride. "It'll celebrate the diversity within the BAME community and the LGBT community to show we're not all the same, we don't have just one identity. "We all have different identities." Joy is a member of Imaan - a group of LGBT Muslims who are hoping to crowdfund £5,000 to put on the festival. People involved with Black Pride and Trans Pride have previously told Newsbeat that their events are important because of abuse they've experienced within the LGBT community. Joy says this happens to LGBT Muslims as well. "There's Islamophobia that we sometimes have to deal with within Pride and within LGBTQI communities," she says. "Not just at Pride, but within the queer community." But another issue some people in the LGBT Muslim community face is being told to "choose" between their sexuality and their religion. "Not only with the Muslim community, but also with other religious communities, we're being told to choose between our religion and our queer identity," she says. Joy says that she, personally, doesn't find any conflict between the two. But she feels the Muslim community's attitude to any sexuality can make things difficult for some LGBT people. "I wouldn't openly discuss certain topics within the Muslim community - and sexuality is one of them," she says. "But then again sexual orientation - whether queer or straight - isn't really discussed in the first place. "There are a lot of conservative circles within the Muslim community for cultural reasons." Homosexuality is against the law in some Middle Eastern countries - where Islam is most commonly practised. Earlier this year, Brunei backtracked on plans to make adultery and sex between men punishable by death. Imaan says it wants to put on the festival to celebrate what it means to be Muslim and LGBT. "Imaan Fest is something that we definitely will - in all traditions of Muslim celebrations - make quite fantastic and glamorous," Joy adds. 'I go out of solidarity' Plans for a Muslim LGBT festival are welcomed by 28-year-old film director Almass Badat, who is a member of the Muslim LGBTI+ group Hidayah. "When I was growing up, I remember really looking hard for just someone that looked like me and that was also queer," Almass tells Newsbeat. "It's really nice when you walk into a space and you can see someone that maybe looks like you, or has the same values - it doesn't always have to be visible. "I'll go to Pride and also go to Black Pride and I'll probably also go to Muslim Pride. "I go out of solidarity, out of support also for myself, to build community, there's so many positives to just interacting and understanding that within a group of people." Follow Newsbeat on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.	"I think we've earned a party," says 29-year-old Joy Muhammad.
+text: The consultant's report said halving the charge to £1 for cars and £2 for lorries would reduce the number of drivers diverting to local free roads. Critics said they were still not convinced tolling was an alternative to paying for the scheme using taxes. The government said tolling would make a significant contribution. The Department for Transport (DfT) has said work on the road was unlikely to start before 2018. The study by Atkins engineering consultants said higher charges of £2 for cars and £4 for lorries would make it "increasingly difficult" to discourage drivers from diverting off a toll road. New local roads Councillor Graham Wilson, who represents Huntingdon and Godmanchester on Cambridgeshire County Council, said: "The toll needs to be very low to stop people using local roads as rat-runs but if the toll is very low, then it isn't going to generate as much money. "Funding the road through general taxation is better than doing it through a toll system. "An untolled A14 will protect local villages [from drivers seeking to avoid tolls], so the detail of how the toll works really needs looking at carefully." The scheme aims to reduce congestion on a 20 mile (32km) stretch of the A14 between Cambridge and Huntingdon. The road links the container port at Felixstowe in Suffolk with the M1 and M6 motorways via Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire. The latest option suggests creating a three-lane Huntingdon Southern Bypass between Trinity Foot near St Ives and Ellington near the A1. It would also include downgrading the existing Huntingdon A14 viaduct from a trunk road and providing two new roads for local traffic between Trinity Foot and a new Girton interchange. Policing HGVs The DfT spokesman said with the lower toll a "relatively small amount" of 8% of vehicles would leave the new bypass to avoid a toll. "With tolling, the cost to the taxpayer is lower," the spokesman said. "Tolls are likely to provide only a minority of the funding that would be necessary, with the majority coming from central government and local partners." Jonathan Djanogly, Conservative MP for Huntingdon, said it was important "there remains a good non-paying road on the A14 route for local traffic to use". "I am also concerned that local roads should not be subject to HGVs diverting to avoid the tolls," he said. "However, I thought that this was more a question of policing weight restrictions rather than toll price." The government estimates tolling at the £1/£2 level would raise £33.1m a year by 2031 (at 2011 prices). The DfT said it now had seven options to consider.	The latest study into a planned £1.5bn scheme to upgrade the A14 in Cambridgeshire favours a lower toll than previously proposed.
+text: By Ros TaylorBBC News, London More than a quarter of England's rough sleepers are in London. The increase comes as London Mayor Boris Johnson, who promised to eradicate rough sleeping in the capital by 2012, is about to reach the end of his term in power. The annual government figures do not include people in hostels or shelters, squatters or travellers. They are usually considered to be homeless, whereas rough sleepers are outside at night without shelter. Ninety-seven people were sleeping on the streets in Bristol, 78 in Brighton and 70 in Manchester. Most of London's rough sleepers were in Westminster, with 55 in the borough of Brent and 48 in the City, according to the Department for Communities and Local Government. A spokeswoman for the mayor of London said: "Any person sleeping rough in London is a cause for concern and something the mayor takes extremely seriously. He invests £9m a year in vital services that help rough sleepers off the streets, including specialist services for non-UK nationals sleeping rough - a group that has significantly increased in recent years. "Through the success of his flagship No Second Night Out scheme, the majority of those who arrive on the streets spend only one night sleeping rough." 'Scandal' Research by St Mungo's, the homelessness charity, found four in 10 rough sleepers had mental health problems, 41% needed help with alcohol dependency and 31% with drug abuse. Howard Sinclair, chief executive of St Mungo's, called the rise in rough sleeping "shocking and unprecedented". "It's nothing short of a scandal that people with mental health problems are sleeping rough." The Department for Communities and Local Government said it had increased funding to tackle homelessness by £139m over the next four years. Rough sleeping rises 30% 3,569 rough sleepers in England in Autumn 2015 2,744 the year before 27% increase in a year in London 97 rough sleepers in Bristol, more than double the previous year £139m fund to tackle homelessness over the next four years Claire's story Claire ran away from home in Peterhead in Scotland to London during the 1980s because of family problems. She was 13. She initially stayed in a hostel in Victoria but ended up sleeping rough around the Strand for about two decades, with several stints in Holloway prison. "I made a few hoax bomb threats. I'm not proud of it. After the years in prison I became institutionalised. It was a way of getting off the streets - at least in prison you've got a bed. "The winters are definitely the worst, when it's raining. "Me and hostels just don't get on very well. But back then the homeless were like a close-knit family, we'd share sleeping bags. Not like now." Eventually she found a church-run hostel that suited her and got help from St Mungo's. Claire now has a temporary place to live - a small flat in Catford. "It's the first flat I've had on my own, it's a bit strange and scary," she said. She helps with laundry at St Mungo's. It's unpaid, but she hopes to work for the charity one day. 'Moral responsibility' Labour's mayoral candidate, Sadiq Khan, said there was a "moral responsibility" to tackle the problem. "If elected mayor I will establish a rough sleepers initiative - a new London-wide taskforce with local authorities, experts and charities." Zac Goldsmith, the Conservative candidate for mayor of London, said he would take responsibility for allocating homeless people to local authorities. "That's important because London has a large transient population that no one borough is technically responsible for," said his spokesman. "No Second Night Out has been a real success, but we must do better, and the No First Night Out pilot has shown we can," said Mr Goldsmith.	More than 3,500 people were sleeping rough on England's streets on any one night last year, 30% more than in 2014.
+text: The ride-hailing firm argued it was an information society service - helping people to make contact with each other electronically - and not a cab firm. The case arose after Uber was told to obey local taxi rules in Barcelona. Uber said the verdict would make little difference to the way it operated in Europe, but experts say the case could have implications for the gig economy. An Uber spokesperson said: "This ruling will not change things in most EU countries where we already operate under transportation law. "However, millions of Europeans are still prevented from using apps like ours. As our new CEO has said, it is appropriate to regulate services such as Uber and so we will continue the dialogue with cities across Europe. This is the approach we'll take to ensure everyone can get a reliable ride at the tap of a button." In its ruling, the ECJ said that a service whose purpose was "to connect, by means of a smartphone application and for remuneration, non-professional drivers using their own vehicle with persons who wish to make urban journeys" must be classified as "a service in the field of transport" in EU law. It added: "As EU law currently stands, it is for the member states to regulate the conditions under which such services are to be provided in conformity with the general rules of the treaty on the functioning of the EU." Analysis: Theo Leggett, BBC business correspondent This ruling is another example of how the courts and regulators are struggling to make sense of the phenomenon known as the gig economy. Since Uber was first launched less than a decade ago, it has repeatedly fallen foul of regulators in different countries - and has frequently been forced to change its business model as a result. This ruling sets out clearly that Uber is, in legal terms at least, a transport company. Uber itself insists that there won't be a huge immediate impact on its business, but it could still affect how it operates in future and how it liaises with national governments. Uber itself has previously said this will undermine the reform of what it calls outdated laws. On a wider basis, it could have implications for other gig economy businesses that try to portray themselves as little more than an app on a phone, connecting providers with customers; it appears the courts, so far, are taking a different view. That could ultimately have an impact, not just on ride-hailing services, but on other gig economy services - such as couriers and accommodation providers - who operate a similar model. TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady said the verdict meant Uber must "play by the same rules as everybody else". She added: "Their drivers are not commodities. They deserve at the very least the minimum wage and holiday pay. "Advances in technology should be used to make work better, not to return to the type of working practices we thought we'd seen the back of decades ago." The verdict comes after Uber was told last month that the appeal to renew its licence in London could take years, according to Mayor Sadiq Khan. Benefits Uber's presence around the world has often been controversial, with protests staged against it in various cities. However, Rohan Silva, a tech entrepreneur and former adviser to David Cameron, says the firm has made competitors up their game. "Millions of people use these ride-hailing apps every day - not just Uber, but dozens of others too. They have brought real benefits, making it cheaper, easier and more convenient to get around the city," he told Radio 4's Today programme. "There has also been a benefit in incumbent London taxi cabs, which are now taking credit cards, which they resisted for years. That is a response to competition." He added that similar services could soon face regulation as a result of the ECJ ruling. "There could be big implications for a sharing economy service like Airbnb, which will probably be regulated by the EU," he said. "What is fascinating about this right now is that different countries are taking very different views. Portugal has legalised Uber and Airbnb, whereas France is clamping down." Prof Andre Spicer, from the Cass Business School, welcomed the ruling. He told Today: "Many people see the EU is actually leading the way in pushing back the almost unlimited power of tech firms and beginning to provide some limits around that. "We also claim this fosters competition, but what Uber's model is based on is pricing, so much that they basically drove everyone else out of the market. "This judgement will allow normal competition, so what we will see is lots of other smaller apps appearing around Europe."	Uber is officially a transport company and not a digital service, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled.
+text: It aims to defuse the spiralling bloodshed in central Africa by removing the LRA's leader, Joseph Kony. LRA fighters will also be encouraged to defect or lay down their arms. US ally Uganda has for more than 20 years failed to defeat the LRA, notorious for kidnapping children to serve as soldiers and sex slaves. LRA leaders initially claimed to be fighting to install a theocracy in Uganda based on the Biblical 10 commandments. But they now roam across parts of Sudan and Central African Republic (CAR), as well as north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The US has given logistical and intelligence support in the past to the armies of Uganda, Southern Sudan and DR Congo. But their concerted push in December 2008 to kill LRA commanders failed - the group dispersed and attacked churches and villages in DR Congo that year. Evading peace President Obama presented his four-point strategy for disarming the rebels to the US Congress in a letter to senators and representatives. He was responding to US legislation passed in May promising a comprehensive strategy to put a stop to the LRA's killing, raping and mutilations. Mr Obama's letter said that strategy would: He also said it would provide a framework for the co-ordination of US efforts. "Given the necessity of bringing political, economic, military, and intelligence support to bear in addressing the threat posed by the LRA," Mr Obama said in his letter, "the development of the strategy relied on the significant involvement of the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the US Agency for International Development, and the intelligence community. All will remain engaged throughout implementation." Mr Kony is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), and now lives an itinerant life, mainly crossing between Sudan and the CAR. Efforts to find peace over the years have not yielded fruit. In 2008, the LRA leader was about to sign a peace deal with Uganda, negotiated by Southern Sudan, but at the last minute he refused to lay down his arms. 'No boots on the ground' Witney Schneidman, a former US deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said Mr Obama's plan was a significant development. "The administration is saying it is prepared to be a partner to the government of Uganda and the government of DR Congo in eliminating the instability," he told the BBC's Network Africa. "The elimination of Kony is a military strategic issue - highly complex and one that needs to be undertaken with very careful thought and planning. "You're not going to see US boots on the ground but I think you're going to see the US being a partner in many other ways." Michael Poffenberger, executive director of Resolve - a US-based campaign group that has been pressing for a new strategy to end the LRA's reign of fear - says defeating the group will be difficult. "They purposely target communities in remote and marginalised areas where they're most likely not to generate a response from the rest of the world and that strategy has largely succeeded," he says. Implementing the White House strategy will depend on funding but there are certain aspects of the plan that can go ahead without difficulty, he says. "Building telecommunications infrastructure - cellphone and radio capacity - so that communities being targeted have a way of getting information out to the outside world. "[And] improving the capacity of militaries in the region to co-ordinate amongst each and provide them with mobility support." Last month, Uganda, CAR, Sudan and DR Congo agreed to form a joint military force to fight the militia.	US President Barack Obama has outlined a plan to disarm one of Africa's most feared rebel militias, the Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army.
+text: Scottish Sports Minister Shona Robison made the announcement during a debate on the legacy of the games at Holyrood. She said security would be provided by a mix of police, military and private sector personnel. A Scottish government spokesman said the measure had been planned and there was no similarity with the emergency use of soldiers at the London Olympics. Ms Robison told MSPs: "I am pleased to announce that yesterday I had confirmation from the home secretary that Police Scotland's request for assistance from our shared armed forces had been supported in full. "It has been agreed with the UK government that costs of this resource will not be passed on to Police Scotland. "I have written to the home secretary thanking her for her support and requesting that consideration now be given to the Royal Regiment of Scotland helping to fulfil that military role."	Members of the armed forces will be drafted in to help with security at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
+text: He said failure to act could embolden Iran and lead to war, which he said would ruin the global economy. The prince was speaking after an attack on oil facilities which he blames on Tehran. Iran said the remarks would "bring [the Saudis] nothing but shame". Mohammed bin Salman also said he accepted some responsibility for journalist Jamal Khashoggi's killing. But, speaking to CBS News, he denied personally ordering it. The prince, who is considered the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, is suspected of personally targeting Mr Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist critical of the government in Riyadh. Mr Khashoggi was killed in Saudi Arabia's consulate in Turkey on 2 October 2018. In an interview with CBS' 60 Minutes news programme on Sunday, he said: "I take full responsibility as a leader in Saudi Arabia, especially since it [the killing] was committed by individuals working for the Saudi government." However, he denied ordering the killing of Mr Khashoggi directly, or having knowledge of it at the time. Saudi authorities have since blamed a "rogue" operation for his murder and put 11 men on trial. You may also be interested in: The prince also appeared to offer talks for a political solution to the civil war in Yemen, where government forces backed by a Saudi-led coalition are fighting Houthi rebels supported by Iran. Iran is Saudi Arabia's regional rival and an opponent of the US, which pulled out of a treaty aimed at limiting Tehran's nuclear programme after Mr Trump took power. US-Iran tensions have risen markedly this year, with the US blaming Iran on attacks on six oil tankers in the Gulf between May and July. Tehran rejects the accusations. Remarks betray Saudi vulnerability There are subtle clues in this interview as to why the Saudi response to the 14 September drone and missile attacks has been so restrained. Note that the crown prince warns that a war with Iran would be catastrophic, not just for his country but for the global economy. Four years ago, when MBS committed his forces to the disastrous war in Yemen, his response might have been bolder. But the Yemen war has not gone as the Saudis intended while their enemy, the Houthi rebels, are launching ever increasing numbers of drones and missiles across the common border. The recent attacks on the Saudi oil industry, widely blamed on Iran, did real damage. So the Saudis now know just how vulnerable their critical infrastructure is to any Iranian strike. On the Khashoggi murder, the crown prince's "taking of responsibility" is a belated acknowledgment of how much unease there still is about this incident in the West. But that, of course, is not the same as admitting any involvement in it, which he and his government still deny. What about the crown prince's oil warning? Iran has denied any involvement in the attacks on Saudi Arabia's oil facilities earlier in September, which knocked out about 5% of global oil supply and sent oil prices soaring. But Mohammed bin Salman, the heir to the Saudi throne, said: "If the world does not take a strong and firm action to deter Iran, we will see further escalations that will threaten world interests. "Oil supplies will be disrupted and oil prices will jump to unimaginably high numbers that we haven't seen in our lifetimes." He said the Middle East region "represents about 30% of the world's energy supplies, about 20% of global trade passages, about 4% of the world GDP". "Imagine all of these three things stop. This means a total collapse of the global economy, and not just Saudi Arabia or the Middle East countries," the prince said. He blamed Iranian "stupidity" for the attacks, saying there was no strategic goal. Saudi Arabia says 18 drones and seven cruise missiles were fired on the country's two oil facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais on 14 September. Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthi rebels have said they were behind the attacks. A week after the facilities were hit, the US pledged to send troops to Saudi Arabia to help defend against further attacks. What did he say about Yemen? The prince urged Iran to cease its support for Houthi rebels, saying it would be "much easier" to bring the war to an end. "Today we open all initiatives for a political solution in Yemen," he said. "We hope this happens today rather than tomorrow." He welcomed a Houthi ceasefire, announced several days ago, as a "positive step" towards political dialogue. The civil war has triggered the world's worst humanitarian disaster, with 80% of the population requiring humanitarian assistance or protection. More than 70,000 people are believed to have died since 2016 as a result of the conflict, according to UN estimates. What about jailed women's rights activists? The crown prince said he would "personally follow up" on allegations that women's rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul was tortured in jail. Ms Hathloul and other activists have been in custody for more than a year, despite organising a successful campaign for rights such as that of a woman to drive and travel without a man's permission. But the prince said the decision whether or not to release the activists lay not with him, but with the public prosecutor. Asked why they had been jailed, he said laws had to be respected, even though there were some he disagreed with.	Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has warned that oil prices may soar if the world does not act to deter Iran.
+text: Caroline Coster caught coronavirus in March but, after initially recovering, quickly ended up in Bedford Hospital with sepsis. The 58-year-old, from Bedford, almost died twice after being put in a medically-induced coma. "Being in a coma can best be described as it felt like I was trapped in a video game," she said. Her daughter, Hannah, said expecting to say goodbye to her mother had been "unimaginable". After recovering from "two horrible weeks" of Covid-19, Mrs Coster was diagnosed with a chest infection and told to go to hospital by her GP. It was discovered she had developed sepsis, an extreme reaction to infection which causes vital organs to shut down. Mrs Coster was in the coma for almost a month and doctors twice almost turned off her life-support machine. Writing on her blog about being in a coma, she said: "When the game was switched off, so was I. "When the game was switched on, my experience was disembodied white heads coming towards me and telling me 'Caroline, Caroline, wake up'." The mother-of-two eventually began to recover but because doctors had redirected her blood flow to vital organs, her hands and feet had been deprived of blood and turned black. She told the BBC her hands looked liked those of an "Egyptian mummy". "They were black and shrivelled," she said. "I was so grateful to have my life that it wasn't a huge jolt to lose those." On her blog, she added: "Losing my legs did not change the person that I am." Mrs Coster, who is due to start rehabilitation, is hoping to use hand and leg prosthetics but will have to raise money for specialised equipment, including a phone with facial recognition, a bathroom she can use independently and mobility aids. She has also made plans to register her dog, Duke, as a therapy dog and wants to go back to the hospital with her so people can "see me as a recovered amputee". "I've never felt 'why me?', she said. "I'm just so aware of how fortunate I am." Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk	A woman who had a quadruple amputation has said losing her hands and feet does "not change the person I am".
+text: By Del CrookesNewsbeat reporter At one stage schedulers had threatened a 75-minute overlap but after last-minute talks, ITV agreed to delay the climax of the latest series of BGT. There have been repeated clashes between the two channels over the past few months. ITV recently moved the audition heats of BGT to a later slot after it was repeatedly beaten in the ratings. Last week it finally edged ahead of the BBC One show thanks to a later start time. The controller of BBC One, Danny Cohen, says media reports of a rivalry between the two shows are not true. "I'm a fan of ITV's entertainment shows," he admitted. "Simon Cowell and others have said very nice things about The Voice. We want viewers to enjoy both shows. "I don't think we should get too involved with rivalry or who's beating who or who's slightly ahead of who." 'Best possible slot' In one draft schedule released on Wednesday (2 May), it was revealed ITV had pencilled in the 150-minute final of Britain's Got Talent at 6.30pm on 12 May. That would have led to the shows being on TV at the same time for an hour and a quarter. The BBC had settled on 6.10pm, which it said was the earliest The Voice could run because of live sports and a film, Madagascar, which were lined up for that afternoon. BBC bosses are understood to have been angry by ITV's efforts to screen the show at 6.30pm, after ITV criticised The Voice for overrunning by three minutes last month causing the two shows to overlap. ITV has previously blamed the BBC for the clashes, saying that the broadcaster had scheduled The Voice at a time of year when BGT was already a fixture in the calendar. BBC producers are also said to be unhappy that ITV has scheduled an edition of Emmerdale against The Voice's results show on Sunday 13 May. A statement from ITV said: "The Britain's Got Talent final is one of the biggest entertainment events of the year for ITV and it's important to us that we screen it in the best possible slot. "We are a family entertainment show with a run time of two hours and 30 minutes, so we are constrained in how late we can start the show, given the audience who want to watch us. "Our start time this year of 7.30pm is line with the 2010 final."	The Voice is set for a 15-minute clash with the final of Britain's Got Talent (BGT) on Saturday 12 May.
+text: Figures show a drop in officers aged under 26 across Wales and England. Winston Roddick says the economic downturn has hit recruitment, but he hopes budget talks lead to a "substantial" rise in young officers. In Wales and England there were 9,088 officers aged under 26 in 2009-10, but that declined to 4,758 in 2011-12. Economic downturn Overall police numbers hit a nine-year low in 2012, due to tighter budget constraints slowing recruitment. Data on the number of police officers was obtained in a Freedom of Information request by BBC Radio 4's The World This Weekend, and showed how much of that fall has been among younger officers. Across England and Wales the number of young police officers had fallen by nearly 50% in two years. But in North Wales Police, and forces in Cleveland and Staffordshire, the fall in the number of officers under 26 was more than 70% over the period. "The current economic downturn has undoubtedly affected the recruitment of new police officers," said Mr Roddick. First budget "However, during my campaign to be elected commissioner, I identified increasing the number of officers on the streets as one of my five priorities. "I believe this will reduce crime and allay public concern for safety on the streets." Mr Roddick said he would will be discussing with the chief constable, Mark Polin, "ways and means of achieving this". He will also be discussing the draft of his first budget with the police and crime panel this week, he added. "If the budget is confirmed then we shall see an increase in the recruiting of young officers and the figures will rise substantially."	The North Wales Police and Crime Commissioner says he hopes to reverse a dramatic fall in the number of young officers in the force.
+text: The 47-year-old was shot a number of times at Welsh Street in the Markets area on Tuesday morning. A lone piper led the cortege carrying his body, which was draped with an Irish tricolour and a black beret and gloves, through the Markets area before making its way to Milltown Cemetery. Mr Davison was buried afterwards in the cemetery. Police have said they do not believe dissident republicans were behind the attack, and did not believe his murder was sectarian. Three men have been arrested and released in connection with his killing. It is understood Mr Davison was involved in the fight in a Belfast bar in January 2005 that led to the death of Robert McCartney, one of Northern Ireland's most high profile killings. Mr Davison's uncle Terence was later acquitted of Mr McCartney's murder.	The funeral has taken place of former senior IRA figure Gerard 'Jock' Davison who was murdered in Belfast.
+text: The EU's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier and his UK counterpart David Frost met in Brussels on Sunday, but key issues remain unresolved. The European Parliament said talks needed to have ended on Sunday in order for it to ratify a deal by 31 December. A UK government source told the BBC a deal will not be reached unless there is a "substantial shift" from Brussels. It is understood there is likely to be a decision before Christmas on whether or not a deal can be reached. David McAllister, a German MEP and chairman of the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, said the European Parliament will not be in a position to grant consent to an agreement this year, as a deal was not reached by midnight on Sunday. Writing on Twitter, Mr McAllister said: "After intensive negotiations this week, there is still no clarity whether an agreement for the future UK-EU relations will be reached or not." He said an extraordinary meeting will be convened on Monday morning to discuss next steps. The UK and the EU have until 31 December to agree a trade deal, plus other points, such as fishing rights. Mr Barnier said talks were at a "crucial moment", but any agreement must be "balanced and reciprocal". "We respect the sovereignty of the UK and we expect the same. Both the EU and Britain must have the right to set their own laws and control their own waters. And we should both be able to act when our interests are at stake," Mr Barnier wrote on Twitter on Sunday. Whitehall sources have said that it is increasingly likely that the UK will emerge from the transition period without a free trade agreement with the EU. This will mean that, from 1 January, both sides will rely on World Trade Organization (WTO) rules to govern exports and imports. Tariffs could be introduced on goods being sold and bought, potentially affecting product prices. A government source told the BBC the EU was "still struggling to get the flexibility needed from member states" to make a deal possible. "We need to get any deal right and based on terms which respect what the British people voted for." After months of negotiations, and during this past weekend, the vast majority of the EU-UK trade and security deal has been agreed. While there remain a number of loose ends, the main focus now in talks is fish. Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised a return of sovereignty over UK waters after Brexit - and that is what he has been pushing for. But the EU insists member states' fishing fleets must retain some access, or - it has threatened - there'll be no trade agreement at all. Both sides say they're committed to trying to reach a deal. But time really is running out now. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has vowed to continue talks, but warned that gaps still needed to be bridged. Health Secretary Matt Hancock said a deal was still possible, and in both sides' interests, but the EU needed to give ground. Any deal reached would need to be agreed by parliaments in the UK and the European Union's member states. British MPs have now finished for the Christmas break, but Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove said on Thursday they could be called back to ratify a deal in the coming days, were one to be agreed. The basics What happens next with Brexit?	Post-Brexit trade talks will continue on Monday after negotiators failed to reach an agreement over the weekend.
+text: Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha died along with two members of his staff, the pilot and a passenger in the crash outside the King Power Stadium. The video shows the aircraft going into a spin, which experts said suggests a problem with the tail rotor. Investigators would not comment on the video or causes of Saturday's crash. The widely shared footage, taken inside the stadium, shows the AgustaWestland AW169 climbing normally for about 40 seconds, before it pauses and goes into a downward spin. Aviation expert David Learmount said the video showed the aircraft completed an "awkward" take-off without issue before getting into difficulty. "At lift-off you can't see anything that's abnormal, but it's an awkward job climbing out of a stadium because ideally you want some forward speed as well as continuing to climb," Mr Learmount said. "The pilot climbed very nearly vertically until he was above the height of the stadium and then started to turn to the right - it was very shortly after that control was lost. "Just after he did a manoeuvre that seemed to be intended, he lost control." Mr Learmount said if the tail rotor was the problem, the pilot's options were limited to simply shutting power off to the rotors. "That leaves you with no power - if you have no power you have to go down," he said. "This action - bringing both rotors back to idle - has to be done incredibly quickly. "If you shut the power down rapidly enough, you can keep the rotor spinning and that effectively puts the helicopter into a glide. "If you've already started spinning, trying to do all of this is very nearly impossible." All five occupants of the helicopter were pronounced dead at the scene of the crash. As well as Mr Vichai, Nusara Suknamai, Kaveporn Punpare, and pilots and partners Eric Swaffer and Izabela Roza Lechowicz also died. Police have said Ms Lechowicz was a passenger at the time of the crash. The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) is already examining the flight recorders, which were retrieved the day after the crash. It said it was "too early" to comment on the video or the possible causes of the crash and said it "will consider a wealth of evidence, and the video is just one element". A spokesperson for Leonardo, the Italian company which manufacturers the AW169, said it was working closely with the AAIB and British authorities. So far it has not issued any new safety advice relating to the AW169 in light of the crash. On Wednesday, coroners for Leicester said formal identification of 60-year-old Mr Vichai had taken place, along with 32-year-old Ms Nusara, 46-year-old Ms Lechowicz and 53-year-old Mr Swaffer. Identification of the fifth victim was still in progress and no date for inquests have been set yet, police said. A huge display of floral and footballing tributes have been left outside the stadium and a steady stream of people have signed a book of condolence since it opened on Tuesday. Families of those who died, players and members of the wider Leicester community have also visited the scene. A minute's silence will be held and black armbands will be worn by players at all Premier League matches this weekend as a mark of respect, the Premier League has confirmed. Leicester players will also travel by road to their game at Cardiff on Saturday rather than fly, as it was felt insensitive to go by plane given the circumstances of Mr Vichai's death. Follow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.	Video footage of the helicopter carrying the Leicester City owner shows it spinning moments before it crashed killing him and four others.
+text: Parys Lapper died suddenly last week at the age of 19. His mother, who was born with shortened legs and no arms, posed nude for the artwork mounted on the square's fourth plinth in 2005. In a written tribute read at Worthing Crematorium, Ms Lapper said: "It was my privilege to be your mother." More than a hundred bikers escorted Parys on his final journey from the family home in Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex. The family held an open house on Tuesday evening for his friends to decorate, paint, stick messages or sign their names on his empty coffin. A letter, read on Ms Lapper's behalf at the service, said: "Dear Parys, you always will be my beautiful miracle boy. "From the second you came out screaming your head off I fell in love and my heart was yours. "You were so sensitive and gentle at times, we would snuggle on my bed for hours and you would play with my toes." It ended: "You will always be a part of me, it was my privilege to be your mother, I would not have missed it for the world." Ms Lapper co-hosted the 2016 BBC Four show No Body's Perfect with fashion photographer Rankin, exploring how digital photography, social media and selfie culture had affected people's sense of identity. Parys also appeared on screen as one of the stars on the BBC series Child Of Our Time, which tracks millennial babies from their infancy into their young adult lives.	The funeral has been held for the son of the artist Alison Lapper, who posed for a famous Trafalgar Square sculpture while pregnant with him.
+text: "We're victorious," said the organisers of the annual event, which has become a magnet for the far right and has been marked by violence in recent years. The ruling comes a day after Mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz barred Sunday's rally, saying the city had suffered enough from "aggressive nationalism". After the ban, President Andrzej Duda vowed to organise an official march. "Everyone is invited, come only with red-and-white flags," he said, referring to the march that was expected to follow the same route as the nationalist rally - only starting one hour later. The president warned that anyone carrying the kind of offensive banners seen last year would be dealt with by the police. An estimated 60,000 people took part in the 2017 march but far more are expected in Warsaw this Sunday to mark the centenary of independence. Why are nationalist marches controversial? Although the yearly event is popular with thousands of ordinary, patriotic Poles, including supporters of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, it is partly organised by the far-right National Radical Camp (ONR). Among the Polish flags last year were smoke bombs, along with racist and anti-Semitic chants and banners. Some of the marchers were far-right agitators from other countries including the UK and Italy. A smaller counter-protest attracted some 2,000 people. The march was cited in a European Parliament resolution last month, which called for a ban on neo-fascist and neo-Nazi groups. What did the mayor say? Ms Gronkiewicz-Waltz, a member of the opposition Civic Platform party, explained that security on Sunday was a concern and her appeals to the government for help had fallen on deaf ears. Strike action by police would also make it difficult to secure the event properly, she said, and Warsaw had suffered historically from aggressive nationalism under German occupation. "Poland's 100th anniversary of independence shouldn't look like this, hence my decision to forbid it," she said. Poland's second republic was established on 11 November 1918 at the end of World War One, after more than a century of rule by Prussia, the Austro-Hungarian empire and Russia. Ms Gronkiewicz-Waltz also complained that no charges had been brought against people who had broken laws at last year's march.	A Polish court has overturned a ban on a nationalist march in Warsaw to mark 100 years of Poland's independence.
+text: Gary Warner, 31, was attacked in the early hours of 31 October and died at Good Hope Hospital in Sutton Coldfield a short time later. Kane Stonehouse, 20, of Sutton Coldfield, appeared at Birmingham Crown Court on Monday and admitted possessing an offensive weapon, but pleaded not guilty to murder. He faces a trial at the same court on 21 June. Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk Related Internet Links HM Courts and Tribunals Service	A man has denied murdering a man who was stabbed in the chest in Birmingham.
+text: The GMB union had accused the Scottish government of forcing carers to work with insufficient personal protective equipment (PPE). The concerns had largely centred on guidance over the use of masks. But after a meeting with the government on Wednesday, the GMB said staff would now get full protective equipment. Unions had been concerned by Scottish guidance which they said recommended that home care staff should only wear a mask when the person they were caring for was suspected of having Covid-19 and they were coming within two metres (6ft) of them. They said this was a change to the original guidance which had been issued to the whole of the UK, and had left Scottish home and social care workers at greater risk. The unions had called on the government to ensure that all PPE given to health and social carer workers met the internationally recognised standards set down by the World Health Organisation Now unions, the Scottish government and Cosla - the umbrella body which represents Scotland's councils - have reached an agreement on what protective equipment social care staff should wear, and when. The government said a joint statement would be issued making it clear that carers could wear masks whenever they felt it was appropriate. 'Sufficient stocks' GMB Scotland organiser Drew Duffy said his expectation was that social carers would now get "the full and proper PPE, specifically masks - as per the four nations guidance - of which ministers assure us they have sufficient stocks." Mr Duffy said it was the government's responsibility to get these stocks to employers and carers as quickly as possible, and warned that further detail on testing was still needed. He added: "We will rigorously monitor the receipt of these vital and potentially life-saving resources. "The point of frustration is that the commitments given today could have been given to us weeks ago. It shouldn't take a point of crisis to bring people together, especially when the willingness was there from the outset." A spokesman for the Scottish government said the safety of health and social care workers was "paramount". He added: "The guidance published on 2 April and agreed by the four nations remains in place and all health and social care staff will continue to have access to appropriate PPE where they need it. "The Scottish government will agree a joint statement with Cosla and trades unions to underline that social care staff can wear protective masks where they feel appropriate in line with their professional judgement." Separately, more than 100 health professionals signed a letter to the government on Wednesday to express "grave concerns" about the protective equipment they have been given. The letter claimed some front-line staff are risking their lives in the Covid-19 epidemic because they do not have suitable aprons, masks and eyewear. The Scottish government has insisted that there are adequate supplies of PPE in place, alongside new measures to ensure the right equipment reached the right locations "with the highest possible urgency".	An agreement has been reached over the equipment that social care staff should wear to help protect themselves and others from coronavirus.
+text: Pupils in year six in primary schools and years 10 and 12 in secondary schools will be the first to return. Schools have been closed to children except those of critical workers and vulnerable children since 20 March. A "bubble" approach will be used to keep groups of children separated with their teacher, the government said. Staff and children in secondary schools will be grouped together in "bubbles" and have to keep 2m (6ft) apart from other "bubbles", and within their group. There will be "greater flexibility" for those in primary schools. Anyone with coronavirus symptoms will not be allowed to return. Further safety measures will include staggered lunch times, avoiding shared equipment, and increased cleaning. PPE will be made available to staff and children if any person in the school becomes symptomatic, the government said. Dr Susan Turnbull, medical officer of health, said there was evidence of lockdown restrictions causing "worrying collateral harm" to children. A government survey found that 48% of 2,105 children said they felt worried, and more than 80% said they missed their friends. Education Minister Senator Tracey Vallois said: "I know how much children have all missed their friends, teachers and schools, which is why we are working hard, following the health advice, to ensure that more children can return to school as soon as is practically possible, while ensuring that public health measures can be maintained." She said there would be some "discretion" in the attendance policy to provide "flexibility" for households which contain someone who is shielding. Private nurseries will also be allowed to open to a set number of children, and child-minders will be permitted to care for small groups.	Schools in Jersey will reopen to some year groups from 8 June, the education minister has announced.
+text: The mainland benchmark index, the Shanghai Composite, closed down 8.5% at 3,209.91 points, extending last week's losses. The sell-off continued despite Beijing's latest attempts to reassure investors. China's dramatic tumble has dragged down markets across the region. The Hong Kong Hang Seng index ended the day down 5.2% at 21,251.57, while the region's biggest stock market, Japan's Nikkei 225 closed 4.6% lower at 18,540.68 points, its lowest level in nearly five months. In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 finished 4.1% lower at 5,001.30, while South Korea's Kospi index wrapped the day 2.5% lower at 1,829.81 points. Beijing's latest intervention, to allow its main state pension fund to invest in the stock market, failed to reassure traders both in China and abroad. Under the new rules, the fund will be allowed to invest up to 30% of its net assets in domestically-listed shares. By increasing demand for them, the government hopes prices will rise. Analysis: Celia Hatton, BBC News Beijing Correspondent: "Every time I look at what's happening in the stock market, I feel sick and I can't eat. China, please save my money," a panicked Chinese investor wrote online. Many others are voicing the same desires: if the mainland's stock markets are faltering, they want the state to come to the rescue. It's not just a hope, it's an expectation. And that's where the government's problem lies. Beijing's economic reform plan hinges on its pledge to withdraw from the market economy. China's stock markets will never mature if the state is always hovering in the background, like an anxious parent. However, 80% of China's investors are individuals managing their own portfolios. In contrast, foreign stock exchanges are usually dominated by large, institutional investors. Of course, China's stock market wealth is concentrated among the elite. China's rookie investors don't have the ability to sway the markets on their own, because the values of their portfolios are relatively small. But that still leaves millions of ordinary people dangerously exposed to the fluctuations in the market. And, as China's internet forums indicate, those are people who believe the government can and should guarantee their investments. If millions of angry citizens lose their life savings in the stock market and the state does nothing to ease their pain, the government may face its greatest fear: widespread social unrest. A 'one-trick pony'? Simon Littlewood, president at business advisory firm ACG Global told the BBC there were concerns that the world's second biggest economy was "a one-trick pony as they have been trying repeatedly over the past few months to put more liquidity into their economy", yet so far have failed to calm markets. Over the past week, China's benchmark Shanghai Composite fell 12%, adding up to a 30% drop since the middle of June. The sharp fall sparked a global sell-off, with the Dow Jones in the US losing 6%, while the UK's FTSE 100 posted its biggest weekly loss this year of 5%. Earlier this month, the Chinese central bank devalued the yuan in an attempt to boost exports. IMF: 'No crisis' Over the weekend, the International Monetary Fund weighed in on the global sell-off in an attempt to avoid further market panic. China's economic slowdown and fall in equities was not a crisis but a "necessary" adjustment for the economy, a senior IMF official said on Sunday. "It's totally premature to speak of a crisis in China", Carlo Cottarelli, IMF executive director representing countries such as Italy and Greece on its board, told a press conference, reiterating the international lender's forecast for a 6.8% expansion of the Chinese economy this year, below the 7.4% growth achieved in 2014. On Friday, figures showed China's factory activity in August shrank at its fastest pace in more than six years. This came after official figures showed the country's economic growth continuing to slow. For the three months to the end of July, the economy grew by 7% compared with a year earlier - its slowest pace since 2009.	Chinese shares continued their sharp fall on Monday as concerns over the country's slowing growth and volatile markets sparked panic among traders.
+text: The Rutland explorer, bidding to become the first woman to row from Japan to Canada, was rescued by the coastguard. Her boat, Gulliver, was damaged by high waves during a tropical storm. Another British rower, Charlie Martell, of Cirencester, Gloucestershire, also abandoned his solo Pacific journey when he was hit by the same storm. 'Frightening conditions' "While on her solo row across the North Pacific Ocean, Sarah has been hit by the Tropical Storm Mawar and her boat, Gulliver, has rolled on several occasions," a post on Ms Outen's website said. "The team has however spoken to Sarah and she is safe and doing well." Ms Outen, 26, said on a podcast from the boat: "Gulliver took a real beating at the hands of the tropical storm. It was much stronger than we had originally thought. "These are the roughest and most frightening conditions I have ever been in. "The coastguard has been wonderful and very supportive." Territorial Army lieutenant Martell, 41, made his distress call when winds of up to 50 knots and waves of more than 50ft (15m) caused his boat to capsize several times, damaging the vessel. A spokesman for Lt Martell said he had been at sea for 34 days and was about 700 miles (1,100 km) from Japan when the storm damaged his boat. His website reported that his boat, Blossom, had encountered strong winds and heavy seas, causing it to repeatedly capsize. "She then pitch-poled (flipped end over end), causing structural damage and leaving Charlie no choice but to abort the voyage and call for assistance," the website said. He is expected to be rescued by the Japanese coastguard at about 02:00 BST on Saturday. Ms Outen's 4,500-mile (7,250km) record attempt was part of a 20,000-mile (32,000km) around-the-world solo expedition. She said earlier on her Twitter feed that the cargo ship Texas Highway was "sat close by watching us until the Coast Guard arrives - reassuring". She also said she would have to abandon her boat as it was "too rough" to take it back to Japan. Ms Outen was about 500 miles off the coast of Japan and had been at sea for 24 days when she made an emergency call to the Japanese coastguard. Her team said she remained in "good spirits" during her ordeal. She had been hoping to become the first woman to row solo from Choshi to Vancouver. The journey could have taken up to 200 days. Her team said it was premature to conclude what it would mean for the adventurer's solo row bid. Ms Outen has been following a route across land and sea since April 2011, travelling only by kayak, bicycle and rowing boat during her "London2London: via the World" solo expedition. She arrived in Japan in November after cycling more than 10,000 miles through 10 countries and rowing 1,000 miles to Tokyo.	British adventurer Sarah Outen has been rescued after a severe storm forced her to abandon her solo row across the North Pacific Ocean.
+text: The Met Office has an amber "be prepared" warning in place for parts of Tayside and Central, with yellow "be aware" warnings covering Grampian and the Scottish Borders. On Monday evening, residents in Inverurie in Aberdeenshire were evacuated from their homes after the River Don burst its banks. Many roads were closed by flood water. The A83 was shut at the Rest and be Thankful to allow operators to remove a boulder using explosives. The Scottish Environment Agency (Sepa) had more than 30 flood warnings in place late on Monday evening, and four flood alerts. People were warned people to stay away from the banks of the Tay in Perth, where the city's flood defence scheme was said to be facing its most significant test since it was built more than a decade ago. The gates were closed at Perth Harbour and on the Queen's Bridge as water levels rose. In Inverurie, a rest centre was set up in a local school after residents were evacuated from their homes in Canal Road. Water levels in Kintore were also being monitored with a rest centre opened at the village hall as a precaution. Earlier on Monday, homes were flooded in Coupar Angus and some properties in Aboyne - including two care homes - were evacuated as a precaution. Police Scotland said Aberdeenshire Council moved residents from Bonty Court as a precaution. Allachburn Care Home was also evacuated. What have we done to make the flooding worse? There were also fears for the future of the historic Abergeldie Castle in Aberdeenshire which was on the brink of collapsing into a swollen River Dee. The castle's owners were forced to evacuate the 16th century A-listed tower house on Sunday, after the river swept away about 60ft (18m) of land behind the property, leaving it only a few feet from the water. In Blairgowrie, a Coastguard helicopter and specialist firefighters rescued an elderly couple from their home which was in danger of being flooded. Aberdeen RNLI volunteers were drafted in to Ballater again to help reconnect telephone wires by using rockets normally used to pass ropes in rescues at sea. Network Rail said trains on the west coast mainline would be disrupted for a number of weeks as work to repair the damaged Lamington Viaduct continues until the end of January.	Communities across Scotland remain on flood alert after further heavy rainfall overnight.
+text: The Metropolitan Police said it believed the violence involved groups of rival fans. Trouble flared at 16:42 GMT on Saturday in the Hawkstone Road area of Southwark, near Millwall's home ground, The Den. The Met said a "large group of males" was fighting and a man in his 20s suffered a slash wound to the face. He was taken to a south London hospital with injuries that are not life-threatening. Videos of the brawl have been watched more than a million times online. Det Insp Darren Young, of the South Central Command Unit, said: "The behaviour of those involved in this incident is nothing short of disgraceful and those involved can be certain we will be working to identify them. "We are aware of the video circulating online, which has quite rightly elicited shock and disgust." Millwall won the match 3-2. 'Racist chants' The FA said it was not investigating the violence because it happened outside the football ground. However, it said it was investigating reports of "a discriminatory song" being sung by Millwall fans at the match. Millwall FC said they were "extremely disappointed" by a video which allegedly showed some fans singing racist chants. The club said they would "work with all relevant authorities during investigations into the matter and look to identify individuals involved". "Anyone identified and guilty of such abuse will be banned from The Den for life," the club said.	A man was slashed across the face during a mass brawl before Millwall and Everton's FA Cup fourth round clash.
+text: Traffic was up 7.4% compared to the same month last year, boosted by an increase in international flights. Growth was also recorded at Glasgow Airport, which handled 665,000 passengers in May - an increase of 1% on last year. Operators have added 18 new destinations in Edinburgh since its change of ownership last June. It was bought by Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) after the Competition Commission ruled that previous owner BAA had to sell either Edinburgh or Glasgow airport. Edinburgh now has more than 130 destinations, with a new Toronto service due to start in July. The airport said international traffic rose by 11.8% in May, driven by new services from easyJet and Ryanair, and domestic traffic increased by 2.7% with "strong performances" from British Airways and Virgin Atlantic's new Little Red service to Heathrow. Chief executive Gordon Dewar said: "When we bought Edinburgh Airport in June last year, we were very clear about the issues we faced and how we were going to tackle them. "The team here has put in a tremendous amount of work and in May we saw all of that work bear fruit. "The increase in domestic traffic is particularly pleasing in what is an incredibly competitive marketplace." Edinburgh Airport handles about 9.2 million passengers a year and employs more than 5,000 people. Busy summer Glasgow Airport said popular services to Dusseldorf, Warsaw and Gdansk had contributed to a 15% increase in its scheduled flights with the European Union. Amanda McMillan, Glasgow Airport's managing director, said: "We have been working closely with our airline partners to introduce new routes and add capacity on existing services, and our efforts have been reflected in the continued increase in passenger numbers. "We are now looking forward to what promises to be a busy summer season and have recruited additional members of staff to meet the extra demand. "They will be on-hand to offer assistance to the tens of thousands of passengers who will travel through the airport in the coming weeks and to ensure their holidays get off to the best possible start."	Edinburgh Airport has recorded its busiest-ever May after handling more than 906,000 passengers last month.
+text: Ms Ardern said she and her partner, Clarke Gayford, were expecting their child in June, after which she planned to take a six-week break. "And we thought 2017 was a big year!" she wrote on Instagram. Ms Ardern, 37, is now set to be the second elected world leader to give birth while in office - and the first to do so in almost 30 years. In 1990, Benazir Bhutto gave birth to a daughter while serving as Pakistan's prime minister - in what was reported to be a first for an elected leader, rather than royal families. Ms Ardern became New Zealand's youngest prime minister since 1856 when she formed a centre-left coalition in October. She was flooded with support after making the announcement on her social media profiles on Friday. Ms Ardern's Labour Party came second in September's election, where no party was able to secure a majority. She formed a government with the backing of Winston Peters, leader of the small New Zealand First party. "As is the case when I am overseas, Mr Peters will act as prime minister, working with my office while staying in touch with me," Ms Ardern said in a statement reported by the New Zealand Herald on Friday. "I fully intend to be contactable and available throughout the six-week period when needed." Ms Ardern said she discovered her pregnancy only six days before learning she would be prime minister, and it was "100% a surprise". "I am not the first woman to multi-task. I am not the first woman to work and have a baby - there are many women who have done this before," she said. Mr Gayford would be a "stay-at-home" dad, she added. Two of New Zealand's former prime ministers were among the first to offer congratulations. Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull also shared best wishes from himself and his wife. Ms Ardern took over the Labour leadership in July. She later said that she had an hour's notice that Andrew Little was about to stand down. On her first day as opposition leader, Ms Ardern was controversially asked by a TV talk show host whether she had made "a choice between having babies and having a career". Ms Ardern replied that such a question was "totally unacceptable in 2017". "It is a woman's decision about when they choose to have children and it should not predetermine whether or not they are given a job or have job opportunities," she said.	New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced that she is pregnant.
+text: It is the climax of three days of mourning which saw thousands of Ghanaians file past his coffin as it lay in state in the capital, Accra. Annan died on 18 August in Switzerland at the age of 80. He was UN secretary-general from 1997 to 2006, the first black African to hold the world's top diplomatic post. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001 for helping to revitalise the international body, during a period that coincided with the Iraq War and the HIV/Aids pandemic. Speaking at the funeral, current UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said Annan was an exceptional leader who saw the UN as a force for good. "As we face the headwinds of our troubled and turbulent times, let us always be inspired by the legacy of Kofi Annan," Mr Guterres said. "Our world needs it now more than ever," he added. 'Irresistible aura' By Mayeni Jones, BBC News, Accra Mourners in traditional black and red attire filled the main hall of the Accra Conference Centre, which sits about 4,000 people. More are watching proceedings on a giant screen in an auditorium just outside the hall. There have been hymns and a performance by soprano and human rights campaigner Barbara Hendricks. Annan's nephew Kojo Amoo-Gottfried read a eulogy, describing how he had led a hunger strike in his secondary school to protest against the quality of food in the dining hall. There were also a moving tribute by his wife, Swedish lawyer and artist Nane Maria Annan. She described how her husband was always excited to return home, and thanked Ghana for giving the world such an extraordinary man. She said her husband had an irresistible aura of radiant warmth. "His legacy would live on through his foundation and through all of us," she concluded. The former queen of the Netherlands, Princess Beatrix, and her daughter-in-law Princess Mabel, who were close friends of Annan, were among the mourners. The king of Ghana's Asante people, Otumfuo Nana Osei Tutu II, awarded Annan the title Busumuru in 2012 to honour his role as an international diplomat. Busumuru is one of the swords attached to the monarch's Golden Stool, or throne. Ghana's President Nana Akufo-Addo described Annan as "one of the truly iconic figures of modern times". "The outpouring of tributes from the world over is an accurate measure of the man, a man who gave his life to making peace where there was conflict, to defending the voiceless who were powerless, to promoting virtue where there was evil," he said. The Anglican bishop of Annan's home city of Kumasi in central Ghana, the Most Reverend Daniel Sarfo, said: "Today history is being made in Ghana. One of our illustrious sons is lying here. "But we are grateful that God used him over the years to work for humanity, for peace. Today, as he lies here, he has finished his work." All pictures subject to copyright	World leaders and royalty have paid their respects to one of Africa's most famous diplomats, Kofi Annan, at his funeral in his home country of Ghana.
+text: The authority said using bright white lights instead of traditional orange sodium lamps would cuts costs and reduce energy consumption. It hopes to save £32.2m against projected costs over 20 years. The council currently spends £1.1m a year on street lighting energy. The work will take some months to complete. Conservative councillor Michael Filer, portfolio holder for transport, said the town's lighting network was "in need of modernising". "Once installed the new lights will lead to a 73% energy saving in current street lighting consumption which equates to large environmental and financial savings," he added. Some 15,000 lanterns, 1,100 columns and lanterns and 500 illuminated bollards will be replaced with the "crisper, brighter" light-emitting diodes (LEDs). The project is being funded through £4.26m from Salix, a government energy projects funding provider, with the remaining £3.5m coming from the council.	A £7m project is under way to upgrade Bournemouth's 16,500 street lights with low-energy LEDs in a bid to save the borough council more than £30m.
+text: Laura KuenssbergPolitical editor@bbclaurakon Twitter And it's no secret that the Home Office budget is one of the departments in Whitehall that is not protected from the overall cuts. Following the Paris attacks, political concern over policing numbers has become acute. A document, prepared at the request of the government's emergency committee in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, spells out some of the potential consequences of further cuts to the police budgets. And for the Home Office, and the chancellor preparing his set piece statement for next Wednesday, it makes awkward reading. We've seen key paragraphs of a restricted document prepared this week titled, "Implications of the Paris Attack for UK Police Preparedness". The document suggests that further cuts to police budgets would have very serious implications for the authorities' ability to respond to multiple terrorist incidents because of the reduction in police numbers. The document cites concerns over "surge capacity" - the need to mobilise large numbers of officers and resources in the event of a serious attack, warning that it will "reduce very significantly across the country unless a different funding settlement is found". These concerns, outlined in a letter to the home secretary, copied to the Treasury, Number 10 and the security services, are on top of existing worries about reductions in neighbourhood policing. The document, dated 15 November, says: "It would be remiss of me not to highlight the impact further reductions in police force numbers would have on our ability to manage terrorist incidents of this magnitude, particularly if spread simultaneously across a number of geographical locations. "Police forces across England and Wales have already seen a reduction of 40,000 officers and further losses will severely impact our surge capacity, which is heavily geared and will reduce very significantly across the country unless a different funding settlement is found. "A Met view is that a 5-10% CSR cash reduction should keep officer reductions at 2,000 or fewer which will be manageable. Other forces' positions vary, but the overarching concerns are the same. These considerations are of course in addition to the need to sustain neighbourhood policing to maintain local trust and intelligence flows." Expectation in Westminster is that the cuts to the police budget may be more than 20%, more than double what this official document suggests is viable to keep numbers at the level required in the event of an attack. The concerns outlined in the document go beyond the specific budget allocated to counter terrorism. The chancellor and the home secretary met today to try to finalise the spending plans for the Home Office, their second such meeting this week. The government has committed to protecting the counter terrorism budget. David Cameron said at Prime Minister's Questions this week: "We rightly protected counter terrorism in the last Parliament and we will protect it again in this parliament." But it's clear that the concerns go far wider than the specific budget allocated to fight terrorism. And, as in so many regards, the Paris attacks are having an impact on politics here too.	It's not entirely surprising that days before a big statement from the Treasury, concerns about the impact of the spending squeeze are made plain.
+text: The Rest and Be Thankful section of the A83 was closed on Wednesday after the slip followed a period of heavy rain. The road was deemed "too dangerous to clear" until Thursday afternoon following several other slips. A long diversion - adding up to 50 miles to some journeys - is in place. It runs via the A83, A819, A85 and A82. The route has a history of being blocked by landslips with closures in 2007, 2009, 2011 and again earlier this year. Machinery to clear the latest slip could not be allowed on to the road until experts had declared in safe. Local politicians said the issue was having a bad effect on the local economy. About £700,000 has been spent at the Rest and Be Thankful on measures to prevent landlsips, including hillside netting, a new culvert and drainage system and monitoring equipment. Work is also due to start at the end of August on a diversion route along the nearby old military road. This upgrade is expected to take 12 weeks. Argyll and Bute MP Alan Reid said the latest closure had come at a bad time of year for businesses dependent on tourism. He said Transport Scotland had previously assured that the diversion route would be in place "before the landslip season, which is known to start in August". Councillor Donald Kelly of the Argyll First group said the Scottish government needed to act, adding: "The impact (of landslip diversions) is immense. "It adds cost to transportation and puts a strain on business. 'Large boulders' "We really need to have the alternative diversionary route in place by the autumn at the very latest this year, but we also need a plan of action to address the issues of the Rest and Be Thankful." The Transport Scotland spokesman added: "It is now believed that up to 1,000 tonnes of debris have fallen onto the road, with more material coming down the slope overnight, including large boulders. "The A83 will remain closed at the Rest and Be Thankful until the clear-up operation is complete. Our absolute priority is the safety of motorists and we appreciate their continuing patience. "We are also well aware of the concerns of the local community and every effort is being made to deliver a safe emergency route as a matter of urgency."	Work is underway to clear a landslip-hit road in Argyll and Bute after about 1,000 tonnes of debris was dumped onto the carriageway.
+text: Andrew Moffat started the "No Outsiders" lessons at Parkfield Community School in the city, which has led to protests by some Muslim parents. Pride organisers said there was "no-one better" to lead the parade, which started at midday. Thousands have been expected to attend the annual event, now in its 22nd year. Speaking to BBC News about the invitation to join the Pride parade, Mr Moffat said it was "absolutely wonderful". He was joined at the front of the procession by Khakan Qureshi, founder of Birmingham South Asians LGBT and Saima Razzaq, from Supporting Education of Equality and Diversity in Schools (SEEDS). "It's so important, isn't it, at this time that we are showing that's what Birmingham is like," Mr Moffat said. "It's not about protests outside schools, that's not Birmingham. This is Birmingham. "They're talking about 80,000 people turning up to support Pride. "That's Birmingham - supporting diversity and community cohesion." In 2015, Birmingham Pride awarded a grant of £5,000 to the "No Outsiders" programme, which organisers said was an "incredible initiative". The "No Outsiders" scheme had been running at Parkfield school since 2014. It was formed to educate children about the Equality Act, British values, and diversity, using storybooks to teach children about LGBT relationships, race, religion, adoption and disability. However, some parents with children at the school in Alum Rock raised a petition in January, claiming some of the teaching contradicted Islam. The protests have since spread to Anderton Park Primary in Balsall Heath with a protest held on Friday afternoon outside the school thought to be the biggest so far. Those against the inclusion of LGBT issues in classes have said the content contradicts their Islamic beliefs, and have accused the school of not listening to parents' concerns. But head teacher Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson said she would "never stop" teaching pupils about equality. Festival director Lawrence Barton said Mr Moffat had been asked to lead the parade in light of the "division which the controversy over 'No Outsiders' lessons has created". Birmingham Pride events are taking place in and around the city's gay village on 25 and 26 May. Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, on Twitter, and sign up for local news updates direct to your phone.	A teacher whose lesson programme covering LGBT relationships has been at the centre of protests is leading the Birmingham Pride parade.
+text: Two vehicles were involved in a crash on Monkswood Way, Stevenage, at 21:45 BST on 18 July last year. Dominic Brown and Julian Castano-Perez, both 21, pleaded not guilty to nine counts of causing serious injury by dangerous driving. They also denied 10 counts of wanton or furious driving at St Albans Crown Court. Mr Brown, of Park Street Lane, St Albans, and Mr Castano-Perez, 21, of Fitzwalter Place, Dunmow, Essex, will next appear in court on 11 December. Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk	Two men have denied causing serious injury at a "car cruise" event where 19 people were hurt.
+text: By News from Elsewhere......as found by BBC Monitoring The Panther tank was removed from the 78-year-old's house in the town of Heikendorf, along with a variety of other military equipment, including a torpedo and an anti-aircraft gun, Der Tagesspiegel website reports. It wasn't an easy job to get it all out - the army had to be called in with modern-day tanks to haul the Panther from its cellar. It took about 20 soldiers almost nine hours to extract the tank - which was without its tracks - and push it onto a low-loader, the report says. As the surreal scene unfolded, local residents gathered at the end of the driveway to watch. Prosecutors in the nearby city of Kiel are investigating whether the man's military collection violates Germany's War Weapons Control Act. But his lawyer says the weapons are no longer functional, therefore shouldn't be restricted. Local prosecutors were tipped off about the cellar's contents by colleagues in Berlin, who searched the home for stolen Nazi art earlier this year. It seems the tank's presence wasn't much of a secret locally. Several German media reports mention that residents had seen the man driving it around town about 30 years ago. "He was chugging around in it during the snow catastrophe in 1978," Mayor Alexander Orth was quoted as saying. But he later added: "I took this to be the eccentricity of an old man, but it looks like there's more to it than that." Next story: Russia bins 'cold' parliament designs Use #NewsfromElsewhere to stay up-to-date with our reports via Twitter.	Police in northern Germany have seized a World War Two tank which was being kept in a pensioner's cellar.
+text: A spokeswoman for the PM and his partner said both mother and baby are "doing very well". It is understood Mr Johnson, who has just recovered from coronavirus, was present throughout the birth, at an NHS hospital in London. But he has now returned to work in Downing Street, No 10 said, where he is leading the response to the pandemic. He is expected to take a "short period" of paternity leave at some point later this year, Downing Street said. The couple have received messages of congratulation from across the political spectrum, and Mr Johnson's father Stanley said he was "absolutely delighted" and "thrilled" by the birth of his grandson. Downing Street declined to say whether the baby was born prematurely, and did not provide details of the weight, timing, nature or location of the birth. "The PM and Ms Symonds would like to thank the fantastic NHS maternity team," Downing Street said. The Queen has sent a private message of good wishes to the couple to congratulate them on the birth of their son, Buckingham Palace said. The PM's weekly audience with the the Queen is due to take place later by telephone. 'Worrying week' Mr Johnson, 55, and Ms Symonds, 32, announced in March that they were expecting a baby in "early summer", and that they had become engaged at the end of last year. They are the first unmarried couple to move into Downing Street together. The baby is Ms Symonds' first child, while Mr Johnson is known to have fathered five. The family are planning to continue living in the flat above Number 11 Downing Street and it's understood their dog, Dilyn, will also be remaining in residence. Mr Johnson returned to work on Monday, after a battle with coronavirus which saw him spend three nights in intensive care. Ms Symonds also suffered symptoms of the disease. Ms Symonds said on social media that she had spent a "worrying" week in bed with the symptoms of the virus while the PM was self-isolating with the the disease. 'Wonderful news' She later sent Mr Johnson baby scans and daily messages while he was in hospital, to keep his morale up. Australian prime minister Scott Morrison and Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe were among the first international leaders to offer their congratulations. Mr Johnson's Conservative colleagues have also been congratulating the couple on social media, with Health Secretary Matt Hancock saying: "So thrilled for Boris and Carrie. Wonderful to have a moment of unalloyed joy!" Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer also offered his congratulations on the "wonderful news". Whatever their political differences, he said at Prime Minister's Questions, "as human beings I think we all recognise the anxiety that the prime minister and Carrie must have gone through in these past few weeks - unimaginable anxiety. "I really hope that this brings them incredible relief and joy." Sir Keir's spokesman said the Labour leader had held "constructive talks" about the coronavirus crisis with the prime minister, by telephone, on Wednesday afternoon. Key workers There was speculation that Mr Johnson would take part in his first Prime Minister's Questions since recovering from coronavirus on Wednesday. But his place was taken Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who has been deputising for him. Mr Raab said: "I'm sure the whole House will want to join with me in sending congratulations and our very best wishes to them." He also paid tribute to the key workers who have lost their lives fighting coronavirus and wished a happy 100th birthday to Captain Tom Moore who has raised over £29m for the NHS. The four children from Mr Johnson's second marriage, to barrister Marina Wheeler, are in their 20s. He was reported to have reached a divorce settlement with Ms Wheeler in February. The new arrival is the third baby born to a serving prime minister in recent history. Tony Blair's wife Cherie gave birth to son Leo in May 2000, three years after her husband's first election victory, and David Cameron and wife Samantha welcomed daughter Florence in 2010. Mr Cameron tweeted his "heartfelt congratulations" to Mr Johnson and Ms Symonds, adding: "Sam and I are thrilled for you both! Sorry we didn't leave the cot - but the climbing frame should still be in the garden!" Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon tweeted: "Some good news - sending congratulations to Carrie and the PM. And wishing health and happiness to the wee one."	Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his fiancee Carrie Symonds have announced the birth of a son.
+text: The 70m (230ft) structure in Bude has racked up more than 160 comments with the majority rating it "excellent". Those commenting have jokingly likened it to the Taj Mahal and called it "one of the seven wonders". Its profile says "nowhere else in Bude can you walk this far undercover in a continuous straight line". The person who originally listed the tunnel, who wishes to remain anonymous, said they did so because it was "one I have admired for a while", and they "never thought that it would become this popular". They have also been selling postcards depicting the tunnel in the town to raise money for the Bude Sea Pool, a popular attraction. The latest stories from Cornwall They said: "It's been a great talking point in the town, and one that seems to have brought everyone together. That's fantastic. "It's great that as well as being a bit of fun, it will raise a little bit of money for one of the town's real attractions." One woman, who gave an "excellent" rating, commented that the tunnel was a "great place for a divorce". She said: "Took my ex-husband, (husband at the time), to the tunnel to break things off and inform him about the divorce. "The walk back through the elongated tunnel felt like the first step towards freedom from Steven and his massive collection of recorders. Best moment of my life." The tunnel links shoppers from the Sainsbury's supermarket to the car park, protecting them from the rain. A Sainsbury's spokesperson said: "It's clear that visitors to Bude have seen the light at the end of this tunnel." Mark Hibbard, from Bude Area Tourist Board, said reviews people read online were unregulated and the town "has so much to offer visitors". "I hope that the Bude Tunnel being rated as the number one attraction in Bude does not become detrimental to the 'real' things to do and visit in our town," he said.	A plastic tunnel attached to the side of a supermarket has become the highest rated TripAdvisor attraction in a Cornish seaside resort.
+text: Sir Jeremy Farrar said he is "worried" about a surge in cases ahead of pubs and restaurants reopening next month. Home Secretary Priti Patel said people have to be "conscientious" about the risk of a second wave. She said the city of Leicester could face a localised lockdown after a rise in cases. Sir Jeremy, a member of the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) and director of the Wellcome Trust, has warned there could be a "very nasty rebound" of the virus in the winter. He told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show: "We're on a knife edge, it's very precarious the situation, particularly in England at the moment, and I would anticipate we would see an increase in new cases over the coming weeks." The warning comes after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a major easing of England's lockdown restrictions, to help to reopen the economy. Pubs, restaurants, hotels and many other businesses will welcome back customers from 4 July. Each UK nation's lockdown measures differ, including varying rules on the reopening of food and drink outlets. In Scotland, beer gardens and outdoor restaurants will be allowed to reopen from 6 July, and indoor areas can be used from 15 July. In Northern Ireland, pubs and restaurants can open from 3 July. The Welsh government has promised talks with the hospitality sector about a "potential phased" reopening, but no dates have yet been given. PM's economic recovery plan Asked about the concerns raised by Sir Jeremy, the home secretary told the BBC that "nothing would be more damaging for our country and for our economy" than a second spike in virus cases, adding that the government's plans to ease measures were "pragmatic and responsible". Earlier, the PM told the Mail on Sunday that if the virus was a "lightning flash", the UK is about to have the "thunderclap of economic consequences". Mr Johnson made the comment as he set out his plans for a post-lockdown economic recovery - which will include a new taskforce to look at fast-tracking the building of hospitals, schools and roads. The UK's coronavirus death toll rose by 36 on Sunday to 43,550. Most of the deaths were in England, while Scotland recorded no new coronavirus deaths for a third consecutive day. The government's daily figures for virus deaths and new confirmed cases peaked in April and have been falling since then, although the downward trend is slowing. There have been concerns about people gathering around the UK during this week's heatwave, including illegal street parties in London, Manchester and Cardiff, crowded beaches and Liverpool FC fans taking part in mass celebrations. But Ms Patel encouraged people to go to pubs when they reopen, while urging customers to "be responsible" and follow social distancing and hygiene guidance. Lockdown easing 'madness' The West Midlands police and crime commissioner, Labour's David Jamieson, described the decision to reopen pubs in England next Saturday as "pure madness." He told the BBC he feared peoples' "pent-up feeling" after three months of lockdown would "explode out onto the streets". Mr Jamieson said senior policing figures disagreed with the government's timetable, and raised their concerns last week in a meeting with the policing minister, Kit Malthouse - but were not listened to. He said had they been asked, they would have suggested a "mid-week" reopening date so that police could have "built up" to the weekend. The Home Office said it trusted the public to "comply with more subtle social restrictions" and that there was "no excuse" for disorderly behaviour. Meanwhile, the home secretary also told Andrew Marr that the government is considering imposing a localised lockdown in Leicester after 658 new cases were recorded in the two weeks to 16 June. She said she had spoken to Health Secretary Matt Hancock about potentially enforcing a local lockdown, and said "extra support" would be going into the area. But the city's mayor Sir Peter Soulsby said there was "no immediate prospect" of a lockdown, adding that data from testing was still being analysed.	The UK remains "on a knife edge" and must act "sensibly" over the summer months to stop a second wave of coronavirus, a scientist has warned.
+text: By Noel TitheradgeBBC News The president of the Royal College of Radiologists has warned the service had been "woefully underfunded". She said cleaning requirements because of coronavirus would reduce capacity. The Department of Health and Social Care in England said it was investing £200m on imaging equipment. "Radiology is one of those services that people use all the time, but don't really often think about, it's not sexy like surgery", said Dr Jeanette Dickson, president of the Royal College of Radiologists. "Imaging touches on virtually every patient who comes into a hospital. "If you look at us on a European-wide average, we are certainly one of the countries that have the fewest number of scanners a head of the population." A comparison by the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, in 2014 - the last set of comparable figures - showed there were just 9.5 scanners per million head of the population, far below figures for Spain, Germany, France and Italy. The BBC has been told some trusts just had a single CT scanner in operation in the UK. Dr Dickson said normal service before the outbreak was "woefully underfunded and under-resourced" and that they were "coping but barely". She said the whole of imaging was very much understaffed prior to the Covid-19 crisis. The latest figures form the Royal College of Radiologists show 11% of funded posts for radiologists across the UK were vacant. 'Breaking point' In April, Cancer Research said a drop-off in screening and referrals meant roughly 2,700 fewer people were being diagnosed every week. Sara Hiom, Cancer Research UK's director of early diagnosis said CT scanners for diagnosing cancer "were already at breaking point before the pandemic". The BBC understands that more than 30 CT scanners have been obtained from the independent sector during the coronavirus crisis, with at least 35 more ordered. "Capacity will be much, much less than demand" even with the equipment that has been ordered, Dr Dickson said. She warned even when all imaging resumes, and the NHS gets back to operating fully, it would take "at least 30-45 minutes" to deep clean scanners after Covid-19 patients and "more attention" was being paid to cleaning equipment between all patients. Patients have to socially distance in the waiting room. "I am very concerned that we may find that patients are suffering unnecessary treatments or unnecessarily damaging treatments and losing the opportunity for a cure of cancer or another serious illness, because of the lack of imaging," Dr Dickson said. Sara Hiom added: "The government needs to invest in the necessary equipment, employing and training more staff to enable the NHS to cope with the backlog of patients waiting for cancer care. "Prompt diagnosis and treatment remain crucial to give patients the greatest chances of survival." The Department of Health and Social Care in England said in a statement it is "committed to increasing our capacity for earlier cancer diagnosis and have provided £200m for new state of the art diagnostic machines to improve the quality and speed of diagnosis and replace any outdated machines". It added that cancer services would be "among the first of many NHS services to be returning to normal" during the coronavirus outbreak. A spokesperson for NHS England said: "Increased cleaning of CT scanners and additional infection control measures are in place throughout the pandemic to protect staff and patients. "The NHS is making full use of the additional scanning capacity in the independent sector as well as buying additional scanners so that tests can go ahead as normal." The Welsh government said it was "increasing diagnostic capacity in radiology, including a new National Imaging Academy, and doubling the radiology training programme". Meanwhile, the Scottish government said it expected all health boards to "continue to prioritise radiology capacity for those patients referred with an urgent suspicion of cancer throughout and beyond the Covid-19 outbreak". "The majority of cancer radiology diagnostics and treatments have continued, however some patient's treatment plans will change to minimise their individual risk," it added.	Radiologists say they are "very concerned" patients may not be cured of serious illnesses when demand for services increases, due to a lack of imaging equipment in the UK.
+text: The Indian steel giant has proposed cutting 1,200 jobs in Scunthorpe and 300 in Teesside at its Long Products division, which Tata says is loss-making due to falling demand for steel. The firm also said it would invest £400m in the division over the next five years to help turn it around. Tata is one of the biggest steel makers in the world, with operations in 26 countries. In 2010, the company, which employs more than 80,000 people worldwide, recorded a turnover of $22.8bn (£14bn). 'Careful scrutiny' The firm said demand for structural steel in the UK was only two-thirds of the level seen in 2007 and "is not expected to fully recover within the next five years". As a result it proposed closing or mothballing parts of the Scunthorpe plant. "We are proposing to take these actions only after going through an inclusive consultative process that involved very careful scrutiny of the Long Products business performance," said Karl-Ulrich Kohler, chief executive of Tata Steel's European operations. He said the company would do "everything we can to provide [employees] with support and assistance". However, the government said that the £400m investment being made by Tata showed confidence in the direction in which the economy was going. "It's encouraging to see that they don't see this as something they shouldn't invest in at all," said Business and Enterprise Minister Mark Prisk. "Their commitment of £400m shows that they have confidence in this over the longer term." But Nick Dakin, Labour MP for Scunthorpe said that government policies had made things harder for Tata. "The actions of the government certainly haven't helped in taking investment out of construction in the local economy and raising the spectre of carbon taxes coming in earlier in the UK than in other parts of Europe," he said. 'Real blow' Unions said the job losses would have a major impact on local communities. "This is a real blow for the region," said Unite's national officer Paul Reuter. "We have already demanded that there should be no compulsory redundancies and we believe that this should be possible to achieve." George Dunning, leader of Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council, also said the job losses on Teesside would represent a "bitter blow" for the local economy. However, he said the council, along with Jobcentre Plus, would do all they could to support those affected. "We have a strong track record of responding swiftly to precisely this kind of situation," he said. North Lincolnshire Council, which covers Scunthorpe, is also setting up a taskforce and pressing the government to make sure that the development of the Marine Energy Park on the South Humber Gateway takes place as quickly as possible. Council leader elect Liz Redfern said she was "shocked and dismayed by the news". Tata has recently announced a number of investments in its Scottish and Welsh plants, including an £8m investment at its Clydebridge plant near Glasgow and a £53m investment at its Port Talbot plant.	Tata Steel is set to cut 1,500 jobs at sites in the North of England.
+text: By Matthew WallTechnology of Business editor, BBC News Would you give up on the internet completely or happily stump up for good journalism and entertainment? These are the choices we could be facing if ad blocking programs go mainstream. This is because advertising revenue underpins about 90% of everything we see online - it's the internet's fundamental economic model. Yet Apple's decision to allow its iPhone and iPad Safari browser to block ads through the use of third-party software extensions could seriously undermine this model, analysts believe. "Ad blocking is a threat to the whole advertising industry," says David Frew, senior programmes manager for the Internet Advertising Bureau trade body. "It's possibly heralding the end of online advertising in its current form," he says. "It's essential people understand that online content isn't free - there's a value exchange. Facebook is monetising you - your data is valuable." Internet browsers have given users the ability to block pop-ups - and therefore pop-up ads - for years, and there are a number of ad blocking programmes already on the market, such as AdBlock, Adblock Plus, uBlock and Adguard, already used by tens of millions of people around the world. But now that a global brand like Apple has weighed in, the practice could become much more popular, particularly on mobile, some in the publishing and advertising industries believe. 'A lot of junk' Brian O'Kelley, chief executive of AppNexus, a digital advertising technology firm, believes that websites only have themselves to blame for this ad backlash. "A lot of websites have gotten greedy - on some home pages about 50% of the screen area is taken up with ads. A lot of junk is thrown on there," he says. "Ads are supposed to be attention getting but they shouldn't be intrusive or annoying." Daniel Knapp, senior director of advertising research at consultancy IHS, agrees, saying: "Consumers are fed up with interruptions and ads that affect the viewer experience. Ads also increase data usage and reduce battery life on mobile." But there is a paradox in our feelings towards ads, believes Mark Pinsent, managing director of digital marketing agency Metia. "People say they don't like ads and as soon as you give them the ability to avoid advertising, they will. "But we often like to chat about our favourite ads. The problem is there's a lot of bad ads out there." 'Hard conversation' So if consumers begin blocking ads en masse, how will online publishers cope with the inevitable cut in revenue, and how will advertisers reach their audiences? "There'll be fewer ad transactions and less money, but it's not going to zero. It just makes the pie smaller for everyone," says Mr O'Kelley. In his view, publishers and content producers will have to have a "hard conversation" with consumers and persuade them not to use ad blockers. "Consumers should have a choice over what kinds of ads they want to see, how fast they want them to load, and how much personal information they are happy to share," he says. "When you visit a site with an ad blocker on there should be no option where you can get the content for free." 'Big disruptor' But how realistic is such an approach in a world where free internet content has been taken for granted and the subscription-based paywall model has succeeded only for specialist publications? Darren Goldsby, chief technology officer for Hearst Magazines UK, publisher of well-known titles such as Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Esquire, admits that ad blocking is "as big a disruptor for us as the internet was when it came along". Ad blocking is as big a disruptor for us as the internet was when it came along "Ad blocking is a threat and the number of ad blockers is likely to increase. But that means we have to work harder to provide content in a commercially successful way that people want to read," he says. This is likely to mean more so-called "native advertising" - sponsored content, advertorials, branded micro-sites, and so on - that can't be blocked by ad blockers, says Mr Goldsby. And advertisers are already learning to use social media as a way of engaging with consumers, presenting content that is entertaining and shareable, says Mr Pinsent. For example, Jaguar recently videoed its new F-Pace four-wheel drive car performing the world's biggest ever loop-the-loop. It made newspaper headlines. "They then used targeted paid-for social media to get that video in front of people who would find it interesting," he says. "They did that without going through any traditional publisher. "Brands will increasingly become their own content producers." Blurred lines But as publishers resort to more of this native advertising and branded content to recoup lost digital ad revenue, what does this mean for independent journalism? "As soon as you start blurring those lines between journalism and brand sponsored content it becomes very dangerous because consumers may be influenced without being aware of it," warns Mr Pinsent. Once consumers understand that they may have to pay for an ad free online experience, ad blockers may wane in popularity, particularly if the other alternative is a website full of commercially biased editorial. But some observers believe the rise of ad blockers provides an opportunity for consumers to strike a new deal with publishers and advertisers. "A new model is to put users of the internet in control of their own data. Let them decide who they trade it with and for what reward," says StJohn Deakins, chief executive of CitizenMe, a group helping consumers take control of their own data and monetise it. Others believe this shift in internet economics will simply put more power in the hands of Facebook, Google and, increasingly, Amazon. "By 2020, 70% of European online advertising will be controlled by Facebook and Google," says IHS's Daniel Knapp. "They're building closed ecosystems to lock in content and advertising. They control the audiences." Is it time for those audiences to wrestle free from such control? You can follow Matthew on Twitter: @matthew_wall	Imagine you had to start paying to view content on all your favourite websites.
+text: By Nuala McCannBBC News NI It seems alien - a white, light birch wood temple of curlicues and spires and impossible twirls. It is as if some giant hand plucked up a strange Balinese temple and whisked it across the globe, perching it gently on Kelly's Field high above the city of Derry looking down on the River Foyle. Even in the stillness of early morning, there is a steady trickle of pilgrims. Women pushing small children in prams, elderly people on sticks, people pushing others in wheelchairs, take the path of wood chippings down to the temple to gaze at the messages and the pictures with which it has been adorned. "Leave a memory behind, let go of the past and look to the future," a large sign says at the entrance. "A prayer for the caring," someone has written and nearby a large pill box is tucked into a pillar, filled with love hearts. "My granny would have been so proud of me," is etched in childish characters on a small piece of wood. Tribute Faces smile out of memory cards, complete with date of birth and date of death. The temple is about people bringing burdens of loss and suffering and leaving it to be burned on Saturday night, when all will go up in flames. David Best, the American artist behind the project, made his first temple as a tribute to a young man who died racing his motorbike. For his friends, it was their first experience of death, and at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert in 2000, David helped them build a tribute that they burned. From there, many temples to help many people deal with loss have followed. It is what life conjured up for him. "This is my ninth last temple," he says. It has been a labour of love carried out in rain, snow, hail and wind. Volunteers of all ages worked to create the intricate airy and ornate wooden frames that rise up to a spire in the sky. Best is not on a one-man mission about peace and healing and said that people in Northern Ireland have little tolerance for pretention. "Northern Ireland does very well without the likes of David Best. They have already manifested that. But this is a celebration of what Ireland has done, it is to share in the celebration of peace in Northern Ireland. "There is grief but there is also absolute joy - this is to share in that." He points to the thousands of visitors who have come to take part - the temple is filled with them. He remembers a blind woman whom he led into the peace of the temple space. "I can feel it," she told him. Inclusivity This city is no stranger to burning - bonfires are very much a part of both loyalist and nationalist traditions. Helen Marriage, director of Artichoke, the organisers of the event, said this sparked her interest. "It was about taking the bonfire tradition and subverting it," she says. "I thought it would be interesting to invite David to create a bonfire about inclusivity, peace and letting go of the past." The choice of the field was important - it would not be considered a neutral space as it is close to a republican estate in the city. "I spoke to elderly people who had picnicked as children up here and then came the Troubles and they had never been back. "The spaces that are never considered to be shared never become shared," she says. The decision was made to try and change that - to reopen areas that some considered 'no go'. The reception has been very warm - all have been "most welcoming", she says. Events manager Seamus Coyle is blessed with an understanding family. The temple has consumed his time in the past few weeks. He has worked on Chinese New Year in Hong Kong, the Liverpool City of Culture and the Giro d'Italia in Northern Ireland, but this project has been chock full of challenging questions like: "How do you build a road?" "It's been more like a building project," he says. But it's not work, he said, and the people taking part are volunteers. "This is not about a job and about paying bills, it is beautiful and some people will say it is a shame to put a match to it, but it is built on people's losses and that is how it goes." Touched All day on Saturday, the temple will be closed as work goes on to fill it with wood chips for the 'big burn'. The idea of fire as cleansing is a tradition that dates back thousands of years. Everything about this project leads to the final burning. David Best has chosen people who have touched his heart to help him burn his temple. It will be a carefully choreographed fire - one that should live on in the memories of the 20,000 people who will stand there and watch. And after the temple has turned to ash and people have turned back to jobs and kids and the weekly commute, the field will be reseeded and there shall be no trace of the day of the spring equinox and the thousands gathered to watch the flames lick and leap. It shall be as if it never happened... but they shall carry the memory like a photograph in the wallet of their hearts.	Take the path up beyond the top of the hill in Londonderry's Waterside, follow the winding country road up and up and, suddenly, you come upon it.
+text: Tom Wade-Allison, 25, of Martock, committed the assaults in Somerset and Honiton in Devon. He was found guilty at Exeter Crown Court of nine counts of rape, one of attempted rape, three of assault and one of sexual assault. Judge Timothy Rose said Wade-Allison remained a "danger to women" and had expressed "no remorse" for his crimes. He must serve a minimum of 16 years for his crimes and will be put on the sex offenders register for life upon release. 'Affected my personality' The rapes took place at sleepovers, after-parties and in the homes of Wade-Allison's victims between March 2016 and November 2017. The women, who were aged between 17 and 20, became too drunk to fight him off within minutes of consuming drinks he mixed for them, the court previously heard. The first four told friends what happened to them at the time but did not go to the police. Wade-Allison was caught when he raped a fifth woman, which led to the others coming forward once they had learned officers were investigating. A statement from one of Wade-Allison's victims said she was suffering from flashbacks to her ordeal, which had left her feeling "totally violated". She wrote: "I feel unsafe and I feel it has affected my personality and character. "My life is a constant reminder of what he did to me." 'Danger to women' Judge Rose said Wade-Allison committed a "campaign of rape" over a 20-month period, which had a "profoundly misogynistic element" to it. He said the victims, who were "particularly vulnerable", described severe psychological harm as a result of the assaults. Judge Rose said: "You have expressed no remorse, no acceptance, no insight as to the offences you committed. "You remain a danger to women. "You were emboldened to continue by your apparent conclusion you were getting away with it," he added. Follow BBC News South West on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to spotlight@bbc.co.uk. Related Internet Links HM Courts & Tribunals Service	A chef who raped five women after spiking their drinks has been jailed for 24 years.
+text: Philip Hammond said moves in his Autumn Budget would "mean £2bn more for the Scottish government". But Scotland's finance secretary said Holyrood had been "short changed", and that funds for day to day spending would actually fall. Ministers have also traded barbs over plans to allow Scotland's police and fire services to claim VAT refunds. Mr Hammond took aim at "SNP obstinacy" over the issue, while the SNP's Westminster leader Ian Blackford accused the UK government of "vindictiveness and nastiness" for not having made the change sooner. The disputed funds come in the form of Barnett consequentials, which are Scotland's share of additional spending in England which falls in areas of devolved competence - like health, education and housing. The £2bn cited by Mr Hammond is spread over the period from the current financial year through to 2020-21, and includes more than £1.1bn in financial transaction funding. This is capital funding for loan or equity initiatives, like "help to buy" schemes, meaning the government is constrained in how it is spent. 'Strings attached' Scotland's finance secretary, Derek Mackay - who will unveil his own draft budget in December - said it was "money with strings attached" which could not be spent "directly on frontline public services" and would eventually have to be repaid to the Treasury. He said the overall deal was "disappointing", telling the BBC's Politics Scotland programme that "it's not a £2bn boost to Scotland, it's a con". But Scottish Secretary David Mundell told the same programme there would be a "significant increase in Scottish government spending". On the capital funds, he said the Scottish government could "use that money in innovative ways", saying: "The money is definitely available. It's for the Scottish government to come forward with the mechanisms that allow it to be used. "Additional money is coming to Scotland and directly will benefit Scotland." Mr Mackay also claimed the block grant for day to day spending was being cut in real terms, something refuted by the UK government. The Fraser of Allander Institute, an economic think tank based at the University of Strathclyde, said the extra funding for the resource budget amounted to "around £350m", saying it "remains on track to be squeezed in real terms over the next two years". Director Graeme Roy said: "The challenge therefore remains for Derek Mackay as to how best to balance the resource budget with major commitments like additional support for the NHS, more money for childcare and public sector pay uplifts all to be paid for." VAT refund The other point of conflict between the governments is over VAT for the Scottish police and fire services, after Mr Hammond confirmed they would be eligible for refunds from April 2018. This brings Police Scotland and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service into line with their counterparts elsewhere in the UK - but tax paid since the creation of the national forces will not be reimbursed. The two services pay about £35m a year in VAT - bringing the total bill since they were set up four years ago to £140m. Scottish ministers have repeatedly called on the UK government to end the "glaring disparity" in the way that VAT affects emergency services across the UK, pointing out that territorial police and fire services in England and Wales already get refunds on their VAT bills. The UK government says the Scottish government knew of the VAT implications before the police and fire service mergers were approved, but pressed on with them regardless. In his budget speech, Mr Hammond said he had been persuaded by Scottish Conservative MPs to make the change. He added: "The SNP knew the rules, they knew the consequences of introducing these bodies, and they ploughed ahead anyway. "But my Scottish Conservative colleagues have persuaded me that the Scottish people should not lose out just because of the obstinacy of the SNP government." Analysis by Brian Taylor, BBC Scotland political editor On spending, Mr Hammond trumpeted a "boost" for Scotland in the shape of £2bn extra. He said he had "delivered for Scotland". In response, Derek Mackay said it was a "con". The money was over four years (the Chancellor never disguised that) - and more than half of the dosh was in the form of financial transactions. These have caused contention in the past. They are, in essence, loan funds available for private projects such as housing, business or agriculture. They fall, thus, to be repaid. Scottish ministers readily concede that such funds have proved valuable in the past - although they tend, discreetly, to cite their own deftness in finding useful vehicles. But they say it is cash with strings and it leaves day-to-day spending on the NHS, education and the like facing a real-terms cut. At which point, Mr Mundell says that the total package going to Scotland will be helpful. At which point…..you get the concept. Read more from Brian here The chancellor also said progress was being made on city deals for Tay Cities and Stirling, and for a growth deal for Borderlands. And he said the government would introduce transferable tax history for oil and gas fields in the North Sea - which he described as an "innovative tax policy that will encourage new entrants to bring fresh investment to a basin that still holds up to 20 billion barrels of oil". Many of the measures announced by Mr Hammond - such as homebuyers no longer having to pay stamp duty for properties of up to £300,000 - will not apply in Scotland, where the tax is devolved and known as Land and Buildings Transaction Tax. It will be up to the Scottish government in its own forthcoming budget to decide whether to follow the chancellor's lead. In a lengthy Twitter thread, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon welcomed the announcements on oil and gas, and on VAT. But she said both were "overdue", and that it was "disappointing and unfair to emergency services" that VAT that had already been paid would not be refunded. Among the other budget measures which the Treasury said would impact on Scotland were: The chancellor said the budget was proof that the Conservative government was "giving power back to the people of Britain and driving prosperity and greater fairness across our United Kingdom". But he also said that the Office for Budget Responsibility had revised down forecasts for Britain's GDP to 1.5% in 2017, down from the 2% it had previously predicted. Scottish Labour's new leader, Richard Leonard, said Mr Hammond had "delivered a failing budget, on a failing economy from a failing government". He added: "They are rudderless and without a plan to grow our economy, help our industries and create the work of the future. This Tory government is a driverless vehicle. This budget is insufficient, inadequate and insincere."	The Scottish government has dismissed the chancellor's pledge of extra funding for Holyrood as a "con".
+text: The Met Office has amber "be prepared" warnings for Moray, Aberdeenshire, Angus, Perthshire and Stirlingshire. The police in Tayside have warned that many roads are closed and affected by rising water across the region. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) has issued about 30 flood warnings. The warnings, which mean flooding is expected, are mostly for the Tayside, Angus, and Dundee areas, as well as Aberdeen and Ballater in Aberdeenshire. Sepa has now added the Scottish Borders to its list of alerts, where flooding is possible, bringing the number of alerts to four. They come as Scotland continues to clean up after Storm Frank hit on Wednesday. Watch the latest forecast here. Vincent Fitzsimons, Sepa's hydrology duty manager, said: "Rivers have been rising since Saturday and flood warnings have been issued. "It's important to note that the rain is less intense but more prolonged than during Storm Frank. "This means that rivers will rise more slowly but then stay high for much longer - from Sunday through till Tuesday. The peak for most areas will be on Sunday night and Monday morning." A Met Office spokesman said: "Over the period ending late Monday, many areas look like receiving a further 40-80 mm of rain, with some of the high ground receiving 100-150 mm - this in addition to that which has fallen over the previous 24 hours. "However, this looks like being fairly evenly spread out, which should slightly ease the resulting impacts. "Given the saturated nature of the ground, there is a greater risk of surface water and river flooding than might normally be expected." A number of roads remain closed in Perthshire, Angus and Aberdeenshire while others have been affected by surface water. The A83 Rest and Be Thankful has temporary lights in place to allow for repairs to be carried out to the fencing and barriers following a landslip south of the area on Wednesday. Roads which have been closed or partially closed include sections of the A984 - between Meikleour and the junction at Tay Farm, West of Meikleour, and from Bendochy crossroads to Meikleour Road. A923 in Coupar Angus has been closed in both directions due to flooding between A93 Gas Brae (Blairgowrie) and Bogside Road/School Road. A824 Main Road closed due to flooding between A9 (Aberuthven) and Auchterarder. Many B roads have also been closed or blocked - the B974 at Cairn O'Mount is closed between B976 (Strachan) and School Road, Fettercairn, as is the B950 between the A924 (Kirkmichael) and A93 (Blacklunans). Network Rail said trains on the west coast mainline would be disrupted for a number of weeks as work to repair the damaged Lamington Viaduct continues until the end of January. The Trans-Pennine Express and Virgin Train services will be affected - with an additional 90 minutes added to the journey time between Carlisle and Glasgow for Virgin's west coast service. The Caledonian Sleeper service could also be affected and Network Rail said passengers should check before travelling. Rockets fired The RNLI was drafted in on Saturday evening to help restore electricity supplies to Ballater which has been without power since the storm. Despite heavy winds and driving rain, Aberdeen RNLI volunteers Bill Deans and Calum Reed used rockets to fire a cord which was used to restore the power line across the River Dee at the Cambus O' May at the A93. Scottish Hydro engineers were then able to connect up the wires and restore some power to the area. A cable damaged by Storm Frank led to the loss of the telephone service, including 999 calls, in Braemar and Crathie. Work has been carried out to repair the cable and BT and the Red Cross have provided temporary cover through communication vehicles in those areas. What have we done to make the flooding worse? Ch Insp Richard Craig said: "Police are continuing to visit vulnerable people in Braemar, Crathie and Ballater and have officers within Braemar Police Station. "Anyone requiring the emergency services is advised to speak to an officer at the police station or utilise the communication vehicles." The Scottish government's resilience committee met again on Sunday to assess the situation. Deputy First Minister John Swinney said: "People will be returning to work in the coming days and all services are working together to make sure the unusually high levels of rain that we are seeing cause as little disruption as possible." Police are advising people to stay away from already flooded areas.	Warnings of high rivers and large coastal waves have been issued as persistent wind and rain batter parts of Scotland.
+text: By Paul GlynnBBC Music Exit polls suggest about 69% voted to repeal a part of the constitution that effectively bans terminations. Speaking ahead of their set at The Biggest Weekend , singer Tim Wheeler said: “This looks like [it's] positive. "Attitudes are changing and it just shows everyone’s getting caught up with modern times.” “Just a landslide, it’s amazing to see that positivity” said drummer Rick McMurray. Bass player Mark Hamilton added: “I don’t think anyone really has the right to tell anyone else what they can and can or can’t do with their own body, so it’s a big step forward.” The rock band, from County Down, are expected to play hits like Girl From Mars, Shining Light and Angel Interceptor when they play Belfast's Titanic Slipways on Saturday afternoon. The trio took to the main stage at 16:10 BST – shortly before the official results of the referendum are announced. Wheeler said he was looking forward to playing songs from the band's new album, Islands, alongside their classics. “It’s the start of festival season for us [and] it’s definitely better when you’ve got something out there that people are buzzing about. “It always adds a lot of energy to the gigs.” Ash's set - as well as performances from Ed Sheeran, Jess Glynne, Sam Smith, Noel Gallagher and more than 120 other acts will be available on BBC television, radio and online over the course of the weekend. The Biggest Weekend, envisioned as a place-holder for Glastonbury in its fallow year, is taking place in Swansea, Perth and Belfast, with Coventry joining the action on Sunday. Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	Belfast band Ash say a vote to overturn Ireland's abortion ban would be “a major step forward” that showed “attitudes are changing”.
+text: The boys, aged between 11 and 16, and their coach entered the cave in Chiang Rai province on Saturday. Navy divers resumed their efforts on Tuesday after rising waters had halted the search. They had reportedly seen fresh footprints inside the cave complex, raising hopes for the group's safety. "We are still optimistic they are all alive," Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwon said on Tuesday. "Even though they may not have anything to eat, they should have water to drink." The Tham Luang Nang Non cave is a tourist attraction which runs for many kilometres underground. The boys and their 25-year-old coach are thought to be in a chamber of the extensive cave network. Desperate relatives have been camping out at the cave, which lies near the border with Myanmar, holding a prayer ceremony for their safe return. "My child, I'm here to get you now," one crying parent said, according to AFP. 'Families praying' Jonathan Head, BBC News, Tham Luang Navy divers have been trying to reach the deepest caverns, and turning the area around the caves into a sea of mud. Weary, rain-soaked rescuers can be seen coming to and from the cave entrance, where medical teams are waiting, in the hope that the missing boys may be found. Family members pray around makeshift shrines. They have brought in pumps to try to reduce the water level, but so far have only been able to use them outside the caves, where their efforts are being thwarted by the rain. They are now reeling power cables into the caves to help the divers with better light, and to use the pumps there. They have also tried using drones. So far the only sign of the missing boys is the bicycles they left, which are still locked to the fence at the cave entrance, and some handprints spotted by divers who reached one of the largest underground chambers on Monday. How was the team trapped? The team and their coach are believed to have entered the Tham Luang Nang Non cave on Saturday afternoon. Rescue workers began searching for them on Saturday night after they were reported missing. The search was briefly halted but navy divers were able to re-enter the cave early Tuesday. Large squads of soldiers have been brought in to see if they can get access from the hills above the caves. There are also dozens of volunteers with more experience of cave diving and exploration. According to the Bangkok Post, visitors must cross a small stream to enter the cave, making it inaccessible if the stream floods. The cave can flood up to 5m (16ft) during Thailand's rainy season, which runs from June to October. Rescue teams were preparing to train the team to use scuba gear, in case they had to dive out through areas of the cave which were completely submerged, according to local officials.	Thailand's deputy PM has said he is optimistic a group of young footballers trapped inside a cave are still alive, as the search enters a third day.
+text: By Brian MeechanBBC Wales business correspondent Now there are questions whether it can be recovered after the UK government rejected the project because it was not "value for money". First Minister Carwyn Jones said it had not been wasted and government funding was normal to develop new technology. He said he wanted to prevent the company collapsing as it awaited the UK government's decision. Charles Hendry, who supported the lagoon in his review, said the UK government could have made its decision 18 months ago. Three months ago the Welsh government loaned £1.25m to Tidal Lagoon PLC (TL PLC). That was on top of another £1.25m loan to a separate but linked business, Tidal Lagoon (Swansea Bay) PLC (TLSB PLC), in February 2015. According to the latest available information, David and Heather Stevens, two of the founders of Admiral, are among the investors, holding shares in both TL PLC and TLSB PLC. Sanjeev Gupta, the executive chairman of Liberty, which tried to buy Tata Steel's UK operations, also invested in TL PLC. In 2013, people also had the opportunity to make a "high-risk" investment in TLSB PLC to help back the project. Both companies have been making losses of millions of pounds in the past few years but Geoff Mesher, managing partner at Tempest Forensic Accounting, said that was to be expected given the early stages of development of the lagoon. It would not be expected to make money until it was operational. The Welsh government also offered a further £200m to help build the Swansea project, if it went ahead. A Wales Office spokesman said: "Now that people know the financial cost of the Swansea tidal lagoon, the limited economic opportunities and the risk higher energy costs pose to the steel and manufacturing industries, it is surprising that some people are still championing this specific project." Dozens of investors, the companies' management, contractors and the Welsh government now hope their tidal power plans can be realised without Westminster's support. Can the companies backing the lagoon carry on? BBC Wales understands the intellectual property (IP) involved in the development of the lagoons - effectively the blueprint for future projects - belongs to TL PLC. In exchange for the £1.25m loaned to TL PLC earlier this year, the Welsh government took a charge on the company, which effectively acts like a mortgage over its assets. But a forensic accountant told BBC Wales "looking at the level of debt the [companies have]... there's a risk the money will be lost". Mr Mesher said the value of the IP would be crucial in whether any money can be recovered - can TL PLC develop a project elsewhere using the same technology? If the UK government's decision not to agree a strike price is based on concern over that technology then it may be worth little. Although TLSB PLC and TL PLC are separate companies, Mark Shorrock is the chief executive and a shareholder in both. TLSB has debts of about £17m, but it has been keeping on top of these liabilities using further loans from investment funds and the Welsh government. TL PLC also made loans to TLSB PLC. Mr Mesher said: "They're getting funding from some government income, they're getting funding through loan notes and loans, so at the moment they're able to [pay their debts]. "But I noticed some contractors are doing work on a contingent basis [meaning they would get paid if the project went ahead]." For now at least there are no concrete proposals for making the Swansea project happen.	£2.5m of taxpayers' money was loaned to companies behind the snubbed Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon project.
+text: The BBC said on Saturday that the fifth series, which begins in January, would be the last broadcast on BBC One. Mark Linsey, acting director of BBC Television, said in a statement that it "wouldn't get into a bidding war or pay inflated prices to keep the show". He said the format, which began as a Dutch talent show, had been "poached". Current speculation over the UK version's future includes suggestions in The Guardian and other publications that ITV could ditch The X Factor to make room for it in the schedule, after the recent X Factor revamp failed to halt falling audience figures There are also suggestions Sky could purchase The X Factor if ITV did decide to drop it. ITV said it would not comment on the BBC's statement on the future of The Voice UK. An spokesperson confirmed the X Factor has one year left in its current contract with the broadcaster after this current series. The broadcaster signed a three-year deal with Simon Cowell's company Syco Entertainment and FremantleMedia UK in 2013 to continue broadcasting both the X Factor and Britain's Got Talent until the end of 2016. Announcing The Voice was leaving the BBC, Mr Linney said the corporation was "incredibly proud" of the UK version of the talent show. "We always said we wouldn't get into a bidding war or pay inflated prices to keep the show, and it's testament to how the BBC has built the programme up - and established it into a mainstay of the Saturday night schedule - that another broadcaster has poached it," he said. The Voice was mentioned in the government's recent green paper on the future of the BBC, questioning whether such shows were "distinctive" enough compared to commercial rivals. The next series of The Voice sees Paloma Faith and Boy George joining the panel in place of Rita Ora and Sir Tom Jones.	ITV has said it will not comment on speculation it has bought The Voice UK, after the BBC revealed it had lost the singing show to a rival broadcaster.
+text: A re-investigation into the disappearance in 1998 of 17-year-old Donna Keogh, from Middlesbrough, was launched three weeks ago. More than 4,000 people have visited the FindDonna site, Cleveland Police said. It has previously apologised to Donna's parents over its handling of its earlier investigation. In addition to the website visits, police said the appeal has been shared thousands of times on social media. Her disappearance is being treated as murder. Det Supt Michael Hunt said: "Twenty years on from her disappearance, the response from the people of Middlesbrough to our renewed investigation has been magnificent. "We've also received a number of telephone calls, passing information on to officers. "It is too early to say more, but we will fully investigate any information we receive and will act with the aim of finally understanding what happened to Donna." The youngster's disappearance in April 1998 is one of three cases being re-investigated by the force after it was awarded £3.77m by the Home Office. The mutilated body of 21-year-old Vicky Glass was found on the North York Moors in November 2000, six weeks after she went missing from Middlesbrough. She had turned to prostitution to fund her heroin addiction. Rachel Wilson, who was also a sex worker, had been working in Middlesbrough and was last seen in May 2002. A decade after her disappearance, her skeleton was found in a ditch on the outskirts of the town.	A website set up to encourage new leads into the disappearance of a teenager 20 years ago has had a "magnificent" response, police said.
+text: Starting in 2018, Crossrail will link Maidenhead, Berkshire, in the west to Shenfield, Essex, and Abbey Wood, south-east London, in the east. Two bridges in Slough and two in Hillingdon have to be replaced to provide clearance for overhead electric equipment. Work sites have been set up with bridge removal starting over Christmas. Network Rail will complete the work over Easter 2013 on Middlegreen Road bridge and Trenches bridge in Slough as well as Old Stockley Road bridge and Horton bridge in Hillingdon, west London. Earlier this month, Network Rail installed a temporary footbridge next to Middlegreen bridge, which will maintain pedestrian and cycle access. Jorge Mendonca from Network Rail said: "The work we are undertaking on bridges across the western section of the route will not only enable new longer Crossrail trains to operate but is also an essential part of the programme to electrify the Great Western main line. "We've spent months preparing for this to ensure we complete the work with the least possible impact on residents."	Work has started on replacing four bridges in preparation for the new electric Crossrail trains.
+text: "I often feel that a photograph is simply not enough," says Doma. "It seems like it's only showing my point of view as a photographer and lacking a deeper communication with the subject. I tried to address this feeling by finding a way to incorporate the person's own voice." The project reveals the powerful effect quarantine and prolonged isolation can have on a person's mental state. Mari "Photographing online made the process really collaborative; all I could do is use words to try and direct the person and we worked together to achieve the best image," explains Doma. "The challenge to translate their thoughts/feelings into something tangible, like a drawing, created an opportunity for a deeper reflection about their inner worlds. "The handwritten notes feel almost tactile, so human and fragile and show the personality of the sitter. I find that the best way to visualise what another person has been through is to allow them to become the main storyteller." "I drew all the things I cannot do... I'm missing the feeling of opportunity, of being out in the early evening, when anything is possible." Simba "I am not running from who I am, nor my identity. I'm not trying to assimilate nor whitewash... I want to say, stop seeing me. Start feeling me." Chloe "Quarantine has been a very strange time. Made me understand the value of the moment... the hours never passed." Scott "The only constant of life is change... I now have to embrace that." Amelia "Its been nice to stay at home and have more time for myself to reflect - even to get the chance to miss my freedom." You can find out more about the project on the website Portraits of The Quarantined Mind. All photos copyright: Doma Dovgialo	Photographer Doma Dovgialo's new project Portraits of the Quarantined Mind is an online collaboration inviting people to use their portraits to reveal their innermost thoughts through drawing.
+text: It said women were half as likely as men to start their own business, and only a fifth of smaller firms were led by females. It said this was creating a "significant pool" of untapped potential. It has asked Alison Rose, head of RBS commercial and private banking, to lead a government review into the issue. "Unfortunately, statistics show that women make up only a third of all entrepreneurs in the UK," Ms Rose said. "To better drive the UK's economy, we need to understand, and tackle, the barriers and reasons as to why this is." More than 1,000 businesses are started every day in Britain and small and medium size (SME) businesses support more than 16 million jobs. However, last year only 19% of SME employers were majority-led by women - defined as controlled by a single woman or having a management team of which a majority were women. Meanwhile, women only make up 27% of full-time chief executives and senior officials. Gender bias According to a survey of company founders by Unilever Foundry, a number of barriers are stopping women becoming entrepreneurs. Women it spoke to who had started companies said there were too few female role models in business. The research also found men and women were still not being encouraged to enter roles that stereotypically are not associated with their gender. Finally, it found women who started companies often encountered discrimination - such as investors being less willing to invest in their firms on gender grounds. Robert Jenrick, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, said: "The fact that Britain is home to so many new, innovative businesses is something to be proud of. But the fact that so few of them are started by women is shocking. This is not because of a lack of talent or appetite." The Treasury said its review would consider ways to boost female engagement in entrepreneurship. It will respond to the review after it is published next spring.	"Unfair obstacles" may be stopping women from starting and growing their own companies, the government has said.
+text: It was the first time in 20 years that Manston Airport had hosted the event but many motorists said they had to turn round and return home on Saturday. Nine-mile tailbacks on Thanet Way meant journeys took more than four hours. Organiser Chris Yates said the air show was more popular than expected and the road infrastructure could not cope. 'Shambolic event' "An awful lot of people [were] trying to come down some very small roads that come into Manston Airport - a classic dual carriageway two-into-one scenario," he added. John Turp, who took four hours to travel from the Monkton roundabout to the airport - a distance of two miles - said it had to be "one of the most shambolic events ever staged". He said: "The day was ruined for tens of thousands of people by the inept organisation." Others trying to get to the air show vented their anger on social media websites. Paul Blair said he left Maidstone at 09:40 BST and did not arrive at the airport until 16:20. "The stewards organising the event parking didn't have a clue and were turning people around and sending them back the other way," he said. "A complete waste of time and money and I had one very disappointed and upset little boy who missed it all." 'Lessons learned' The event featured a display of aircraft, old and new, from the last Vulcan bomber still flying to the Apache helicopter. Mr Yates said initial news that it would be one of the last flights of the Vulcan had attracted a lot of people to the show, but this was not now the case as it had since been announced that it would be around for two more years. He added that lessons would be learned from the issues and there would be "plenty to debrief on". "We'll learn about the car parks and we'll learn about the timings of peoples' arrival and bigger car parks," he said. In a statement on Sunday, Heritage Events apologised to people who experienced long delays and were unable to attend the event. "We would ask for people to email their views and their personal experiences to enquiry@heritage-events.co.uk so we can respond appropriately to each person individually."	Organisers of the South East Air Show in Kent have been criticised after thousands of people trying to reach it were stuck in long queues of traffic.
+text: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 25, pleaded guilty to attempting to blow up a commercial plane as a would-be suicide mission for al-Qaeda. His family quickly called on the US government to review the sentence. Abdulmutallab was badly burned when a bomb sewn into his underwear failed to detonate fully, prosecutors said. Almost 300 people were on the flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. Some of the passengers from the flight were in the courtroom as Federal Judge Nancy Edmunds announced the sentence. "This was an act of terrorism that cannot be quibbled with," Judge Edmunds said, as she imposed the maximum sentence. The son of a Nigerian banker and a former engineering student at University College London, Abdulmutallab faced eight counts against him, including terrorism and attempted murder. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a militant group based in Yemen, said it was behind the attempted attack. Bolder, stronger In statement to the BBC, the family of Abdulmutallab said they were "grateful to God that the unfortunate incident of that date did not result in any injury or death". "We strongly appeal to the American justice department to review the life sentence," they said. "We also appeal to the Federal Republic of Nigeria to continue with their support and engage with the American government to ensure that a review is made." Ahead of the sentencing, assistant defence lawyer Anthony Chambers argued that a life sentence for Abdulmutallab would be unconstitutional, since no other passengers were hurt. Sentencing guidelines directed the judge to impose a mandatory life sentence, but Mr Chambers appealed for a lighter term. "Not one passenger lost his or her life. Not one passenger suffered life-threatening injuries," he said. Prosecutors said a life sentence was warranted because an attempted terror attack heightens public fear and burdens airports with expensive and time-consuming security procedures. As part of the sentencing hearing, four passengers and a crew member aboard Flight 253 made statements, telling the judge the event had forever changed their lives. A video from the FBI showing the power of the explosive material found in Abdulmutallab's underwear was also shown at the hearing. As the video played Abdulmutallab twice said loudly "Allahu akbar" - Arabic for "God is great". Abdulmutallab himself made a brief statement. During the short trial, he had fired his lawyer and attempted to represent himself. "Mujahideen are proud to kill in the name of God," he said in court. "And that is exactly what God told us to do in the Koran... Today is a day of victory." "In quick response to some of the things that have been said, I say my life and the lives of Muslims have also changed due to the attacks on innocent civilians," he added. Failed to detonate On the second day of his trial, in October, Abdulmutallab unexpectedly declared that he would plead guilty to all charges. The bomb was a "blessed weapon to save the lives of innocent Muslims", he told the court. "The US should be warned that if they continue to kill and support those who kill innocent Muslims, then the US should await a great calamity... or God will strike them directly," he added. Investigators said Abdulmutallab admitted he was working for AQAP, and had been inspired by and had met Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric who was killed in 2011 by a US drone strike in Yemen. Abdulmutallab received the bomb, as well as training, from AQAP before travelling from Nigeria to Amsterdam. There he boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to Detroit, which was carrying 279 passengers and 11 crew members. The bomb was not picked up in security checks at airports in Lagos and Amsterdam. On board, the bomb failed to detonate completely and passengers had to put out the fire. Abdulmutallab's father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, an influential banker who is well connected in Nigerian politics, said he had approached the US embassy officials and Nigerian authorities in 2009 to warn them about his son. Abdulmutallab was already on a US watch list, but not a no-fly list.	A Nigerian man accused of trying to bomb a US-bound flight on Christmas Day 2009 has been sentenced to life in prison without parole.
+text: She joins Britain's most successful Olympian, Sir Chris Hoy, who has also undertaken the role. The position will see the ambassadors work with games organisers and appear in high-profile promotional campaigns. Adlington won two bronze medals in the 2012 Olympics. She also won two medals at the Beijing Olympics. She said: "It's a privilege to be involved as an ambassador for the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games and I'm thrilled to be able to voice my support to the next major sporting event coming to the UK. "The huge success of London 2012 will only increase the excitement and interest towards the Games and I can't wait to be part of the journey to 2014." The swimmer, from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, will help launch the official mascot at an event in Glasgow on Thursday. Lord Smith, chairman of Glasgow 2014, said: "Rebecca is Great Britain's greatest ever swimmer and she is such a well-known personality across the sporting spectrum. "Alongside Sir Chris, Rebecca will promote the Games and help ensure as many people as possible make the most of Scotland's largest ever sporting and cultural event."	Olympic swimmer Rebecca Adlington has been revealed as an official ambassador for the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games.
+text: Mark UrbanDiplomatic and defence editor, BBC Newsnight The latest salvo between Nato allies came in a German government briefing to Spiegel magazine that accuses the alliance's supreme commander (American Gen Philip Breedlove) of disseminating "dangerous propaganda" on the extent of Russian military involvement, trying to undermine a diplomatic solution to the war. The Kremlin has denied its forces are directly involved in combat, but the latest estimate by US Lt Gen Ben Hodges, commander of the US Army in Europe, says 12,000 Russian troops are operating inside the neighbouring country. As the conflict there has worn, on this intervention has become increasingly hard to hide, growing bigger, with more advanced weapons, and capturing more territory for the nominal "separatist army". The evidence of the Kremlin's direct military involvement can be gleaned from many different types of sources: For those distrustful of the Pentagon or Western intelligence agencies, you can set their information entirely aside. Indeed, there may be some reasons (such as not wanting the diplomatic damage involved in directly labelling the Russian moves an invasion) why Western leaders may have held back when describing the Kremlin's action. Sustaining the operation in Ukraine and on its borders has, however, required the mobilisation of units across the breadth of Russia, according to a new assessment by Dr Igor Sutyagin, of the Royal United Services Institute. He believes 90,000 troops were required in late 2014 to provide deployments around Ukraine, inside its eastern (rebel held) districts and in Crimea. This effort has been so great, he argues, that, "it is obvious that there insufficient resources... to sustain military operations at the current level for over a year". This intervention evolved in several phases: A journalist from the Russian newspaper Kommersant met several young Russian soldiers in Debaltseve who told him they had come from the same mechanised infantry unit after commanders appealed for volunteers. "Their commanders did not oppose their going," the journalist reported, "on the contrary, they welcomed their enthusiasm, explaining to the soldiers why it was necessary for them to go to those very areas to protect their homeland." Another Russian paper, Novaya Gazeta, interviewed a badly burned tank crewman in Donetsk hospital who said he had been serving with the 5th Independent Tank Brigade in Siberia when ordered on "exercises", which all the soldiers involved had understood meant they were deploying to eastern Ukraine. Since last August, when the scale of this increased considerably, the Russian Soldiers' Mothers Committee and other human rights groups have published details of dead soldiers being returned for burial in Russia. Open Russia, a group funded by Kremlin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has compiled evidence of 276 Russian soldiers killed there up to late January. Dr Sutyagin says this is a considerable underestimate and the total is nearer to 800. During the August fighting, entire Russian units were sent across, a necessity perhaps in view of the crisis faced by separatist forces, but one that produced some tell-tale evidence. Ten paratroopers from the 331st Guards Airborne Regiment, usually based at Kostroma in Russia, for example, were captured together by the Ukrainian military inside their country. And in Pskov, home of another airborne unit, several corpses were returned together for burial. When Russian forces drew down a couple of months later, I was told by a senior Nato official that as few as 1,000 remained in eastern Ukraine. It was then, evidence suggests, that the Russian army determined a change in the way it would use force across the border, forming composite units of volunteers that would be exercised together so they attained the necessary military slickness, but would come from a variety of garrisons and units so their identity would be harder to prove. There could be another reason for the use of smaller detachments from far flung units across Russia. Dr Sutyagin says it "appears to indicate a shortage of badly needed manpower". Recent Russian reporting makes clear the direct involvement of its combat troops in February's battle for Debaltsevo, something Nato did not even allege at the time. Indeed much of the Nato or US analysis, however critical German backers of a diplomatic solution may have been of it, may have erred on the side of conservatism. At a meeting with journalists in London last month, for example, the US ambassador to Nato, Doug Lute, said the Russian military had committed specialists to help crew advanced weapons such as anti-aircraft missiles or electronic warfare gear, and "an alternative chain of command". That Russian officers are providing the brains as well as co-ordination behind the Donetsk and Luhansk separatist forces became clearer last November, when Lt Gen Alexander Lentsov, deputy commander of Moscow's ground forces, appeared in eastern Ukraine. He has subsequently been appointed to the committee trying to uphold the latest ceasefire. As for whether this command structure was actually relying on Russian combat units, Lt Gen Lute would not go that far, saying the Russian military in the east of Ukraine was "not a force in the sense of being an entity". But reporting from the Russian side of the front suggests that during the fight for Debaltseve, Lt Gen Lentsov won the battle with three battalion groups made up almost entirely of troops originally from units across the border in Russia. In the Novaya Gazeta interview with wounded tank man Dorzhi Batomunkuev, he said his group, from the 5th Tank Brigade, had been combined with detachments of men from other Russian army combat units during three months of training at a camp near Kuzminsky, close to the Ukrainian border. The battalion, equipped with 31 T72 tanks, had crossed into Ukraine early in February before taking part in the Debaltseve battle. The men who had actually joined locally, in the breakaway areas of eastern Ukraine, had made up less than 10% of the unit, he said. Other reports suggest the local men, as well as some Cossack volunteers from Russia, make up the public face of the separatist forces, manning checkpoints and so on, while the composite Russian army units, equipped with the latest tanks and artillery, are employed for offensive action. Complex picture Of course trying to differentiate between these forces (genuine locals, Russians who have come individually to fight alongside them, and trained units of serving Russian army soldiers) is not easy for reporters on the ground - or even it seems for Nato countries with their considerable intelligence resources. Lt Gen Lute, for example, noted late last month the presence of "hundreds" of Russian army troops in Ukraine. Now, Lt Gen Hodges has raised that figure to thousands. "If you don't believe Russia is directly involved in Ukraine now, you'll never believe it," he said. Did the US assessment change dramatically in less than a fortnight? It's possible. But it's also the case that Nato military people I've spoken to have been notably more hawkish on their estimation of the Kremlin role than politicians or diplomats (Lt Gen Lute is something of a hybrid, having previously served as a US Army general and in the White House). US political authorities have also sought to minimise the gap between their public statements and assessments by Germany and others determined to avoid confrontation with Russia. President Barack Obama and his team have long sought to avoid painting themselves into a corner over Ukraine, for example by labelling the Russian action "an invasion", something that might suggest tougher action was needed against President Vladimir Putin. But the odd thing is that the most compelling evidence that his army is bearing the brunt of the fighting against the Ukrainian government is now coming from Russian reporters or the mothers of dead soldiers rather than the West.	Western arguments about how to counter President Vladimir Putin's support for east Ukraine separatists are leading to clashes over the question of how deeply involved Russia's military is in the conflict.
+text: Firefighters were called to an address in New Cross Drive, Woodhouse, at about 05:30 GMT, South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue said. The fire was thought to have started in a ground-floor room next to the kitchen, and was put out by crews from three stations, it added. Andy Hayter, from South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue, said crews had discovered a man "who sadly could not be revived". He said another crew wearing breathing apparatus searched the rest of the house and confirmed there were no other casualties. A joint fire and police investigation "to establish the cause of the fire" is under way. "I'd like to pass on our deepest condolences to the family, and all involved, in what is a really tragic incident," Mr Hayter said.	A man has died in a "tragic" fire at a house in Sheffield in the early hours.
+text: By Hannah RichardsonBBC News education reporter A third of UK teenagers eat unhealthy breakfasts such as fry-ups or crisps, the poll of 2,000 youngsters aged between 12 and 18 suggests. Four out of 10 skip breakfast altogether to lose weight, the poll for the Make Mine Milk campaign suggests. Brian Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the results were a worry. He said pupils breakfasting on energy drinks, which are not usually recommended for children, was something he had seen as a head teacher. 'Hyperactive' "When children arrive in schools having started the day eating or drinking totally inappropriate things like that, they are in no fit state to be in the classroom. "They can be hyperactive, and it can have a very negative effect on their behaviour." He added that parents should be ensuring that their children were eating good breakfasts, rather than sending them off with money to buy something on the way to school. He added: "There's a lot of advertising with these drinks and they are fashionable, and teenagers love things that are fashionable." Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), also said it was vital that children had a good and nutritious breakfast to set them up for the day and enable them to concentrate in class. "A healthy breakfast is also important in stopping children become fractious and badly behaved. "It is worrying to think that some children are breakfasting on energy drinks, such as Red Bull, which are stuffed full of sugar and stimulants and have little nutritional value. "School breakfast clubs can play a key role in making sure children have had a good breakfast before they start school to help their learning. And we would like children to be taught about healthy eating, so they learn about healthy diets and how to cook nutritious meals." Caffeine content in such energy drinks ranges from about 8mg of caffeine - about the same as an espresso coffee - to as much as 400mg. 'Shot style' Some of the smaller "shot style" products can contain as much as 175mg of caffeine in a 60ml bottle. Drinks containing more than 150mg of caffeine per litre (mg/l) must be labelled with the term "high caffeine content", and the Food Standards Agency recommends that children should only "consume in moderation drinks with high levels of caffeine". The makers of the Red Bull Energy Drink did not wish to comment on the issue raised but its website says: "Red Bull Energy Drink's special formula has been appreciated worldwide by top athletes, students, and when undertaking demanding work or during long drives." It adds the drink is "the ideal equipment when you are active and keen to set personal bests". Director general of the British Soft Drinks Association Gavin Partington said: "The soft drinks industry is clear that energy drinks are not suitable for children, and we want to get that message across to young people and their parents. "Adults might choose an energy drink, containing about as much caffeine as a typical cup of coffee, when they want a physical or mental boost. But, like all food and drink, energy drinks should be consumed in moderation as part of a balanced diet and active lifestyle."	One in 20 teenage pupils goes to school on a can of energy drink instead of a good breakfast, a survey suggests.
+text: Jon Platt was convicted of failing to secure his child's regular attendance. He lost an earlier legal challenge at the Supreme Court in April, despite winning previous legal battles in a case brought by Isle of Wight Council. Platt was given a 12-month conditional discharge and ordered to pay £2,000. The case - over a £120 fine - returned to Isle of Wight Magistrates' Court earlier where Paul Greatorex QC, for Platt, had argued the prosecution should not continue and was an "abuse of process". He suggested none of the documents published by the council or the primary school on attendance made it clear when a penalty notice would be given. "It's completely vague, it does not give the guidance that parents are entitled to expect," he said. Mr Platt told the court he did not believe he had seen a number of documents from the school setting out changes to absence rules. He said a form from the school, when he applied for the seven-day absence in 2015, had noted that attendance of between 90% and 95% was satisfactory, which his child fell into. Truancy prosecutions in England in 2015 Source: PA But Ben Rich, counsel for Isle of Wight Council, said giving clear guidance did not mean spelling out every consequence of any action. He argued the school was not required to make sure that every letter sent home was read, and that the council's code of conduct had made it clear that a penalty notice could be issued for a term-time holiday. Giving the judgment, magistrate Jeannie Walker said: "The circumstances of this case fall squarely into that breach of school rules." The case has cost taxpayers £140,000. Speaking after the hearing Mr Platt said he was "disappointed" by the verdict. "I didn't want to lose but there's a part of me that is actually relieved. "If we'd won today, it seems pretty clear the Isle of Wight Council on the abuse of process argument may well have sought to appeal to the High Court and I desperately needed this all to be over."	A father who fought a long-running legal battle after taking his daughter on a term-time holiday to Disney World Florida has been found guilty over the unauthorised trip.
+text: Rebecca Evans, the minister for sport, suspended the activities of its board last week amid concerns. A leaked report by the chairman, Paul Thomas, said Sport Wales was in "danger of stagnating" and had spent an "unacceptable" amount on its board. Ms Evans revealed the vote of no-confidence in him had been unanimous. In a statement issued on Monday, the minister said: "On Tuesday 22nd November the Vice Chair and Board of Sport Wales unanimously passed a vote of no confidence in the Chair who was not present at the meeting. "On Wednesday 23rd November, and with the full agreement of the Chair and the Vice Chair, Ministers suspended all of the Sport Wales Board activities until an assurance review could be completed." Ms Evans said the suspension of activities was a "neutral" act and that the day-to-day activities of Sport Wales continued as normal. Any matters normally dealt with by the board would be referred by the organisation's chief executive to a senior Welsh Government official, Ms Evans added. Ms Evans said the assurance review had been called: The minister added that the review would not consider Mr Thomas's draft review or the wider effectiveness of Sport Wales itself. The review will consist of a series of structured interviews and examination of records, Ms Evans said, leading to a report to the Welsh Government's director of governance with evidence, conclusions and recommendations.	Events surrounding a vote of no confidence in the chairman of Sport Wales are to be investigated for ministers in an eight-week review.
+text: Kirsty Williams said it was part of a "national effort to reduce transmission of coronavirus". However, the Children's Commissioner for Wales has criticised the decision as disruptive to education. A number of counties have also said primary schools will close earlier, including Cardiff and Swansea. Ms Williams said it was important to take a "clear, national direction" to ease the pressure from schools, colleges, local councils and parents and carers. "Every day, we are seeing more and more people admitted to hospital with coronavirus symptoms," she added. "The virus is putting our health service under significant and sustained pressure and it is important we all make a contribution to reduce its transmission." She said the advice from Wales' Chief Medical Officer, Dr Frank Atherton, was to implement the online learning plan "as soon as is practicable". "Having spoken to local education leaders, I am confident that schools and colleges have online learning provision in place," added Ms Williams. "This will also be important in ensuring that students are at home during this time, learning and staying safe. "Critically, and this is very important, children should be at home. "This is not an early Christmas holiday, please do everything you can to minimise your contact with others." The latest data shows the infection rate across Wales is averaging more than 370 cases for 100,000 people, with 17% of tests now coming back positive. It means the reproduction (R) number in Wales has now reached 1.27, with infections doubling in 11.7 days. But Children's Commissioner Sally Holland said the move was "not the right decision" for children and young people in Wales and had yet to see any scientific advice to support the move. "Whilst accepting the severity of the public health emergency and the responsibilities all of us have to keep each other safe, this decision compounds the disruption to our children's education over the last few months," she said. Which primary schools will close early? The announcement does not extend to primary or special schools, with the education minister "encouraging" them to remain open. However, a number of local authorities have announced they will also be halting face-to-face learning early. Schools in Swansea will all move to online blended learning on Monday, so Friday is the last day in the classroom for primary school pupils. Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion parents have been sent emails telling them classrooms will close after Monday. Carmarthenshire council has said primary and special schools will be given the choice to move to online learning or stay open from Tuesday. Cardiff council said the final day in class will be Tuesday. "The move is designed to enable students to remain at home in the run up to Christmas to try to halt the rise in infection rates," said a statement from Cardiff city officials on Thursday evening. The neighbouring Vale of Glamorgan will close primary schools on Wednesday, 16 December. Some local authorities had already announced plans to close schools early. Blaenau Gwent shut classrooms on Wednesday, with infection rates in the county now standing at nearly 600 cases for 100,000 people. In north Wales, Flintshire and Wrexham had decided to shut schools on Friday, with infection rates running at 175 and 230 cases per 100,000. Bridgend, Caerphilly and Rhondda Cynon Taf councils had also planned to shut early next Wednesday. The teaching union NAHT had called for schools in Wales to shut this Friday, and be replaced with online classes. But the union said it was "bitterly disappointed" the move did not include primary or special schools. "This decision ignores Welsh Government's own advice on pre-isolating before seeing extended family over the Christmas holidays," said Laura Doel from the union. "Many parents will simply vote with their feet and keep children at home anyway." The Association of School and College Leaders has supported the Welsh Government's announcement. "This is obviously a difficult decision but the public health advice is very clear that this needs to happen to tackle Covid infection rates in Wales and reduce transmission of the virus," said its director in Wales, Eithne Hughes. "However, we urge the Welsh Government and local authorities to keep a close eye on the situation in primary schools and take appropriate action if needed." The decision has also been welcomed by the National Education Union Cymru and Unison. 'Blanket approach' But the move has been criticised by the education leader at one north Wales council. Huw Hilditch-Roberts, of Denbighshire council, said the announcement was a "blanket approach based on what is happening in the south". The rate of infection in the county is 101.4 per 100,000. "Any decision to close schools should be made on the data, and the data in our area doesn't support the decision," he told the Local Democracy Reporting Service. "I feel this could result in a community spike because it will be harder to manage with more children in the community for longer." Responding to the announcement, Plaid Cymru's education spokeswoman Siân Gwenllian said on-site provision must be made for all younger learners, and children of key workers "who can't make alternative arrangements". She said every secondary school pupil must also have suitable devices for accessing online lessons, adding: "Accessing education through Xboxes and mobiles phones is not good enough." The Welsh Conservatives said the decision was another instance of "confusing messages" from the Welsh Government. "There is no doubt that the situation is grave in parts of Wales, but I would have preferred targeted interventions where needed, not another blanket ban," said their education spokeswoman in the Senedd, Suzy Davies.	All secondary schools and further education colleges in Wales will move classes online from Monday, the education minister has announced.
+text: "It was just horror, people were screaming, people had shards of glass stuck in their legs, all the staircase had gone," says Luke Turner, who was on the third floor of his hotel when the earthquake struck. "The whole of the hotel had been demolished, literally flattened in the earthquake. "We had to all run up a very steep hill because of the threat of a tsunami. "People were crying, being sick. "The locals that had lost most of their livelihood were worried about their own families." Mr Turner, who had travelled to the country for his honeymoon, told the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme that everybody "just helped each other" in the aftermath. Thousands of tourists have been pictured flocking to the beach to be evacuated from the Gili islands, which are situated off the north-west of Lombok and popular with backpackers and divers. Some have described waiting on the beach for nine hours to get on a boat. Mr Turner says there were "still hundreds of British citizens and European citizens" stuck in Lombok airport, but he and his husband managed to get a flight to the Indonesian capital Jakarta. "The flight was just awful. There were locals that were on there to flee the island that were in floods of tears," he says. "It was just the most eerie flight." He said they had experienced 14 aftershocks in 48 hours. "We haven't had sleep for four days, people are so frightened... it's just been a nightmare it really has." Matt Roche, a 27-year-old tourist from Country Durham, was on holiday in Bali with his girlfriend, Lesley, 30. The self-employed bricklayer said: "Whilst having a drink, my girlfriend felt something and looked over at me and said, 'is that an earthquake?' - she was here when the one last week struck. "I replied, 'no it can't be', then looked up and saw all the lights in the bar shaking violently. "As soon as the Balinese staff started to scream and run it hit me that it was, so I jumped up, grabbed my partner and ran into the street. "I then lost her briefly in the crowd and when I found her I made sure we kept moving away from power lines and high buildings to be safe. When we have been out today we have had to take different routes because of bridge collapses. "It does strike fear into you, obviously total panic from everyone around you running and screaming, even though it's over." British tourist Julie Silvester filmed the aftermath of the 6.4 magnitude earthquake in Kekalok village. She said people's homes and livelihoods were "damaged beyond ruin". The UK Foreign Office said it was working with the Indonesian authorities to provide assistance to British people caught up in the earthquake. Extra flights are being added to help people who want to leave Lombok, a spokesperson said.	British tourists caught up in the 6.9 magnitude earthquake in Lombok, Indonesia - which killed nearly 100 people and left at least 20,000 people homeless - have been speaking about what happened.
+text: By Roger HarrabinBBC environment analyst It warns that electrifying cars will not address traffic jams, urban sprawl and wasted space for parking. The Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions (CREDS) report calls on the government to devise a strategy allowing people to have a good standard of living without needing a car. The government said it was spending £2bn to promote walking and cycling. It also says it plans to spend £50bn on improving roads. However, critics accuse the government of not having a serious plan to deal with the social problems associated with mass car ownership. CREDS is an academic consortium of more than 80 academics across the UK. "Car use is a massive blind spot on government policy," Prof Jillian Anable, one of the authors of the report, said. She added: “For many years ministers have adopted the principle of trying to meet demand by increasing road space. "They need to reduce demand instead.” But what about people who depend on their cars? The authors say there will always be people who depend on cars, especially in the countryside or suburbs. But, they point out that many young people in cities are choosing not to buy cars. Instead they are using public transport, walking, cycling, taking minicabs and hiring cars when they are needed. This more active lifestyle means less obesity, pollution and road danger – and greater sociability as people meet their neighbours on their way to work. It also allows parking spaces to be liberated for more housing or gardens. The government, the authors say, should be encouraging other people to follow the lead set by the young. “It is a happy accident that car ownership is static in every age group except the over-60s," Prof Anable says. "The government should build on that.” How could we help people to live without cars? She maintains car ownership is wasteful because cars are parked for 98% of their lifetime, with a third of cars not going out every day. “Once you own a car,” she says, “there is a compelling temptation to use it even for simple journeys. “But it is a really expensive investment. If people do not have cars they can spend the money on other things. “Often once people start to live without a car they wonder why they wanted one in the first place – a car is so much hassle.” She says ministers should prioritise walking, cycling, public transport and vehicle-sharing wherever possible. They should also incentivise local councils to build housing developments that are easy to access without a car. That would also benefit the 25% of households that do not have cars. Won’t electric cars be a good thing? The report supports government efforts to phase out petrol and diesel cars in the move towards Net Zero emissions. But it says the timetable is too slow, and may not be achieved anyway. There is a huge challenge in charging vehicles – especially in urban areas with no off-street parking. What is more, drivers tend to be choosing hybrid vehicles rather than pure electric cars – and that will lock in fossil fuel usage into the future. People are also buying status-symbol SUVs which clog up narrow city streets - the report says banning them from some areas might be a solution. Will driverless cars help? The other great technological change under way on the roads is driverless cars. The report warns this dream could also turn sour as car owners may choose to live many miles from their workplace, using their car as a mobile office while sitting in traffic jams they have helped to create. The AA’s president Edmund King agrees electric driverless cars could make congestion worse. He told us: “One vision of hell is that the driverless car turns up in the city centre where there is no parking. "The occupant gets out to do their business, whilst the car just continues driving around for hours on end until beckoned back by the user.” He suggests perhaps switching vehicle taxation away from petrol and diesel and on to Road Miles – a charge for the miles you drive, imposed electronically. How are people reacting to the report? A spokesperson for the Department for Transport said: "We are committed to future-proofing our towns and cities for journeys which reduce traffic, encourage healthy exercise, tackle carbon emissions and improve air quality. “This year, we launched the biggest regulatory review in a generation to ensure we are ready to take advantage of new technologies which can help achieve this. "We are also helping more people choose cleaner, greener forms of transport by investing around £2bn in active travel over the course of this Parliament." But, Labour's Lilian Greenwood, chair of the Commons Transport Committee, believes ministers must do more. She said: “The move to electric vehicles is most definitely not a panacea and fails to address wider concerns about public health and the kind of places where we want to live. "Congestion is a costly blight in many urban areas and there is a real risk that we will end up swapping dirty, polluting traffic jams for clean, green ones. "Inactivity and obesity are increasingly serious public health problems. Getting people out of their cars is essential, yet the government has no targets for such a shift - my committee has called for that to change." Follow Roger on Twitter	Car use will still need to be curbed even when all vehicles are powered by clean electricity, a report has said.
+text: Rory Cellan-JonesTechnology correspondent@BBCRoryCJon Twitter It seems every week brings evidence of scams and fraud, from the hacking of exchanges to Initial Coin Offerings where the founder disappears with the money. Just on Monday, America's Securities and Exchange Commission charged the founder of an online adult entertainment marketplace with running a fraudulent ICO (Initial Coin Offering). But that case involved tens of thousands of dollars - a mere bagatelle compared to the monster cryptocurrency scam whose story is being told in an enthralling BBC podcast. In The Missing Cryptoqueen, Jamie Bartlett investigates the woman behind OneCoin, a scheme which managed to persuade investors around the world to part with as much as £4bn ($4.9bn) They had bought into the compelling vision of a new kind of money sold by Dr Ruja Ignatova, in a series of events in countries around the world. You can catch a flavour of the mixture of hoopla, hucksterism and blockchain balderdash in a video of her appearance at London's Wembley Arena in 2016. Dr Ignatova - or Dr Ruja to her fans - walks on to "This Girl is on Fire", tells an excited crowd that OneCoin is on course to overtake Bitcoin, and derides "all those Mickey Mouse coins that have copied our concept." Plenty of people were convinced, including one of the stars of the podcast, Jen McAdam from Glasgow. She invested €10,000 herself in the Bulgaria-based scheme and persuaded family members to put in €250,000 - that's about £220,000 at current exchange rates. But in 2017, Dr Ruja Ignatova disappeared - and she hasn't been seen since. The investigation by the team behind the podcast has uncovered just how successful OneCoin had been in spreading its message around the world. Internal documents reveal that people in 175 countries invested, with much of the money coming in a six-month period in 2016 when Dr Ruja was on a global tour - including that Wembley appearance. In the UK, £26m was invested in that period, and the podcast team reckons that the total coming from British investors may have been as high as £96m. But the documents show that €427m came from China in 2016, with people in South Korea, Hong Kong and Germany also keen investors. Even in poorer countries like Vietnam, Bangladesh and Uganda, people parted with substantial sums. Earlier this year in the United States, Dr Ignatova was charged in absentia with money laundering, with the Department of Justice calling OneCoin an old-fashioned pyramid scheme. And indeed this and other crypto-scandals seem disturbingly familiar to anyone who has been in financial journalism for a while - the same old tricks delivered with a hi-tech veneer. Back in 2016, Bitcoin was still a revolutionary disrupter of the tired old financial system, blockchain was going to be more important than the internet and something called an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) was going to show Wall Street that an Initial Public Offering was so "last century". Now, after the wild gyrations in the value of cryptocurrencies and the realisation that just about every ICO fails to deliver on its overblown promises - even if it's not an outright scam - you might think that "crypto" is the last word anyone would want to attach to a new project. That came to mind this week when I attended a briefing about Facebook's plan to launch a new cryptocurrency called Libra. The briefing was with the Libra Association, the collective of 28 partners including Visa, PayPal, Uber and Spotify, who are joining with Facebook to launch the currency. The plan has already run into a lot of opposition from regulators and I put it to the Association's Chief Operating Officer Bertrand Perez that much of this was due to that C word. Surely such a powerful coalition could have invented a new payments system - a more ambitious version of Kenya's Mpesa perhaps - that was neither a crypto-currency nor dependent on a blockchain? No, he insisted, blockchain was the cornerstone of the Libra project, immune to fraud, fast and efficient: "This technology is the future for sending and receiving money." Funnily enough, that was similar to Dr Ruja Ignatova's message to the Wembley faithful in 2016 - OneCoin was going to be "borderless, safe and easy to use." Now of course Libra is a very different kettle of fish, backed by many very respectable institutions which have pledged that it will not launch until regulators are happy. But convincing governments that this cryptocurrency will not be a safe haven for money launderers, or pose a threat to economic stability, is going to be an uphill struggle. Back to OneCoin - the company behind it rejects allegations that it is a scam, and states that "OneCoin verifiably fulfils all criteria of the definition of a crypto-currency". It says the podcast "will not present any truthful information and cannot be considered objective, nor unbiased". The company also claims that the allegations made about it around the world are being challenged, stating: "Our partners, our customers and our lawyers are fighting successfully against this action around the globe and we are sure that the vision of a new system on the basis of a 'financial revolution' will be established". You can listen to The Missing Cryptoqueen on BBC Sounds.	If ever an industry needed a PR makeover, it's the world of cryptocurrencies.
+text: The vote is now held every five years, and this will be the sixth election in its history. What does the Scottish Parliament do? It was established in 1999 to debate issues and make laws for Scotland. A total of 129 MSPs are elected to the Parliament - often referred to as Holyrood, after the area of Edinburgh where the parliament building stands. They debate and pass laws on devolved issues - these include most aspects of day-to-day life in Scotland, such as education, health and transport. SCOTLAND ALERTS: Get extra updates on BBC election coverage Holyrood also has control over some taxes, most notably income tax, and some areas of the welfare system. The UK Parliament at Westminster can pass laws on reserved matters, which are generally those with a UK-wide or international impact - such as defence, foreign policy and immigration. Who can vote in the election? Anyone who lives in Scotland and is registered to vote is eligible, so long as they are aged 16 or over on the day of the election and have not been legally excluded from voting (for example because they are serving a prison sentence of longer than 12 months). They must also be a British or Irish citizen or a citizen of another country living in Scotland who has permission to enter or stay in the UK, or who does not need permission. How does voting work? People have two votes - one for a constituency MSP, and another for a regional ballot. There are 73 Constituency MSPs, each elected on a first-past-the-post system similar to the UK general election - the winner is the candidate who receives the most votes in each constituency. In the regional ballot, people vote for a party. The parties are then allocated a number of MSPs depending on how many votes they receive - once the number of constituencies already won in that region is taken into account - to make the overall result more proportional. There are eight electoral regions, each with seven regional MSPs. These are: This means that people in Scotland are each represented by eight MSPs - one representing their constituency and the other seven representing their region. The Scottish government is formed from the party that hold the most seats in the parliament, or alternatively a coalition of more than one party. It is led by the first minister, who appoints a number of ministers to be in charge of departments such as education, health and finance. When will we know the results? In previous elections, votes were counted as soon as the polls closed at 22:00, with the results being announced overnight. The pandemic means that the votes in this election will not start to be counted until the morning after, with a final result not expected until the weekend of 8/9 May. What happened last time? The SNP, led by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, lost its overall majority in the 2016 election, but continued in power after forming a minority government. The Scottish Conservatives - led by Ruth Davidson - finished second after overtaking Scottish Labour for the first time, while the Scottish Greens were fourth - ahead of the Scottish Liberal Democrats. The SNP has won every Scottish Parliament election since 2007. What are the big issues for voters? The election campaign is likely to be dominated by the question of whether there should be another referendum on Scottish independence. The SNP has already said it wants to hold a vote once the Covid pandemic ends - if the election returns another pro-independence majority. The Scottish Greens also back independence, but the Scottish Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats are all opposed and say the country's focus should be on recovering from the pandemic rather than the constitution. Health, education, the environment and the economy are among the other important issues for voters, and all are likely to feature prominently during the campaign. What impact will Covid-19 have on the campaign? Social distancing rules mean the campaign will look and feel very different to normal. Party campaigners will not be able to knock on doors, for example, and there will be no large gatherings for set-piece events such as TV debates or manifesto launches. Much of the campaign is likely to play out online instead, with BBC Scotland planning to hold two virtual debates. It is also expected that more people than ever before will choose to vote by post rather than going to a polling place. How do I register to vote? There are three ways to vote: The deadline to register to vote is Monday 19 April. The deadline to register for a postal vote is 6 April. The deadline to register for a proxy vote is 27 April. You can register to vote online.	Voters across Scotland will go to the polls on 6 May to elect members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs).
+text: The body of Christopher Laverack was found in Beverley Beck two days after his disappearance on 9 March 1984. Humberside Police have now identified his uncle Melvyn Read, who died in 2008, as the killer. It was the force's longest-running unsolved murder case. Det Supt Ray Higgins said Read, a convicted sex offender, was "evil". The schoolboy had been left alone with his 15-month-old nephew Martin at the house in Harpham Grove, east Hull, when his sister Kim Hines left for work and her husband Stephen went out. Mr Hines returned about an hour later to discover Christopher was no longer there. The boy's body was found two days later in a plastic carpet underlay bag weighted down by a brick. Detectives said he had suffered savage injuries and his clothing had been disturbed, suggesting he had been sexually assaulted. Humberside Police said Read had emerged as a suspect when allegations of child abuse were levelled against him. In 2003, he was convicted of a number of sex offences involving children and jailed for seven-and-a-half years. Police said a case had been built up against the uncle, with evidence including the fact that Read owned a car fitting the description of a vehicle seen outside Harpham Grove the night Christopher disappeared. He was arrested in 2006 in connection with his nephew's death. But detectives were unable to gather conclusive evidence to charge him with the murder before he died from cancer in Hull prison in February 2008. Police said a later review of the case had brought a scientific breakthrough. A forensic palynologist, who specialises in identifying pollen and spores, was brought in to help the investigation. Dr Patricia Wiltshire concluded there was enough pollen and other plant matter on the clothing Christopher had been wearing on the night to link him with Read's garden at Grantley Grove. A brick found with the schoolboy's body was also forensically linked to the garden. In 2012, detectives sought an independent assessment of the strength of their case against Read to see whether there would have been a realistic chance of a conviction in court. Humberside Police said QC Paul Watson described the weight of evidence against Read as conclusive. Det Supt Higgins said: "This has been a very complex case to solve but there can be little more important to relentlessly pursue than the murder of a child." He added: "Read was an evil man and a man wholly without remorse. "I am satisfied that Christopher's family can have some sense of closure and understanding of what happened."	A nine-year-old boy found dead in 1984 after vanishing from his sister's home in Hull where he was babysitting was killed by his uncle, police have said.
+text: The train left the city of Yiwu, on China's east coast, this month and travelled 7,500 miles (12,000km), crossing seven countries, before arriving at a freight depot in Barking. The service delivered 34 containers of clothes and high street goods. China Railway already runs services between China and other European cities, including Madrid and Hamburg. The service passed through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, Belgium and France before entering the UK via the Channel Tunnel. In order to make the journey, a number of different locomotives and wagons were used as the railways of the former Soviet Union states have a larger rail gauge. However, the rail firms say the service is still cheaper than air freight and faster than sending goods by sea. The service is part of China's One Belt, One Road programme - reviving the ancient Silk Road trading routes to the West. 'Ever-expanding destinations' In Yiwu, in eastern China, a bright orange locomotive pulling 44 containers laden with suitcases, clothes and an assortment of household goods set off on a 7,500-mile (12,000km) journey to western Europe. Ten containers were taken off at the German cargo hub of Duisburg. The rest made up the first cargo train from China to arrive in London at Barking's Eurohub freight terminal. London is the 15th European city to find its way on to the ever-expanding map of destinations for China's rail cargo. Last year, 1,702 freight trains made the voyage to Europe, more than double the 2015 figure. Yiwu Timex Industrial Investments, which is running this service with China's state-run railways, says prices are half that of air cargo and cut two weeks off the journey time by sea. Read more: All aboard the China-to-London freight train	The first direct rail freight service from China to the UK has completed its 18-day trip and arrived in London.
+text: Dr Ruth Hussey was speaking ahead of a special conference on the issue hosted by Alcohol Concern Cymru in Cardiff. Latest figures estimate 39% of mothers-to-be in Wales drink alcohol although mostly only in low amounts. Bur Dr Hussey said in practice it was easy to underestimate the quantity in a glass and difficult to measure units of alcohol accurately. The proportion of pregnant women who say they drink some alcohol in Wales has been falling, according to the last survey of infant feeding by the UK's four health departments. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) advises that pregnant women who choose to drink alcohol should not drink more than one to two units - equivalent to a small to medium glass of wine - once or twice a week. Nice says the first three months of a pregnancy are particularly important. Dr Hussey said: "The advice is to avoid alcohol altogether when pregnant, including when trying to conceive - so when trying for a baby or pregnant, keep it simple - no alcohol, no risk." The Welsh government's Change4Life Wales website has received more clicks on its alcohol and pregnancy pages in the last year than any other section. It is the theme of the alcohol campaign group's conference in Cardiff, which also includes contributions from Cardiff Central AM Jenny Rathbone and academics and health experts.	Pregnant women and those trying to conceive should not drink alcohol, Wales' chief medical officer has said.
+text: Republican presidential hopeful Rand Paul blocked a Patriot Act extension and it lapsed at midnight (04:00 GMT). However, the Senate did vote to advance the White House-backed Freedom Act so a new form of data collection is likely to be approved in the coming days. The Freedom Act imposes more controls, after revelations by Edward Snowden. The former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor first exposed the extent of the data collection in 2013. 'Roving wiretaps' The White House described the expiry of the deadline as an "irresponsible lapse" by the Senate. "On a matter as critical as our national security, individual senators must put aside their partisan motivations and act swiftly. The American people deserve nothing less," it said in a statement. The failure to reach a deal means that security services have temporarily lost the right to bulk collect Americans' phone records, to monitor "lone wolf" terror suspects and to carry out "roving wiretaps" of suspects. The government can still continue to collect information related to any foreign intelligence investigations. Analysts also said there could be workarounds to allow continued data collection in some cases. Authorities could try to argue that older legal provisions - so-called grandfather clauses - still apply. A Senate vote on the Freedom Act can come no earlier than 05:00 GMT on Tuesday. The Freedom Act retains most of the Patriot provisions, but requires that records must be held by telecommunications companies, and that the NSA needs court approval to access specific information. It also explicitly prohibits bulk collection of data. "It is officially a new day in America. A day with more liberty and freedom. #StandWithRand" Mr Paul tweeted on Sunday night. 'Silver linings' The NSA, which runs the majority of surveillance programmes, stopped collecting the affected data at 19:59 GMT on Sunday. The failure to reach any agreement in the rare Sunday sitting of the Senate was the result of the actions of Rand Paul. A libertarian, Mr Paul used a Senate technical procedure to block an extension of the Patriot Act, arguing that data collection is illegal and unconstitutional. Two weeks ago, he led a filibuster - using extended debates to delay or block the passing of legislation - to stop the quick passage of the Freedom Act. Patriot Act vs Freedom Act What is changing? The expiry of the Patriot Act brings to an end bulk collection of Americans' phone metadata - who called who, when and for how long, but not the content of calls - by the US. Under its successor, records must be held by telecommunications companies and investigators need a court order to access specific information. Technology companies will be given greater leeway to reveal data requests. The measures are intended to balance concerns on privacy with providing the authorities the tools they need to prevent attacks. What stays the same? Key parts of the Patriot Act are retained in the Freedom Act. They include the provision allowing the monitoring of "lone wolf" suspects - potential attackers not linked to foreign terror groups, despite the US authorities admitting the powers have never been used. The Freedom Act also maintains a provision allowing investigators to monitor travel and business records of individuals, something law officers says is more effective than bulk collection. On Sunday he said: "This is what we fought the revolution over, are we going to so blithely give up our freedom?" After the deadline passed, he added: "Tonight begins the process of ending bulk collection. The bill will ultimately pass but we always look for silver linings. I think the bill may be replacing one form of bulk collection with another but the government after this bill passes will no longer collect your phone records." His actions have infuriated many other Republicans. They left the chamber en masse when Mr Paul rose to speak. Senator John McCain said Mr Paul was putting "a higher priority on his fundraising and his ambitions than on the security of the nation". The situation was uncomfortable for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has endorsed Mr Paul's presidential campaign, and led to a dramatic reverse by the Republican-controlled Senate. Bulk data collection rulings US spy leaks: How intelligence is gathered The Freedom Act had been approved by the House of Representatives and the White House but the Senate rejected it last week by a vote of 57-42. Once it became clear that the Patriot Act extension would not be possible, senators voted 77-17 to move forward with the Freedom Act. Mr McConnell, who had opposed the bill originally, said that senators were left with little choice but to pass it in order to restore surveillance powers. "It's not ideal but, along with votes on some modest amendments that attempt to ensure the program can actually work as promised, it's now the only realistic way forward," Mr McConnell said. The BBC's North America Editor Jon Sopel says that although the new legislation is likely to be passed in the coming days, the delay will be seen as a victory for Mr Paul. Mr Paul's embrace of civil liberties is bringing new members to the Republican Party, but at the same time is alienating many others, he says. Meanwhile, polling by the US-based Pew Research Centre suggests a minority of Americans think the government has overreached in its collection of telephone and internet data. In a 2015 poll, only 37% of 1,504 polled said they think the government has gone too far. US media response The New York Times says "the expiration of surveillance authority demonstrates a profound shift in American attitudes since the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when national security was pre-eminent in both parties". It also suggests the spy agencies might find "workarounds" to avoid gaps in surveillance The Washington Post quotes national security expert Elizabeth Goitein as saying that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had gambled and "badly overplayed his hand" Time magazine says that Mr Paul scored a victory that was "messy and almost certain to be brief" but for him "the real audience was the Republican electorate that will pick a White House nominee next year, along with potential donors who can fund his campaign" The Daily Beast called Rand Paul "GOP Enemy No. 1", quoting Republican Sen. Mark Kirk as saying, "I don't stand with Rand," poking fun at his campaign slogan.	The legal authority for US spy agencies to bulk collect Americans' phone data has expired, after the Senate failed to reach a deal.
+text: The first episode of the 22nd series of children's programme Arthur features the character Mr Ratburn marrying his aardvark partner, Patrick. But APT instead ran an old episode, and announced it had no plans to show the premiere. Programming director Mike McKenzie said broadcasting it would break parents' trust in the network. In a statement, Mr McKenzie said "parents trust that their children can watch APT without their supervision", and that children "younger than the 'target' audience" might watch without parental knowledge. Show creator WGBH and broadcaster PBS reportedly alerted local stations in April about the episode, and Mr McKenzie said this was when they decided not to air the show. Arthur is a joint Canadian/American series which debuted in 1996 about an eight-year-old anthropomorphic aardvark named Arthur Read and his friends, who live in the fictional Elwood City. APT previously refused to broadcast a 2005 episode of the series which depicted Buster, a rabbit, visiting a girl who had two mothers. Substitute teacher Misty Souder told news website AL.com that she and her daughter were disappointed the episode did not run and had contacted the network about it. "I never thought I'd be going to battle for a gay rat wedding, but here we are," she said. A 2018 Gallup poll showed 46% of people in Alabama identified as conservative, second only to Mississippi among all 50 states. Earlier in May, Alabama passed a law banning abortions even in cases of rape and incest, the latest US state to restrict access to abortions. You may also be interested in:	Alabama Public Television (APT) has refused to broadcast a cartoon which shows a same-sex wedding.
+text: EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier said a deal looked "at this point unlikely" given the UK position on fishing rights and post-Brexit competition rules. His UK counterpart David Frost said "considerable gaps" remained in these areas, but a deal was still possible. The UK has ruled out extending the December deadline to reach a deal. This was the second official negotiation round to be held in person since the coronavirus crisis, after both sides agreed to "intensify" talks in June. The two sides' chief negotiators are due to meet informally in London next week, with another round of official talks scheduled for mid-August in Brussels. Speaking after the talks, Mr Barnier said the UK had not shown a "willingness to break the deadlock" over fisheries and post-Brexit rules on competition. "By its current refusal to commit to conditions of open and fair competition and to a balanced agreement on fisheries, the UK makes a trade agreement at this point unlikely," he told reporters. He said there was a risk of no deal being reached unless the UK changed course on the topics, which were "at the heart" of the EU's trade interests. He added that an agreement would be needed by October "at the latest" so it could be ratified before the current post-Brexit transition period ends in December. 'Pragmatic approach' In a statement, Mr Frost said fisheries and the rules on competition - known as "level playing field" provisions - remained the "most difficult areas". He said he still believed a deal could still be reached in September, but the government must "face the possibility" one will not be struck. But he added the EU had shown a "pragmatic approach" over British demands to limit the role of the European Court of Justice after the transition period ends. If the last four years, or even 40 years, have taught us anything about negotiations and the European Union, it is that they go on a bit and rarely are they concluded without the deadline being not just imminent, but, well...pretty much now. And this is not that point, yet. It was always very unlikely this would be the moment where a document would be pulled triumphantly from the inside of a suit pocket, a deal done. When Michel Barnier says a trade agreement between the UK and the EU is "at this point unlikely", your eye is drawn towards that word "unlikely". But "at this point" matters too. Both sides are still talking and compromise likes to turn up fashionably late. None of this guarantees there will be a deal - there may not be. But both sides want one, if they can find one they can live with. And remember, whatever happens between now and New Year's Eve, things will be different next year. Legally, Brexit happened at the end of January this year. In practical terms, it happens at the start of January next year. Mr Frost said the UK, which has so far insisted on a series of separate deals in different areas, was also willing to consider a "simpler" structure for an agreement. However he conceded previous UK demands for an "early understanding" on the principles of a deal by this month would not be reached. He said EU offers to break the deadlock had so far failed to honour the "fundamental principles which we have repeatedly made clear". Each side says the other needs to make a move. And if there is to be a deal, it will probably come at the eleventh hour. That means compromises will have to emerge in September before a deal is agreed in October - leaving both sides just enough time to ratify an agreement before the end of the year. There have been suggestions of potential progress this week - on the role of the European Court of Justice and on the overall structure of a future agreement. But differences between the two sides are substantial, and go to the heart of what the Brexit process is all about: how closely aligned will the UK be with the EU in the future? For the UK sovereignty is key; for the EU the priority is to protect the integrity of its single market. And for now, the two sides often seem to be talking past each other in public. Read more of Chris Morris's analysis on what's happening in post-Brexit trade talks State aid dispute Mr Barnier said that to agree a deal, the EU would require "robust" guarantees from the UK over its future rules for providing state support to companies. He criticised the UK for providing "no visibility" on its future regime in this area, and called for it to share more details of its plans. The UK is due to stop following EU "state aid" rules at the end of the transition period, and has not unveiled details of its subsequent regime. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has previously said he wants to make it easier for the UK government to provide assistance to struggling firms.	The UK and EU have said they still remain some way off reaching a post-Brexit trade agreement, following the latest negotiations in London.
+text: A Nottingham Trent University team will also study whether tunnels under roads could reduce the number of deaths. Experts believe the animals are struggling with lost habitats, increased competition and traffic. Researchers hope this study could help stop the creatures' decline and provide guidance for planners and developers. The study, part funded by wildlife charity People's Trust for Endangered Species (PTES), will assess the numbers of hedgehogs killed on roads, as well as how many live in the area. It will help determine whether the problem is so serious in some places that the local population is at risk of disappearing,. It will also look at which hedgehogs - males or females, young or old - are most at risk of being injured or killed. The study will take place in a dozen sites across the UK, six of which have tunnels of various sizes to help animals pass under roads safely. Lauren Moore, a PhD student in the university's School of Animal, Rural and Environmental Sciences, said: "We need to know whether roads are affecting the long-term viability of hedgehog populations. "To the best of our knowledge, the impact of roads on hedgehogs has not been investigated in this way before. "There have also been no studies to examine whether tunnels are effective at reducing hedgehog road mortality or what attributes of a tunnel could make them more effective." A "state of Britain's hedgehogs" report, published in 2018 by PTES and the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, revealed a 30% drop in the number of hedgehogs in urban areas since 2000. Hedgehog numbers declined by half in rural areas in that time, the report found. Nida Al-Fulaij, grants manager at PTES, said: "Lauren's work could help save this iconic species from further decline." Follow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.	Researchers are investigating how many hedgehogs are killed on our roads in a bid to help the UK's declining population.
+text: It is marking the 70th anniversary of an organisation set up in the city to help survivors of a Nazi massacre. Lidice Shall Live was formed by a city councillor and local miners in September 1942 to raise funds for the Czech village of Lidice. The village was razed to the ground in June 1942 after a senior Nazi official was assassinated. The concert is at Victoria Hall in Hanley on 8 September. The event is being organised by Stoke-on-Trent City Council which is offering 500 free tickets to former miners. Adolf Hitler sanctioned the destruction of Lidice in June 1942, following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the highest ranking Nazi official in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. More than 170 men were executed there and many of the women and children were murdered in concentration camps. The massacre inspired Stoke city councillor Barnett Stross and local miners to set up the Lidice Shall Live campaign to raise funds for the rebuilding of the village.	Some 500 hundred former miners have been invited to a wartime memorial concert in Stoke-on-Trent.
+text: Alexander Agnew, 53, sent eight emails which included videos from the right-wing terrorist group Nation Action. One told Mr Sarwar he was no longer welcome or needed "in a white nation". Another said: "Scotland shall never accept a brown skinned heretic as anything but a rapist culture and a sin against god." Sheriff Lindsay Wood ordered Agnew to carry out community service and banned him from leaving his home between 21:00 and 06:30 for the next eight months. Glasgow Sheriff Court had heard Agnew's emails left Mr Sarwar fearing for his safety and that of his family. Prosecutor Lucy Adams had told the court Glasgow MSP Mr Sarwar believed he had been targeted "because of his race and his campaign against racial hatred". The first email, sent on 5 February 2018, read: "If a cat is born in a stable, does it make it a horse?" Agnew's next hate message 10 days later stated: "Not one step back, we are everywhere." Another read: "Keep a close eye on your offices" with an emoji of a fire beside the text. 'Keep fighting' Police seized the emails and sent them to the force's cyber-crime unit. The investigation found the emails all matched up with Agnew's mobile phone number and his partner's address in Penilee, Glasgow. Following Agnew's sentencing, Mr Sarwar said his high-profile stance against racism had seen him repeatedly subjected to threats and racist abuse. He added: "While it has been a very difficult time for me and my family, it has strengthened my resolve to keep fighting for those who aren't as fortunate as I am to have a voice. "I want to thank the police and courts for their action in this case and hope it encourages victims across Scotland to report instances of anti-Muslim hatred. "I am pleased to have launched the first ever public inquiry into Islamophobia in Scotland, and this case demonstrates why it is important to understand both the scale of the challenge and the work needed to find solutions." Institutionalised racism Earlier this year, a pensioner from Dumfries who sent abusive emails to Mr Sarwar was fined £400. In one of the messages, Donald Brown, 72, told the politician to "go back to Pakistan because you're probably happier amongst your own kind". The messages were sent in 2018, after Mr Sarwar claimed a Scottish Labour councillor told him "Scotland wouldn't vote for a brown Muslim Paki". Mr Sarwar then launched a cross-party group on Islamophobia at Holyrood, with the aim of rooting out institutionalised racism in Scotland.	A man who sent racist and threatening emails to Labour MSP Anas Sarwar has been ordered to carry out 120 hours of unpaid work.
+text: The two-hour tour of Colchester, Essex, was due to be conducted by Liberal Democrat Sir Bob Russell and visit "significant places" in his life. It was offered on eBay with a starting price of £40 but received no bids. Sir Bob, who has represented Colchester since 1997 and was knighted last year, could not be reached for comment. The tour was billed as a "Rome around Colchester", which was the site of a Roman fortress and known as Camulodunum. Colchester was first mentioned by Roman author Pliny the Elder, who died in 79 AD. The tour was for one or two people and was to include high tea in the Castle Park Cafe. It was offered by East of England Liberal Democrats. The only lot it has sold so far was a tour of St Albans Abbey conducted by Sandy Walkington, Liberal Democrat prospective parliamentary candidate for St Albans. It sold for £20, with the winning bidder rating the tour as "very good".	A walking tour of Britain's oldest recorded town hosted by its MP has failed to attract any bids in an online auction.
+text: By Brian WheelerBBC News, Washington DC In the UK, the shadow cabinet is a team of politicians from the party that finished second in the general election, known as the Opposition, who scrutinise and challenge the government's policies. It is a way of both holding the government of the day to account and presenting voters with a ready-made alternative government, with its own set of policies. All cabinet ministers - and many junior ministers - have an Opposition shadow, with whom they do battle in Parliament and in the TV studios. The current shadow cabinet, headed - and chosen - by Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, has more than 30 members. They are given public money to hire researchers and develop policy - and time in Parliament to rebut government statements. Other parties can, and do, set up "shadow cabinets", but they do not have the same status or resources as the Opposition team. If the Opposition party wins the next general election, the shadow cabinet, sometimes with one or two changes, becomes the government. Being a shadow minister can be a thankless, unglamorous task - all responsibility and no power. But it is a reliable proving ground for future leaders - Tony Blair made his name as shadow home secretary before going on to lead the Labour Party to three general election victories. At its best, the system can be a powerful protection against badly thought-out policy, lies and spin. At its worst, it can lead to "opposition for opposition's sake" - a sterile rebuttal-by-rote of whatever the government minister says. The most effective shadow cabinets have tended to be ones with well thought out policies and a stable line-up of effective performers, who can establish themselves as credible alternatives. Being agile and spotting opportunities to humiliate the government, and knowing how to use research and data to the best effect, also helps. The "shadow cabinet" assembled by Mark Green, a Democratic politician from New York, to hold the Trump administration to account is unlikely to have anything like the kind of profile or political clout of a British shadow cabinet. It has 15 members and relies on donations to support its efforts. It will have no role in Congress and no formal links to the Democratic Party, relying instead on social media to get its message across. At its launch this week, it described itself as "a comprehensive, one-portal stop of 'citizen secretaries' - officials and scholars who will comment agency-by-agency not just on small 'lies' but especially on false narratives in the service of political ends". Its members include Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, who is "shadowing" attorney general Jeff Sessions, and Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's former Labor Secretary, who will "shadow" Trump pick Alex Acosta. As a group of unelected commentators, they may find it difficult to differentiate themselves from other fact-checking teams and opposition pundits - but they do have one potential advantage over British shadow cabinets. They are all experts in their fields. Shadow cabinets, and indeed cabinets, tend to be chosen from the ranks of MPs and unelected Lords for political reasons. The ability to perform well in Parliament and on the media tends to be prized more highly than expert knowledge. Sometimes, the opposition leader finds his or her hands are tied when it comes to selecting their top team. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has been forced to reshuffle his pack of shadow ministers several times after resignations. It is hard to imagine the Parliament at Westminster without a shadow cabinet, but it is a relatively recent invention. The term was not widely used until the early years of the 20th century. And the idea of presenting an alternative team of ministers to voters did not really take hold until the late 1950s, when television began to dominate elections. America's new "shadow cabinet" can never present itself as an alternative government - that's not how the US system works. But if it learns to be as agile and authoritative as the best British Oppositions it could still have an impact.	A "progressive" shadow cabinet has been set up to rebut and challenge statements made by Donald Trump's administration. The "shadow cabinet" is an alien concept in American politics - so what exactly is it?
+text: The new rule is likely to apply to all shared spaces in offices and factories where there is more than one employee present. The measure is set to begin on 1 September. Individual offices will be exempt. France has seen a sharp rise in coronavirus cases since July and masks are already widely used. Its average number of new cases over seven days is now well above 2,000, double what it was at the start of the month. About 220,000 people have now been infected and more than 30,000 have died. Health officials suggest that almost a quarter of new clusters have been linked to workplaces outside medical settings, reports BBC Paris correspondent Lucy Williamson. The spike comes as the government encourages the country back to work in order to fill a 11% hole in its budget, she adds. France imposed one of Europe's strictest lockdowns in March, which was gradually lifted from 11 May. Following fresh outbreaks in July, the government made face masks compulsory in enclosed public spaces. Several cities have also mandated their use in busy outdoor areas. Until now, however, the French government has only advised the wearing of masks at work when social distancing is not possible. Health minister Elisabeth Borne discussed the issue with union leaders on Tuesday and the new advice is expected to be published in the coming days. The latest measure follows updated advice on the risk of aerosol infections. Coronavirus is spread when droplets are sprayed into the air when infected people talk, cough or sneeze. Those droplets can then fall on surfaces. But experts say there is also emerging evidence of people catching the virus from tiny particles hanging in aerosol form in the air. France is among several European countries tightening coronavirus restrictions, amid increasing infections - particularly among younger people. Italy has made it compulsory to wear masks at bars and clubs in the evening. Meanwhile, the opening match of the 2020-21 season for France's top football league, Ligue 1, has been postponed. The first fixture, in which Marseille were set to take on Saint-Etienne on Friday, has been called off after four positive coronavirus tests at Marseille. The opening match will now be played on either 16 or 17 September.	France is to make face masks compulsory in most workplaces as it grapples with a resurgence in coronavirus cases.
+text: The Framingham Foot Study looked at 1,370 adults and found strong family histories of the condition. They say this suggests people have a genetic predisposition. UK podiatrists said the research supported their view shoes could worsen the problem - but it was a myth they were completely to blame. The main sign of the condition is the big toe pointing towards the other toes, which forces out the bone attached to it - the first metatarsal. This changes the shape of the foot and can cause swelling, tenderness and pain. If symptoms get too bad to bear, surgery will be needed to remove the bunion. Women are known to have a higher incidence of the condition - and this has fed into the idea that high heels or ill-fitting fashionable shoes are to blame. But while these could exacerbate the symptoms - because they might rub the bunion and cause pain or blistering - they do not cause it. Foot shape The study, carried out between 2002 and 2008, looked at people who had foot complaints, including bunions and hammer and claw toes and then looked at the incidence of the same conditions in close family members. It found a very strong correlation between family incidence of bunions, across men and women of all ages, but particularly in women. The researchers suggest this could be due to inheriting a particular shape of foot which predisposes a person to developing the condition. Dr Marian Hannan, who led the study , said: "These new findings highlight the importance of furthering our understanding of what causes greater susceptibility to these foot conditions, as knowing more about the pathway may ultimately lead to early prevention or early treatment." Richard Handford, of the Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists, said: "This is what we tell our patients - as opposed to the myth that shoes cause bunions." "It is something a person will have a predisposition to - but poor footwear will exacerbate it. "It's a bony deformity, so it's not going to fit into a shoe if you ram it in. "And once you have a bunion, accommodative footwear is it."	The risk of developing bunions - bony growths on the big toe - is linked to your family, not your shoes, a US study has shown.
+text: It was the first step in a process to release gas trapped in a seam of shale running from Clitheroe to the coast. The process, called fracking, will take place in the coming weeks to see if it is viable. Earlier this year, environmentalists called for a moratorium on drilling until its safety is established. Mark Miller, CEO of Cuadrilla Resources, said: "We're convinced there is significant gas and we're right at the stage where we are figuring out whether this would be commercially viable to produce it. "So that's what the fracking and well testing will tell us over the next 30 to 60 days." Fracking, which involves the hydraulic fracturing of the ground using high-pressure liquid containing chemicals to release the gas, has been considered controversial in the States, where it is claimed some water supplies near drilling have been contaminated. Cuadrilla Resources maintains it is safe. The process was backed by MP Tim Yeo of the Energy and Climate Change Committee earlier this month.	Engineers drilling for shale gas near Blackpool have carried out their first UK operation to fracture the rock thousands of feet below ground.
+text: The scooter carrying the man was struck by a silver car and pushed down the road in Alweston, near Sherborne, on Wednesday, just before 14:00 GMT. The man, who was tipped out, suffered "nasty cuts" to his head and right arm and was taken to hospital, police said. Another driver who saw the crash stopped to help. Dorset Police said the car involved - possibly an estate car - had attempted to overtake as the man was turning right. It did not stop after the crash. The man is now recovering at home following hospital treatment. Police Sergeant Tom Renshaw said: "This collision has left the victim with nasty cuts to his head and arm and he has been extremely shaken by what happened. "He now faces Christmas having to recover from his injuries rather than celebrating with his loved ones." Police urged the driver involved to come forward and for anyone who notices damage to a silver car to get in touch.	A man in his 80s was injured when he was knocked off his mobility scooter by a car in an apparent hit-and-run crash in Dorset.
+text: The original writers, producers and cast members will appear in the new show, given the working title The Conners. Ms Barr will not receive any payment for the series, ABC said. The network cancelled Roseanne in May, immediately after Ms Barr posted a racist tweet. Later blaming sedative pill Ambien for her words, the comedian likened a former aide to President Barack Obama to an ape. A vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, Ms Barr received support from the White House in the ensuing scandal. The Conners will start in the autumn and is expected to have Roseanne's daughter Darlene, played by Sara Gilbert, as the main protagonist. Aside from Ms Gilbert, core cast members John Goodman, Laurie Metcalf, Lecy Goranson and Michael Fishman will also star in the 10-episode season. In a joint statement the five said their characters "not only have a place in our hearts, but in the hearts and homes of our audience, "We are so happy to have the opportunity to return with the cast and crew to continue to share those stories through love and laughter." For her part, Ms Barr expressed "regret" for her removal, saying in a statement she agreed to a settlement with ABC "in order that 200 jobs of beloved cast and crew could be saved" and wished the best for all involved. It is not yet known how the writers of The Conners will address the disappearance of the former lead character.	ABC has ordered a spinoff to comedy series Roseanne, without the involvement of its creator and namesake, Roseanne Barr.
+text: Wales' largest mass participation race takes place around the capital's streets on Sunday, 1 October. A spokesman for organiser Run4Wales said the number of entrants breaks last year's record of 22,000 runners. Since its inception in 2003, it has become the UK's second largest event of its kind and last year participants raised £2.5m for charity. This year's route starts outside Cardiff Castle and will take runners past Cardiff City Stadium to Penarth, before they cross to Cardiff Bay and complete a loop of Roath Park Lake.	The Cardiff Half Marathon is a 25,000 sell-out for the first time, organisers have confirmed.
+text: Jersey telecommunications company JT has had reports of automated calls and callers asking for personal details. JT's Director of Corporate Affairs, Daragh McDermott, said people needed to hang up immediately and avoid ringing the numbers back. He said JT Global did its best to protect people from the scams but it was difficult. He said: "There are up to a million numbers available and we cannot just block people from calling these numbers. "What we can do is urge people when they receive suspicious calls to hang up immediately."	Islanders in Jersey are being warned not to give their personal details to phone scammers.
+text: Police say 84 eclectus parrots and 41 endangered white cockatoos were stuffed into drain pipes sealed by wire. Indonesia's vast jungles are home to many threatened bird species. The country is trying to rein in a rampant wildlife trade. Separate raids were conducted in parts of eastern Indonesia, leading to the arrests of four men. If found guilty, they face jail sentences of up to five years and fines of 100m Rupiah ($7,400; £5,600). Indonesia is home to a large-scale illegal trade of birds, many of which find themselves sold in giant avian markets. Many poached birds are also smuggled abroad. Dwi Adhiasto of the Wildlife Conservation Society believes the birds uncovered from Monday's raid were on their way to the Philippines, given links to "a parrot smuggling network there". Native to Indonesia's North Maluku province, white cockatoos are listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The IUCN says there are between 43,000 and 183,000 white cockatoos left in the world - but their numbers are falling due to bird poaching and trapping, and destruction of their natural habitats.	A wildlife raid in Indonesia yielded startling results after 125 exotic birds were found squashed into pipes.
+text: By Kevin PeacheyPersonal finance reporter The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced it will conduct a full inquiry into the funerals sector. The essential costs of a funeral have increased by 6% each year for the past 14 years, it said. Families struggled to find clear prices and details of services online, and were unable to shop around. As it was such a difficult time, it was hard for grieving relatives to search out a range of options, the CMA said. "This appears to have made it easier for some funeral directors to charge high prices," it said. In November, the CMA said it had "serious concerns" about above-inflation price rises. The CMA found that people typically spent between £3,000 and £5,000 organising a funeral, with the average price of the core elements now standing at £4,271. Larger chains had consistently raised prices, it said. Now, it has concluded that a full investigation is needed. Cremations account for a large share of the cost and the CMA said that the largest private crematoria operators had increased prices by between 6% and 8% each year for the past eight years. Some local authorities had also raised fees considerably. The watchdog also highlighted the sparsity of crematoria providers in local areas, and said it was difficult for new companies to enter the market owing to the planning regime and high fixed costs. Investigation 'welcome' Shares in Dignity, one of the UK's largest funeral providers, fell by nearly 3% in early trading, having also dropped sharply after the CMA's interim announcement in November. Mike McCollum, chief executive of Dignity, said: "Dignity has made clear that we welcome the CMA's investigation into the funeral market and look forward to continuing our work with the CMA and other industry bodies to protect consumers." Terry Tennens, chief executive of the National Society of Allied and Independent Funeral Directors, said "it's important that a distinction is made between the behaviour of family run firms and large chains and crematoria operators. "We're working with partners across the funeral sector to agree a website price template which will provide the public with a format that enables easy comparison of funeral director prices. In the meantime, we urge all our members with websites to display their prices online." There is a state safety net, the Funeral Expenses Payment, available to people on certain benefits, but critics say it still leaves a shortfall that has to be picked up by families.	Some funeral directors find it easy to charge grieving families higher prices, the UK's competition watchdog has said ahead of an in-depth investigation.
+text: By Sean CoughlanBBC News education correspondent It will be included as one of the science options that count towards this measure. The English Baccalaureate (EBacc) requires pupils to get good GCSE grades in English, maths, sciences, history or geography and a language. Technology firms have been calling for a bigger role for studying computing. Microsoft's education director Steve Beswick welcomed the announcement as the "start of a journey" in changing how computer science is taught. He wants the subject to be taught to even younger children, including in primary school. A Google spokeswoman said this "marks a significant further investment in the next generation of British computer scientists". Core subjects The decision by Education Secretary Michael Gove will mean that computing will count as a science in the English Baccalaureate for secondary school league tables from January 2014 - alongside physics, chemistry, biology and pupils taking double science. The Department for Education says the change is intended to reflect the "importance of computer science to both education and the economy". In January 2012, Mr Gove announced he was replacing the information and communications technology (ICT) curriculum in schools with a more challenging computer science curriculum, developed to meet the needs of technology firms. In October, a panel of technology experts, including representatives of Google and Microsoft, called for the inclusion of computer science in the English Baccalaureate. The English Baccalaureate was introduced as a measure of school performance, appearing in league tables, and showing the proportion of pupils achieving GCSEs grade C and above and some AS-levels in specified key subjects. The planned changes in qualifications in England will see some of these core subjects becoming English Baccalaureate Certificates, replacing the current GCSEs. There have been several lobbying campaigns to add further subjects to the English Baccalaureate - including arts and religious education - with concerns that subjects outside this group could be marginalised. Computer science will be the first extra subject to be added. The subject is being offered by exam boards including OCR, AQA and WJEC. AQA's first cohort will take the exam in summer 2014 - with 231 schools signed up to teach the subject. OCR introduced the subject in 2010 with a first 50 candidates taking the exam in 2011. This had risen to 2,000 candidates for the subject in summer 2012. WJEC's GCSE computer science course was available for teaching from September 2012. Alongside sciences, the English Baccalaureate comprises English, maths and humanities - which is a choice of history or geography - and a language. Languages can be either ancient or modern, drawn from a list of 172 course options, ranging from classical Greek to Japanese and Urdu. The introduction of computer science prompted arts campaigners to call for a further widening of the English Baccalaureate. Deborah Annetts, chief executive of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, called on the government to address "the needs of the creative economy and introduce rigorous creative subjects". Stephen Twigg, Labour's education spokesman, said: "Adding computer science into the EBacc is too little, too late. Gove's exams still place no value on creative subjects like art, music and drama, and no value on practical subjects like engineering, design and technology and construction." A Department for Education spokesman said: "We need to bring computational thinking into our schools. Having computer science in the EBacc will have a big impact on schools over the next decade. "It will mean millions of children learning to write computer code so they are active creators and controllers of technology instead of just being passive users."	Computer science is going to become part of the English Baccalaureate - one of the measures used in school league tables in England.
+text: It comes after the medical director of the NHS in England said the rates were worrying and should be investigated. Health Minister Mark Drakeford ruled out an inquiry claiming the call was an attempt to "drag the Welsh NHS through the mud". He said data for England and Wales could not be compared. The statistics are part of a drive to make the NHS more transparent in the wake of the Stafford Hospital scandal. Neglect and abuse at Stafford Hospital was said to have contributed to hundreds of unnecessary deaths between 2005 and 2008 and prompted a public inquiry. Speaking to BBC Wales, Mr Drakeford said he was "coldly furious" about the way an email Sir Bruce Keogh had sent his NHS Wales equivalent, Dr Chris Jones, was being used. In the email, sent in November but now released under the Freedom of Information Act, Sir Bruce said persistently high death rates in Welsh hospitals should be investigated. Sir Bruce said data on rates in six Welsh hospitals was worrying, but not adequate to form a view. Sir Bruce and Dr Jones have met since the email was sent but the outcome of that meeting is unknown. Mr Drakeford said he had "no quarrel" with the email sent by the most senior doctor in England's NHS to his Welsh equivalent. He went on: "But the use that has been made of that email today makes me coldly furious. 'Utter shambles "It is the concerted political attempt by the Conservative Party in London to drag the Welsh NHS through the mud which is absolutely unacceptable to me. "All they are interested in doing is trying to divert attention from the utter shambles that is the English NHS by trying to pretend that things in Wales are worse. "They are not and we will not fall into that kind of nonsensical trap." Mr Drakeford insisted the quarterly trend showed that things were getting better in Wales' NHS. Sir Bruce's e-mail came amid heightened tensions between the governments in London and Cardiff Bay over the performance of the Welsh NHS. Prime Minister David Cameron has repeatedly criticised the performance of the Welsh NHS and the Labour administration in Cardiff Bay during Prime Minister's Questions. Statistics published last year by the Welsh government showed 11 out of 17 district general hospitals in Wales had higher death rates than should be expected. Officials described the findings as a "fire alarm" but they warned that there were major problems with the way the data was collected. More updated statistics now show the figure is down to eight. On Thursday, Welsh Conservative leader Andrew RT Davies, said: "The concerns raised in this email confirm our serious worries over standards of care in the NHS. "Professor Keogh's recommendation of 'investigation' into mortality rates should be immediately undertaken and no longer ignored." The Welsh NHS has faced problems recently with key targets for A&E missed since 2009, ambulance response time targets hit once since May 2012 and a rise in people waiting more than nine months for their first hospital appointment. A Welsh government spokesperson said: "The NHS in Wales is open, transparent and has a higher level of scrutiny than any other part of the UK. "Mortality rates in Wales are published on a quarterly basis and latest figures demonstrate clear improvement. "The points raised by Sir Bruce were discussed with him at a meeting with Dr Chris Jones on December 10th." But Tony Beddow, visiting professor at the University of South Wales Institute of Health and Social Care and an adviser to Edwina Hart when she was health minister, issued a warning over the e-mail. "There is form on this," he told BBC Radio Wales. "A few months ago one of Sir Bruce Keogh's reports was used, and I would say misused, in relation to the English data. "This is not a new issue. "There are reasons why in my view the English administration has to try and portray the shambles that I have described to me every time I meet my colleagues in England - which now passes for a failing healthcare system - and try to portray that in the best light possible."	Calls for an inquiry into death rates at Welsh hospitals are politically motivated and a "nonsensical trap", the health minister has claimed.
+text: By Orla GuerinBBC News, Kabul The Taliban came once for Fawzia Koofi, and she knows they could come again. This prominent member of parliament - and mother of two - survived a hail of bullets last year. "It was the Taliban. They kept shooting at my car for half an hour," she said. "But luckily I survived that. For me the threats are more, because I don't like to keep silent". Lately there was a new threat. Fawzia was warned that the much-feared insurgents of the Haqqani network planned to assassinate her. "Our intelligence service wrote to me saying please strengthen your security measures and be careful. I don't know what that means," she said, with a laugh. "How can I be careful if they want to assassinate me?" This articulate and tireless campaigner refuses to be intimidated. She shuttles from parliament to public meetings, under armed guard, championing reform and women's rights. But over lemon tea, in her Kabul home, she spoke about her new fear - that Afghan women could soon be abandoned by the international community, which promised them so much 10 years ago. "They seem to kind of turn their face to the women's issues, and say we just want to say goodbye and leave Afghanistan," she said, "and that could put us even more at risk because we have been outspoken about what we want. "If they leave without giving us an assurance for our own security, the women's rights activists will be the first victims," Fawzia said. Clock turned back Another outspoken activist, Wazhma Frogh, of the Afghan Women's Network, already jokes with friends about the risk of being hanged if the Taliban return. "There are times when we laugh among women's groups and say 'Okay, the first day you might be hanging around this square or you might be killed,'" she said. "We joke about it on a daily basis, because we are that scared". That's a lot to be scared about, and a lot at stake. In the decade since the Taliban government was ousted from power, there has been tangible progress for Afghan women and girls - though much less than many had hoped. Women now account for almost 30% of Afghan MPs. Equal rights are enshrined in the constitution. The number of girls in school has climbed to 2.5 million. But in some areas handed to Afghan control, the clock is already being turned back, according to Wazhma Frogh. One women's organisation had to close training projects in five districts, she said, because communities were fearful, knowing that foreign troops would be pulling out. Feisty and fearless as she is, Wazhma is haunted by flashbacks from Taliban times - from the era when women could be beaten because their feet were visible. "The nightmare that I have is the memories of when I lived under the Taliban," she said. "That's what we went through and that's what might come back." Storm cloud In her textile factory on the edge of Kabul, Hassina Sher Jan shares those concerns. "I'm in counter-insurgency," said the stylish entrepreneur with a smile, gesturing to the rows of men and women sewing, cutting and pressing side by side. Women make up half the workforce at the Boumi Design Company, producing cushions, curtains and tea cosies, and fashioning new future for themselves and their country. Nadia sits in the back row, head bent over her sewing machine. Under the Taliban, she and her seven sisters had to stay at home, embroidering burqas. Zarghona, who wears a patterned yellow headscarf and lipstick, said she was providing for her two younger brothers. "I'm proud to work like a man to support my family," she said. "I was very sad in the Taliban times because I couldn't work outside." But the possibility of reconciliation with insurgents hangs over this business, like a storm cloud. The Taliban would want to shape the future, as they did the past, Hassina warned. "None of the Taliban have come forward to saw I am a moderate, and I believe differently," she said. "Of course all the achievements that we have had so far are going to be lost. We have been fooling ourselves with thinking that there are moderate Taliban, and the situation will be different. They are not saying that. We are making that up," Hassina said. Stoned for adultery The death of a 25-year old woman called Siddqa is testament to that. An amateur recording, which emerged in January, captured her last moments. She was slaughtered, without mercy, in a Taliban-controlled area of Northern Afghanistan. The grainy footage shows her standing waist deep in a hole, shrouded in a blue burqa, as local men bayed for blood. Siddqa had eloped, and been found guilty of adultery. The Taliban stoned her - for two minutes - then shot her dead. In areas under Taliban control women are still voiceless and defenceless, 10 years on. Fawzia Koofi wants her daughters to grow up in a different Afghanistan. She has spent the past decade working for that. After a long day of speeches, and political meetings, Fawzia sits at the dining room table, helping her eldest daughter prepare for a computer exam. Sharhazad, 13, wants to be an aerospace engineer but she and her younger sister are afraid for themselves and their mother. They want a future outside their homeland. "My daughters seem to be worrying more these days," said Fawzia. "They are asking me questions like 'why are we living in Afghanistan?'. It makes me feel sad. They would prefer to be poorer abroad, with safety and stability."	Women's rights activists in Afghanistan say they fear the advances made by women over the past decade could be reversed if a peace deal is done with the Taliban.
+text: It was found in the summer of 2010 and divers at the time discovered a tunic button and piece of Spanish pottery. Far from home, this wreck is not the first to be found off the coast of Ireland. It's thought that up to 24 ships were wrecked along the north and west coasts of Ireland as the Armada made its way home after defeat at the hands of the English. In the summer of 1588 the Spanish Armada set sail for England after decades of hostility between Spain's catholic King Philip II and the protestant Queen Elizabeth I of England. Once in-laws, when Phillip was married to Elizabeth's elder sister Mary, the Spanish king was determined to overthrow the new Protestant regime in Britain introduced by Henry VIII. Excavation It is remembered as one of the greatest naval battles in history, when the British fleet of 66 ships defeated an Armada twice its size by sailing fireships into its formation off Calais. Although relatively few ships were destroyed, the wind forced the Armada fleet into the North Sea. After drifting into the North Sea, unable to return to Spain through the channel, the remainder of the fleet faced a perilous voyage home through the unfamiliar waters and worsening weather around Scotland and Ireland. This latest find was discovered in shallow water near Burtonport. The Irish Department of Arts Heritage and the Gaeltacht has given 50,000 euros of funding for an exploratory excavation of the wreck. Minister Jimmy Deenihan said that he was "delighted" to be able to support investigations into "a major find of significance not only to Ireland but also to the international archaeological, historical and maritime communities". If it proves to be an Armada vessel, the minister said that it could constitute one of the most intact of these wrecks discovered to date. "It could provide huge insight into life on board and the reality of the military and naval resources available to the Armada campaign", he said. The Geological Survey of Ireland will supply one of its research vessels, the RV Keary, free of charge as the main dive vessel. Around the BBC BBC - History - The Spanish Armada Related Internet Links Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport - Ireland	A wreck believed to be a ship from the Spanish Armada, discovered by archaeologists off the coast of County Donegal, is to be excavated by the Irish government.
+text: The British-American journalist, who led an investigation into the drug Thalidomide, died of heart failure in New York, his wife Tina Brown said. His 70-year career also saw him work as a magazine founder, book publisher, author and - at the time of his death - Reuters' editor-at-large. Sir Harold was editor of the Sunday Times for 14 years and oversaw many campaigns in that time. He then went on to become the founding editor of Conde Nast Traveller magazine and later president of the publishing giant, Random House. One of Britain and America's best-known journalists, Sir Harold also wrote several books about the press and in 2003 was given a knighthood for his services to journalism. A year earlier, a poll by the Press Gazette and the British Journalism Review named him the greatest newspaper editor of all time. Author and editor Tina Brown said on Twitter that her husband was "the most magical of men" and had been "my soulmate for 39 years". Sir Harold forged his reputation as editor of the Northern Echo in the 1960s, where his campaigns resulted in a national screening programme for cervical cancer and a posthumous pardon for Timothy Evans, wrongly hanged for murder in 1950. During his tenure as editor of the Sunday Times, his notable campaigns included fighting the Distillers Company for greater compensation for those affected by Thalidomide. But he said campaigns should be selective, and he deplored what he saw as the invasion of privacy by the British tabloid press. Thalidomide, which first appeared in the UK in 1958, was prescribed to expectant mothers to control the symptoms of morning sickness. However, hundreds of these mothers in Britain, and many thousands across the world, gave birth to children with missing limbs, deformed hearts, blindness and other problems. Sir Harold's campaign, launched in 1972, eventually forced the UK manufacturer, Distillers Company - at the time the Sunday Times's biggest advertiser - to increase the compensation payments. He also fought a legal injunction to stop the paper revealing the drug's developers had not gone through the proper testing procedures. Speaking about his campaigning in a 2010 interview with the Independent, Sir Harold said: "I tried to do - all I hoped to do - was to shed a little light. And if that light grew weeds, we'd have to try and pull them up." What is Thalidomide? Sir Harold later edited the Times but left in 1981 following a public falling-out with the paper's owner, Rupert Murdoch, over editorial independence. Writing about their relationship, Sir Harold described his decision not to "campaign against" Mr Murdoch's takeover of the papers as "the worst in my professional career". He added: "My principal difficulty with Murdoch was my refusal to turn the paper into an organ of Thatcherism. That is what the Times became." Harry Evans personified not only the noblest possibilities of journalism, but of social mobility in the 20th Century too. Born into what he called "the respectable working-class", his route to national and international acclaim via the streets of Manchester and Darlington - the latter as editor of the Northern Echo - is sadly a route few take today. He embodied the most romantic ideal of an editor: a humble hack taking on mighty forces through the dogged pursuit of truth. Though he later fell out with Rupert Murdoch, and never forgave him, in his 14 years at the helm of the Sunday Times he redefined journalism itself. He was a master craftsman, in a trade where practical wisdom was precious and vital; and he combined a flair for layout, projection and design with a remarkable nose for a story, particularly those with human suffering at their heart. But above all he was brave. During his reign, it seemed no super-rich bully or powerful government could intimidate him. In our era of information overload, diminished trust in journalism, and fewer people willing to pay for news, the nostalgia for what he represented is impossible to resist. As he put it himself in the title of his wonderful memoir from 2009, he reached the top in Vanished Times. He had the resources, and the time, to hold power to account - and he did uniquely well. Mixed with his charm and sheer decency, this put journalism itself in a debt to him that will never be fully serviced. Journalists have paid tribute to his campaigning work on the Thalidomide scandal and other injustices. Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Guardian, said he was a "master craftsman of journalism" who "was the editor we all wanted to be". Andrew Neil, a former editor of the Sunday Times, described Sir Harold as the "greatest editor of his generation" and one with an "unerring instinct for a story". Author Robert Harris told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that Sir Harold was an outsider coming in to the Sunday Times, the "son of a railway man who wanted to take on the establishment". Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who once worked as a journalist at the Times newspaper, described Sir Harold as a "true pioneer of investigative journalism" who "will always be remembered" for "tirelessly campaigning on behalf of those who were affected" by the Thalidomide scandal that he exposed. 'Giant among journalists' Ian Murray, executive director of the Society of Editors, said: "Sir Harold Evans was a giant among journalists who strove to put the ordinary man and woman at the heart of his reporting." And Glen Harrison, a Thalidomide survivor and deputy chairman of the campaign group Thalidomide UK, described Sir Harold as "an outstanding human being for our cause". After leaving the Times, Sir Harold and his second wife, Tina Brown, moved to New York. She edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, while he became founding editor of Conde Nast magazine. In 2011, at the age of 82, Sir Harold was appointed editor-at-large at Reuters, the organisation's editor-in-chief describing him as "one of the greatest minds in journalism".	Former Sunday Times editor Sir Harold Evans has died at the age of 92.
+text: By Mark SavageBBC music reporter The singer posted a video of the track, Looking for America, on Instagram, just hours after writing it. As her producer Jack Antonoff plays guitar, Del Rey softly sings: "I'm still looking for my own version of America." "One without the guns, the flag can freely fly. No bombs in the sky, only fireworks and you and I," she goes on. The shootings in Texas and Ohio left 31 people dead over the weekend. "I know I'm not a politician and I'm not trying to be so excuse me for having an opinion," said Del Rey in her Instagram caption. "But in light of all of the mass shootings and the back to back shootings in the last couple of days... I just wanted to post this video." Del Rey is not the only musician to address the attacks, and criticise politicians' lack of action on gun control, in recent days. "Imagine a world where it's easier to get an AK-47 than a Visa," tweeted Rihanna, while country star Kacey Musgraves called on her fans to "hold your politicians [and] the president accountable". "For a man who clearly loves being well-liked, it's indescribably mind-numbing to see him blatantly and murderously ignore doing one thing that would not only make people happy but would save people's lives," she wrote. Blink-182 postponed a planned concert in El Paso, Texas, on Sunday in "solidarity with the community". Other stars who have spoken out against America's gun control laws included Cardi B, Chuck D, John Legend and Billy Ray Cyrus. President Trump condemned the shootings on Monday, saying: "In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy. "These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America." But he did not voice support for gun control measures proposed in Congress, instead calling for mental health gun control reforms and the death penalty for those who commit mass murder. "Mental illness and hate pull the trigger, not the gun," Mr Trump said. Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	Lana Del Rey has previewed a new song, written in response to the two mass shootings in America over the weekend.
+text: In a letter to the Welsh Language Commissioner, chairman of Trago Mills, Bruce Robertson, called the signs "visual clutter". Welsh language campaign group Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg said the letter was "very offensive". Mr Robertson said he would not "pander to minorities". In the letter, Mr Robertson also criticises Welsh medium education, saying: "I also harbour misgivings upon the challenge to the educational system that teaching another language will pose, certainly if the existing standard of literacy is indicative, 'furniture' last week only being spelt by an employee as 'fernicher': forgive my ignorance but for all I know that may be the correct spelling ....in Welsh!" Despite committing in the letter to erect bilingual signage, the signs at Trago Mills' Merthyr Tydfil store are currently in English only. But Trago Mills chairman Bruce Robertson told BBC Wales: "I have never ever heard it spoken, and I frequent stores, I frequent restaurants, I frequent bars and I have many friends in the valley just across the road where I've spent much time across not 22 but actually 30 years, and in all honesty, frankly, I've never heard it spoken. "With all due respect to Welsh speakers, with all due respect to local people, I have no lack of respect for them, that's why I've invested £68m into having a presence in Wales and creating 380 jobs. "I'm unlikely to, as I say respectfully, to pander to minorities when trying to do the best for the majority." Merthyr Tydfil has the second lowest number of Welsh speakers out of all 22 local authorities at 8.9%, although 27% of 10-14 year olds do speak the language. The Welsh Language Commissioner, Meri Huws, said: "Research certifies that customers - from all over Wales - appreciate seeing businesses using Welsh. "The statistics for the Welsh language are sound, with 80% agreeing that using the language shows respect for the community and 86% agree that it shows respect for the Welsh culture. "We have proposed helping Trago Mills to develop the use of the language, and this motion is still standing." Wyn Williams, chair of the local branch of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, said: "It demonstrates a complete disrespect for our country as well as our unique national language. "They also reflect imperialistic attitudes that belong in the far distant past. "The comments about education are completely ignorant - experts are clear that Welsh-medium education means pupils become fluent in both Welsh and in English. "There are tens of thousands of Welsh speakers in the area the store serves, and it's insulting to them."	Trago Mills has been accused of an "anti-Welsh rant" after a letter was leaked complaining about bilingual signs at its Merthyr Tydfil store.
+text: Damage to overhead lines saw passengers stranded on trains for several hours on Saturday as dozens of services were cancelled and the station was closed. It has now emerged ScotRail missed performance targets in 22 out of 34 areas in the first months of 2018. The company said it would keep improving its level of service. Separately, an independent watchdog survey has named Glasgow Queen Street - also operated by Abellio ScotRail - as Britain's most unpopular station, although Glasgow Central ranked well, making into the top 10. Transport Scotland measures ScotRail's performance through quarterly figures called the Service Quality Incentive Regime (Squire). The Squire figures are linked to financial penalties for failing to meet benchmarks. ScotRail previously claimed it had signed up to what it called the "toughest service quality regime in the UK" and that they were "not fines", as "the money gets put back into Scotland's railways". The Scottish government confirmed that the firm had accumulated a record £1.6m in financial penalties over the last three months - nearly £400,000 more than in the previous three months. Latest figures published on 4 May showed ScotRail failed to hit key targets in numerous areas including litter and contamination, train seats, refreshments, food, help points, telephones, ticket machines, train and station toilets, cleanliness, taxi ranks and car parks. One of the biggest dips in performance came in station CCTV, which at 77.8% was short of the 95% benchmark. There is an ongoing union dispute over a cut in the number of CCTV monitoring staff with a planned strike on 19 May - the day of the Scottish Cup Final.. Abellio ScotRail posted a profit of £9.5m in 2015 and a loss of £3.37m in 2016. ScotRail said it had identified 10 priority areas and has developed detailed plans to address the top issues which lead to Squire failures. The company said this has led to improvements in on-train ticket inspections and booking office opening times. A spokesperson said: "These are not fines - it's a reinvestment fund that drives standards even higher, and every penny raised through the fund gets put back into enhancing Scotland's railway. "We have developed detailed plans to keep improving the high level of service our customers quite rightly expect." A Transport Scotland spokesman said: "The Squire regime, the toughest of its kind in the UK, is a fundamental part of our efforts to improve the passenger experience. This level of penalties is disappointing, especially in comparison to the corresponding quarter in 2016/17. "We have robustly challenged ScotRail on the issues which are contributing towards, not only the Squire performance but the non-delivery of the fundamental expectation of staffed stations and trains. "As a result ScotRail has committed to two reviews, one on staffing/recruitment and the other to produce a recovery plan to focus on more effective methods to resolve and repair faults. "All penalties accrued are reinvested in the franchise through improvements to the Scottish Rail Network." Glasgow Central station's high level was closed completely at 22:45 on Saturday after 10 trains travelling on high level routes lost power at around 21:15.. Passengers stranded on affected services were helped off trains by staff, with all customers off the trains by 12:45 on Sunday. Disruption continued into Sunday afternoon. Train lines re-opened at 13:00 but ScotRail said some routes were winding down early to allow for essential repairs to be carried out. Robert Samson, spokesman for Transport Focus, told BBC Scotland's Good Morning Scotland programme: "It was a major disruption. It is good that the services are back to normal today. "But there has to be a review of the way communications to passengers were handled over the weekend. "Overhead lines do come down but passengers were trapped on a train for two to three hours. Glasgow Central station last night was closed for a time. "At that time of night it was difficult to get replacement buses for the number of services that were cancelled. "I think there has to be a review to see how it was handled but I believe they did their best under difficult circumstances but a lot of people would have been inconvenienced." It comes as Glasgow Queen Street was named Britain's most unpopular railway station in a survey of passengers. Independent watchdog Transport Focus took the views of more than 28,000 people at 56 stations for its ranking. Only 58% of travellers were "satisfied" with Queen Street, Scotland's third busiest station. But nearby Glasgow Central made the top 10 with a 91% approval rating.	After a weekend of disruption for passengers at Glasgow's Central Station, it has emerged ScotRail missed most of its latest performance targets.
+text: Thousands of women with terminal breast cancer are being denied extra time with their loved ones due to the high cost of new drugs, it said. The charity called on drugs firms and government to make medicines more accessible. Drugs firms said more drugs needed NHS approval. NICE, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, said it approved drugs based on clinical and cost effectiveness. Over the past few years, NICE has not recommended at least seven breast cancer treatments, with cost being a factor in the rejection of over half of those treatments. Drugs fund Life-extending drugs that are not available on the NHS can currently be paid for through the £200m per-year Cancer Drugs Fund. The fund is due to be available until the end of March 2016. Many drugs have been rejected for approval by NICE on the grounds of cost, Breakthrough Breast Cancer said. The charity has called for action from the government, the pharmaceutical industry, drugs approval body NICE, and charities to bring down the costs of new treatments and sort out funding issues. "The Cancer Drugs Fund was only supposed to be a temporary solution and, while it should remain until a workable alternative is found, it is merely papering over the cracks of a system which is no longer fit for purpose," said Chris Askew, chief executive of Breakthrough Breast Cancer. "Whilst there will be no quick fix solution to this problem, the pharmaceutical industry will need to get serious about its pricing and whoever forms the next government will need to get a grip on the problem and take action to resolve it," he added. The cost of a life The NICE drugs approvals process takes into account the cost of the drug, as well as how it effects a patient's quality of life, and how long they live. NICE uses a measure called a "quality adjusted life year" - a "QALY" - to gauge how much it would cost to give patients a year of healthy life using a treatment. Drugs that cost up to between £20,000 and £30,000 per QALY can get NICE approval, but end-of-life drugs that cost almost double that can also be approved. However, some innovative cancer treatments can cost up to £100,000 per QALY, so are dropped by NICE, Breakthrough Breast Cancer senior policy manager Caitlin Palframan said. "We understand it costs money to develop new treatments," she said. "It's not that we believe that pharmaceutical companies don't have a right to make a profit. "However, it doesn't do anybody any good if the treatments aren't available on the NHS," she added. The charity gave the example of breast cancer drug Kadcyla, which is not routinely available in England and Wales, due to its cost. Safety net? Cancer drugs that are rejected by NICE can be funded through the Cancer Drugs Fund, but only in England, Ms Palframan said. In Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, terminally-ill patients must get cancer specialists to apply for funding for non-approved treatments. It was "unacceptable" that some terminally-ill patients "are having to fight for their treatment", she told the BBC. The high costs of new cancer drugs mainly reflect research costs, drugs industry body the ABPI said. "The price of development is high," said ABPI director of value and access Paul Catchpole. "It can cost more than £1bn and 10 to 12 years to research and develop a new medicine." In addition, only one third of new medicines end up covering research and development costs, he said. "The issue is - who decides what 'high' and 'appropriate' is?" he added. Mr Catchpole said there were "no upper limits" on what the Cancer Drugs Fund was willing to pay, and called for "evolution" in how NICE assesses cancer drugs. "We need to make sure [NICE] is taking into account the full costs and benefits of proposals," on the wider economy, he said. The approvals body said it "makes recommendations for treatments based on the clinical and cost effectiveness of each drug." "For NICE to recommend a treatment it must work at least as well as, or better than, currently available NHS treatments for the price that the NHS is being asked to pay," it said. The body said that so far this year it had recommended five cancer treatments, and one drug had been recommended for a specific group of patients. It has rejected two cancer drugs this year.	A fund to pay for cancer drugs that are not available on the NHS "papers over" deeper drugs pricing issues, according to charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer.
+text: The hunting of foxes with hounds was banned under the Protection of Wild Mammals (Scotland) Act in 2002. But there have not been any successful prosecutions since - with police branding the legislation "unworkable". A review by Lord Bonomy also suggested introducing independent monitors to randomly check on the activities of hunts. At present, dogs can still be used to flush out foxes and chase them towards the hunts, where the foxes are shot. Effective control But there have been allegations that the law has been broken because guns have not been visibly present. A review of the legislation was ordered by the Scottish government last year, with Lord Bonomy being asked to examine whether the existing law gave adequate protection to wild mammals, while at the same time allowing effective control of these animals where necessary. In his report, Lord Bonomy concluded that there were "aspects and features of the legislation which complicate unduly the detection, investigation and prosecution of alleged offences". And he said there were grounds for suspecting that illegal hunting may still take place, and that those suspicions should be addressed. He suggested that hunt monitors, who would observe hunts on a random basis, could be introduced either through legislation or a voluntary scheme. The monitors could submit a report of their observations to Scottish Ministers, with an annual summary included in the Wildlife Crime in Scotland Annual Report. The judge also said the monitors' observations could be admissible evidence in court. His report also recommended: Responding to the report's publication, Environment Minister Roseanna Cunningham said Scotland had "led the way" in addressing animal welfare concerns, and the government remained committed to ensuring the "highest levels of welfare" for the country's wild animals. She added: "We will now carefully consider the findings, with a view to responding in 2017. Any ensuing proposals for legislative change will be subject to the proper consultation processes." Analysis by Kevin Keane, BBC Scotland environment correspondent There are few people in the UK who are as far apart in their views as those who practice hunting and those who oppose it. And yet the senior judge Lord Bonomy has produced a set of proposals which appear to satisfy both. That outcome cannot be underestimated. Most of his recommendations were expected; clarifying the language of the act, creating a code of practice. The most surprising is the suggestion of appointing independent monitors to randomly track the activities of hunts. Policing the law is a big job. Where the two sides differ is in their interpretation of what Lord Bonomy concludes. League Against Cruel Sports Scotland says his report shows there is "considerable law-breaking." The pro-hunting Scottish Countryside Alliance interprets it by saying there is no evidence packs "are acting outwith the legislation." Ministers will wait until next year to decide what to do next. It may be at that detailed stage that this initial unity diminishes. Scottish Greens MSP Mark Ruskell said the current legislation was not fit for purpose, and claimed wild animal hunters had been able to exploit it using loopholes. He added: "Lord Bonomy's report is clear that changes are needed to introduce greater restriction and monitoring of hunting and that landowners should also be liable for breaches of the law. "The Scottish government must act fast to bring amending legislation to parliament and prevent further animal cruelty from taking place." The League Against Cruel Sports called on the Scottish government to strengthen the law before the current fox hunting season closes at the end of March 2017. Its Scottish director, Robbie Marsland, said: "This review set out to evaluate whether the current law banning hunting in Scotland works. "Lord Bonomy's robust and detailed examination clearly shows that it doesn't, and that he agrees with us and Police Scotland that improvements are essential if it is to stand any chance of fulfilling its purpose of protecting wild animals." Gun wound The Countryside Alliance, which represents hunts, said it was pleased that the inquiry had "recognised the importance of gun packs for fox control and rejected unjustified calls for further restrictions". But it said it does not believe there is a significant problem with the enforcement of the current legislation, and said Police Scotland had confirmed to MSPs in January that there was "no evidence to suggest that the mounted foxhound packs that exist are acting outwith the legislation that is in place at the moment". At the weekend, two charities published what they claimed was proof that a fox was killed by dogs during a recent hunt in Renfrewshire. A post-mortem examination of the animal concluded that a gun wound was unlikely to be the main cause of death and that extensive other injuries were likely to have been inflicted by dogs. The Countryside Alliance said the animal had been shot in accordance with the law. A vote on relaxing hunting laws in England and Wales was shelved last year after SNP MPs indicated they would vote against it.	Scotland's "unduly complicated" fox hunting laws should be changed to make prosecutions easier, a judge has found.
+text: They will pull the switch in a virtual ceremony in Blackpool Tower ballroom on 4 September designed to celebrate those who have shone during the pandemic. Lights ambassador Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen said they were "truly humbling". Thousands usually attend the event at the Tower Festival Headland but it will be a "closed set" due to the lockdown. Creative curator of the Illuminations and TV presenter Llewelyn-Bowen helped select the winners from hundreds of nominations from the public. Leona Harris, a nurse from Rossendale, Lancashire, who raised £30,000 in a week to buy tablets for patients unable to have visitors in hospitals, care homes, and hospices so they could speak to loved ones. Another "hero" picked was six-year-old Will Ritchie who raised more than £12,000 for Wirral University Teaching Hospital Foundation Trust Covid-19 Support Fund. He has a severe visual impairment and epilepsy and completed Will's Marathon Month in June to help the hospital - which has treated him - during the pandemic. The other winners were : Llewelyn-Bowen said: "Every nomination has illustrated the dedication and self-sacrifice that has been made by so many during this pandemic... who have put their own lives on hold to support the sick and the vulnerable." The lights will shine an extra two months this season until 3 January. Why not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk	"Corona heroes" - including a nurse and six-year-old boy who raised thousands of pounds for patients - will switch on this year's Blackpool Illuminations.
+text: By Steve DuffyBBC News It was also by far the worst week for deaths in north Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures. Three quarters of the region's 102 deaths were in Wrexham and Flintshire, Covid-19 hotspots in recent weeks. Meanwhile, Covid deaths in care homes were also at their highest weekly number. The ONS figures show there were 447 deaths involving Covid-19 across Wales for the week ending 22 January. This is 20 fewer than last week, which was the highest recorded during any week of the pandemic. It was still the third highest total registered during the pandemic but the first time the weekly total has fallen since 4 December. The total number of deaths occurring involving Covid-19 in Wales has now risen to 6,473 people. What has happened in different parts of Wales? The Betsi Cadwaladr Health Board area in north Wales - with 102 deaths - had by far its worst week for deaths in the pandemic, with 75% in north east Wales. They included 47 deaths in hospitals and 40 in care homes in the health board area. There were 25 deaths involving Wrexham care home residents and 17 in hospital in the area. There were also 20 hospital deaths involving Flintshire residents. The Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board area saw 78 deaths. These included 20 deaths in hospital and 19 of care home residents in Bridgend. There were 18 more hospitals deaths in Rhondda Cynon Taf and five in Merthyr Tydfil. There were also 29 hospital deaths in Cardiff, 25 involving Caerphilly residents and 24 in Swansea. All counties recorded at least one death involving Covid-19. How many deaths in total? The total number of deaths involving Covid in Wales, up to and registered by 22 January, was 6,330 people. When deaths registered over the following few days are counted, there is a total of 6,473. RCT, with 802 deaths, has the largest number of Covid-19 deaths occurring in Wales, followed by Cardiff with 708 up to the latest week. What about 'excess deaths'? So-called excess deaths, which compare all registered deaths with previous years, continue to be above the five-year average. Looking at the number of deaths we would normally expect to see at this point in the year is seen as a useful measure of how the pandemic is progressing. In Wales, the number of deaths from all causes fell again from 1,170 to 1,077, but it was still 265 deaths (32.6%) above the five-year average for the week. When this is added up, the number of deaths from all causes from 3 January 2020 and up to 22 January 2021 was 41,238, which is 4,962 more than the five-year average. Of these, 6,330 deaths (15.3%) mentioned Covid-19 on the death certificate. When deaths occurring up to 22 January but counting registrations in the week or so after, the total is 6,473. What about care homes? There has also been the highest number of weekly deaths in care homes involving Covid-19 in Wales - 129. This brings a total of 1,396 Covid-19 deaths in care homes up to 22 January, making up 22% of all coronavirus deaths in Wales. Older People's Commissioner for Wales Heléna Herklots said she was "deeply concerned" and that the deaths represented "heartbreak and loss" for families and friends. "It is crucial that care homes continue to work with local public health teams to identify any additional measures that could help protect older people and the staff who care for them, and ensure these are put in place immediately," she said. "Today's sad news also underlines why all possible action must be taken to ensure that older people living in care homes - the group at the very top of the priority list - receive their vaccines as soon as possible to protect them from becoming seriously ill with coronavirus." Meanwhile, Care Inspectorate Wales (CIW) compiles its own figures, which showed they have been notified of 7,445 deaths among adult care home residents, from all causes, since 1 March. This is 37% more care home deaths than notified in the same time period last year, and 40% higher than for the same period in 2018. CIW has been notified of 1,709 care home resident deaths with suspected or confirmed Covid-19, with 490 of these being residents transferred to hospital. Separate figures also show 112 care homes (10.7%) notified at least one confirmed Covid case in the last week. This is a fall from the 163 homes who did the same in the week before. When looking at crude death rates - based on local populations - Wales has four of the highest 10 across England and Wales. RCT has 332.4 deaths per 100,000 people in total so far in the pandemic. Merthyr is third with 305. Bridgend and Blaenau Gwent are also high. Ceredigion, once second lowest behind the Isles of Scilly, now has the 26th-lowest death rate in the UK with 100.4 per 100,000, with Anglesey the lowest in Wales on 65.7 deaths per 100,000. ONS reports registrations of deaths, where doctors either confirm or suspect Covid-19 and include it on the death certificate. As well as hospitals and care homes, it also includes deaths in hospices and people's own homes. In around 90% of cases, it is estimated that Covid is the underlying cause of death, not just a contributory factor.	Covid-19 was involved in 41.5% of all deaths in Wales in the latest week - the highest proportion in the pandemic.
+text: Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Service said six houses in Deep Glade Close, St Thomas, were evacuated on Thursday, just before midnight. More than 45 firefighters from eight forces tackled the blaze in Kilvey Hill that began about 19:30 BST A man who was evacuated said they told him it was a "touch and go" situation. Carl Mainwaring, whose garden backs onto Kilvey Hill, said: "It's not every day you get woken up to your neighbour telling you to evacuate your house." Mr Mainwaring, his wife and their two-year-old son were evacuated at 23:20 BST on Thursday. He said he had been worried the fire would spread to the conifer trees and the fences behind the houses, before eventually setting all of the street's properties alight. "I don't think we realised how serious it was until we spoke to the fire service this morning, when they said it was 'touch and go'. They couldn't get to the fire - they just had to wait for it to come to them". He said cars were still covered in ash the following morning. The service said it had received more than 300 calls. Crews from Swansea Central, Swansea West, Gorseinon, Pontardulais, Neath, Morriston, Llanelli and Tumble worked on "dangerous terrain" to tackle the blaze. Area manager Simon Jenkins said "Crews worked tirelessly to bring the fire under control as it encroached close to properties. "Six properties were evacuated as a precaution. Our control staff worked extremely hard dealing with over 290 emergency calls for this incident during the course of the evening". The service said grass fires resulted in "considerable cost" to the community and environment and put "lives in danger" by affecting responses to other incidents.	Firefighters believe a large grass fire that forced Swansea residents to evacuate their homes was started deliberately.
+text: By Sean CoughlanBBC News family and education correspondent Last year about one in 10 families missed out on their first choice - but 98% got one of their top three places. Primary schools have added 636,000 extra places since 2010 to meet rising numbers - but that demographic bulge is now moving on to secondary. Head teachers' leader Paul Whiteman said securing a place can "feel like a battle for parents". More than 600,000 families will find out where they have been offered a school place for the autumn. Big regional differences The national picture on applications will not be known until June, but the chances of getting a first-choice place have been improving in recent years - up from 88% in 2014 to 91% in 2018. But last year, about 2% did not get an offer on their three top preferences or any of the schools they named. There are big regional variations each year - with authorities such as the East Riding of Yorkshire, Northumberland and Rutland having more than 97% of families getting their first preferences. But the lowest success rates tend to be in London, with only 68% of families in Kensington and Chelsea and 77% in Camden getting their first choice last year. A population boom had put pressure on places - but that has peaked and this year's application numbers could show a downward trend. For the past decade, primary schools have been building extra classrooms as pupil numbers rose by about 15% between 2009 and 2018, up to 4.7 million. The size of the average primary school grew by an extra 42 places, but this has not been spread evenly, with some expanding very significantly and with some areas still struggling to meet demand. 'Anxious wait' Mr Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, called for a more joined-up "national strategy" to ensure enough places. Otherwise, he said, "the annual anxious wait for families will continue". Mr Whiteman warned of a "haphazard" approach to expansion, so that "new school places are not always being commissioned in the areas they are most needed". School standards minister Nick Gibb said standards had risen and the primary school sector was "unrecognisable from a generation ago". He said 87% of primary schools were now judged good or outstanding, and the use of phonics lessons had improved children's reading. "What this means in practice is that even in instances where parents aren't getting the news they hoped for today, the likelihood is that their child will be attending a school which will provide a first-class education," said Mr Gibb. But the New Schools Network, which promotes free schools, said too many children would still be heading for schools which were below the rating of "good". "Finding out which primary school your child is going to should be a time of excitement, but today nearly 100,000 families will find out their child is being sent to a school that isn't good enough," said the group's director, Luke Tryl.	Families in England will find out on Tuesday whether their children have got into their preferred primary schools.
+text: Highlands and Islands Airports Ltd (Hial) said its figures for July were down 1.3%, compared to the same time last year. Of Hial's 11 airports, only Inverness and Tiree recorded increases. It said potential travellers choosing to stay at home to watch the Games was among likely causes for the drop. However, the Scottish government-owned company said the country's regional airports were performing better than counterparts in the rest of Europe in terms of passenger growth. Figures released by industry body Airports Council International indicated a slowing of traffic growth across Europe. Average growth rates of 1.8% were recorded for the first six months of 2012 for airports with less than five million passengers. Hial said the statistics showed it recorded growth of 5% across the group. Its two busiest airports - Inverness and Sumburgh - recorded growth rates of 9.6% and 10.4% respectively. Inglis Lyon, managing director of Hial, said the company had enjoyed a good start to the new financial year. He added: "Clearly, last month's result were less encouraging but we are hopeful that growth will continue. "Much will depend on the strength of the economy, which is a key driver for business and leisure travel. "Market conditions are tough but we are punching above our weight compared to other airports in Europe." Hial's airports in the Highlands, Northern Isles, Argyll, Dundee and the Hebrides connect to a network of more than 30 destinations in the UK and abroad. They include Amsterdam, Bergen, Dusseldorf and Zurich.	The London Olympics was among factors that led to a fall in passenger numbers at Scottish regional airports, it has been suggested.
+text: The pound closed 0.6% higher on Wednesday at $1.22. Against the euro, it rose nearly 1% to close at €1.11. But the gains could prove short-lived. In Thursday's early Asian trade, it fell to $1.21 again. Sterling's current slide began when Prime Minister Theresa May named a date for the start of the Brexit process. On 2 October, she said the UK would trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty by the end of March 2017. Traders have been selling the pound, fearing the impact of leaving the single market. According to figures from the Bank of England, on Tuesday the pound fell to its lowest level in history on a trade-weighted basis. The trade-weighted index measures the pound against a basket of currencies, adjusted to reflect the importance of nations as trading partners. 'Shift in tone' MPs have been demanding to scrutinise the eventual plan to leave the European Union before it is finally agreed, and on Wednesday the government agreed there should be a "full and transparent debate". But it added that the process should not "undermine" the government's negotiating position. "After weeks of tough rhetoric pushing sterling into a trading environment closer to an emerging market currency, the government may aim to stabilise markets, with its rhetoric and suggestions now possibly shifting in tone," said Morgan Stanley's head of currency strategy, Hans Redeker. "However, there is a fine line to walk as [Mrs] May's Conservative Party wants a clean split from Europe. "In addition, giving in too much, even before Article 50 negotiations have started, shifts the negotiation advantage towards the EU. Hence, the pound's rebound should be limited and followed by a decline," he added. 'Should I change my pounds to dollars now?' Who's afraid of the falling pound? Ahmed: The pound's fall and why it matters Viewpoints: How low can the pound go? 'Maximum access' The subject of Brexit dominated the first Prime Minister's Questions since the end of the party conference season. Mrs May told MPs any deal would aim for "maximum possible access to the single market", but added she was "absolutely clear that the British people" wanted "maximum control" over immigration. Analysts warn that the uncertain political situation will continue to make the pound volatile. "It would appear that trying to find a floor for the pound is going to be difficult in the short term, simply due to the amount of political uncertainty being generated on both sides of the Channel, as both sides dance on the edge of the volcano, in laying out their negotiating positions, which for now appear a long way apart," said Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets. Shares slide The FTSE 100 share index has fallen back after a recent strong run, which has been partly helped by the weaker pound. It closed 47 points lower, a drop of 0.7% to 7,024. The fall in the pound has boosted the FTSE 100, as many of the companies in the index generate most of their revenues abroad. A weaker pound means overseas revenues are worth more when they are converted back into sterling. On Tuesday, the benchmark index hit an intra-day high of 7,129.83, and on Monday it fell just short of registering a record close. Analysis: Kamal Ahmed, BBC economics editor Why does the fall of the pound matter? On the upside, it matters for exporters which are boosted as their goods are far cheaper on foreign markets. It matters for multinational companies like pharmaceutical firms which earn much of their income in dollars. It matters for the tourism industry in the UK, as foreign visitors flock here for bargains and good value holidays. On the downside, it matters for tourists travelling abroad who will find everything they buy much more expensive. It matters for the food and fuel this country imports as it becomes more expensive. It matters for inflation, as the rise in import costs feeds through to businesses and the High Street. And remember, it does not need much of a rise in inflation to wipe out real income growth, which at present is running at around 2%. If real incomes start falling, that is when the fall in sterling becomes a truly political issue. Because the pound in your pocket will actually be worth less. Read Kamal's blog in full	The pound has recovered some of its recent losses, with analysts attributing the gains to the promise of a Commons debate on the Brexit process.
+text: All ministers serve at the discretion of the PM, the chancellor told the BBC. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson's repeated Brexit interventions in recent weeks have prompted calls from some in the party for him to be replaced. Mr Hammond said his colleague's comments were "rhetorical flourish" but the cabinet was agreed on a transition period of "around two years". This, he told the BBC, would give businesses the "certainty and comfort" to plan ahead. Theresa May has said her plan for a two-year implementation period after the UK leaves the European Union in March 2019, which she set out in last month's Florence speech, has the full backing of the cabinet. In an interview on Sunday, she side-stepped a question about whether the foreign secretary, who set out a number of his own Brexit "red lines" in a newspaper interview over the weekend and said a transition should last "not a minute" longer than two years, had become "unsackable". Some MPs have reportedly been lobbying for Mr Johnson's removal, saying his comments about the terms of the UK's exit were a direct challenge to the PM's authority. However, others continue to back him, saying his views are not at odds with the government's stated position of wanting to minimise the disruption to business while delivering on the result of last year's referendum. Asked on Monday about Mr Johnson's position, the chancellor - who has himself between criticised by some Tory MP for being too pessimistic about Brexit - said all ministers served at the prime minister's discretion. "I always operate - I think it is a sound and cautious principle - on the principle that everyone is sackable," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. The chancellor said he had initially argued for a transition phase of up to four years but the cabinet, including Mr Johnson, had united behind a "time-limited interim period of around two years" which he suggested offered both flexibility and a "degree of precision". "We have come to this agreed formula of about two years which works for everyone," he told Today. "That leaves us some flexibility but a degree of precision that business needs to start planning.... a transition of about two years will take the immediate pressure off business...If we don't give businesses clarity about the future, they will have to make decisions assuming the worst possible outcome. "What we are hearing from business is a plea... 'don't put us in a position where we have to assume the worst and act accordingly - give us the comfort and certainty we need'." In his keynote speech to the conference, Mr Hammond said a freer, more prosperous UK was the "prize" on offer from Brexit but that people should be aware that this outcome could not be taken for granted. "If we get this right - Britain will have a bright future beyond Brexit," he said. "But to get to it, we must be clear-eyed about the challenges along our way. "We must not downplay the difficulties nor underestimate the complexities. This will be one of the most challenging tasks ever undertaken by a peacetime government but with focus and determination and unity, we will succeed." Business leaders have warned they are "growing impatient" with divisions at the heart of the government, with the British Chambers of Commerce saying it risks undermining business confidence. It called for ministers attending the Conservative Party conference to show "competence and coherence". The organisation's director general Adam Marshall said: "Public disagreements between cabinet ministers in recent weeks have only served to undermine business confidence, not just on Brexit negotiations."	Philip Hammond has said he operates on the basis "everyone is sackable", amid continued Brexit cabinet tensions.
+text: The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said 211 allegations were made against 91 officers over corruption and failure to act. Of those identified 30 will be formally investigated, the watchdog said. Nine of the 62 inquiries to date have been completed and found no evidence of police misconduct, it added. Rachel Cerfontyne, deputy chair of the IPCC, said: "We've certainly found things that have gone wrong and we've certainly found significant failings but in terms of the individuals, whilst we've got concerns around some performance, we've not found is any indication of misconduct." She added that as a result of the inquiry at least one officer had been interviewed under caution but no charges had been brought. An IPCC spokesperson said it had made "learning recommendations" to the force concerning the recording of information and the retention of archived materials." Details of the nature of the allegations at the centre of the nine investigations have not been revealed. 'Intolerable' delay However, Ms Cerfontyne said they related to "leadership, crime reporting and intelligence, as well as attitudes towards survivors and suspected offenders, and the ineffectiveness of police engagement with other agencies". Inquiries began in November 2014 after South Yorkshire Police referred 13 officers to the IPCC and has now grown into the "the second largest operation" the IPCC has undertaken after the Hillsborough inquiry. South Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner Dr Alan Billings, said the length of time the investigation is taking was "intolerable and unfair" on victims and officers and described it as a "denial of natural justice". Ms Cerfontyne said Dr Billings concerns were "entirely understandable" but the IPCC's priority was to ensure all claims were carried out "rigorously and thoroughly". She added the inquiry had been slowed down by a number of factors including the fact new allegations continue to be received, the most recent of which were lodged on Monday. South Yorkshire Police said it was pleased that a number of inquiries had been concluded but that it shared concerns over the time taken to complete the investigation.	Investigations into how 30 police officers handled child sex abuse complaints in Rotherham have begun, the police watchdog said.
+text: The group, known as the Vatican G8, has been chosen from outside the Holy See's administration to ensure independence. Made up of eight cardinals picked by Francis from around the world, the group is looking at ways to reshape the Roman Catholic Church's bureaucracy. Francis said in a newspaper interview that the Vatican had become too self-interested and needed to be inclusive. The Church's central administration has been hit by numerous scandals in recent years, with bishops around the world criticising it as autocratic and heavy-handed. As the three-day talks got underway, Italy's La Repubblica newspaper printed an interview with Francis in which he spoke about problems facing the Vatican's administration. In it he denounced its "Vatican-centric" attitude and conceded that his predecessors had been infatuated with the pomp of the Vatican and its "courtiers". "The [papal] court is the leprosy of the papacy," he said. "It looks after the interests of the Vatican, which are still, in large part temporal interests. This Vatican-centric vision neglects the world around it and I will do everything to change it." 'Spread love' The group's main task is rewrite a 1998 constitution on the workings of the Holy See's various departments. The BBC's David Willey, in Rome, said no immediate decisions were expected and the Pope himself admits change will take time. In the La Repubblica interview, Francis said he wanted a missionary church like that sought by his namesake, St Francis. "We need to give hope to young people, help the aged and open ourselves toward the future and spread love," he said. Meanwhile, the Vatican bank, which has been accused of turning a blind eye to allegations of money laundering by a few account holders and is currently the subject of a radical makeover ordered by Francis, has issued its first ever detailed accounts. The bank, known as the the Institute for Religious Works, reported net profits of 86.6m euros, quadruple those of the previous year.	Pope Francis has held his first meeting with a special group of cardinals to consider ways to reform the Vatican.
+text: Tribunal judges ruled on Monday that people born in Northern Ireland remain British citizens according to the law, even if they identify as Irish. The Good Friday Agreement allows people to identify as British, Irish or both. In 2017, NI woman Emma De Souza won a case against the Home Office in relation to the issue. It deemed she was British when her US-born husband applied for a residence card, making the application under her Irish passport. But on Monday an immigration tribunal upheld an appeal of the case, brought by the Home Office. Speaking in the Dáil (Irish lower house of parliament) on Tuesday, Mr Varadkar said the Good Friday Agreement allows people in Northern Ireland to be British, Irish or both. He said he would raise the case on Thursday or Friday when he meets Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Mr Varadkar said he believed the British court ruling was based on a distinction between identifying as British or Irish as opposed to being a citizen. "That is a misreading in our view of the Good Friday Agreement," he added. 'Citizenship and identity' On Tuesday, Tánaiste (Irish deputy PM) Simon Coveney said the Irish government had concerns about "citizenship and identity provisions" of the Good Friday Agreement being delivered, and would raise them with Northern Ireland Secretary Julian Smith on Tuesday. Anyone born in Northern Ireland has the right to identify as Irish or British or both, as a result of the Good Friday Agreement, signed in April 1998 by the British and Irish governments and Northern Ireland's political parties. The agreement said the British and Irish governments would: "Recognise the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland." A Home Office spokesperson said it was pleased the tribunal agreed that UK nationality law was consistent with the Good Friday Agreement. "We respect the right of the people of Northern Ireland to choose to identify as British or Irish or both and their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship," the spokesperson added. 'Strength of feeling' In its ruling, the judges said that: "As a matter of law, Mrs De Souza is, at present, a British citizen at the current time. "Whilst we fully appreciate her strength of feeling on this matter, it is not disproportionate... for her nevertheless to be required to give notice of revocation, if she wishes only to be a citizen of Ireland." The ruling added that in order to renounce British citizenship, an individual must pay a fee. Mrs De Souza said she was "disappointed" and that she would now seek for the case to be heard in the Court of Appeal.	The Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) Leo Varadkar has said the De Souza court ruling is "out of spirit" with the Good Friday Agreement.
+text: By Jane DreaperHealth correspondent, BBC News It has been launched by the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP), which claims at least 10,000 extra GPs will be needed by 2020. The three-minute film features doctors talking about how they find general practice exciting and varied. NHS England is launching a big initiative next week to boost GP numbers. The RCGP says it wants to tackle stereotypes of general practice as being less stimulating and exciting than other medical careers. The film will be shown at a series of regional roadshows around the UK next week, timed to coincide with the recruitment round when medical graduates decide their training specialty. Dr Maureen Baker, the chairwoman of the RCGP, said: "Reality programmes and dramas set in hospitals are always fast-paced and thrilling. "But programmes about being a GP are very few and far between, and mostly reinforce outdated stereotypes about GPs handing out cough medicine and referring the more difficult cases to consultants. "This video - and the GPs who appear in it - show that nothing could be further from the truth. "While it might be unusual for a medical royal college to make a promotional video, we hope it will make a tangible impact." 'Best job in the world' The RCGP has been campaigning for more investment in general practice, and it believes the tide is now turning. BBC News understands that on Monday NHS England will launch a package of measures to help encourage recruitment and retention among GPs. This will include a new scheme to encourage family doctors who may be considering a career break or retirement to instead remain working part-time. The measures will be funded by money from the £1.2bn investment announced in the Autumn Statement for a four-year plan to improve GP infrastructure. Scottish health ministers have also recently pledged an extra £40m for general practice, while the Welsh Government has announced a £10m cash injection for primary care. Northern Ireland says it has no issues encouraging students to become GPs. Last year, around 20% of the 7,341 doctors who completed foundation training chose to work in general practice, with particular shortages in the East Midlands, the North West and North East of England and Yorkshire and Humber. The RCGP says that the number of unfilled GP posts went up from 2.1% in 2010 to 7.9% in 2013. Ministers in England have committed to train 5,000 more GPs by the end of the decade. Dr Baker added: "I've been a GP for over 30 years and I still believe it is the best job in the world."	Doctors have turned to a recruitment video to convince medical students that being a GP is not a dull career.
+text: It says it will begin next week processing about 25,000 people with active cases. Asylum seekers will first be required to register and pass a Covid-19 test, before being allowed in via one of three border crossings. The move reverses the much-criticised policies of ex-President Donald Trump. The Migrant Protection Protocols programme was enacted in 2019, deterring would-be asylum seekers from coming to the US. It required migrants entering through the southern border to wait in Mexico while their cases were being heard by US immigration courts. But on his first day in office since winning last year's election, President Joe Biden suspended the policy. "As President Biden has made clear, the US government is committed to rebuilding a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system," Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said. "This latest action is another step in our commitment to reform immigration policies that do not align with our nation's values." The Biden administration plans to start with two border crossings each processing up to 300 people a day and a third crossing taking fewer numbers, according to the Associated Press. The authorities say asylum seekers will be released with notices to appear in court in cities close to or in their final destinations, typically with family. At the same time, Mr Mayorkas stressed that "individuals who are not eligible under this initial phase should wait for further instructions and not travel to the border", amid concerns that many people would try to cross the border illegally. Friday's announcement was welcomed in a sprawling migrant camp in the Mexican city of Matamoros, just across the border from Texas. "Honestly, I have no words for how I'm feeling right now!" Salvadoran asylum seeker Sandra Andrade, who has been waiting in Mexico for over a year, told Reuters news agency. The border cities where migrants wait for months are suffering from growing crime rates. Last year, charity Human Rights First said "returned families, children and adults are being sent to highly dangerous situations where many suffered kidnappings, attacks, sexual assaults, threats and other incredible cruelty".	The Biden administration says it will start gradually allowing into the US tens of thousands of asylum seekers currently forced to wait in Mexico.
+text: The e-commerce giant said it was starting a fund of more than $2bn (£1.47bn) aimed at creating or preserving 20,000 homes across three regions in the US. The money will be used primarily to support low-cost loans for moderate income families, it said. The effort follows years of rising home and rental prices in the US. Home prices have climbed more than 6% each year since 2012, despite muted wage growth for most workers. Before the pandemic, rental rates had also risen steadily, driving a shortage of affordable units. In some cities, such as San Francisco, the rapid growth of the tech industry has been blamed for exacerbating the affordability crisis, after an influx of highly paid engineers drove up rents and priced out other residents. In 2019, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Google, among other tech firms, made high-profile promises of hundreds of millions of dollars to help ease the crunch. Their efforts were welcomed by advocates, who also cautioned that more comprehensive measures were needed. Amazon, which has faced increasing scrutiny of its its work practices as its profits boom during the pandemic, said its initiative would focus on the areas around its hometown of Seattle, as well as Nashville and Washington DC, two other major employment hubs. The firm said it was targeting its fund at families earning up to 80% of each area's median income - up to roughly $95,000 for a family of four in the case of Seattle. In addition to subsidising the low-cost home loans, the firm is also planning donations to charities and other groups working on the housing issue. Amazon boss Jeff Bezos said the Housing Equity Fund would "help local families achieve long-term stability while building strong, inclusive communities". The average annual compensation of an Amazon worker in the US was $36,640 in 2019, roughly in line with the national average. Mr Bezos, who has an estimated net worth of more than $185bn and properties scattered across the US, earned 58 times that amount that year.	Amazon has become the latest US tech giant to pledge billions of dollars to support affordable housing.
+text: Health Minister Vaughan Gething said he was looking at how powers could be used to protect areas with lower cases. It comes after the prime minister rejected calls from Welsh ministers for a travel ban. Currently people in lockdown areas in England can go on holiday in parts of Wales not subject to restrictions. It is illegal for people to leave or enter lockdown counties Wales except for a limited set of reasons, like work or education. But a similar law does not exist for areas under local restrictions in England. UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the Westminster government felt it was more "appropriate" to put "travel restrictions in guidance rather than in law". Mr Gething said if some English areas were countries Wales "would have quarantine regulations for them". But he said there was "no good reason" to prevent someone from a low incidence area like Devon from travelling to Pembrokeshire. "We're having to consider how we use our powers to protect lower-prevalence areas of Wales but at the same time, we don't want to take a whole-nation approach," Mr Gething said. First Minister Mark Drakeford had written to Prime Minister Boris Johnson last week, asking for travel restrictions to prevent people visiting Wales from areas under lockdown in England. But Mr Johnson told BBC Wales: "We are all one country, people should exercise their common sense." Mr Gething said it was "disappointing" Mr Johnson did not respond to the letter. He added that if people travelled from an area like Liverpool there was a risk of "spreading events". 'Dramatic action' The Conservative health spokesman in the Senedd, Andrew RT Davies, said bringing in quarantine restrictions for people travelling to Wales from Covid hotspots in England was a "dangerous slope" for the Welsh Government to go down. "If you start introducing such quarantine restrictions in Wales does that mean then there's a quid pro-quo that England, Scotland and Northern Ireland will start doing the same for Welsh residents? "There are all sorts of questions to be answered before you even entertain implementing such dramatic action." Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price said he had called for measures to limit travel with Mark Drakeford for "two weeks running". "At a time when we need to act quicker and smarter to eliminate the virus, it's regrettable that it took the UK government's negligent dismissal of travel restrictions to bounce the Welsh Government into action," he said. How are the restrictions different? In Wales it is illegal to enter or leave the 15 locked-down council areas, and the the town of Llanelli, without a "reasonable excuse". That can include: Travelling through the areas is legal, but breaches can be punished with fines, with a fixed penalty notice of £60 for a first offence. There is no similar legal restriction in England, although people in areas like Merseyside, Halton and Warrington have been asked to avoid non-essential travel. 'Huge disruption' In the Commons the Labour MP for Swansea West, Geraint Davies, asked Mr Hancock if people travelling from England should quarantine when arriving in Wales. Mr Hancock said in response: "The primary transmission of the disease is between households and between households mixing with each other". "And the approach that we've taken thus far in England since we came out of the initial full blown lockdown has been to put travel restrictions in guidance, rather than in law, because we felt that's the most appropriate thing to do. "I know that's not the approach that they're taking in Wales, but that's how we are currently handling it in England". James Davies, Conservative Vale of Clwyd MP, said the travel restrictions in north Wales have caused "huge disruption" to half a million people. Mr Davies said people had not been allowed to cross "often meaningless county council boundaries." The health secretary added that he had shared proposals for a "simplified" approach to local lockdowns with the devolved governments. The UK government is understood to be planning a new three-tier approach to local coronavirus restrictions in England. Mr Hancock said he had discussed these plans with Mr Gething and that it would "simplify further if it were undertaken across the UK." What has the UK government said? A UK government Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: "We work closely with local leaders and public health teams to inform decisions on local interventions, taking into account a range of factors." Public Health England, the Joint Biosecurity Centre and NHS Test and Trace "are constantly monitoring the levels of infection across the country," the spokesperson added. "We discuss measures with local directors of public health and local authorities, constantly reviewing the evidence and we will take swift targeted action where necessary." Data glitch 'does not affect Wales' A data glitch that has delayed test results in England has not impacted Wales, an official has said. An investigation is under way after nearly 16,000 coronavirus cases went unreported in England, delaying contact tracing efforts. Giri Shankar, incident director at Public Health Wales, said: "Preliminary findings from a Department of Health and Social Care analysis have indicated that this issue has not affected Wales, either in terms of data reporting, or in terms of contact tracing under Test, Trace, Protect. We continue to stay in close contact with the DHSC about this," he said.	People travelling to Wales from Covid hotspots elsewhere in the UK could face quarantine under measures being considered by the Welsh Government.
+text: The company said it was responsible for more than 1,800 delays of 15 minutes or more on London Underground. The Liberal Democrats, which requested the figures from TfL, said the number of claimants showed a lack of awareness of the refund scheme. TfL said the delays accounted for 1.3% of 1.1 billion journeys taken in 2010. A total of 14 million passengers were affected by delays but three million were disrupted by incidents which were beyond TfL's control. 'Excessive delays' Caroline Pidgeon, Lib Dem leader on the London Assembly, said: "No-one should have to wait 15 minutes for a Tube train, yet incredibly 14 million people had to last year. "It must be the mayor's top priority to tackle these excessive delays. "It is also vital that every Londoner is aware that they are entitled to compensation when such delays take place." A TfL spokesman said: "Despite the vital work to upgrade the Tube network, just 1.3% of the Tube's 1.1 billion journeys last year were affected by significant delays." Since last year there have been numerous disruptions on Tube lines owing to faulty trains, track and signal faults, upgrade work and people jumping on the line. A two-hour closure on Jubilee Line during the morning rush hour due to a faulty train last month prompted Mayor Boris Johnson to ask London's transport commissioner Peter Hendy for a report.	Just 330,000 of a potential 11 million Tube passengers claimed compensation for delays in 2010, Transport for London (TfL) has said.
+text: The Times reported that Conflict Resolution Services Ireland (CRSI) received more than £385,000 from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. It reported that CRSI's offices have been raided by anti-terrorism police twice. The PSNI said detectives had searched an office on Belfast's Falls Road and seized a number of items in June. The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust told the BBC it had "no relationship with armed groups or proscribed organisations". CRSI offers a mediation service for people threatened by paramilitary punishment attacks, and the Charity Commission said an inquiry was opened into the organisation in April 2017. The BBC has contacted the CRSI for comment. 'Historic' The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust said its "funding portfolio" included work with groups transitioning from violence in loyalist and republican communities. Stating that it has worked to end violence in Northern Ireland, the trust also addressed a number of allegations made in the Times. It said allegations made against four people associated with CRSI were "historic". It said three out of the four allegations related to periods before the individual concerned became associated with the charity. In the fourth case, the individual's employment with the charity was terminated after his arrest. "During a two-year period leading up to their most recent grant, CRSI sought to mediate on behalf of 704 individuals who felt they were under threat of paramilitary violence," the trust said. "CRSI were able to successfully resolve almost all of these cases: protecting lives and reducing harm. "CRSI have also made a significant contribution by their engagement with republicans who are outside the peace process." 'Disrepute' In July, it emerged the Charity Commission was investigating claims the JRCT gave £275,000 to a group linked to a banned terrorist organisation in Northern Ireland. The funds were given to Teach Na Failte, which supports ex-prisoners but has links to the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). At the time, the watchdog said the charity needed to "explain and justify" its decision. The JRCT said it had "no relationship with any proscribed organisations". The Charity Commission's chief executive Frances McCandless said: "While we cannot comment on an open inquiry, we can make it clear that a charity's trustees must act in the best interests of the charity and only within the purposes of the charity, regardless of any external affiliations. "Charity trustees are also responsible for the reputation of the charity and should not act in a way which may bring the charity into disrepute. "As our guidance highlights, where someone within or connected to the charity is found to have business with or links to terrorist groups, the commission expect this to be reported to us and the PSNI immediately, including how the issue is being managed."	A Quaker trust funded a charity which is under investigation by the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland.
+text: Eduardo Vela is accused of abducting Inés Madrigal from her mother in 1969 and giving her to another woman, in the final years of the Franco dictatorship. He denied signing her birth certificate and did not remember the case. Dozens of people stood outside the Madrid court appealing for justice. The scandal began when children of left-wing opponents were seized after Gen Franco won the Spanish civil war but it later became a criminal baby-trafficking network. Inés Madrigal, 49, arrived at the court on Tuesday surrounded by supporters in yellow T-shirts bearing the word "justice". "This is not just my case, it has gone beyond that. The whole world knows that in this country children were stolen," she said. However, she made clear she did not expect the trial to reveal who her real mother was. If convicted Dr Vela could face 11 years in jail for illegal adoption and falsifying documents. He denies wrongdoing. What is the 'stolen babies' case? Campaigners have long highlighted a secret practice of baby abductions during the dictatorship of Gen Francisco Franco which ran from 1939 to 1975. From the late thirties children would be taken from families deemed "undesirable", often because they were identified by the ruling fascists as Republicans. They would then be handed to couples with links to the regime. In 2008 investigating judge Baltasar Garzón estimated that some 30,000 children had been stolen in the period after the 1936-39 Spanish civil war. By the 1950s it is thought that organised criminal gangs had become involved in selling infants for adoption for profit. In 2011 two men, who revealed they had been bought by their fathers, estimated many more adoptions in Spain between 1965 and 1990 involved children taken from their biological parents without consent. Inés Madrigal says she was abducted in 1969. The true number of abducted children may never be known. No answers for victims By James Badcock, Madrid More than 100 people who gathered outside the courtroom had come in search of answers - information that could help them locate children or parents they believe were concealed from them by a large-scale baby-snatching network. What they got in court was an old man, hunched in his seat, his eyes closing as if with extreme tiredness. Dr Vela said he remembered virtually nothing about his 20 years at the helm of the San Ramón clinic that has given rise to dozens of stolen baby claims. "I didn't give any baby to anyone," the gynaecologist mumbled. He said he had no idea what happened to the clinic's paperwork, which has vanished. So much time has elapsed that the chances of a stolen baby finding their biological mother and vice versa is sadly remote. Only this week, with the spotlight back on the issue, have Spain's main political parties promised to work together to improve victims' access to archives, a shared DNA database and a more proactive judicial response. Why is the Madrigal case so significant? Hers is the only case to have gone to trial, despite thousands of other complaints being filed with the courts. Last year, another woman was convicted of slandering a nun whom she accused of taking her from her biological mother in 1962 and handing her to an adoptive father who was a senior Franco figure. Inés Madrigal was told by her adoptive mother that she had been adopted and, after finding out in 2010 about the emerging "stolen babies" scandal, looked into her own past. Her adoptive mother, Inés Pérez, told a judge before she died in 2016 that Dr Vela had given her Ms Madrigal as a gift because she could not have children of her own. Dr Vela has in the past admitted signing the birth certificate that stated Ms Pérez and her husband were the biological parents. However, when presented with the signature on the document in court on Tuesday he responded with the words: "That is not mine."	A retired gynaecologist aged 85 has become the first person to go on trial in Spain over a scandal said to have involved thousands of babies being taken from their parents over decades.
+text: Michael Beaumont, a successful aircraft engineer, inherited the title from his grandmother, the Dame de Serk, Sibyl Hathaway, in 1974. In 2001 he was appointed OBE for services to the Sark community. The popular and traditionalist Seigneur clashed with the Barclay brothers, who bought the island of Brecqhou in 1993, over the payment of treizieme and the island's inheritance laws. The pressure brought about by these events resulted in fundamental changes to Sark's feudal laws by 2009. Many of the Seigneur's ancient rights and duties were revoked, including having the sole right to keep pigeons on the island.	The 22nd Seigneur of Sark has died at the age of 88.
+text: Newcastle University student Ed Farmer, 20, died in hospital in December 2016. A round of 100 triple vodkas had been ordered at one of the pubs on the bar crawl, the hearing at Newcastle Coroner's Court was told. Mr Farmer, of Leicester, was taken to the Royal Victoria Infirmary in the early hours after being found unconscious. A post-mortem examination found he had five times the legal drink-drive limit of alcohol in his blood. Night out The inquest heard excess alcohol caused cardiac arrest which led to brain damage and his death. James Carr, who was the chairman of the university's Agricultural Society and a second-year student at the time, told the inquest the night out was staged every year to welcome new arrivals. That was despite "initiation-style" ceremonies having been banned by the university, he said. CCTV footage played at the inquest showed a large group of students visiting a number of bars. At one point Mr Farmer was seen falling over before being held up by two other students and then carried by his arms and legs. 'Very grave' After ending up at Mr Carr's house in the Jesmond area of the city, a third-year student shaved Mr Farmer's head. Mr Carr told the inquest he was woken by another student at around 04:30 GMT who told him Mr Farmer needed to be taken to hospital. "I was panicking if I'm honest, I was in a state of shock," Mr Carr said. Dr Reuben Sahara, head of the royal infirmary's Emergency Medicine Department, told the inquest earlier treatment "may" have saved Mr Farmer. Dr Sahara said there was a spectrum of alcohol poisoning and that cardiac arrest was at the "very end of that scale". He said: "We knew that the situation was very grave from the outset. I would agree that had he been in hospital prior to cardiac arrest then I would expect the patient to survive." The hearing is expected to last for four days.	A university student died after taking part in an "initiation-style" bar crawl, an inquest has heard.
+text: By David KellerBBC News But perching just 28ft (8.5m) from certain doom, her home at Happisburgh in Norfolk brings a whole new meaning to living on the edge. Great chunks of land have fallen around her beloved house since she moved to erosion-hit Beach Road five years ago. But this winter has really taken its toll, and for the first time the retired teacher and grandmother-of-six has to admit she is starting to feel "threatened" and "frightened" by the creeping coastline. "I work on the assumption that if the house becomes seriously unsafe that my cats with their uncanny perceptions will yowl and not want to be in the house, but I'm told that I'm wrong on this and cats can equally well fall over cliffs," said Ms Nierop-Reading. "But I do feel threatened now because of the rate at which it is going on the corner. I'm frightened sometimes, which I haven't been up until now." A year ago virtually all of Ms Nierop-Reading's neighbours moved out after taking compensation from the council. However, £53,000 was not enough to sway her, and she is now the last permanent resident living on the crumbling cliff top. Erosion has threatened north Norfolk's idyll landscape for centuries, with communities such as Whimpwell and most of Eccles now consigned to historical records. But now it is Happisburgh's turn, and after a recent clear-up on the beach below, Ms Nierop-Reading reckons she only has about three years left before she is forced to go. "It's actually getting very serious," she said. "Unfortunately North Norfolk District Council took away all the unsightly stuff at the corner on the beach and the revetments, which although damaged broke the force of the waves. So I am now being put under threat diagonally from the East. "I lost a largish chunk - about 10ft - about two or three months ago. On March 4th I was shining the torch along the next remaining bit of fence to show people what was there. The next morning, I looked out of my window and the next section of fencing was falling over the cliff. "On the 13th the cliff was up to the next fencepost, so it's going very, very fast." But the 1930s timber-framed bungalow has become more than just a home for Ms Nierop-Reading. It has become her platform for protest, believing successive governments have failed to fully address the threat of the sea. Recent Environment Agency statistics show about 200 properties in England are vulnerable to coastal erosion, with 2,000 predicted to become vulnerable over the next 20 years. 'Feel the house lifting' Current government policy states it is not possible to prevent all areas from erosion, but "action is being taken to manage the risks and reduce its impact". But despite the risks - having that sea view day-in, day-out is what Ms Nierop-Reading says will keep her going right until the very end. "I've had windows broken by the wind hurling things at me and I've definitely got tiles off the roof. When the wind is blowing and gusting furiously I can feel the house actually lifting slightly as it gets underneath. "There are ripples going across my glass of water beside my bed and the glass in the windows bows - that's frightening. "I knew one day I'd go, but what I'm more concerned about is the fact that we still have this stupid piecemeal policy right round the coast and there is no political will at a high level to save the coastline. "But it doesn't put me off. I call it my 'million dollar' view. People say, 'Why didn't you take the £53,000 I was offered and run?'. My view is worth infinitely more than that. "Either that or I'm just plain stupid. Take your pick."	There's no doubt Bryony Nierop-Reading's bungalow has what she refers to as "the million dollar view".
+text: The inquiry was told a call from North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) to fire control referred to "reports of people being shot" minutes after the blast. Police then began a protocol used in cases of a marauding armed terrorist. The inquiry was told that saw firefighters kept away from the area, in accordance with national guidance. Twenty-two people were murdered and hundreds more injured when Salman Abedi detonated a bomb in the foyer of Manchester Arena as fans left an Ariana Grande concert at 22:31 BST on 22 May 2017. On Monday, the inquiry into the attack was told firefighters did not arrive at the arena until two hours after the bombing, only one paramedic entered the blast scene in the first 40 minutes, and Greater Manchester Police (GMP) did not declare a major incident until the following day. During Tuesday's hearing, the 12-minute call between NWAS and North West Fire Control (NWFC) played to the inquiry. In it, the NWAS caller could be heard requesting assistance, before adding: "We are getting reports of people being shot". He was told by the NWFC responder that his reports of a bomb explosion, 60 casualties and an "active shooter" would be logged, though later in the call, she said she had an update coming through which indicated the injuries were caused by shrapnel, rather than shots. The inquiry also heard other recordings of conversations between emergency services in the aftermath of the bombing. During a call between NWAS control and its tactical department at 22:43, one woman stated that "we've got a marauding terrorist incident at Manchester Arena", before adding that British Transport Police had reported 50 casualties, but had "nothing regarding an active shooter, so it may be a bomb". Three minutes later, another short clip of audio confirmed NWAS had declared a major incident. The inquiry heard that minutes later, Insp Dale Sexton, the force duty officer at GMP HQ, declared Operation Plato, pre-agreed emergency response to a suspected marauding armed terrorist. Following the playing of the audio, counsel to the inquiry Nicholas de la Poer QC asked GMP's Det Insp Michael Russell, who had been helping the inquiry outline the sequence of events, if it was "unmistakably the case" that as a result of the calls, Insp Sexton had had "in mind the possibility of whether there is more than one person involved". Det Insp Russell replied that that was "correct". The inquiry continues. Why not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk Related Internet Links Manchester Arena Inquiry	Fears of an "active shooter" were raised by the ambulance service in the aftermath of the Manchester Arena bomb, the inquiry in the attack has heard.
+text: Doctors Nishant Joshi and Meenal Viz, who is seven months' pregnant, are concerned PPE advice has changed "without rhyme or reason". Dr Viz accused the government of "trying to kick the can down the road". The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said it could not comment on pending or potential legal action. The couple has released a video on social media directed at their unborn child that shows images of life before and during the pandemic. "In just 63 days, this is going to be your new home," Dr Viz says on the video. "I hope I get to show it to you. "You are arriving at a very difficult time. People are dying". The couple, who are crowdfunding their legal challenge, said they were motivated by the death of pregnant nurse Mary Agyapong, who contracted Covid-19 and died at the Luton and Dunstable Hospital on 12 April. Her baby daughter, named Mary, survived. "Mary was also pregnant at the time and I am in that position right now," Dr Viz said. In a pre-action legal letter to the DHSC four weeks ago, Dr Joshi and Dr Viz said there was "great anxiety" among staff over safety protocols. They claim the government's stance is "unclear and inconsistent" and exposes healthcare workers to a greater risk of contracting the virus. A statement released through their lawyers, said the government responded two weeks ago, asked the doctors to wait for further information and a further response received on Thursday contained "minimal information which was unconvincing". Dr Viz told the BBC: "In these four weeks we have lost over 100 healthcare workers and they keep trying to kick the can down the road. "We're not going to wait any longer because we are seeing our colleagues suffer. "We've decided to take it to the next step - to file for judicial review." Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk	A couple who fear their NHS jobs expose them to Covid-19 are pushing for a judicial review over personal protective equipment (PPE) guidance.
+text: By Brian MilliganPersonal Finance Reporter, BBC News Victims are persuaded to cancel their cards, but when they try to phone their bank to do so, the person they end up talking to is the fraudster himself. He or she convinces them to hand their cards over to a courier, who calls at their door within the hour. Police as far apart as London, Manchester and Glasgow are investigating similar cases. A nursing manager with the NHS is among those who have been tricked within the last two weeks. The woman, who lives in north London, did not want to be named. "I felt totally violated," she told the BBC. "It was like being burgled. It is that same sense that your privacy at home has been invaded." She and her husband ended up handing over four debit and credit cards, and only realised they had been conned a day later. By that time, the fraudsters had spent £1,200 on their accounts. The scam The con began when the nursing manager received a phone call from someone claiming to be a staff member at the Apple store in London's Regent Street. He explained that her grand-daughter was in the store, trying to spend £1,000 on a card he thought belonged to the hospital manager. He said the police had been called, and put the phone down after saying that the customer had run off. The woman immediately tried to call her bank, to get the card cancelled. But unknown to her, the fraudster, or one of his accomplices, simply stayed on the line, meaning that while she thought she was calling her bank, she was again speaking to a conman. "Hello, is that the Halifax?" she asked. "Yes, how can I help?" said a convincing voice at the other end. The supposedly helpful assistant went on to explain that, under a new scheme, the woman could now cancel all her cards in one go, even cards belonging to rival banks. She was then asked to dial her PINs into the telephone. She did so not just for her own bank cards, but for her husband's as well. The fraudster explained that the cancelled cards would then be collected by courier. For security reasons, she was told to ask the courier for a code number. When he turned up on the doorstep within the hour, and repeated the correct code, she handed him an envelope with four perfectly valid credit and debit cards. The fraudsters now had four cards, and four PINs to match. "I thought it was odd at the time that I got straight through to the bank," said the woman. "Afterwards you feel so stupid that you were conned, but at the time you are in a panic." Changes At the moment, when someone makes a telephone call, it is possible that the line can stay open, even though the person receiving the call has hung up. When the person receiving the call picks up the phone again, they will not get a dialling tone. But in stressful circumstances, they may not notice. The fact that they then dial a number on the keypad makes no difference to the line, which remains in place. The telecoms regulator Ofcom is working with the industry to get this changed. Talks are currently taking place to see how easy it would be to alter the necessary technical systems, and to establish how quickly such changes could be made. "Ofcom is extremely concerned that telephony network features are being exploited in this way and we are working as a matter of urgency with the Metropolitan Police and the fixed-line telephone industry to put a stop to this particular criminal activity," a spokesman told the BBC. Advice The scam is similar to another fraud well-known to police, in which victims are phoned by someone claiming to be from their bank. For security reasons they are asked to ring back. But again, the fraudster simply stays on the line, and receives the call back. The victim is told their card needs to be returned to the bank to be changed, and they are to give it to the courier on the doorstep. In Glasgow, Police Scotland (formerly Strathclyde Police) have warned that criminals are now making tens of thousands of pounds from the scam every day. "Our ongoing enquires into such scams have revealed that some criminals are making in excess of £50,000 a day from this type of crime," said Det Insp David Peritt. "These individuals are highly organised using sophisticated equipment to defraud innocent people of their money," he said. In Manchester the police are warning that the fraudsters are also posing as police officers. But again they tell their victims that their cards need to be collected. In two recent examples, in April, victims were asked to hand their cards over to taxi drivers. Police say the average amount lost by victims is £4,000, although in most cases the bank takes responsibility. Over a two-year period, up to Christmas last year, the Metropolitan Police say 93 fraudsters operating such scams were charged, having stolen a total of £2.4m from their victims. One had taken nearly a quarter of a million pounds. Action Fraud, the government body which fights card fraud and internet crime, has some simple advice for consumers. "If you receive a phone call that seems suspicious, end the call immediately and don't give out any information," an Action Fraud spokesman told the BBC. "Instead call your bank from another phone or go into a branch." In the meantime the woman who was conned did not end up out of pocket. The banks involved all agreed to cover her losses.	Police are investigating a frightening new variation of card fraud, which tricks people into handing over all their credit and debit cards on the doorstep.
+text: By Glenn CampbellChief political correspondent, BBC Scotland NHS Tayside is preparing for possible service disruption when the transition period ends on 31 December. The UK and the EU are struggling to strike a post-membership trade deal with the two sides acknowledging "significant differences remain". Both the UK and Scottish governments have prepared contingency plans in case no agreement is reached. Whatever the outcome of continuing Brussels talks, continuity of healthcare is a key concern and the NHS across Scotland has reactivated plans drawn up when a Brexit crisis loomed last year. NHS Tayside is preparing for possible shortages of medicine, equipment and staff - warning that a no deal departure could "lead to an inability to deliver safe and effective care". The health board serves more than 400,000 patients across Dundee, Angus and Perth and Kinross. Hold extra stocks The UK government's department of health and social care said it was working to "help ensure continued supply of medicines and medical products to the whole of the UK at the end of the transition period". It has asked medicine suppliers to hold extra stock in the UK and has plans to re-route deliveries to the UK if necessary. Scotland's Health Secretary Jeane Freeman also highlighted the need to prepare. She said: "We are working with the UK government and other devolved administrations to ensure we have a stockpile of essential medicines, including Covid-19 and end of life medicines." Ms Freeman added that the country benefited "enormously" from EU citizens who worked in the health and social care sectors. She said: "We encourage all EU citizens, including those working in the health and social care sectors, to apply to the Home Office's Settled Status Scheme to exercise this right." In a 34-page Brexit readiness plan released to BBC Scotland in response to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, NHS Tayside set out potential problems and measures to offset them. Its concerns are shared by other health boards that have responded to the BBC's FOI. NHS Lanarkshire considers Brexit a "very high" risk with the "potential to adversely disrupt continuity of delivery of healthcare services". The board's concerns include possible "interruption to availability of medicines, vaccines, personal protective equipment and essential consumable items". The NHS is preparing for Brexit at the same time as managing Covid-19 and the winter pressures of flu and bad weather. Even before the pandemic, NHS Dumfries and Galloway flagged "an unprecedented degree of risk for smooth provision of services" in the event of a disorderly exit from the EU during winter. Its chief executive, Jeff Ace, has since been appointed to play a leading role in co-ordinating NHS Brexit preparations across Scotland. What stage is Brexit at? The UK formally left the EU in January but is able to keep trading in the European single market and customs union until the end of this month. A trade deal is needed by then to prevent the introduction of tariffs (or taxes) on imports and exports. Even with a deal, new border controls will take effect from 1 January when the free movement of goods and people comes to an end. Extra paperwork and checks are expected to cause delays at key border crossings such as Calais-Dover. Scotland's health boards and the five areas of concern Across the health service, some of the key concerns included disruption to supplies and increased costs of medicine; the recruitment and retention of EU nationals in the NHS and procurement process such as the maintaining flow of orders for essential items such as PPE. 1. Medicines NHS Grampian noted that about 85% of prescription-only medicines are imported to the UK from, or through, the EU single market. It said medicine shortages, unrelated to Brexit, were increasingly common especially with the strains that Covid-19 has placed on the global supply chain. The board is concerned that "any customs delays could create disruption at ports and reduce the supply of medicines into the UK from Europe". To ease any pressure, the UK government has asked pharmaceutical firms to keep six weeks of supplies in the UK and has secured its own cross-channel freight capacity. NHS Tayside's planning assumptions include "shortages of some medicines, particularly after the first six weeks as stocks reduce". NHS Ayrshire and Arran has also raised concerns that it may have to plug gaps in supply with more expensive alternatives and that European manufacturers may raise their prices after Brexit. 2. Procurement NHS National Services Scotland, which bulk buys medical, surgical and cleaning supplies for all health boards, has been building up a Brexit stockpile since September. Before the end of that month, it had amassed a six-week supply of 80% of the items thought to be vulnerable to any trade disruption. While the UK is phasing in its new border arrangements over the first six months of 2021, EU member states will be entitled to apply controls from 1 January. NHS National Services anticipates "disruption if significant volumes of freight arrive at the border without completing the correct formalities". In a report dated 13 October, it expected to be "able to manage supply chain risks effectively". NHS Tayside is assured it will have access to sufficient supplies for the first six weeks of 2021 but considers "there may be delays" after that. 3. Workforce Many health authorities are worried Brexit will reduce the number of EU nationals available to work as doctors, dentists, nurses and in social care. While those already living and working here can apply for settled status until next summer, NHS Tayside believes "there remains a risk that EU staff will leave the UK". It expects the UK's new immigration rules to make staff shortages worse and is concerned a post-Brexit drop in the value of the pound would encourage EU workers to return home. NHS Grampian has raised a particular concern about the impact any loss of EU workers would have on social care provision in the north east. NHS Borders said that while it was "not overly reliant" on EU nationals "uncertainty remains" about access to European labour after Brexit. 4. Sick and vulnerable patients NHS Tayside expects existing reciprocal healthcare arrangements with EU countries to break down if there is no deal. That could lead to many UK nationals coming home for treatment, especially more vulnerable patients such as those who are elderly, disabled or pregnant. NHS Grampian estimates that as many as 300 UK citizens may relocate to north east Scotland and seek access to healthcare within a 6-12 week period. 5. Costs and other concerns There is a general concern that the pound could further reduce in value after Brexit, increasing healthcare costs and adding to budget pressures. While NHS Borders said it had not yet experienced cost increases as a result of Brexit, NHS Ayrshire and Arran reported a 30% rise in some of its IT costs since the EU referendum in 2016. The Ayrshire and Arran board said there was a "high likelihood" that food supplies would be impacted by Brexit. While NHS Grampian expects this could affect choice and price, it is confident local supplies will be sufficient to cover any shortages. NHS Borders has a particular concern about possible restrictions in supply of fresh produce such as fruit and vegetables. NHS Lanarkshire has registered an unusual risk factor - possible disruption to the normal supply of illegal drugs leading to alternative substances "contaminated with anthrax" reappearing on the market. The Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service said it was concerned about "disruption to service delivery" if Brexit planning proved to be "insufficient". It has used "advanced purchasing and extended stock holding" of some key consumable items to guard against possible shortages. NHS Highland expressed concern that a no-deal Brexit could compound the challenges of winter and "managing the backlog from the Covid-19 pandemic". NHS Tayside said it was planning a table-top exercise to test the robustness of its Brexit planning. As well as working on local preparations, NHS Orkney said its staff would be attending a national EU exit planning event on 10 December. NHS Shetland, in a response dated 11 November, said the Brexit plans it had in place prior to the pandemic were "only now being revisited". NHS Western Isles said it had made "no updated assessment" of the likely impact of Brexit this year. All three island boards work together with NHS Highland and local authorities on resilience planning across the Highlands and islands. NHS Forth Valley said it had "identified risks" associated with Brexit and was monitoring and reporting on them as part of the national response. Scotland's two largest health boards, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and NHS Lothian have yet to respond to the BBC's request for information.	A no-deal Brexit could threaten safe and effective patient care, a major Scottish health board has warned.
+text: Ms Willott is leaving the coalition government with fellow Lib Dems Norman Baker and Mark Hunter. Mr Baker quit as a Home Office minister on Monday, saying he faced a "constant battle" working with Conservative Home Secretary Theresa May. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said he respected the three MPs' decisions to concentrate on their constituencies. The Lib Dem leader said: "I completely understand and respect the decisions that Norman, Mark and Jenny have taken to stand down from their ministerial positions to concentrate on their roles as constituency MPs. "They have all been outstanding ministers and made an enormous contribution to the success of the coalition government." "The Liberal Democrats are extremely fortunate to have a large number of talented people on our benches ready to step into their shoes," added Mr Clegg. Tuition fees Ms Willott, MP for Cardiff Central since 2005, was appointed as an aide to the then Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne following the 2010 election. She quit the post later that year in order to vote against the government on student tuition fees. In February 2012 Ms Willott was appointed an assistant whip, later serving as consumer affairs and equalities minister while her colleague Jo Swinson was on maternity leave. In her resignation letter to Mr Clegg, Ms Willott said he was doing an excellent job as deputy prime minister and party leader. In his reply, Mr Clegg said he understood Ms Willott's desire to resign from the whips' office in order to "speak in parliament and focus on your constituency". Welsh Secretary Stephen Crabb said he was "sorry" to see the Cardiff Central MP leave the government. He said on Twitter that she was a "very effective minister and whip" and that he "enjoyed" working with her. However, Jo Stevens, Labour's parliamentary candidate for Cardiff Central, said Ms Willott's resignation was a "shameful admission" she had "neglected" her constituency. She said: "It is completely arrogant of the Lib Dems to think that having delivered the bedroom tax, given a £100,000 tax cut to millionaires and trebled tuition fees that people will conveniently forget what they have done."	Cardiff Central Liberal Democrat MP Jenny Willott has resigned as an assistant government whip.
+text: Milton Keynes Council is consulting tenants on whether to rebuild or refit Mellish Court and The Gables after they failed fire safety inspections. Resident Tina Walsh said she was having to choose between "size or location" when looking at alternative housing. The council said it was trying to be "flexible". Inspections by the fire service found "significant" improvement works were needed in both tower blocks. The council's preferred option would be to demolish and rebuild the 60-year-old flats in Bletchley and Wolverton, but it was also considering having them refitted instead. The consultation with residents lasts until 2 March. Ms Walsh, who lives in Mellish Court with six-year-old daughter Tyler, said: "It's upsetting. I've made my flat a home. "I've been told it is a choice of size or location. "It's beyond my control, and the council's control as the building is so old." Kirsty Piper, who lives in The Gables with her 10-year-old son, said it was "still scary when you've been told your flat is not fire-safe". She said she was worried about having to start again in a new home, but added: "By the end of the year everyone who lives here will be in a fire-safe building. "That's the most important thing." Milton Keynes Council's cabinet member for housing, Emily Darlington, said she had "a lot of sympathy" for residents. "I appreciate it's not their decision to move, but because of the fire safety issues we are having to decamp the building," she said. "We are trying to be as flexible as possible, but in various areas there is a lack of council housing stock." Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk Related Internet Links Milton Keynes Council	Residents of two demolition-threatened council tower blocks say they are frustrated by the process of being rehomed.
+text: Seth Frotman, who served as Student Loan Ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) for three years, is due to leave by Friday. His resignation letter reportedly said the CFPB "silenced warnings" and favoured companies over students. The CFPB has declined to comment on "personnel matters". The CFPB's Student Loan Ombudsman position was created by Congress in 2010 after the financial crisis, with the directive to handle issues in America's $1.5t (£1.1t) student loan market. Mr Frotman was responsible for reviewing thousands of complaints from students about private lenders and debt collectors. His office is one of the only sectors of the government to handle these loan issues. What did he say? In a letter addressed to CFPB acting director Mick Mulvaney, published in full by NPR, Mr Frotman said the CFPB was now "shield[ing] student loan companies from accountability for widespread abuses". "For nearly seven years I was proud to be part of an agency that served no party and no administration; the Consumer Bureau focused solely on doing what was right for American consumers. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case." "At every turn your political appointees have silenced warnings by those of us tasked with standing up for servicemembers and students." Mr Frotman's letter outlined three broad ways in which the CFPB "made sweeping changes" that ultimately hurt families: undercutting law enforcement, undermining the CFPB's political independence and shielding "bad actors" from scrutiny, according to US media. "For seven years, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fought to ensure these families received a fair shake as they strived for the American Dream," Mr Frotman wrote. "Sadly, the damage you have done to the Bureau betrays these families and sacrifices the financial futures of millions of Americans in communities across the country." Mr Frotman has worked with the CFPB for seven years and has been the ombudsman since 2015. In a statement to US media, the CFPB said it "does not comment on specific personnel matters". Why is his resignation controversial? The ombudsman's office works with CFPB enforcement officials to call out any questionable behaviour in the market and serve as an advocate for borrowers within the government. Since 2011, Mr Frotman's non-partisan office has played a key role in returning over $750m to borrowers. His office was also at the centre of recent lawsuits against loan companies and for-profit colleges. According to a 2017 CFPB report, student complaints "have served as the critical link in a process through which government agencies and market participants have repeatedly taken action to improve the student loan system for millions of Americans". Under US President Donald Trump, the justice and education departments have favoured practices protecting debt collectors from state regulations. Mr Mulvaney, a Republican from South Carolina, had been a fierce critic of the CFPB before he was appointed as its director. Over the summer he directed the student loan office to be moved under consumer education rather than enforcement. And this month, US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced her department would end an Obama-era rule that mandated for-profit colleges show their students could obtain jobs that paid decent salaries. Earlier this month, the Department of Education said in a statement that its regulation overhaul would benefit students and "treat all institutions of higher education fairly". "This administration is working to ensure students have transparent, meaningful information about all colleges and all programmes," Ms DeVos said. "Our new approach will aid students across all sectors of higher education and improve accountability." But Julie Margetta Morgan, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute think-tank and a higher education scholar, told the BBC that these changes within the CFPB are particularly significant because the bureau - under Mr Frotman - made sure to support populations that may not always make it into mainstream conversations about student loans: veterans, lower-income families and older Americans. These groups have been most vulnerable to predatory industry behaviours like deceptive marketing strategies aimed to get students into loans they may not even need, she adds. "When the agency is very obviously catering to the needs of those who are the most powerful and wealthy in the industry, it's hard to see how the needs of average Americans are going to get represented adequately," she says.	The top US official overseeing student loan complaints has resigned, alleging that the government has abandoned borrowers, US media report.
+text: Pre-tax profits for the year to 31 August were £112m, up 9% on the previous year. The company also announced an additional share buyback of "up to £50m". However, group like-for-like sales, which strip out the effect of new store openings, fell 3%. Group chief executive Stephen Clarke said: "The Group has delivered a strong performance with EPS [earnings per share] up 18% year on year." The retailer's travel division - stores located mainly in airports, railway stations, motorway service areas and hospitals - experienced a "record year", with profits up 11% to £73m, Mr Clarke said. As the business was "highly cash generative", WH Smith felt able to extend its share buy back scheme by up to £50m. It completed an earlier £50m return of cash to shareholders on 13 October. WH Smith also increased its full-year total dividend by 14% to 35p. The company aims to cut costs by £21m over the next three years.	WH Smith, the stationery and bookstore chain, has reported a rise in full-year profits after a "strong performance".
+text: Plans for the first in Denbigh have caused controversy with opponents, who claim Stanley aided slavery. Now a Cornish father and son have revealed designs for a "totem pole" style statue in St Asaph. The artists said they would "take on board" the earlier criticism and said the memorial was more about the time Stanley lived. The 4m (13ft) work is by blacksmith artists Gary and Thomas Thrussell and will be erected in Stanley's childhood home town. Residents and children are being asked their ideas to be included on the pole. A separate statue for Denbigh was approved by Denbighshire council last month, despite a letter signed by 50 prominent figures claiming the explorer was guilty of crimes against humanity. Instead, opponents had called for a permanent exhibition to provide a "fuller" historical context. Gary Thrussell, one half of the Cornwall-based father and son team behind the St Asaph design, said they would be taking that controversy "on board". He added: "We're trying to celebrate a general picture of that time, and of Africa as well. "This is more about the time that Stanley lived, and depicting life generally." On Tuesday, local school children will be offering ideas for inclusion on the galvanised steel statue. At the top of the pole, will sit a Congolese effigy made from copper. Mr Thrussell added: "It's really about getting ideas for the content of the sculpture and what they would like to see in it. "We want to create a time line of Stanley's life. "It's a 4m column with a snake wrapped around it from the bottom to the top. "In between the snake is a forged relief of Stanley's life, starting at St Asaph where he was a child in the work house. "It's like a totem pole for St Asaph." Stanley is known for greeting the missing explorer in Africa in 1871, saying "Dr Livingstone, I presume?" An open day is being held at the community and council meeting room, Roe Plas Meadow, St Asaph, between 1230 BST and 1400 BST and 1500-1600 BST on Tuesday 12 October.	A second statue to remember Victorian explorer HM Stanley is being proposed for his home county.
+text: Tayabb Shah, 38, formerly of Embley Road, Nottingham, is accused of five counts of sexual assault at the Queen's Medical Centre in September 2020. He has been released on bail with conditions banning him from visiting his former workplace unless he has a medical emergency and needs treatment. He is due to appear at Nottingham Magistrates' Court on 23 March. Follow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk. Related Internet Links HM Courts & Tribunals Service	A doctor has been charged with sexually assaulting two male patients at a hospital in Nottingham.
+text: By Brian MeechanBBC Wales business correspondent They have been in negotiations since last year when Tata withdrew from a sales process to sell its entire UK operations, including Port Talbot - the largest steel works in the UK. Tata's £15bn pension scheme had been a major sticking point. But it is understood an announcement will be made early on Wednesday. It follows an agreement with workers and the support of the pensions regulators, which means Tata has distanced itself to a large extent from its pensions liabilities. That has made a deal more likely between the two companies. Almost 7,000 people are employed by Tata Steel across Wales, including more than 4,000 in Port Talbot. In April, unions expressed fears a merger would be "high risk" and could lead to job josses. IG Metall union, which represents metalworkers in Germany, is concerned the joint venture could pave the way for ThyssenKrupp to exit the steel business entirely.	India's Tata Steel and German steel manufacturer ThyssenKrupp have agreed the first stage of a deal to merge, BBC Wales understands.
+text: Heavy overnight snow in some parts of the country led to wintry conditions for voters, particularly in the Highlands. A record number of people have already cast their ballots - with more than a million having registered to vote by post. Votes will not be counted overnight after the election because of Covid. Instead, counting will start on Friday morning, with the final result expected on Saturday. Scotland's party leaders all turned out at polling stations on Thursday morning. SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, who had already voted by post, was in Glasgow, which was where Scottish Labour's Anas Sarwar and Scottish Green co-leader Patrick Harvie cast their votes. Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross was at Alves Hall in Moray, while Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie - who had also voted by post - was at Strathpeffer Community Centre near Dingwall. The election is seen as being crucial to the future of the UK as the result could impact on whether or not there is a second referendum on Scottish independence. But it will also decide who forms the next Scottish government, which has considerable powers over areas such as health, education and income tax. The pandemic means polling stations will feel different to normal - with voters being expected to wear face coverings and use hand sanitiser when they arrive. The Electoral Commission has also recommended that voters bring their own pen or pencil to fill out their ballot papers - although clean pencils will also be available for use. Physical distancing measures will be in place and there may be a one-way system in operation, depending on your polling place. The Electoral Commission has also warned voters that they may have to queue to enter the building as there will be a limit on the number of voters allowed inside at any one time. Anyone who tests positive for Covid-19 or who is in self-isolation will be able to apply for a proxy vote up until 17:00 on polling day. How do I vote in the election? Anyone who lives in Scotland and is registered to vote is eligible, so long as they are aged 16 or over on the day of the election and have not been legally excluded from voting (for example because they are serving a prison sentence of longer than 12 months). People have two votes - one for a constituency MSP, and another for a regional ballot. There are 73 Constituency MSPs, each elected on a first-past-the-post system similar to the UK general election - the winner is the candidate who receives the most votes in each constituency. In the regional ballot, people vote for a party. The parties are then allocated a number of MSPs depending on how many votes they receive - once the number of constituencies already won in that region is taken into account - to make the overall result more proportional. There are eight electoral regions, each with seven regional MSPs. This means that people in Scotland are each represented by eight MSPs - one representing their constituency and the other seven representing their region. The Scottish government is formed from the party that hold the most seats in the parliament, or alternatively a coalition of more than one party. A modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. More information about these elections Who won in my area? Enter your postcode, or the name of your English council or Scottish or Welsh constituency to find out. Eg 'W1A 1AA' or 'Westminster' Other elections are also taking place across the UK on Thursday, including to the Welsh Parliament. There are also elections for seats on 143 English councils and 13 local mayors, as well as a by-election for the Westminster seat of Hartlepool in the north east of England. About 48 million people across Great Britain will be able to take part in the elections - many of them postponed from last year because of the pandemic. SIGN UP FOR SCOTLAND ALERTS: Get extra updates on BBC election coverage	Voting is taking place in the Scottish Parliament election, with polling stations open until 22:00 on Thursday.
+text: South Kesteven District Council's cabinet previously agreed to set aside funding for the event due to be held in Grantham this year. The Conservative-led authority said the money would be recouped in donations. The matter was put before a scrutiny committee on Tuesday after council leaders were criticised over the move. Independent councillor Ashley Baxter requested the decision be called-in, saying it had been taken without a proper opportunity for discussion. Labour councillor Louise Clack said there was "a real issue with a handful of people making a decision about such a large sum of money for what is effectively a party". "Ostensibly, this was done on the basis that it was underwriting £100,000, but we've not had any proof or evidence that we have support from the community for this," she said. Independent councillor Phil Dilks said the council's priority at this time should be to help those affected by the coronavirus pandemic. He said: "How have we become so out of touch with reality that we're seriously thinking of staging a party?" However, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, council leader Kelham Cooke said the event was "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to boost tourism and to raise the profile of Grantham". "Already I have had several expressions of interest to donate towards the cost of the event which is a huge vote of confidence for us," he said. The culture and visitor economy overview and scrutiny committee voted in favour of a proposal to ask the cabinet to provide further information on the event's costs before they would approve the spend. The bronze statue was offered to South Kesteven District Council after proposals to erect it in Parliament Square were rejected. The council agreed to put it on a 10ft (3m) high plinth to prevent vandalism, making the entire structure more than 20ft (6m) overall. Follow BBC East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk. Related Internet Links South Kesteven District Council	Councillors have been told to review plans to underwrite a £100,000 unveiling ceremony for a statue of Margaret Thatcher in her home town.
+text: Dr Eamonn Jessup, chairman of the local medical committee, said the majority of the region was at risk of losing their family doctor. He has written an open letter to cross-party AMs calling on them to help fight the "recruitment plight". The Welsh Government said sustaining high quality primary care across the whole of Wales was a priority. Since 2015, Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board (BCUHB) has taken over the running of seven GP practices across north Wales after they terminated their NHS contracts. The board also opened a GP hub in Prestatyn after three other surgeries handed back their keys. Four more practices, Criccieth, Rysseldene in Colwyn Bay, and Borras and Forge Road, both in Wrexham, are due to terminate their contracts in the coming months. The health board said it was continuing to work hard to find solutions to the challenges. Dr Jessup said GP bodies had warned of the upcoming crisis for years, but the number being taken over by the health board seemed to have "picked up significant speed" recently. He said many family doctors were retiring early due to high workloads, and practices were struggling to fill vacancies. "We have moved from the position that it was a minority of areas in north Wales that were at risk of losing their GP to the majority of areas now being at risk. "Since we last raised the issue of this potential collapse there seems to have been little recognition that north Wales has issues more acute than down south," he added. In Wrexham, BCUHB runs four GP practices after they terminated their contracts, while there are issues in Colwyn Bay, Conwy, Llandudno, and the Llyn Peninsula. Dr Jessop claimed it cost approximately a third more for BCUHB to run the services than the practices. A Welsh Government spokesman said changes to the GP contract for 2017-18 meant investment in primary care had increased by about £27m. Ministers are working with health boards and the British Medical Association to support practices vulnerable to closure. He added: "Through our successful This is Wales: Train, Work, Live campaign, designed to market Wales and NHS Wales as an attractive place to work, we are successfully recruiting more GPs to work in Wales." BCUHB said the issue was affecting primary care across the UK and it was working with partners to "deliver the best possible care for patients across north Wales". "We've seen considerable success in using new models of working, and will continue to work hard to find solutions to the challenges identified," a spokesman said.	GP shortages across north Wales are reaching crisis point, a senior medic has warned.
+text: Daft as a Brush Cancer Patient Care was set up last year by former millionaire-turned-philanthropist Brian Burnie from Newcastle. Now the first volunteer driven vehicle to be provided by the charity has made its debut trip. It is now looking for volunteers to increase its services in the region. Brian Burnie sold his Doxford Park Hotel and Estate last year in a multimillion-pound deal. 'Immense' reward He invested all of the proceeds into the charity to provide a fleet of taxis for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy and radiotherapy. The organisation is now hoping to create enough vehicles capable of transporting 50,000 cancer patients per year. Mr Burnie, said: "We need lots and lots of volunteers. We're hoping to have a fleet of 25 vehicles over the next nine months so we're needing lots and lots of drivers. "They're not really drivers, we've called them chauffeurs because they're moving VIP', very important patients. "Daft as a Brush is going to be a thousand times bigger than Doxford Hall. I only wish I'd done it 40 years earlier. The reward that I get and all the other volunteers get is immense." The first mode of transport to be put into use is called Starlight and is a seven-seat people carrier decorated with the Daft as a Brush characters. 'A big difference' The first patient to use Daft as a Brush's services was Eddie Carson from Winlaton, Newcastle. Last year Mr Carson had a mastectomy to remove a cancerous growth after he was diagnosed with breast cancer. He needed radiotherapy and was helped to and from his home for treatment by the charity. He said: "Because of the mastectomy I was banned from driving for months, it was too much pressure to put on the arm so driving was out of the question. "I was approached by somebody at the hospital and asked if I would be happy to be transported by a brightly coloured vehicle. It makes a big difference." Mr Carson now wants to become a volunteer to help others. For more information on becoming a volunteer, visit the Daft as a Brush Cancer Patient Care website.	A Newcastle charity is helping cancer patients on their journey to recovery by providing them with free travel to and from their home for treatment.
+text: Angered by "recent disruption, lack of investment and huge price increases", they made their feelings known in their version of The 12 Days of Christmas. They gathered at Charing Cross station in London on Wednesday to highlight issues such as signal failures, broken trains and missing drivers. Southeastern said it was "happy for customers to express their views". The event was organised by commuter Adam Halall, who regularly travels on the Hastings to Charing Cross line. He said he had been inspired by Southeastern's "incompetence over the last few weeks". WHAT THEY SANG On the 1st day of Christmas Southeastern said to me, There are no trains the rest of the week On the --- day of Christmas Southeastern said to me, 2 points are stuck 3 signal failures 4 missing drivers 5 broken trains 6 dirty toilets 7 flakes are falling 8 dodgy heaters 9 power failures 10 trains are cancelled 11 porky pies 12 hundred stranded And there's no trains the rest of the week.	A group of disgruntled rail commuters who use Southeastern trains have staged a festive protest about its services.
+text: The case has been brought to the Court of Session by petrochemical companies Ineos and Reach CSG. They say the Scottish government acted illegally in announcing an "effective ban" last year. But advocate James Mure QC, who is acting for the government, insisted that a ban is not actually in place. He insisted the government had "not yet adopted a position" on whether to impose a ban - with a final decision not due until later this year. The Scottish government announced a moratorium - or temporary halt - on fracking in 2015 while it sought the opinions of experts and the public on whether the controversial oil extraction technique should be allowed in Scotland. After considering the evidence for two years, ministers concluded there was "overwhelming opposition" and announced what was described at the time as an "effective ban". Nicola Sturgeon later told MSPs that: "Fracking is being banned in Scotland - end of story". The move did not involve legislation, with local authorities being instructed not to consent planning for any fracking-related activities in their areas. Ineos and Reach are seeking a judicial review of the decision, arguing that the government has converted a moratorium on the gas extraction into an unlimited ban. Ineos, which owns the Grangemouth refinery, holds two fracking licences in Scotland and imports fracked shale gas from the United States to process at its refinery in Grangemouth. It claims that ministers at Holyrood made "very serious" errors in their decision-making process. The company also believes a ban on fracking would result in Scotland missing out on economic benefits, including about 3,100 jobs and £1bn for local communities. And it claims that millions of pounds it invested in acquiring the fracking licences and obtaining planning permission for drilling sites had been "rendered worthless". Ineos and Reach want the court to declare that it is unlawful for Scottish ministers to use their powers under planning legislation to ban fracking in Scotland, pointing out that the licences were originally issued by the Westminster government. The petrochemical companies are also seeking damages - although the exact sum is not mentioned in legal papers. 'Preferred position' When the case started on Tuesday, Mr Mure argued that the action should be dismissed. He insisted the companies were mistaken in thinking that a ban was in place, and said that ministers were still considering whether fracking should be stopped - with a decision due in October of this year. Mr Mure added: "The concept of an effective ban is a gloss. It is the language of a press statement. What they have done is to announce a preferred position on the issue. "They have not yet adopted a position. Any position which the government will take has to undergo an environmental and strategic assessment. "The court should therefore allow the policy-making process to go to finalisation which is expected in October this year." The Scottish government later said it has "made its preferred position clear", and this is now subject to a Strategic Environmental Assessment. What is fracking? Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a technique used to recover gas and oil from shale rock by drilling down into the earth before directing a high-pressure water mixture at the rock to release the gas inside. Water, sand and chemicals are injected into the rock at high pressure which allows the gas to flow out to the head of the well, where it can be collected. Fracking allows drilling firms to access difficult-to-reach resources of oil and gas, and has been credited with significantly boosting US oil production. But opponents point to environmental concerns raised by the extensive use of fracking in the US. They say potentially carcinogenic chemicals used in the process may escape and contaminate drinking water supplies around the fracking site, although the industry argues any pollution incidents are the results of bad practice, rather than an inherently risky technique. There have also been concerns that the fracking process can cause small earth tremors. And campaigners say the transportation of the huge amounts of water needed for fracking comes at a significant environmental cost.	A senior lawyer has urged a judge to throw out a legal action aimed at overturning the Scottish government's "ban" on fracking.
+text: The monarch is shown with her son, the Prince of Wales, grandson, the Duke of Cambridge, and great-grandson, Prince George, to mark the royal christening. It echoes a 1894 image from the future Edward VIII's christening, showing him with his father, grandfather and great-grandmother - George V, Edward VII and Queen Victoria. The pictures were taken by Jason Bell. 'Windsor dynasty' The four official portraits were taken in the Morning Room at Clarence House following Wednesday's ceremony at the Chapel Royal, St James's Palace. BBC royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell said the images showed the Windsor dynasty on a scale not previously seen. The reigning monarch and three future kings will, in all probability, occupy the British throne for considerably more than 100 years. It is the "four monarchs" photograph that can genuinely be said to have historic significance, said our correspondent. The images were captured by Bell, who is renowned for his images of high-profile figures like Sir Paul McCartney, actress Scarlett Johansson and former England footballer David Beckham. Prince George wears a replica of the intricate lace and satin christening gown made for Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, Victoria, the Princess Royal, in 1841. The sofa which the royals sat on for the pictures was designed by Thomas Chippendale and is part of a range dating from about 1773. It is thought to have been commissioned by the Duke of Gloucester, George III's brother. 'A good boy' The prince, who was born on 22 July, was baptised by the Archbishop of Canterbury during a private christening attended by just 22 members of the royal family. The Cambridges broke with tradition to have their son christened at the Chapel Royal, where the coffin of the duke's mother, Princess Diana, lay before her funeral. The Queen, Charles and William were all christened at Buckingham Palace. Following the ceremony, the Queen told guests at Buckingham Palace how much she had enjoyed the ceremony. While the duchess said he had been a "good boy", as she attended a reception and dinner at the Kensington Palace State Apartments. The godparents, announced ahead of the christening, are Oliver Baker, Emilia Jardine-Paterson, Earl Grosvenor, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, Julia Samuel, William van Cutsem and Zara Tindall. Mrs Tindall is Prince William's cousin, while the other six godparents are all friends of the royal couple.	The Queen has been pictured with three future kings - the first such image of royal succession for nearly 120 years.
+text: The 28th year of the fancy dress event in Saundersfoot took an Olympic theme to celebrate the 2012 London games. To start the swim, local triathlete Oliver Simon carried an "Olympic swim" torch which has been touring the county since starting its journey in London. Meanwhile, in Gwynedd, swimmers turned out for a sponsored dip in Abersoch to raise money for the RNLI. Saundersfoot saw 1,657 taking part in the dip, and only two people, Chris Williams and John Joseph, have taken part in all 28 years. Saundersfoot Festivities Chairman Martyn Williams said: "Again we have exceeded expectations and have broken all records. "Twenty-eight years on and this event is getting bigger and better with thousands of pounds being raised for charity." Organiser Steve Williams said that despite low sea temperatures there were plenty of brave souls willing to take part. "But you'll never catch me down there on 2 January," he joked. "It's brilliant," said Steve. "It's really grown over the last 10 years and spread through the community". "The swim has raised over £350,000 during its history".	More than 1,600 have braved the cold sea in a record turnout for a Pembrokeshire New Year's Day swim.
+text: The 23-year-old had arrived in Singapore on Thursday after undergoing three operations in a Delhi hospital. The attack earlier this month triggered violent public protests in India that left one police officer dead. As news of the student's death spread across social media in India, police sealed off large parts of central Delhi and appealed for calm. The BBC's Sanjoy Majumder tweeted that the centre of Delhi resembled a fortress, with armed police and riot troops maintaining a heavy presence. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said he was "very saddened" and promised to channel "emotions and energies" into a course of action. Six men have been arrested and two police officers have been suspended following the 16 December attack. A statement from the hospital said the woman "passed away peacefully" early on Saturday with her family by her side. "The patient had remained in an extremely critical condition since admission to Mount Elizabeth Hospital," hospital chief executive Kelvin Loh said. "She had suffered from severe organ failure following serious injuries to her body and brain. She was courageous in fighting for her life for so long against the odds but the trauma to her body was too severe for her to overcome. "We are humbled by the privilege of being tasked to care for her in her final struggle," Mr Loh said. A team of eight specialists had tried to keep the patient stable, but her condition continued to deteriorate over the two days she was at Mount Elizabeth Hospital, he added. Officials from the Indian High Commission were also present when the patient passed away. The Indian home minister said the government had decided to send the victim overseas on the recommendation of her doctors. Arrangements are being made to take her body back to India, said Indian high commissioner to Singapore TCA Raghavan. "The requisite formalities for sending the body are being completed. The deceased and family members to be flown out in a chartered aircraft later today," Mr Raghavan said. In a statement issued in Delhi, Prime Minister Singh said: "It would be a true homage to her memory if we are able to channelise these emotions and energies into a constructive course of action. "The need of the hour is a dispassionate debate and inquiry into the critical changes that are required in societal attitudes. "Government is examining... the penal provisions that exist for such crimes and measures to enhance the safety and security of women. I hope that the entire political class and civil society will set aside narrow sectional interests... to help us all reach the end that we all desire - making India a demonstrably better and safer place for women to live in." Rising anger The victim and her friend had been to see a film when they boarded the bus in the Munirka area of Delhi, intending to travel to Dwarka in the south-west of the city. Police said she was raped for nearly an hour, and both she and her companion were beaten with iron bars and thrown out of the moving bus and into the street. On arrival at the hospital in Singapore, doctors said that as well as a "prior cardiac arrest, she also had infection of her lungs and abdomen, as well as significant brain injury". The government has tried to halt rising public anger by announcing a series of measures intended to make Delhi safer for women. These include more police night patrols, checks on bus drivers and their assistants, and the banning of buses with tinted windows or curtains. The government has also said that it will post the photos, names and addresses of convicted rapists on official websites to shame them. It has set up two committees - one looking into speeding up trials of cases involving sexual assaults on women, and the other to examine the lapses that might have led to the incident in Delhi. But the protesters say the government's pledge to seek life sentences for the attackers is not enough - many are calling for the death penalty. Since the Delhi incident, several cases have been highlighted of authorities failing to respond to reported rapes. On Wednesday, a woman committed suicide in the state of Punjab, after having tried to report to police a rape which allegedly took place last month, local media reports said. At least one police officer involved in the case has been sacked, according to local officials.	A female student gang-raped on a bus in India's capital Delhi has died at a Singapore hospital, doctors say.
+text: Sirens wailed and church bells tolled in the city, where several hundred Jews battled the Nazis in World War II. About 13,000 Jews died in the ghetto when the Nazis reduced it to rubble. Survivors were sent to death camps. Poland's president praised the Jews' "last stand" in a speech on Friday. President Bronislaw Komorowski and Israel's Education Minister Shai Piron spoke at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, on the site of the former ghetto. "This was the last stand of people deprived of dignity and hope," Mr Komorowski said. "Hundreds of insurgents stood to defend the last remnants of human freedom." In 1942, before the uprising, the Nazi SS deported about 300,000 Jews from the ghetto to the Treblinka camp, where they were murdered in gas chambers. To coincide with the uprising anniversary Warsaw is opening a new Museum of the History of the Polish Jews. The museum - not yet completed - will chronicle the 1,000-year presence of Jews in Poland, a once large and thriving community mostly wiped out by the Holocaust.	A major ceremony is under way in the Polish capital Warsaw to honour Jews who fought overwhelming Nazi German forces 70 years ago in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
+text: Ashleigh Butler, 17, trained her pet to jump and dance for their elaborate routine, performed to Lalo Schifrin's Mission Impossible theme. Judge Simon Cowell said the pair, from Northamptonshire, were one of his "favourite ever acts". The television audience peaked at 14.5 million, said ITV. The pair will appear in the Royal Variety Performance. Butler cried when presenters Ant and Dec announced her win. She said: "I just want to say thank you to everyone that voted for me, and I'm just so proud of Pudsey." Butler hugged her dog and said: "I love you." She said Pudsey - a border collie, bichon frise and Chinese crested cross - had become "very diva-ish" during the last week, and had been demanding steak dinners. The teenager trained the dog to jump, dance on his hind legs, and weave between her knees. Over the course of the series, the act have performed three separate routines. Responding to their win, Cowell said: "My life's work is now complete". 'Special moment' Earlier, he had told the duo: "I adore both of you. You have got better and better as the competition has progressed and to do what you did in such a short time is a miracle." Panellist and comedian David Walliams said the dancing dog act was "extraordinary". He added: "The nation has fallen in love, not just with Pudsey but with you too." Ashleigh and Pudsey, from Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, managed to beat the favourites, teenage opera duo Jonathan and Charlotte, from Ilford, Essex. The duo, who came second had performed The Prayer for the final. Earlier in the series - during their first audition - Cowell suggested Jonathan should go solo. But after Saturday's performance, Walliams said: "That was sensational. That was your best performance yet. It was so heartfelt, it was so professional." Charlotte was not upset at being a runner-up, saying: "We came second out of 70,000 people, it's incredible, it's been amazing." Only Boys Aloud, a 133-strong choir, came third after a rousing performance of Calon Lan, a song often associated with Welsh rugby. Judge Alesha Dixon praised the boys, aged 14 to 19, for sticking with tradition. She said: "That was a really special moment. I could feel the passion coming from every single one of you. "I commend each and every one of you and I am so glad that once again you chose to stick to your tradition and sing something Welsh." Cowell added: "I got emotional listening to a song I didn't understand a single word of - not a word of it - but I could tell how much it means to every single one of you, individually." 'Already made it' The show was kicked off by boy band The Mend with their version of the David Guetta and Usher track Without You. The group had been voted back on to the show as a wildcard. Judge Amanda Holden said their performance was "fantastic". Among the other acts Molly Rainford, 11, sang a moving rendition of Beyonce's ballad Ave Maria. She told told Ant and Dec it was a "dream come true" to perform in the final. Other finalists, in what the judges described as one of the strongest ever line-ups, included singers Ryan O'Shaugnessy and Sam Kelly, Welsh dance group Nu Sxool and synchronised swimmers Aquabatique. Dancers Kai and Natalia struggled with an injury during their final performance, while the band Loveable Rogues gave a strong performance of original material. Simon Cowell described the trio as appearing like a group who had "already made it". The live final came after 60,000 auditions and five semi-finals. ITV said the show was its highest-rated programme of the year to date. The average audience was 11.4 million - beating the 11.2 million who tuned in to see a pivotal episode of Coronation Street in January. On the BBC, meanwhile, audiences for The Voice continued their downward trajectory. An average of 5.6 million tuned in to the singing contest on Saturday night, down from 8.16m last week, and 10.5m the week before.	Dancing dog trick act Ashleigh and Pudsey have won ITV's Britain's Got Talent, scooping a £500,000 prize.
+text: Weather services say 49.2mm fell in one hour, the French capital's heaviest July deluge on record. Flooding closed 20 metro stations and three were still shut as commuters made their way to work on Monday morning. Parts of Switzerland were hit by violent winds and hail storms that also caused flooding at the weekend. Heavy rain began in Paris at 21:00 (19:00 GMT) on Sunday night and Méteo France said the amount that fell was higher than the previous record of 47.4mm set on 2 July 1995. Rain continued to fall heavily on Monday in Paris. Some areas of the west and around Paris had seen more than a month's average rainfall between Sunday afternoon and 08:00 on Monday, it said. While Montsouris park on the southern edge of central Paris recorded 68mm in 24 hours, the western French village of Civray saw 86mm. Forecaster Patrick Galois said that radar images suggested the central-western regions of Poitou, Berry and the northern Limousin could easily top 100mm in a matter of hours. A dozen storm alerts were in force on Monday as the weather front moved east. The Paris fire brigade recorded 1,700 emergency calls and responded to 87 incidents, including one in the basement of the culture ministry. The flooding brought back memories from June 2016, when staff at the Louvre and Orsay museums moved priceless artworks to safety as the river levels on the Seine reached their highest for over 30 years and emergency barriers were raised.	A two-hour storm unleashed 54mm (2.1in) of rain on Sunday night in Paris, the equivalent of 27 days of rainfall.
+text: The airline confirmed it was running its south coast business from Southampton airport, but also withdrawing its fleet of jet aircraft. The airline currently flies to Jersey, Glasgow, Dublin, Paris and Amsterdam from Bournemouth. It resumed flights from Bournemouth Airport in March. Flybe chief commercial officer Paul Simmons claimed: "This will enable more frequency and more choice to our customers through consolidating our South Coast operation into one airport. " Analysis - Paul Clifton, BBC South Transport Correspondent This is a huge blow for Bournemouth airport. It invested £45 million in a grand new terminal just as the recession started to bite. Its dream of handling three million passengers a year evaporated. Flybe, with a range of domestic and European routes, helped it rebuild passenger numbers above 750,000. Now it will fall back once again to a fraction of the business that was anticipated. As Flybe continues to restructure its operations, it will withdraw all its jet aircraft from Southampton. That's a disappointment there, but the airport says it hopes other changes and the arrival of another airline will keep passenger numbers broadly stable next year. Bournemouth Airport, which opened a new £45m terminal in 2010, has been primarily used by Ryanair and Thomson Airways. An airport spokeswoman said it was "extremely disappointed" at Flybe's decision. "We remain committed to providing a good range of choice to our loyal customers here in Bournemouth and there remains a wide range of destinations served across the networks of our other based airlines." Travel broadcaster Simon Calder described Flybe's actions as "fine-tuning" for the company but said he did not think the airport would close as a consequence. "It has some form of future… it's just a question of getting the right operator in there, and clearly Flybe doesn't think it's them."	Budget airline Flybe has announced it is to pull out of Bournemouth Airport, six months after restarting flights from the resort.
+text: More than a hundred and fifty people are being taken by ferry to the northeastern town of Trincomalee. It is expected to arrive there on Sunday. Latest violence In the latest violence in the area, the Sri Lankan army says six of its soldiers were killed when a booby trap bomb exploded in Muhamalai ,army spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe said. Four other soldiers were wounded. Airforce planes also destroyed a mortar launching pad in Palai in Jaffna, he said. Policeman released Earlier, separatist fighters released the policeman B.W. Bopetigoda they had taken prisoner in the north more than ten months ago. Peace monitors said he was handed over to them in what the rebels had called a goodwill gesture. The policeman was one of three officers captured in the north in September 2005 as he pursued a suspected British paedophile. The two other policemen had already been released. Weapons seized In the capital, Colombo, police said they had arrested sixteen people after seizing weapons at a house on the outskirts of the city. Army spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarsainghe said that the special task force and police arrested these suspects in Uswetakeyyawa, Pamunugama on a tip off by a civilian. The police also found two claymore mines, four detonators, wires, arms and ammunition and eight hand grenades.	The Red Cross in Sri Lanka has started to evacuate holders of foreign passports from the northern Jaffna peninsula.
+text: Keith Rizzo denies killing 23-year-old Neomi Smith - who was originally from Aberdeen - at her flat in Brechin on 9 June last year. Mr Rizzo, 23, and Miss Smith were said to have cut short a night at a pub. Jurors at the High Court in Glasgow also heard claims that weeks earlier he had held her by the throat until she passed out. Kirsty McLeish, a friend of the couple, told how she met the pair heading to Miss Smith's flat at about 23:00 on 8 June. Prosecutor Duncan McPhie asked the 22 year-old witness if she spoke to Miss Smith. She replied: "I asked how she and Keith were doing. She told me they were arguing quite a lot and that they were going home to have a break from the pub." Mr McPhie asked: "What was her mood like?" Miss McLeish said: "Still happy, but annoyed because they had been arguing." The witness told the trial she was with the couple at a hotel in Brechin on 10 May. Struck with knives She and Miss Smith then chatted about what allegedly happened the previous night. Miss McLeish: "She said her and Keith had been out at a pub in Brechin. He had got drunk and she remained sober. "They had started arguing and gone home. Once at her flat, he had pressed her up against a wall by her throat until she passed out." The charge includes accusations that he compressed her neck as well as repeatedly striking her on the head and body with knives. He also faces a separate charge of earlier assaulting Miss Smith to her injury and danger of life. The trial, before Lady Rae, continues.	A man argued with his girlfriend the night before he allegedly murdered her, a trial has heard.
+text: Waves of up to 27ft (8m) were recorded off Land's End, Cornwall. The environment secretary said seven people had died and 1,700 homes had been flooded in England due to storms and flooding in December and January. There are currently three severe flood warnings in place in England and travel by road and rail is being hit. In Aberystwyth, all buildings along the promenade have been evacuated after Natural Resources Wales (NRW) warned of an "exceptional" wave swell expected later. Woman rescued Western and southern areas have borne the brunt of the latest severe weather, with flooding leaving some villages in Somerset cut off, properties flooded in Cornwall, rivers bursting their banks in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, and residents forced from their homes in the centre of Salisbury, Wiltshire. The Environment Agency has warned communities in Dorset, Oxfordshire, south Wiltshire, Hampshire and along the Thames to "remain prepared" for more flooding on Monday and the rest of the week. Travel Check if this is affecting your journey The latest travel disruption includes: Around the UK: There are currently three severe flood warnings for parts of Dorset - indicating danger to life and property - for the Lower Stour, Chiswell and Preston Beach near Weymouth. There are also scores of lower-level flood warnings and alerts in force in England and Wales, as well as several in Scotland. The Met Office has yellow weather warnings - the lowest of its three levels - in place for wind and rain for south and south-eastern England. Environment Secretary Owen Paterson chaired a Cobra emergency meeting to ensure agencies are ready to respond, and made a statement to the Commons on the impact of the bad weather. Mr Paterson told MPs there was "a risk of groundwater flooding in Dorset and Wiltshire for some time to come and we need to remain vigilant". "Approximately 1,700 properties have been flooded in England so far, with Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Devon, Cornwall and Dorset particularly affected, although there were also impacts in the Midlands and the North West," he said. There had also been flooding in Northern Ireland and Scotland and 140 properties in Wales flooded, he said. Mr Paterson said the country's electricity network operators deserved credit for reconnecting "unprecedented" number of people cut-off, but added there were "lessons to be learned about how customers are supported and informed during power cuts". He again defended spending on flood defences, following criticism over the weekend, saying the government was spending "more than ever before". Prof David Balmforth of the Institution of Civil Engineers told the BBC: "I don't think we've woken up to the increased threat of flooding in the future due to climate change. "What we're seeing today as a rare event is likely to become much more frequent in the future and therefore it's important that we do continue to invest in flood defences." Rebecca Davies, pro vice-chancellor of Aberystwyth University, said about 150 students in seafront accommodation had been moved to another campus and a further 100 in private homes have also left. Exams scheduled for this week have been postponed until next week, she said, and students who have not yet returned to the university are being urged to stay away until the middle of the week. The village of Muchelney, on the Somerset Levels, has been cut off for about four days. Residents David and Tracey Bradley said they were making daily trips in their canoe to fetch essential supplies. "It's pretty desolate really, especially for the elderly and the children," said Mrs Bradley.	Huge waves have battered southern and western coasts of the UK, as forecasters warn exposed areas could see a fresh round of flooding.
+text: By John CampbellBBC News NI Economics & Business Editor Economist Dr Graham Gudgin was giving evidence to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee. He said studies done so far suggest the impacts on the UK economy would be in the range of plus or minus 2% of GDP. He described that impact as "pretty small" and "within the margin of error." Dr Gudgin, a former adviser to David Trimble, said the UK would have £10bn in net savings which is currently paid into the EU. He said that meant there would be "plenty of money around" to replace the EU subsidies on which Northern Ireland farmers rely. DUP 'likely to campaign for British exit' in EU referendum Read more: The UK's EU referendum - everything you need to know However, he cautioned that there is "total uncertainty", with everything depending on the exact post-exit arrangements. Two other economists giving evidence on Wednesday also pointed to the issue of uncertainty. Prof Neil Gibson, from Ulster University, said "nobody will know" what new trade deals will emerge post-exit. He said "the whole complexity" of such deals add a "huge level of uncertainty" which, he said, will be an important factor when people come to vote. However, he was optimistic that the UK could get a good trade deal with the EU. He said it would be in both sides' interests to have "a very open trade agreement". However, Dr Leslie Budd from the Open University said he did not share that optimism on trade. He said the transaction costs of trying to get deals with a range of countries "could be very large". He also raised questions about the impact of foreign direct investment in the UK. Meanwhile, Prof Gibson said a UK exit could, in the short-term, blunt the impact of Northern Ireland having a reduced rate of corporation tax. He said it could lead foreign firms to postpone investment until trade agreements become clear. "I think there would be added complexity, it would at least be a factor in those firm's intentions," he added. He said that could lead to a situation where the tax was cut and "in the first two years not much is happening."	A UK exit from the European Union would not have "much effect" on the Northern Ireland economy, a Cambridge academic has told a Westminster inquiry.
+text: By Jill TreanorBusiness reporter, BBC News Retailers also hope the sequel will get their tills ringing too. Why? Nine years ago, when Toy Story 3 was released, sales of toys, T-shirts and other merchandise in the UK were greater than takings at the box office. The Buzz figure is already the Disney Store's best selling toy of all time. The film - which will be released on 21 June - could provide a boost for the UK toy industry after a 7% fall in annual sales last year. "The more successful the movies, the more likely (but not always) it will correlate with toy industry sales," says Rebecca Deeming of the British Toy and Hobby Association. Franchises are an important fuel for toy sales. Data from market research company NPD shows that 23% of toy sales in the UK last year were generated by franchises - and almost half of that was related to films. "The good thing about toys from licences is that they can encourage role play and imagination and children can recreate what they've seen in films," says Ms Deeming. Toy Story is an extra special gift for retailers: a film based on toys and with an added dose of nostalgia. The children in the mid-1990s when the first film was released - 1995 in the US, 1996 in the UK - are now adults and may well have children of their own to take to the latest film. Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore, says the new film will "reinvigorate interest and excitement in the merchandise among a whole new generation of fans". Amy Pearson, marketing director for Disney Store Europe, says Toy Story appeals to fans of all ages. "It's not just for kids. It's for everybody," she says, adding that in the UK it "is by far the biggest franchise for us". Even before the film's release, last week a fifth of sales in the 42 UK Disney Stores and online were being generated by Toy Story. 'Woody's a great leader' Andre Taylor was born in 1996 - the year the first Toy Story film was released in the UK. Browsing in the Disney Store on London's Oxford Street, he says he is a "big fan". He has fond memories of playing with the toys with his brother when he was younger. "It's just been something I hold on to for a very long time. I've always identified with Woody and I've liked his character development from the first film... They really do put detail into the stories they are making," he says. "[Woody's] a great leader. When times get tough, he never ever gives up," he says. A toy collector, he keeps the toys in their boxes and intends to get characters such as Bo Peep and Bullseye after payday. New toys were added to the range in April, including those based on the new character, Forky - a spork given a makeover who does not want to believe he is now a toy. But Ms Pearson says that an updated version of the original Buzz Lightyear figure launched almost 25 years ago is still the main attraction. "He's the best selling toy of all time," she says. 'The year of the movie' Alice Enders, director of research at Enders Analysis, says expectations are high that the latest Toy Story release will do well for Disney - and not just in the UK. "It's a family movie... the timing is for the 4th of July [independence day holiday] in the US," she says. Analysts have been expecting 2019 to be a good year for Disney because of the slate of films being released. The sequel to Frozen is due before Christmas, while Avengers: End Game - based on the Marvel superheros - has already been released. Rivals have major releases too: Lego Movie 2 and How to Train Your Dragon: the Hidden World have already hit our screens. Frederique Tutt, global industry analyst of toys at NPD, describes 2019 as "the year of the movie". It is one of the reasons she is hesitant to predict that Toy Story 4 can smash records like its predecessor did. Her data shows that toy sales from Toy Story 3 generated £104m of sales in 2010 - breaking the then-record for franchised-related toy says in the UK. Data provided by Disney shows that box office receipts in the UK for Toy Story 3 were £74m, which it says still makes it the UK's highest grossing animated film. It also says more than a million Buzz Lightyear action figures were sold that year. Ms Tutt reckons £80m of toy-related sales in the UK would be a very good figure for this year's Toy Story release. While the week after the release of the film will be a crucial indicator for sales, she points out that there is not always an immediate correlation. Frozen was released in 2013 but its biggest year in retail was 2015, when it grabbed Toy Story's 3's crown for the most film franchise-related toy sales in the UK. (That has since been broken again by Star Wars). And while Avatar from James Cameron has been the best-selling film at the box office worldwide up to now, it has no sales in toys. "This was a miss. I'm sure this will be different when Avatar 2 comes out," says Ms Tutt. She says sales of the new Toy Story toys were already making up 1.2% of the UK's toy market in the week ending 8 June. Compare that with 2010, during the record year, when Toy Story made up 3.7% of total toy sales in the UK. For now, toy retailers will be hoping their sales catch a bit of that famous Buzz catchphrase: "To infinity and beyond."	When Buzz, Woody and Jessie return to our screens on Friday with the release of Toy Story 4, it's not just cinemas that will be hoping for queues at their doors.
+text: The airline expanded its schedule to 40% of its normal capacity last month, but now says it expects that to fall. "Customer confidence to make travel plans has been negatively affected" by "constantly evolving government restrictions", EasyJet said. "We know our customers are as frustrated as we are," it added. On Monday, the government added seven Greek islands to the quarantine list which means people return to England from these locations will have to isolate for 14 days. Johan Lundgren, the boss of EasyJet, told the BBC on Monday that the latest change to the quarantine rules - which means islands can be treated differently from their mainland countries if infection rates differ - was "too little, too late", as the peak of the summer holiday season had passed. "This is something we have argued for a long time - it should not have been a blanket instrument when it comes to quarantine. It should be based on risk and on a much more targeted approach," he said. In the airline's latest statement, Mr Lundgren said: "Following the imposition of additional quarantine restrictions to seven Greek islands and the continued uncertainty this brings for customers, demand is now likely to be further impacted and therefore lower than previously anticipated," "We now expect to fly slightly less than 40% of our planned schedule over the current quarter." The airline said this would be achieved by "continued schedule thinning as we continue to focus on profitable flying". Quarantine 'unpredictable' EasyJet, like other airlines, has been hit hard by lockdowns and travel restrictions around the world, with many announcing job cuts. It has previously said it will cut up to 30% of its workforce - about 4,500 jobs - as it struggles with the effects of the pandemic. EasyJet said that in view of "the continued level of uncertainty", it would not be maintaining any forward-looking financial guidance for this financial year or the next. "We know our customers are as frustrated as we are with the unpredictable travel and quarantine restrictions," said Mr Lundgren. "We called on the government to opt for a targeted, regionalised and more predictable and structured system of quarantine many weeks ago so customers could make travel plans with confidence." He added that it was difficult to overstate the impact that "the pandemic and associated government policies" had had on the whole industry. Mr Lundgren called on the government to provide "sector-specific support for aviation", with a package of measures including the removal of Air Passenger Duty for at least 12 months.	EasyJet says it is expecting to fly fewer passengers because consumer confidence has been hit by UK coronavirus quarantine measures.
+text: The court ruled there was insufficient evidence, but it refused to acquit him. In a split ruling, one judge declared it a mistrial because of a "troubling incidence of witness interference and intolerable political meddling". Mr Ruto denied murder, deportation and persecution charges during violence that followed the 2007 elections in which about 1,200 people were killed. Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta welcomed the ruling, saying the trial had been a "nightmare" for the nation. Mr Ruto is one of the most senior politicians to be tried by the ICC. In 2014, the prosecutor dropped similar charges against Mr Kenyatta, alleging that witnesses had been intimidated to make them change their testimony. The case against Mr Ruto's co-accused, journalist Joshua arap Sang, was also dismissed. Mr Ruto and Mr Kenyatta were on opposite sides of the 2007 election, but formed an alliance that won the 2013 election. Analysis: Alastair Leithead; BBC News, Nairobi The ICC's decision to "terminate" charges against Kenya's deputy president effectively brings to an end the international efforts to pursue justice for the victims of violence that followed the disputed elections in 2007. Some 1,200 people were killed and more than half a million were forced to flee their homes during inter-ethnic clashes driven by fierce political rivalries and the pursuit of power. The court's decision will come as a blow to the victims of the violence, and their families, who want to know the truth behind what happened, who was responsible - and to claim compensation. "This ruling does not mean the violence didn't occur, it does not mean that the victims do not exist," said Nelly Warega, a human rights lawyer who represents some of the victims. The pain and ethnic rifts are still felt today, as nobody has yet been held accountable for fomenting the violence which was widely seen as having been organised rather than spontaneous. A huge blow to the ICC Mr Ruto's supporters burst into celebrations after the verdict was announced, reports the BBC's Wanyama wa Chebusiri from his home town of Eldoret in western Kenya. The prosecution case Mr Ruto was dogged by repeated setbacks. In February judges at the ICC barred the use of recanted testimony, meaning that prior recorded witness statements could not be used by prosecutors. Several key witnesses in the case have changed their statements, which prosecutors said was due to intimidation and bribery. Mr Ruto's lawyers said he should be acquitted because so many key prosecution witnesses either dropped or changed their original statements. ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda acknowledged that the loss of witnesses weakened the case against the deputy president - but she argued there still remained enough evidence to proceed with the trial.	The International Criminal Court has thrown out the case against Kenyan Deputy President William Ruto.
+text: The green space on College Green is returning to normal days after the protest, which immediately led to complaints the area had been destroyed. Thousands of people attended the Youth Strike for Climate protest on Friday. It prompted a fundraiser for repairs to be carried out that has now reached nearly £14,000. Bristol City Council said any funds left over would be used for wildflower areas across the city. Following her speech, during which she warned global leaders that "the world is on fire", Swedish activist Greta led a march around the city. It rained heavily throughout the event, leading to extensive damage to the grass on College Green. Jon Usher, head of partnerships of Bristol-based charity Sustrans, set up a GoFundMe page after the march ended, aiming to raise £20,000. By Sunday morning more than £9,000 had been donated. Mr Usher, who attended the rally, said: "I did it knowing how important the green is to our staff as a place to go in the spring and summertime." "I think there could also be an opportunity for additional wildflower/pollinator planting on College Green which would be a lovely legacy from Greta's visit to Bristol."	Grass is growing back on the site of a climate change rally in Bristol that was led by Greta Thunberg, after it became a mudbath.
+text: But pressure group Stop Climate Chaos Scotland points out that the UK Committee on Climate Change report said the Scottish government must do more. The committee found that the annual target was missed by 2% last year. However, the CCC states that it would have been met if it had not been an exceptionally cold winter. Overall, the Scottish government has said it wants to cut carbon emissions by 42% by 2020. Scotland is committed to a series of annual emission reductions targets, which are currently legislated from 2010 to 2027. In its second progress report to Scottish ministers, the CCC states that, in a normal year for temperature, the target would have been reached. The fact that it fell short "can be attributed to the exceptionally cold winter months, which increased energy demand for heating, particularly in the residential sector". 'Low-carbon economy' CCC chief executive David Kennedy said that it was more important that there had been underlying progress in implementing low-carbon policy measures and that, in this respect, Scotland had performed well across most sectors. "Scotland has made good progress in delivering on emission reduction measures to date," he said. "This lays the foundations for meeting ambitious Scottish emissions targets and building a low-carbon economy in Scotland with the benefits that this will bring. "It is important that the Scottish government now focuses on fully developing its policy proposals and ensuring these and existing policies are delivered to their full potential." The reports states that: Opposition parties complained in January that Holyrood's SNP administration had failed to meet targets and needed to look again at policies across all departments. The CCC recommends "a significant increase in effort in developing and implementing existing policies in Scotland". However, the report warns that "meeting targets to 2020 will continue to be difficult unless the EU moves to a 30% target for 2020". "Without this, even implementing all of the proposed policies will not be enough to meet targets," it adds. "Through the 2020s, the Scottish government has set out a package of policies and proposals that looks feasible, but there is considerable uncertainty over how exactly it can be delivered." 'More action' That point was highlighted by Tom Ballantine, chairman of Stop Climate Chaos Scotland. "While we welcome the areas where progress to meet targets has been made, we share the concerns that the UK CCC latest report flags up of 'considerable uncertainty' in the Scottish government's draft climate plan and the need to increase the rate of policy implementation if we are to deliver our climate targets," Mr Ballantine said. "The independent watchdog emphasises the continued reliance ministers place on the EU increasing its climate ambition, following previous warnings that the government needs to come up with more action here in Scotland. "The report echoes the strong evidence heard by four committees in the Scottish Parliament that the government's draft plan does not provide the step change in effort the climate change committee has previously called for and is too reliant on weak proposals, rather than strong commitments to action."	Scotland is making good progress in reaching its climate change emission reduction targets, according to an independent report.
+text: "Nobody believes me," he said. The Edinburgh writer insisted the "prequel" was actually written as part of his most famous novel but was not used in the published version. According to Welsh, when he moved to Chicago three years ago he decided he would either erase his old work or use it in some way. The 53-year-old writer said he had a fear that he might fall under a bus and leave behind "half-written stuff" which people would publish. Given the continued interested in the heroin-fuelled exploits of Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie and Spud, he could have a point. Skagboys takes the characters made famous by Trainspotting and sketches out their lives before the beginning of that novel. Rather surprisingly it has Renton studying at Aberdeen University before his decline into the world of heroin addiction depicted in the later book and Danny Boyle's 1996 film, starring Ewan McGregor. Welsh insists it was not difficult to recreate a world he first wrote about almost 20 years ago because the "preamble" already existed. "I found this initial 100,000 words from the start of Trainspotting that I had never known what to do with and I couldn't throw it away," the author told BBC Scotland's Janice Forsyth programme . "So I thought if I can't throw it away it must be telling me to do something with it. "I just went through it and started writing on the basis of what was there, getting inspired by what I was reading and chopping bits out and putting bits in. "Before I knew it I had another novel on my hands." More reflective The new book is set in the 1980s - a decade in which Britain "changed structurally forever", according to Welsh. And while Welsh is happy to point the finger at Thatcherism for much of the damage done to society he is also critical of successive governments for not addressing the problems of "under-employment" and "people on housing estates being cut off and ghettoised". He said: "That social fabric was never repaired under New Labour. "It was a more benign continuation of the same policies. "Now we are in the same position with the current Coalition government, who are getting back into that paradigm of more tax cuts for the rich and hammering everyone else." Welsh said that when he wrote Trainspotting he was more interested in taking the reader into the character's world than telling them how they got there. He added: "But now being a bit older and a bit more reflective on things, I probably have a bit more confidence in myself as a writer to look at some of the bigger themes about cause and effect." He said his characters all ended up together doing the same things, but for different reasons. "For Spud, for example, there is a collapse in manual work and he's never going to work again almost. "At that young age he feels redundant and worthless. So the excitement he has is being part of the drug gang. "With Renton, it is much more complex. I think he feels he will actually benefit from Thatcherism, from that individualistic culture. "But while he will personally be ok, I think he realises that his family, his friends, his community are going to be crushed by it. "With him it is almost perverse way of showing solidarity with them."	Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh insists he wrote new novel Skagboys at the same time as his 1993 bestseller.
+text: The Aberdeen-based business said turnover rose by £11.4m to £123.3m in the year to April, while operating profits were up £1.7m to £14.8m. Craig Group said there was a strong performance across all divisions. The company, whose activities include offshore support, oilfield supplies and leisure, employs about 1,000 staff. Last year it invested £28.4m, mainly in modernising its fleet. Since 2003 Craig Group has spent £215m on its modernisation programme, resulting in the addition of 20 new vessels. The fleet is a mix of offshore support, platform supply, tanker assist, survey and emergency response and rescue vessels. It is operated by Craig Group's North Star Shipping division, which saw its turnover increase by 9.7% to £80.3m. Four new vessels were completed in 2012, creating 100 jobs in the marine industry. Turnover at Craig International Supplies (CIS), the group's oilfield procurement division, also rose by 10.3% to £37.6m. 'Healthy results' Managing director Douglas Craig said: "We are pleased to report healthy results across all three divisions for 2011/2012. "The UK oil and gas sector continues to flourish in what is still very much a fragile economic period and as a result we have been able to invest in vessels, people, premises and services." Mr Craig added: "We are particularly excited by the potential of CIS' global strategy, which will see the procurement division moving into new markets including West Africa, Central Europe and Australia over the next year." The Craig Group's divisions operate in Europe, Africa and the US. Its leisure arm operates the Kings Links Golf Centre in Aberdeen.	Shipping and energy services firm Craig Group has seen turnover and profits climb as it continues to modernise its fleet of vessels.
+text: In a letter to the National Association of Head Teachers, regulator Glenys Stacey said there were "questions" over how grade bands were set. The government is facing a possible legal challenge over grading reforms which appear to have denied thousands in England a C grade in the core exam. The Department for Education (DfE) said it welcomed Ofqual's decision. The proportion of GCSEs - taken by pupils in England, Wales and Northern Ireland - awarded an A*-C grade fell for the first time in 24 years when the results were released on Thursday. In an open letter to Education Secretary Michael Gove and Ofqual on Friday, the NAHT suggested grade boundaries in English had been "significantly altered" during the year in response to suggestions the pass rate would rise again. Ms Stacey said Ofqual would look at the detail of grade C boundary changes over the coming days, to "ensure confidence is maintained in our examinations system". 'Quickly, but thoroughly' The chief regulator added: "We recognise the continuing concerns among students, parents and teachers about this year's GCSE English results. "We will look closely at how the results were arrived at. We will do this quickly, but thoroughly." Ms Stacey said she expected to gather evidence over the next week and that Ofqual would then meet awarding bodies to discuss its findings. Mr Gove has come under increasing pressure from teaching unions who say it is unfair that pupils sitting the exam in June were marked more harshly than pupils who took it in January. The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) has said it is "not afraid" to take legal action against exam boards over the grade boundary reform. General Secretary Brian Lightman said the ASCL, which represents most secondary head teachers, "warmly welcomes" the Ofqual announcement. "It is essential that the injustice done to many thousands of young people is put right," he added. Earlier the ASCL called on the education secretary to take "immediate and decisive action". Education officials at Leeds City Council have announced they are also considering a "legal challenge". A statement on the council's website said: "We do not feel this basic principle of fairness has been adhered to in this case and will be looking with colleagues nationally at the possibility of raising a legal challenge to ensure Ofqual and the government put this right." The NAHT said it had been "inundated" with calls from schools about the situation. The Centre for Education and Employment Research, a think tank, says thousands of pupils could have been affected. Kathryn James, director of policy for the NAHT said she was "delighted" with the quick response from Ofqual. "I'm still absolutely clear though that we do need an independent inquiry into what has gone on this summer. "I think we need to be absolutely clear and make sure that this doesn't happen again - that we don't have this fiasco year upon year," she added. 'Urgent action' Labour have demanded a cross-party parliamentary inquiry into what they have branded the "GCSE fiasco". Shadow education secretary Stephen Twigg said: "Michael Gove needs to take urgent action as pupils may lose out on places in college. "If that means getting exam boards and Ofqual in a room and banging some heads together, he should do that. Pupils must not be treated unfairly." He added that Mr Gove had argued in the past for ministers to have greater accountability when problems arise in the exams system, and that the education secretary must "apply the same standards" now the coalition is in government. In an earlier statement defending the reforms, the DfE said: "Ofqual is the independent exams regulator. Its job is to make sure that standards are maintained over time and that students receive the grades that they deserve." "That's why we have strengthened Ofqual's powers to make sure the system is robust and rigorous and to give the public real confidence in the results."	The examinations regulator Ofqual is to "look closely" at concerns over grade changes to English GCSEs.
+text: By Tim MastersEntertainment and arts correspondent, BBC News Arthur, who was originally Corden's understudy, is leading a brand new cast at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, playing gluttonous minder Francis Henshall. "I still sometimes hear James's voice saying a line that I'm saying," he said after Tuesday's opening night. "But tonight I left him in the dressing room and went on stage as myself." The new cast includes Oliver! star Jodie Prenger and former S Club singer Hannah Spearritt. Speaking to the BBC after the show, Arthur admitted that having the Queen attend a preview performance had helped ease his first-night nerves. "There's been such a build up to tonight, but when the Queen came last week it was an added pressure - so press night was a doddle compared to that." As an understudy, Arthur filled in for Corden four times during the show's previous West End run at the Adelphi Theatre. It was during the interval of his very first night on stage that National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner asked the Welsh actor to take over from Corden. "When he offered it to me it didn't really register," admitted Arthur. "I didn't know what to say, so he carried on talking to fill in the gaps. But I accepted it and here I am." Hytner told the BBC that Arthur's fame - or lack of it - wasn't an issue. "It felt like a much better idea to get the guy who we knew to be really good, rather than to go for someone famous. "We didn't cast James because he was famous. We cast him because we knew he was a great comic actor. We cast Owain because he's a great comic actor, and I'm sure he'll be famous in time." The early indications from the critics look positive. Describing Arthur as "really rather good", the Daily Mail's Patrick Marmion saysin a four-star review: "Corden had the comic timing and physical comedy off pat and this is a replica performance." Richard Bean's play, based on Carlo Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters, first opened at the National Theatre in May 2011. The slapstick adaptation tells the story of sacked skiffle musician Francis Henshall juggling errands for two bosses in his new job as a minder in 1960s Brighton. The show opened at the Adelphi Theatre in November to rave reviews. Arthur's previous stage-work includes Hytner's National Theatre production of The History Boys, as well as Romeo and Juliet for the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Comedy of Errors for the Royal Exchange Theatre and Birdsong at the Comedy Theatre. "The biggest challenge is getting over myself," Arthur said. "I've never played a leading role in a show especially in the West End. I couldn't shy away from it - I had to go for it and enjoy it." He said there was no point in trying to imitate Corden's performance. "Being able to rehearse with a new company forced me to be different. A few lines have been changed to adapt Francis to being a Welshman. US transfer Corden and the play's original cast are opening the play on Broadway in April. "It's the kind of thing that might not cross the Atlantic, but it's worth a try," Hytner said. "Americans who come to London love it, but the question we can't answer until we get there is whether the wider Broadway audience will get it, whether it tunes into a very British sense of humour. I think it will. A lot of the humour is universal." Arthur added he had received a message from Corden just before the opening night. "He sent me a lovely text saying: 'It's yours now - go for it.' "It felt like an official handover, if you like. It was like he was saying, 'I'll take it to New York, but you're taking over in London. You have it - and smash it!'"	Welsh actor Owain Arthur has described the "challenge" of taking over from James Corden in West End hit One Man, Two Guvnors.
+text: Thousands gathered at Elland Road on Friday as a return to the top-flight was confirmed when West Brom lost to Huddersfield Town. Head coach Marcelo Bielsa, who will have a street named after him, was cheered into the stadium earlier. Leeds also took the Championship title earlier as Brentford lost to Stoke. Countless fans watched the historic moment from home and shared their joy online as promotion was sealed for the first time in 16 years. Former player and BBC commentator Noel Whelan - known for his shouts of "get in" after each time Leeds score - paid tribute to the fans. Mr Whelan, who played as a striker for Leeds from 1993-95, said: "To every single Leeds fan thank you for every single bit of support you have given our great club through the good and the bad you all deserve this and our great club are so lucky to have you." Boxer Josh Warrington was with the players when the news broke. "I got a call from some people at the club saying get yourself down and be part of the celebrations, so I was able to congratulate them personally, which was an honour," he said. "I'm still wired, it's kind of like the feeling after a fight. I don't sleep and I'm full of adrenaline. "That's how I'm feeling this morning, I hardly slept a wink last night." Leeds captain Liam Cooper said: "With this group of players behind me I feel unstoppable, that's how they make me feel. "I didn't get off to a great start with the club but since Marcelo's come in, it's changed me as a person and it's taken my playing to a whole new level. "Everyone involved it's been a massive effort. Andrea came in and he had a plan, and they have allowed us to go and achieve our dreams. This smile is going to take some wiping off my face." Analysis By Adam Pope, BBC Radio Leeds A year on, a centenary has been celebrated and amidst a pandemic the passing of legends mourned. A new one now lives. Marcelo Bielsa has led United out of exile and swept the stables along the way. Cleaner, fitter, smarter a team has been coached to greatness. He has restored pride and improved all around him. With his back against the wall in the Leeds style he did it his way, the right way. Leeds United are back and football is better for it. The edginess and "nobody likes us, we don't care" swagger will return too. But remember, its all because, just for once, the nice guy won. On twitter, fanzine The Square Ball wrote: "YYYYYEEEESSS! It's like Christmas Day, but one we've waited 16 years for! And we got Marcelo Bielsa! Bueno. #LUFC." Club owner Andrea Radrizzani tweeted: "I feel very happy and proud to be a leader of such an amazing club, our fans, our players, Marcelo and all staff, our management and everyone involved have worked very hard showing an unconditional love for @LUFC and an endless commitment to achieve our goal and dream. #WEAREBACK". Councillor Judith Blake, leader of Leeds City Council, said: "Under the expert and meticulous eye of Marcelo, Leeds have proved without doubt that they are a truly outstanding team and more than worthy of promotion this season." A Leeds street is also to be renamed Marcelo Bielsa Way to commemorate the promotion. The street, which connects Trinity Leeds shopping centre to Commercial Street, will have a sign installed next week. A BMW car was seen parked in front of the ground with a damaged windscreen after the celebrations, and fan Gareth Cundall set up a campaign to help pay for the damage. The Go Fund Me page had raised £1,697 raised of its £20,000 goal at midday on Saturday. Follow BBC Yorkshire on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk or send video here.	Leeds United's return to the Premier League has been likened to Christmas Day by jubilant fans celebrating the club's promotion.
+text: The funds would cover mitigation and prevention efforts as well as repairs. On Monday New York Governor Andrew Cuomo asked for $42bn, saying his state could not foot the bill alone. The north-eastern states were devastated by the 30 October storm, which killed more than 100 and caused $62bn in damage. "My commitment to the people of New Jersey is to make steady progress in our recovery, and to know that three or six or 12 months from now I'll demand the same level of effort, attention and results from government as I have in the past 30 days," Gov Christie said at a news conference on Wednesday. Last week, the Republican governor announced he had requested $29.4bn for repairs. On Wednesday he added to that $7.4bn for the mitigation and prevention of future flooding and destruction. The request is larger than the state's annual budget of $32bn. Gov Christie says more than 30,000 properties were destroyed or badly damaged in last month's storm, while 230,000 New Jerseyans have registered for emergency aid from the government. In New York, Gov Cuomo said taxpayers could not afford to pay for the recovery and prevention on its own. "It would incapacitate the state," he said on Monday. "Tax increases are always a last, last, last resort." Gov Christie said this week he would run for re-election in November. He said he was motivated by a desire to help the state through the recovery process. His response to the storm, including his embrace of Democratic President Barack Obama and federal recovery efforts, won widespread praise.	New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has requested $37bn (£23bn) from the US federal government to help the state recover from "Superstorm" Sandy.
+text: A poster featuring a kilted man in front of an image of Glen Coe is being displayed on 50 large digital screens in the US city. The VisitScotland poster reads: "Visit Scotland. The land that inspired Outlander". It also urges New Yorkers to "Give in to your kilty pleasures". Based on a series of novels from American author Diana Gabaldon, the TV series follows the story of Claire Randell, a nurse from 1946 who is swept back in time to 1743. It was filmed at various locations across Scotland, including Doune Castle near Stirling. 'Fantastic opportunity' The promotion drive will also see VisitScotland members march along New York's 6th Avenue with an Outlander-themed banner during the Tartan Day Parade on Saturday. The parade will include 300 Outlander fans and will be led by Graham McTavish, who plays Dougal Mackenzie in the show. VisitScotland has also teamed up with Showcase, the Canadian channel broadcasting Outlander, to offer viewers a holiday for two in Scotland. The advert for the competition is being broadcast during the first and second episodes of the series this month, with shots of Scotland appearing alongside clips from the show. VisitScotland chairman Mike Cantlay said: "Outlander has captured the imagination of people across the globe, particularly in North America, and it is vital that we make the most of this fantastic opportunity. "Our intensive marketing activity during Scotland Week, and beyond, will encourage more and more people to come to Scotland - the land that inspired Outlander."	Tourism promotion agency VisitScotland is targeting American fans of the hit drama Outlander during Scotland Week celebrations in New York.
+text: By Natalie JamiesonNewsbeat entertainment reporter Cumberbatch has apologised and said he was "devastated to have caused offence" after using the word on a US TV show to describe black actors. "I think it's ridiculous," Selma star Oyelowo told Newsbeat. "When you look at what he was actually saying it's clear that he's a huge supporter of black performers." David Oyelowo was speaking at the UK premiere of Selma, in which he stars as 1960s civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. Cumberbatch mentioned David Oyelowo and Chiwetel Ejiofor as part of a wider discussion with US talk show host Tavis Smiley about diversity in the film industry. "To attack him for a term, as opposed to what he was actually saying, I think is very disingenuous and is indicative of the age we live in where people are looking for sound bites as opposed to substance." More: Why the word 'coloured' is offensive The actor also said he had spoken to Cumberbatch about the controversy that flared up online over the past few days. "I reached out to him in support and said I think it's ridiculous," he said. When asked if he felt Hollywood and the film industry had an issue with diversity, Oyelowo replied with a resounding "absolutely". "You can see that in the fact every time a film of this size and stature comes up. "We're talking about diversity again and that's because there isn't enough of it." He cited his recent role in Interstellar as one that wasn't specified as a black character and noted "to get to the point whereby myself and Ryan Gosling are going up for the same role is going to be great". "That's not to say that that doesn't happen, it just doesn't happen often." Oyelowo suggested there needed to be more diversity among people with the power to finance and get films made. "Excellence is the best weapon against prejudice. I intend to be part of the solution and not the problem. "You've just got to keep on banging out good performances." Benedict Cumberbatch has been nominated for the best actor Oscar for his role in The Imitation Game, and while David Oyelowo missed out on an acting nomination for Selma, the film is in the running for best picture at next month's ceremony. So does David think the negative publicity Benedict has been getting will harm Cumberbatch's career? "Absolutely not," said Oyelowo. "I think it's just part of the silly news cycle that we all feed off and it will go away like chip paper as it does. "He's a brilliant actor, he gives a brilliant performance in Imitation Game and, like I say, it's just a diversion from what we should be talking about, which is that astounding performance." Follow @BBCNewsbeat on Twitter, BBCNewsbeat on Instagram and Radio1Newsbeat on YouTube	David Oyelowo has defended fellow British actor and friend, Benedict Cumberbatch, for using the term "coloured" during an interview.
+text: An investigation by Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust found the radiologist's actions caused a delay in diagnosing a patient. The trust said the patient should have had a biopsy which would have picked up breast cancer earlier. The radiologist was no longer working for the NHS, the trust said. 'Sincerely apologise' The trust said the radiologist was conducting an ultrasound scan and failed to then carry out a biopsy on the patient, contrary to guidelines. An audit was done of the previous work carried out by the radiologist. Following the audit of almost 500 ultrasound scans, concerns were raised over 24. The patients concerned have been asked back to have reassessments. Medical Director Dr Mark O'Donnell said: "We would like to sincerely apologise for any anxiety this may have caused them and their families. "All of the patients who have been at any possible risk of delayed diagnosis have been contacted by telephone or by hand delivered letter and we have arranged to see them as quickly as possible. "We understand that other patients may also be worried. However we can assure them if they have not been contacted by the hospital already, they should have no cause for concern." The trust referred the case to the General Medical Council.	Dozens of women have been recalled for further breast cancer tests after Blackpool Victoria Hospital radiologist failed to follow proper procedures.
+text: UK Steel policy chief Dominic King also accused the EU of saying to Chinese producers "please dump here". In January, Tata announced it was cutting 750 steel jobs in Port Talbot, out of more than 1,000 going in the UK. Welsh Secretary Stephen Crabb said the UK government would continue to do "all it can" to help the industry. Leading figures from the steel sector were giving evidence to the assembly's enterprise and business committee on Thursday. 'Wake up' Mr King compared a new 266% tariff on Chinese coiled steel into the United States, with a 16% tariff for Chinese imports into the EU. "We see the European Commission as not really having the teeth to deal with the flooding of Chinese exports into not just the UK, but Europe as a whole," he said. "The UK has a perfect storm but the rest of Europe is starting to be hit as well." Economy Minister Edwina Hart told the committee that unless tariffs on Chinese steel exports were increased "we won't have the luxury of talking about steel because there won't be steel". "Europe's got to wake up and smell the coffee ... we've got to have an industry in Europe that produces for Europe," she said. In February, the European Commission announced it was opening three investigations into steel products made in China, saying it would not allow "unfair competition" to threaten Europe. In relation to levels of UK government support, Chris Hagg, head of external affairs for Celsa Steel, which has a major operation in Cardiff, said: "It has taken them quite a long time to come to the party." He welcomed the introduction of an energy compensation package from ministers at Westminster, but he also described delays by the Welsh government on changes to business rates as a "key concern". Sanjay Tohani, director of Liberty Steel, which has re-opened a mill in Newport and is looking to create 1,000 jobs, said the outlook was "not particularly bright". In written evidence to the committee, Welsh Secretary Stephen Crabb said: "The UK government has taken significant action in response to industry asks and will continue to do all it can in the coming weeks and months to ensure a healthy and sustainable future for the industry. "There is clearly more to be done and I recognise this is a vital economic issue for Wales, and will continue to work closely with the Welsh government." Analysis by Nick Servini, BBC Wales political editor The committee may have been at the assembly but in reality the main issues under discussion had little to do with devolved politics. At the heart of this is the attitude to trade tariffs. The department for business at Westminster believes the EU could do more within the existing rules. By way of defence, it says it voted in favour of anti-dumping measures twice last year and lobbied for the EU inquiry into cheap imports of reinforcing steel bar. But the industry wants Britain to call for a more fundamental shift in attitude, or in the jargon scrapping the regulation called the lesser duty rule. This is being resisted in Westminster because of fears that it could open the door to protectionism and retaliation from other countries: in other words a trade war.	UK ministers were among the "ringleaders" blocking higher tariffs on Chinese steel, the body representing the UK steel industry has told AMs.
+text: The deadline set by Aberdeen City Council for claims related to Hazlehead Crematorium passed at 17:00. Baby and adult ashes were mixed together at the crematorium and given back to relatives of the adult. The parents of the infants were told there were no ashes. Thompsons Solicitors told BBC Scotland they were dealing with 171 cases. Aberdeen City Council said it could not confirm the number of claims it had received. The council announced in December last year that it had approved a new financial compensation scheme for those affected. BBC Scotland revealed in 2013 that no ashes had been offered to the families of infants cremated in Aberdeen over a five-year period.	A solicitors' firm acting for families affected by the baby ashes scandal in Aberdeen has submitted 171 cases for compensation.
+text: Mohammed Saleem was stabbed by Pavlo Lapshyn in Small Heath on 29 April, less than a week after Lapshyn had arrived in the UK. At the Old Bailey, 25-year-old Lapshyn pleaded guilty to murder, as well as plotting to cause explosions near mosques in Walsall, Tipton and Wolverhampton in June and July. He will be sentenced on Friday. The postgraduate student, from Dnipropetrovsk in Ukraine, was living in Birmingham while on a temporary work placement in the city when he killed Mr Saleem. 'Evil and ill-informed' The grandfather of 22 had been attending prayers at the Small Heath mosque and was just yards away from his home when he was stabbed three times. Later, Lapshyn planted three bombs near three mosques in the West Midlands as part of a campaign he said was motivated by racial hatred. He was arrested almost a week after an explosion near the Kanzul Iman Masjid mosque in Tipton on 12 July. Assistant Chief Constable Marcus Beale described Lapshyn as a "self-starter" who would have been likely to go on to commit further offences, while in the UK on a year-long visa. "He was motivated through what he had learnt himself - he was operating alone and not part of wider group," he said. "He is an evil and ill-informed man, he was extremely dangerous. "His motivation was that the white man was better than anyone else." After his initial arrest for planting the explosive device outside a mosque in Walsall, he told police: "I would like to increase racial conflict." When asked why he had targeted the mosque he replied: "Because they are not white - and I am white." Mr Saleem's daughter Shazia Khan said: "He did not do anything to deserve this - other than be a Muslim. "The effect of the trial process has been very difficult for the whole family; we have not had the peace to grieve for our father, but we are hoping for closure after sentencing on Friday. "Hopefully he will get the sentence he deserves. "We question why he did it, the reasons he has given we can't accept, for someone to commit such a heinous murder. "It's such a pity he's wasted his whole life for personal hatred of a particular race." 'Shrapnel and nails' Lapshyn was on placement at software company Delcam, and his apartment above the company's offices was searched as part of police investigations. The company's chief executive Clive Martell said staff were "deeply shocked and saddened". Det Supt Shaun Edwards, from the West Midlands Counter Terrorism Unit, said: "We found part-made devices in Lapshyn's room plus chemicals and bomb-making equipment, so it is clear he planned to place further devices with the intention of killing or maiming innocent members of the public. "All three of the devices he detonated were powerful but his final attack in Tipton was the first to feature shrapnel and nails. "He placed this near the mosque's car park with the intention of hitting worshippers as they arrived for prayers. "Thankfully, the service had been put back an hour so the mosque was largely deserted when the bomb went off." Mr Edwards said that during interviews Lapshyn had been keen to take credit for the attacks, although at the Old Bailey he denied endangering life in the Walsall blast. That charge is to lie on file. Within days of the first bomb exploding in Walsall on 21 June, officers had a clear picture of what the 25-year-old looked liked after analysing footage from hundreds of CCTV cameras in the area. West Midlands Police said the problem was finding Lapshyn as he was a "loner". "It was local neighbourhood officers in Small Heath, asking 'do you know this man?', that got him," Mr Edwards said. "They noticed he appeared to be wearing work clothes, and started asking the businesses - one of which was Delcam." One of Lapshyn's tutor in the Ukraine, Viktor Laskin, said he was in "the same state of shock" he had experienced when the 25-year-old was first arrested. Mr Laskin said: "We never did believe and don't believe now that he could have done this on his own and consciously. "During the years of his studies, he never expressed any anti-nationalist sentiment, and so his statement that he wanted to increase racism, or whatever it is he said, came as a big surprise for us."	A Ukrainian student has admitted murdering an 82-year-old man who was walking home from a Birmingham mosque.
+text: The Met Office is warning of icy roads across much of the UK and Central Scotland police advise essential journeys only. A number of BBC News website readers were stuck over night on Monday, unable to get home because of bad weather. Gabrielle Clark, North Lanarkshire Lisa Boden, Edinburgh My husband Tim, our two-year-old daughter, Mia, our dog, Kenco and I were all stuck in our car on the M8 for 11 hours yesterday. I am five months pregnant. It was a horrendous journey. It occurred to us that if there is a lack of infrastructure, like gritters and manpower to prevent these situations, why is there not better management of the traffic flow? For example, why not have better control of traffic entering these main junctions and motorways, so that, when they are available gritters can enter the motorways to clear them. One of the problems on the M8 on Monday evening was the presence of snow over old ice and compacted snow which had obviously not been cleared from last week, despite this more cars were allowed to enter the motorway - including large lorries which were struggling to cope with the icy conditions. Emma O'Donnell, Hamilton I left work on Monday afternoon and got home late Tuesday morning. I was stranded because of the bad weather and had to stay in a call centre overnight. I stayed with about ten people at a Travel Centre in East Kilbride after I couldn't get home from work. The kind staff there left the centre open to give people shelter and warmth, without this I have no idea what I would have done. We were sent home from work early because of the bad weather. There were no buses, so I went to the train station, we were told they were running, so I waited for an hour but nothing came. I thought about walking the ten miles or so home and then came across the centre and a helpful woman called Yvonne. I'm not bitter or angry at the authorities for this, it was an act of God, it's not their fault. The police were really helpful and in the end, I managed to get a lift home. People have been very helpful, even strangers, but I think everyone pulls together at times of need. Mustafa Elshani, Bathgate I left work early, at midday, to avoid traffic. My journey usually takes 50 minutes at the most but on Monday it took 12 hours. It was awful. No one was in attendance, no services were there. People were desperate, they had no food or drink, temperatures were down to minus five, both the car and phone batteries were running out. It was a travel disaster no-one seemed to be doing anything to help the people left stranded. I got home at 0100. I do not understand why Scotland's Transport Minister, Mr Stevenson, is defending the contractors. They were no where to be seen, even though eastbound of the M8 was cleared of traffic, there was 20cm of snow on the westbound lanes, and the hard shoulder was not cleared. If cleared, the hard shoulder could have provided another lane to ease the traffic or be used by stranded cars. Mr Stevenson is blaming the Met office for not giving enough warning about the bad weather, which is pathetic, they should have their own guys on the ground. Jordan Watterson, Lanark I spent almost nine hours getting home from a dentist appointment in Coatbridge, North Lanarkshire, on Monday. I live in Lanark, which is in the south of Lanarkshire and the journey usually takes 35 minutes. It took me four hours just to get to the M8. The main problem was lorries - they were struggling to get up the hills and were getting stuck so cars behind couldn't get past. One driver, so fed up with the traffic jam got out of his car and built a snowman while he waited.	Heavy snowfall and freezing temperatures across parts of Scotland, Northern Ireland and northern England have caused major traffic problems.
+text: More than 150 people, some hooded and armed, gathered on Monday to avenge the alleged assault of a Chechen teenager by a drug dealer. It comes after a number of incidents in the city over the weekend. One man, who claimed to be Chechen, told local media he was part of the group and said others had joined from across France, Belgium and Germany. A prosecutor said several people were hurt, some seriously, on Friday night and one person suffered gunshot wounds on Saturday. On Sunday, more than 200 people entered the district of Gresilles with violent intent, police said. The violence began again on Monday, with people setting fire to rubbish bins and a car, AFP news agency reports. About 37 riot police have already arrived in the city and 110 additional police officers were due to be deployed on Monday. Bernard Schmeltz, the top state official in the region, said in a statement that the violence "appeared to be part of a settling of scores between members of the Chechen community in France and residents" of Dijon. In an interview with daily paper Le Bien Public, a man claiming to be Chechen said the incidents were in retaliation following an assault on a 16-year-old by local drug dealers. "We never intended to ransack the city of take it out on the people," he said. A probe has been opened into attempted murder by a criminal gang, Dijon prosecutor Eric Mathais said.	Police reinforcements have been sent to the French city of Dijon following a spate of violence from Chechen groups.
+text: On Wednesday evening it published a report by its scientific advisory group, TAC, referring to a recent paper issued by UK ministers that pulls together some of the information that helps scientists understand where transmission is occurring. This is evidence First Minister Mark Drakeford and his colleagues looked at when deciding on laws which will ban alcohol in pubs and restaurants from Friday, and close all hospitality venues in Wales at 18:00 every night. Plaid Cymru maintains that the Welsh Government has failed to answer questions about the decision, while the Tories claimed Welsh customers will go across the border. Businesses can offer a takeaway service after 18:00, and if they have an off-licence can sell takeaway alcohol up until 22:00. The UK government document says that each type of data has limitations, but it is "consistent in supporting the view that hospitality venues are a significant risk for transmission". Analysis of UK coronavirus measures Sage (the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) has analysed the impact of introducing tiers and national level restrictions. That suggests that "it is only possible to get R consistently below 1 in places where there have been substantial restrictions on hospitality" . R is the number of people that one infected person will pass on a virus to, on average. That means places in the UK that have introduced English tier three type restrictions or higher have seen the pandemic shrink. Other interventions have produced "a more mixed picture", according to SAGE. Research from other parts of the world International studies looking for connections between events or locations and infection have "found significant association between hospitality and infection", the paper says. A report from the US Centre for Disease Control found that people infected with Covid-19 without having knowingly been in close contact with an infected person were nearly three times more likely to say they had been to a restaurant and nearly four times more likely to say they had been to a bar or a coffee shop. Analysis of outbreaks in Japan, China, South Korea and Indonesia "noted that their largest "superspreading" events, where the number of cases transmitted us disproportionately high originated from pubs, clubs, restaurants, gyms and wedding venues." However, clusters in Japan have also been traced to hospitals and other care facilities. Sage's own advice The UK government paper also refers to Sage advice that close face-to-face contact for prolonged periods, in crowded indoor settings, is high risk. Sage says that risk is higher in loud, poorly ventilated environments. "These are all prevalent in the hospitality sector (but not unique to it)," the paper says. Sage also says the effect of alcohol can make people disregard Covid-safe behaviour such as social distancing. What do opposition parties say? Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price said Welsh ministers "cannot point to any modelling undertaken relating to the important details of its new restrictions", saying they had "eroded public confidence and alienated the hospitality sector". He said: "Why is there a total ban on alcohol? Did they undertake modelling on allowing a limited number of alcoholic drinks per customer? "Where are the modelling comparisons between banning alcohol and closing at 6pm compared with allowing hospitality to stay open until 8pm with alcohol served until 7pm? "A failure to answer these questions weakens the Welsh Government's case and will further frustrate a sector in which some businesses will never recover." Darren Millar, who speaks for the Welsh Conservatives on Covid recovery matters, said that while he welcomed the lifting of travel restrictions between Wales and parts of the UK, announced on Thursday, "this news will rub salt in the wounds of the Welsh hospitality industry". "With Welsh pubs, cafes and restaurants being banned from selling alcohol on their premises from 6pm tomorrow, many of their customers will be taking their custom and cash across the border to enjoy a tipple with a meal in England instead," he said. "The Welsh Labour-led government must rethink its new rules, engage with leaders the hospitality industry and adopt a more targeted approach to intervention that keeps the Welsh pound in Wales, and attracts the English pound into Welsh businesses too, especially in the run up to Christmas."	The Welsh Government has faced pressure this week to produce evidence to support tough new restrictions on the hospitality industry to help reduce the spread of coronavirus.
+text: The drivers union Aslef said hundreds of its members had decided "overwhelmingly" to take industrial action after rejecting a pay offer from the rail operator. Southern said it would continue discussions to find a resolution. A joint meeting is planned for Thursday. The firm runs services between London, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire and Kent. 'Finding a resolution' More than 91% of union members backed the walkout, according to Aslef, with 95.3% supporting action short of a strike. The turnout was 85.3%. A spokeswoman for Southern said: "We are of course very disappointed that Aslef has rejected our above inflation pay offer. "We will be continuing discussions with union representatives with the aim of finding a resolution and avoiding action that will affect our passengers." Network Rail workers are set to go on strike for 24 hours from 17:00 BST on bank holiday Monday in a row over jobs and pay. The action will see signallers, maintenance staff and station workers walk out on 25 May in the first UK-wide rail strike in 20 years.	Train drivers at Southern Railway have voted to go on strike in a row over pay.
+text: A report to councillors suggested the reopening of the DG One site in Dumfries would happen in October 2019. However, Dumfries and Galloway Council leader Elaine Murray said it might be possible during school summer holidays. She stressed that the work would not be rushed in order to allow the reopening to take place. "That's one of the lessons to be learned from DG One - that we shouldn't be desperate to get things open rather than doing the health and safety procedures," she said. "In this case we are assured that all health and safety processes have been rigorously adhered to." Ms Murray said that if there was a possibility to open earlier than anticipated, the council would be happy to take it. "We are talking at the moment about an opening date to the public in August," she said. "If it were possible to bring that forward a little bit so that for the majority of the summer school holidays next year children could have access to the facilities and visitors have access to those leisure facilities that would be an added bonus."	A major repair programme to construction faults at a multi-million pound leisure centre could be completed weeks ahead of schedule.
+text: Susan and Paul Rutherford, of Pembrokeshire, argued the room was essential because it is used by carers who look after Warren, 14, overnight. They claimed the £14 a week reduction to their benefits, described by critics as the "bedroom tax", was unlawful. But a High Court judge dismissed their judicial review claim. Warren suffers from a rare genetic disorder which means he is unable to walk or talk and cannot feed himself and needs 24-hour care. The family's spare room is used by carers who sometimes stay overnight and to store all the medical equipment he needs there. Disabled adults who need a spare room for carers are exempt from the benefit restriction, but the same does not apply for children. The family, from Clunderwen, argued that was unfair and were seeking a change in the law. 'Constant fear' But Mr Justice Stuart-Smith, sitting at the High Court in London, dismissed their challenge because they have been granted a discretionary housing payment from Pembrokeshire council to cover the shortfall for a year. Mike Spencer, solicitor for Child Poverty Action Group representing the couple, said they were disappointed with the ruling. "The court has at least indicated that the local council should help pay the shortfall in Warren's rent, but ultimately families with severely disabled children should be entitled to the same exemption as disabled adults and not have to rely on uncertain discretionary payments," he said. "Paul and Sue work round the clock to care for Warren and have the constant fear hanging over them that Warren might lose his home and have to go into care. They will be seeking to appeal." A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said it was pleased the court had found in its favour and agreed the policy was lawful. "We have made £345m available to councils since the reforms were introduced to help vulnerable families who may need extra support," the spokesman said. "The removal of the spare room subsidy is a fair and necessary reform. It will give families in overcrowded accommodation hope of finding an appropriately sized property and help bring the housing benefit bill under control."	A couple who care for their severely disabled grandchild have lost an appeal against cuts to their housing benefits because they have a spare bedroom.
+text: It is the Taliban's first ceasefire since the government they ran was toppled by the 2001 US-led invasion. The Taliban said it would stop all offensive operations during the holiday, except against foreign forces. Earlier, Taliban fighters killed dozens of Afghan security force members. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said the Taliban move was an opportunity for the militants to realise "their violent campaign" was "not winning them hearts and minds but further alienating the Afghan people from their cause". Government forces will not stop fighting other militants operating in Afghanistan, like the Islamic State (IS) group, during the ceasefire. Previous offers of peace talks and ceasefires with the Taliban have come to nothing. Why now? The Afghan government's unconditional truce followed a meeting of clerics, who earlier this week issued a fatwa condemning militant violence as un-Islamic. The clerics were themselves targeted in a suicide attack claimed by IS, which killed 14 people outside their peace tent in Kabul this week. The Taliban did not specify why they made the surprise decision to agree to the truce in their statement, but they said they would consider releasing prisoners of war as long they did not return to fighting against them. However, the group warned that it would "strongly defend" itself if it came under attack. Afghan officials hailed the Taliban's move to join the ceasefire. The UN special representative for Afghanistan, Tadamichi Yamamoto, said he hoped it would "serve as as stepping stone" towards peace talks. When will it actually happen? No exact date has been given. It is timed to coincide with Eid-al-Fitr, which marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Afghan calendars mark the end of Ramadan as 15 June. What about foreign forces? In Washington, the state department said US forces and coalition partners in Afghanistan would "honour the ceasefire". Foreign troop levels in the country have dropped to about 15,000. Last August, US President Donald Trump unveiled a more hawkish strategy in Afghanistan, including a surge of air strikes and committing more troops. Their presence has been a major sticking point for the Taliban, who have long demanded they completely withdraw from the country as a pre-condition for peace talks to begin. The Nato combat mission, which at one point numbered more than 130,000 troops, withdrew from Afghanistan in 2014. What's the latest on the ground? News of the forthcoming truce has not prevented further violent incidents across Afghanistan. On Saturday alone, more than 60 members of the Afghan security forces were killed in separate Taliban attacks: Tens of thousands of Afghans have been killed since the US-led invasion drove the Taliban from power in 2001. How much territory do the Taliban control? The militants have made substantial territorial gains across the country since the withdrawal of thousands of troops in 2014, with security incidents at their highest level in more than 10 years. A BBC study from January found the Taliban are openly active in 70% of Afghanistan and now control or threaten more territory than before the foreign troops left. The same research found that IS was also more active, but is not as powerful as the Taliban. Who are the Taliban? The hardline Islamic Taliban movement swept to power in Afghanistan in 1996 after the civil war which followed the Soviet-Afghan war, and was ousted by the US-led invasion five years later In power, they imposed a brutal version of Sharia law, such as public executions and amputations, and banned women from public life. Men had to grow beards and women to wear the all-covering burka; television, music and cinema were banned They sheltered al-Qaeda leaders before and after being ousted. Since then they have fought a bloody insurgency which continues today. In 2016, Afghan civilian casualties hit a new high - a rise attributed by the UN largely to the Taliban.	The Taliban have announced a three-day ceasefire with Afghan government forces coinciding with Eid later this month, days after a unilateral ceasefire was ordered by the government.
+text: By Roland HughesBBC News "The very space seemed on fire, the lamps blazing in hundreds of thousands of reflections," she would later write in her memoir. "I imagined myself standing inside a many-faceted diamond and looking out at the sun. "It was a universe unto itself, architecture transformed into performance, all movement and fluid light, all solids fractured and dissolved in brilliance in space, in prayer. I was overwhelmed." The year was 1975, and the setting was the Shah Cheragh (King of Light) shrine in the Iranian city of Shiraz, that had been decorated in splintered mirrors since the 14th Century. At the time she visited the shrine, Monir was already a recognised artist in the US and her native Iran, but the epiphany in Shiraz left her "fired up with ideas", she wrote in her memoir, A Mirror Garden. Monir left Iran and returned many times as the country underwent radical change over her life. But the influence of Iran, and of that moment, never left her work. Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian died on 20 April in Tehran, aged 97. Monir Shahroudy, as she was born, was raised in the northern Iranian city of Qazvin among peach, almond and walnut trees. One of her earliest memories was of being chased through the bazaar by a camel she had unwisely decided to chide. When she was seven, the family moved to Tehran, where her father had been elected to parliament, and young Monir got her first glimpse of the capital modernising under the Shah, Reza Shah Pahlavi. Her first taste of art came in a once-a-week class in school, in which she was made to draw flowers or - on one confusing occasion - a jug sitting on a chair placed on a table. "The teacher called this 'still life'," she wrote in A Mirror Garden. "It perplexed me at first, but still it was more fun than math." At the Fine Arts College of Tehran University, she met the man who would become her first husband, Manoucher. During World War Two, the couple moved to New York but it was a loveless marriage, with Monir making progress in her artistic studies and Manoucher holding a single-minded determination to become a famed artist. "My role," she wrote, "was to help that destiny along by providing financial support, unending praise, and gracious entertainment for any gallery owners and wielders of influence who crossed our path." It was Monir herself who began to associate with artists of influence, spending time at the Tenth Street Club in Greenwich Village with Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, among others. Another soon-to-be-famous name crossed Monir's path when she started her first main job as a fashion illustrator with department store Bonwit Teller. His name was Andy Warhol, who was then working as a shoe illustrator. "Conversation was not his strong suit," she said, "but we made a connection in spite of his ghostly shyness." That connection was made again years later when Warhol travelled to Iran to paint the Shah and his wife. During his trip, he gave Monir the gift of a Marilyn Monroe print. Love - or at least the prospect of it - took Monir back to Iran in 1957, in the guise of Abol Farmanfarmaian, a man of aristocratic background who had babysat for her first daughter in New York. With Monir's divorce to her first husband finalised, she was wary, but welcomed the return to an evolving Iran 12 years after leaving. Just as the colours of Iran had never left her paintings of flowers, as her teachers noted, all her happy memories of her homeland had remained in place. "I sat in a jet-lagged stupor and drank in the smells of home," she wrote, "the sooty perfume of kerosene heaters with overtones of dill, parsley, fenugreek and aromatic rice that hinted at lunch, and the sourceless, ever-present mystery of rosewater. No, this was not New York. I was home." It was during this period back home, and during her long and happy marriage to Abol, that Monir flourished as an artist, beginning with her winning a gold medal for her display at the Iran Pavilion in the 1958 Venice Biennale. Monir had seen mirror mosaics before that day in the mausoleum in Shiraz - the style had been used elsewhere in Iran - but none had affected her in quite the same way. There was a practical reason for the style: centuries ago, mirrors that were imported from Europe had often broken by the time they had arrived, and so they were reused. The style encouraged Monir to experiment: with shapes, with geometry, with building images up from their smallest fragments. Hexagons, the shape she later called "the softest form" that opened up more and more possibilities to link shapes, began to feature prominently in her work. "I read up on Sufi cosmology and the arcane symbolism of shapes," Monir wrote in A Mirror Garden, "how the universe is expressed through points and lines and angles, how form is born of numbers and the elements lock in the hexagon." Read about other notable lives Monir's research took her across Iran and her curiosity about her country grew. She began learning from Iranian craftsmen trained in cutting mirrors like butter and in kneading plaster to make it pliable, and spent time with Turkmen silversmiths, studied an ancient observatory and worked alongside archaeologists. This week, one of Monir's regular exhibitors, the Third Line gallery in Dubai, said she would always be known for her "eternally young and curious spirit". Over the years, Monir became an avid collector of fine silverwork and folk art from across Iran, buying 1,600 paintings on glass from artists across the Gulf. But much of it would be lost years later, along with Monir's own work and her Warhol print, as revolution swept Iran. The Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, had led Iran through a programme of modernisation and Westernisation, but in doing so, he had alienated powerful religious and political forces. After months of protests and strikes, the US-supported Shah and his family were forced to leave the country in January 1979. Two weeks later, Iran's main spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, returned after 14 years in exile. Abol and Monir watched the Shah's fall from New York, aware that Abol's aristocratic background would make a return to Iran almost impossible. Much of what they owned was now gone, they knew, as homes were seized by the authorities. "The best antiques and carpets found their way into the mullahs' homes," Monir wrote. "Were my mirror mosaics hanging now on some mullah's wall?" she wondered. "More than anything else, I regretted the loss of my drawings, not just because those sketchbooks had followed me all through my life, but damn it, they were really good." Most of the last 40 years of Monir's life were spent in New York, and eventually saw her work exhibited to larger and larger audiences. The biggest challenge she had to overcome, she told the Guardian in 2011, was getting people to view Iran differently. "In America, after the revolution, after the [Gulf] war, nobody wanted to do anything with Iran," she said. "None of the galleries wanted to talk to me. And after September 11 - my God. No way. Rather than being a woman, it was difficult just being Iranian." After Monir's death, Middle East cultural historian Shiva Balaghi wrote that Monir and Abol would often walk by the Guggenheim Museum in New York as it was being built in the late 1950s. One day, Monir told Abol, she would exhibit her art there. That day came in 2015, with one of her largest shows yet, Infinite Possibility. Abol, with whom she had another daughter, was not there to witness the show, having died of leukaemia in 1991. There was time for one last move back to Iran, where Monir continued working with the craftsmen she so valued. She was critical of the direction the country was taking, telling the Guardian in 2011 it was becoming "more devilish and more awful" with "these stupid Islamist things". One work, Lightning for Neda, was produced in tribute to a young Iranian woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, shot dead during protests in 2009. But her work had a receptive audience in Iran, and in 2017 the Monir Museum - the first Iranian museum dedicated to the works of a female artist - opened in Tehran. It was here that a memorial to Monir was held by her friends on Thursday. "All my inspiration has come from Iran - it has always been my first love," she said when the museum opened. "When I travelled the deserts and the mountains, throughout my younger years, all that I saw and felt is now reflected in my art." All pictures copyright	Monir Farmanfarmaian looked up at the mosaic of mirrors that covered the mausoleum's walls and ceiling. It was the moment that reshaped her artistic career.
+text: Howard Jones, 59, had been arrested and bailed just weeks before the lorry robbery in Swindon, Wiltshire. Armed police intercepted the lorry but shot him in the leg after he opened fire at the Rivermead Industrial Estate on 16 June 2020. Jones was jailed for 12-and-a-half years at Swindon Crown Court after admitting offences including robbery. He had pleaded guilty to blackmail, robbery, possession of a firearm, false imprisonment, actual bodily harm and assault on an emergency worker. Jones, of Stratton Road, Swindon, had threatened to shoot his former employer's son if he was not paid £250,000 in five instalments after he was sacked for taking cash. He phoned his former boss Babu Chavda, the owner of Swindon-based N&B Foods, 11 times on 25 May. But Mr Chavda only picked up the final call and it was partially recorded by his wife. Jones was arrested and charged with blackmail but was bailed on 11 June and bought a BB gun used in the robbery for £88.50 the next day. During the robbery, Jones wore a balaclava and wielded the gun and bolt croppers as he demanded access to a lorry's safe. He then forced its driver into the vehicle's refrigerated compartment and threatened another member of staff before driving the lorry away. Armed officers then intercepted the vehicle and after an officer tried to Taser him, Jones accidentally fired his gun, hitting one of them in the face. He suffered minor injuries. Police shot Jones and his gas-powered air pistol was seized by police. He was taken to hospital, where the Falklands veteran assaulted an officer guarding his room on 19 June. The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) ruled earlier this month that shooting Jones was proportionate. Related Internet Links New Tab	An armed robber who stole a lorry from his former employer and shot a police officer in the face has been jailed.
+text: A further 56 people - including a pregnant woman - have been rescued. Survivors said there were about 100 people on board the boat, which sank in the early hours on Friday morning. Lampedusa, about 80 miles (120km) from Tunisia, is one of the nearest gateways to Europe for African migrants. Officials have said the initial figure of about 100 people on board may be inflated. The migrant boat, reported to be 10m (33ft) long, sank about 12 nautical miles off Lampedusa. Nato ships pulled two survivors out of the water, while others were found on an uninhabited outcrop of land. A coast guard spokesman quoted by the Associated Press news agency said 56 people had been accounted for, all of them believed to be Tunisian. Prosecutors have opened an inquiry into whether there were people traffickers on board, the AFP news agency said. But Laura Boldrini, spokeswoman for the UN refugee agency UNHCR, told AFP: "The idea of people smugglers is by now obsolete. "Today it is the migrants themselves who take turns in sailing the boat. They are often people with no maritime experience." On Thursday, 56 people drowned, about half of them said to be children, after a migrant boat capsized off the coast of western Turkey. Another 45 of those on board - said to be Iraqis, Syrians and Palestinians heading for Europe - managed to swim to shore, officials said. In 2011, at least 1,500 people drowned in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe, Amnesty International reported. Many of them were fleeing upheaval in Tunisia and Libya, in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings.	Italian coast guard and Nato vessels are searching the waters around the island of Lampedusa after a migrant boat sank, leaving at least one person dead and dozens missing.
+text: The LTTE might be part of history, for all intents and purposes. But its supporters in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu are going all out to try and get the ban lifted in India. A tribunal headed by Justice Vikramjit Sen is currently holding a public hearings on the issue. Though observers discount any possibility of revocation of the ban imposed in May 1991, ardent supporters of Tamil Eelam are crying their hearts out. This is no justice, they argue, and LTTE is no longer a threat to anyone. Rajiv Gandhi murder The ban was first promulgated in May 1991, following the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, and has been renewed every two years. The ban order is issued under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 1967 and holds good for two years. Under law, a tribunal headed by a sitting high court judge has to adjudicate whether the ban is justified or not. Invariably the bans are upheld, though the organizations concerned might protest. In the case of the LTTE too, the ban has been extended routinely. A couple of times in the past, LTTE representatives have appeared before the tribunal and argued against banning, but to no effect. The pro-LTTE sections in Tamil Nadu have not made any sustained effort till now to contest the ban, except for making ritual denunciations. But now the likes of Vaiko, general secretary of the MDMK and Pazha Nedumaran of the Organization of the Eelam Tamil Supporters have been appearing before the Vikramjit Sen tribunal and trying to make a case against extending the ban. Their main contention is when the LTTE is not a threat to Indian sovereignty or the country’s integrity, why should one ban it. P.Pugazhenthi, Coordination Secretary of the Tamil Nadu People’s Rights Forum, another veteran Eelamist, is yet to be permitted to argue before the tribunal, but undaunted he has been submitting petitions. When there has not been a single incident involving the Tigers since May last year what purpose a ban in India would serve, he wants to know. However, no major political party has opposed the ban in public or appeared before the tribunal. The state police is also said to be reluctant to allow the organization any legitimacy, claiming allowing the Tigers, armed or unarmed, any free run, could give Tamil nationalists a chance to rally together. They might then pose a serious problem to law and order in the state, the police apprehend. The Tribunal’s next sitting is scheduled to be held on 28th October at Chennai.	The supporters of Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers in India are engaged in a legal battle to get the ban on the rebel group that was militarily defeated last year removed, the BBC’s TN Gopalan reports from Chennai.
+text: By Chris MasonPolitical correspondent Ed Miliband is a "ruthless bastard," writes a Labour MP. As if the rough patch Labour has had in the last few weeks wasn't enough, you might be thinking, now this. But, the author of these words, the former frontbencher Tom Harris, meant his remark as a compliment. "The kind of steel" within Ed Miliband, Mr Harris writes in the Daily Telegraph and his "courage," is vital for Labour's success. This glowing reference for the Labour leader comes from an MP with no need to indulge in a spot of brown nosing. Tom Harris recently stood down as a shadow minister because he was struggling to juggle his job with his family commitments. But his testimonial to Mr Miliband's apparent ruthless streak comes after a week of public grumbles from Labour MPs suggesting the party had lost its voice, reduced to a summer stupor while hyperactive coalition ministers, from the prime minister down, dominated the airwaves. 'Shout louder' Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham told the Guardian Labour must "put its cards on the table" and produce attention-grabbing policies by next spring or risk losing the 2015 election. The party, Mr Burnham said, must "shout louder and speak in a way that captures how people are feeling and thinking." Labour backbencher George Mudie weighed in, telling BBC Radio 4's The World At One that the party was "slightly hesitant and confused" and not "setting the agenda". And, to boot, former whip Graham Stringer said: "The real worry is the almost deafening silence there has been from the shadow cabinet in a time of the year which is traditionally a ripe time for the opposition to attack the government." Unfortunately for Labour, when a shadow minister broke that silence and did make headlines, he did so for all the wrong reasons. Shadow Immigration Minister Chris Bryant was forced to backtrack and climb down after the bungled briefing of a speech. Internal grumbling So how worried should Ed Miliband be? And how much of this is down to the fact it is August, known by journalists as the silly season? Westminster in August is a curious place. As a reporter, it can seem like every other phone call you make triggers that tell-tale sign that the person on the other end is on the beach, and even less inclined to talk to you than they might normally be: The foreign dial tone. The lack of much news means those stories that are about can be given the megaphone treatment and get much more attention than they would at any other time of the year. But, with many people on holiday, there may be fewer people about to listen to that megaphone. Labour will hope most people have barely noticed this internal grumbling. And most probably haven't. Two things, though, are striking. 'Bigger problem' Firstly, in a binary political system, with a government and an opposition, if one side is seen to be up, almost by definition the other side appears to be down. Secondly, the coalition in general, and the Conservatives in particular, have sharpened up their political messages, on, amongst other things, welfare and immigration. Labour's lead in some opinion polls appears to have narrowed. And what appears to be the beginnings of good news on the economy is good news for the coalition too, and so tricky for Labour. For Deborah Mattinson, a former senior aide to Gordon Brown, who now runs her own polling company Britain Thinks, what is happening is indicative of a bigger challenge for Labour. "I think in a way it's symptomatic of a bigger problem which is an apparent lack of an overarching strategy," she told Radio 4's The World Tonight. "What voters need to hear is some real clarity about what Labour stands for, what Labour believes, how Labour now would be different from how Labour has been before. And that needs to be set out with absolute clarity in a language that people understand." In short, a spot of internal bickering in the dog days of August is probably something Ed Miliband can bat away, and no one is suggesting his leadership is in any danger. But a lingering impression in the long term that his vision is fuzzy and people aren't sure what he, and Labour, stands for, would be far, far trickier and much more significant politically, with a general election now less than two years away.	As one of his MPs resorts to colourful language to describe his leadership style and others fret about Labour's ability to set the agenda, exactly how much trouble is Ed Miliband in?
+text: Cyrus has called off a trip to Australia, where she was due to headline a bushfire benefit concert. Two Madonna shows in Paris have been cancelled after French authorities banned large gatherings. And Pearl Jam have postponed their US and Canada tour, saying the risk "is simply too high for our comfort level". Meanwhile, reports say the Coachella music festival in California will be put back to October. The most high-profile festival in the US, it was due to take place in April and be headlined by Rage Against the Machine, Travis Scott and Frank Ocean. Miley 'so disappointed' The US singer had planned to fly to Melbourne to top the bill at Friday's charity concert, but has decided to stay at home on advice from authorities "to reduce potential health risks". The concert has now been called off. She added: "I am so disappointed to not be there, but I have to do what is right to protect the health and safety of my band and crew." Madonna tour ends early The Queen of Pop's shows at the 2,800-capacity Grand Rex in Paris on Tuesday and Wednesday were due to have been the last of her Madame X world tour. But on Sunday, the French government banned gatherings of more than 1,000 people. "It is with profound regret that we are announcing the cancellation of the last two Madame X shows," the venue said. Pearl Jam criticise US government response The grunge veterans said they were "deeply upset" to call off their 17-date North American tour, which was due to begin in Toronto on 18 March. "We are being told that being part of large gatherings is high on the list of things to avoid as this global health crisis is now beginning to affect all of our lives," they wrote on their website. They also criticised the government's response to the coronavirus outbreak in the US, where 26 people have died so far. "Having no examples of our national health department's ability to get ahead of this, we have no reason to believe that it will be under control in the coming weeks ahead," they said. President Donald Trump has sought to play down the seriousness of the coronavirus outbreak and overestimate America's preparedness, BBC North America editor Jon Sopel says. Coachella 'to be postponed' According to multiple reports, the festival, which attracts 250,000 people over two weekends, will be pushed back by six months. The Stagecoach country music festival, which is due to be held the following weekend at the same polo club in California's Coachella Valley, is also expected to be postponed. It follows the cancellations of the South By Southwest festival in Texas and the Ultra Festival in Miami, Florida. The annual Winter Music Conference in Miami was also called off on Monday. Neil Young tour announcement on hold The veteran Canadian rocker has said he is holding off announcing the first leg of his Crazy Horse world tour because "putting tickets on sale is questionable and needs to be thought through". He wrote on his website: "We are all super ready to go, and the last thing we want to do is put people at risk, especially our older audience. No-one wants to become sick in this pandemic. "So here we are together, watching to see how it goes, how long it will last, and how many more of our planet's people and animals will be affected." Kiss avoid contact Rock band Kiss have reportedly told fans who paid for Meet and Greets on their current US tour that they won't get to meet the group after all. "After many discussions with experts in the field, we have been advised to temporarily cancel these events given the reality that we do this nightly for 100 or more fans," their manager said in a statement. However, the concerts themselves are still going ahead as planned. Japan cases traced to small music clubs Despite restrictions being placed on large gatherings in some countries, evidence suggests coronavirus has been spread in smaller crowds in Japan. According to Reuters, 49 of the 55 cases reported in the city of Osaka by Sunday were linked to four small music venues, known as live houses. Most of those cases were traced back to three dates in mid-February, when each performance was attended by around 100 people. Another 19 cases around the country have also been traced back to the venues. "Can it be? The coronavirus has engulfed the underground live house scene!" said local guitar pop trio White Shadow in a blog post. Foals video teaches hand washing Brit Award-winning group Foals are using the video for their new single Wash Up as a public service announcement - showing the correct way to wash your hands. Follow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	Pop stars Miley Cyrus and Madonna and rock band Pearl Jam have called off concerts as the impact of coronavirus begins to hit live music.
+text: Gavin HewittEurope editor@BBCGavinHewitton Twitter All the campaigns have been busy making their calculations. What impact will the shootings have on the first round of voting in the presidential elections on 22 April? In the short term it is likely that President Nicolas Sarkozy will benefit. Very quickly he took charge. He rushed to the scene. He suspended his campaign. He spoke as the president of the republic. He called for a minute's silence. He brought together Jewish and Muslim leaders. His interior minister has been on the ground at the siege in Toulouse directing operations and briefing the media. In a crisis, incumbent leaders often have the advantage. 'Untested' Hollande The shootings also play into a narrative that the Sarkozy campaign have been stressing; that the president is a man of experience, of crisis management while his main opponent, Francois Hollande, is untested. The background and motive of the suspect, however, has changed calculations. There was a presumption in most French papers that this was a racist attack carried out by a gunman from the far right. It led the centrist candidate Francois Bayrou to criticise the tone of the campaign and what he called the "growing climate of intolerance". This was seen as a reference to President Sarkozy's remarks about the failure of integration and his demand that there be no special treatment for minorities. He had made an issue over slaughtered halal meat, calling for all halal or kosher meat to be labelled. His critics accused him of pandering to the far right in a bid to take votes away from Marine Le Pen. The far left candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon, urged people to "choose their words and their quotations more carefully". The Socialist candidate Francois Hollande also spoke about the risk of "words that influence". But today the script changed. It emerged that the suspect was 23-year-old Mohammed Merah, a French national of North African origin. He has apparently claimed a connection with al-Qaeda and has visited Pakistan and Afghanistan. He told negotiators that the killing of the Jewish children and the attacks on French soldiers of North Africa origin was "revenge on behalf of Palestinian children". The revelations have altered the political fall-out. Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, who might have been damaged if this had been an extreme right attack, came out and said "we have minimised the rise of radical Islam in this country... we did not want to look it in the face". She said that France should wage war against "these fundamentalist political and religious groups that are killing our children". Almost certainly, France will again debate immigration and the failures of integration. This is territory that usually benefits candidates from the right and centre-right but after the killings the tone of the campaign is likely to soften. The incident has enabled Nicolas Sarkozy to play the role he likes best, a man of action and decision in a crisis. Francois Hollande, the Socialist candidate, will want to try and get attention back to taxes and the economy. So will the tragic events in Toulouse change the course of the election? Probably not. The first round of voting is over a month away and France's national focus on these attacks will fade. The election will turn on leadership, the economy and whether voters want another five years of Nicolas Sarkozy.	After the killings at the school in Toulouse, French candidates suspended their election campaigns. That did not, of course, suspend politics.
+text: Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Prisons (HMP) said there had been 113 incidents of self-harm at Morton Hall, in Lincolnshire, over a six month period. It said uncertainty over immigration status and potential for long-term detention caused anxiety for detainees. The Home Office said the "utmost importance" was placed on the health and well being of detainees. Inspectors found in a report that the centre had improved since the last visit in 2016. The report also said care for those at risk of self-harm was "generally good", but that the 113 incidents of self harm were higher than those recorded for a similar period in the last inspection. It said: "There were several clear indications of the vulnerability of the population. For example, levels of self harm were high and over 40 detainees had been subject to constant supervision in the previous six months because they were assessed to be at risk of imminent self-harm or self-inflicted death." The centre is operated by the prison service on behalf of the Home Office, and holds 241 men subject to immigration control. Detainees held for lengthy periods were often kept there because of documentation problems, a lack of suitable accommodation or casework inefficiencies, the report states. It said although the number of detainees held for over a year had reduced, one had been held for more than two years, which was "unacceptable". In the six months before inspectors visited in November, doctors had submitted 173 reports to the Home Office to raise concerns that a detainee's health was being affected by continued detention. Levels of violence and use of force remained high but there were few serious incidents, inspectors found. A Home Office spokesperson said "additional safeguards and support" had been made for vulnerable people, "such as robust monitoring and care for those at risk of self-harm, as well as an Adults at Risk policy which makes sure vulnerable individuals are only detained when the immigration factors outweigh the risk of harm".	Concerns over high levels of self harm and violence at an immigration centre have been made by inspectors.
+text: The track was damaged by a landslip last April which cost nearly £1m to repair. A second landslip occurred at a different embankment in January. The 14-mile round trip service, leaving from Cheltenham Racecourse, began on Good Friday. It was the first to leave from the racecourse since the embankment collapsed at Gotherington. Rail enthusiast and music producer Pete Waterman, the railway's president, led a £1m emergency appeal to fix it. 'Amazing support' All the funds came from donations. The line has now reopened as two railways following the landslips. The other line, which opened on 2 April, offers a nine-mile round trip from Toddington via Hailes Abbey and Laverton. Project manager Alan Bielby said: "We have received amazing support from other railways. "They've been doing a full weekend galas for us at the Great Central [in Leicestershire] and number of other railways are doing a special train or a special day for us." The railway, also known as the Honeybourne Line, is run by volunteers. It started 30 years ago and carries 75,000 passengers a year. Related Internet Links Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway	The Gloucestershire Warwickshire Steam Railway has reopened between Cheltenham and Winchcombe.
+text: Anne-Marie Simpson and her dog Elvis were taken via a window by a rescue crew from her home in North Curry. She had asked to be evacuated while the Burnham Area Rescue Boat (Barb) team were checking on flooded properties. "I had been in the house for 13 days and was keen to get away. The scale of the flooding has taken us by surprise," said Ms Simpson. She had been living upstairs since 23 December, when floodwater first entered the property, eating supplies bought in advance of the pre-Christmas storms. Ms Simpson, who is in her 50s, has been taken to dry land half a mile away to stay with friends until the water recedes. The BARB rescue crew had been in the area carrying out training when they checked on the welfare of several residents and Ms Simpson asked to be evacuated. A builder who was living in her home to install flood defences has chosen to remain in the property. Volunteer Mike Lowe, from the charity, said: "We were very happy to help this lady and her dog, who had been stuck since before Christmas. "It was so gratifying to see the look of relief on Anne-Marie's face when we got her back onto dry land." 'Lethal' Forecasters have warned of "colossal waves" and winds of up to 70mph to cause further flooding as some coastal areas take another battering. John Hammond, a BBC forecaster, said the picture could be worse than that seen over the last couple of days and waves "are going to be absolutely lethal if you get in the way of them". Some eight flood warnings remain in place on rivers and moorland across the county, with a similar number of flood alerts in place as well. Also, the A361 and A372 remain closed in parts due to flooding. The BBC's Andrew Plant, in south Somerset, says the village of Muchelney has been cut off for about four days. "On a day when many people are just going back to work after Christmas and the new year, for people in Somerset the going is very difficult indeed - and for the villagers here they are not going anywhere anytime soon," he said.	A homeowner who was stranded on the Somerset Levels for almost a fortnight has been rescued by boat.
+text: Italy, Spain, France, Cyprus, Malta and Greece presented joint proposals at a meeting of EU interior ministers in Brussels on Thursday. The six countries want a common EU asylum system to be in place in 2012. But Italian warnings of a "Biblical" exodus from Libya were given a cool reception by Germany and others. The BBC's Chris Morris in Brussels says at least one million migrants, many of them from sub-Saharan Africa, are believed to be in Libya, hoping to reach Europe. Many of them may be political refugees, not simply economic migrants, so Europe has an obligation under human rights agreements to identify genuine refugees who have a right to asylum. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, appealed to the EU to help the Libyan people. "If the situation gets even more dramatic, if we move into a level of fighting that forces a massive outflow from Libya, it's very important that protection space is guaranteed in Europe," he said after meeting top EU officials. 'Catastrophic emergency' The six Mediterranean countries whose ministers met in Rome on Wednesday demanded a programme for relocation - that is, spreading asylum seekers around Europe if they arrive in large numbers. They want a special solidarity fund to be set up to help them process arriving migrants. "We are in front of a humanitarian emergency and I ask Europe to settle all the necessary measures to deal with a catastrophic humanitarian emergency," Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said in Brussels on Thursday. Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba backed up his counterpart, saying Italy was "only the door of Europe". Our correspondent says these are extremely controversial proposals, which will not be warmly received by Britain or many other countries. Austrian Interior Minister Maria Theresia Fekter said her country had received hundreds of thousands of refugees during the Balkan wars in the 1990s, and Italy was capable of handling on its own the 5,000 illegal migrants from Tunisia who arrived last week on the island of Lampedusa. Germany's Interior Minister, Thomas de Maiziere, said there was "no refugee influx right now" and states should not "provoke one by talking about it". "Let's not play at scaring ourselves," said Belgium's Melchior Wathelet. In a recent ruling, the European Court of Human Rights challenged the EU's Dublin II Regulation, under which asylum seekers are sent back to their point of entry into the EU. The regulation is intended to prevent "asylum shopping" in Europe, but it has exacerbated the dilemma of Greece, which is struggling to cope with thousands of asylum applications. Lampedusa influx Lampedusa - a tiny island in the Mediterranean between Tunisia and Italy - is a major entry point to Europe for immigrants from Africa. In recent years Malta and Spain have also intercepted numerous boatloads of migrants from Africa. Often the boats are rickety and migrants risk their lives in their desperation to reach Europe. The EU border agency Frontex is providing Italy with logistical support. As the uprising in Libya intensified, the government of Col Muammar Gaddafi warned the EU that it would stop co-operating on illegal migration from North Africa if the EU backed those seeking to topple him from power. In recent years, Italy and Libya have co-operated to intercept boatloads of illegal migrants in the Mediterranean. The number of such boats fell sharply after the systematic interceptions began.	Countries in southern Europe have urged the rest of the EU to share the burden of accepting migrants from North Africa as a new influx is predicted.
+text: The county council paid the firm £10.65m to cover work already completed and to bring the end of the contract forward from June this year. Carillion provided school meals and cleaning, maintenance of council buildings, property services and building work. It collapsed after losing money on big contracts and running up £1.5bn debts. Following the collapse, firefighters were put on standby to deliver school meals in Oxfordshire, but ultimately they were not needed. Oxfordshire County Council signed a 10-year contract with the firm in 2012, but last year agreed to transfer back most services except facilities management. 'Significant impact' Lorraine Lindsay-Gale, cabinet member for property services, said: "This early exit deal means we can get on with finding better ways to deliver services that Carillion provided. "We recognise the significant impact on local companies working for Carillion that may be owed money and hope that work can continue as soon as possible." A spokesman said services previously provided by Carillion will continue through a mix of bringing staff in-house, continuing with suppliers, and working with existing sub-contractors. He added that the council is currently working out the most cost-effective way to complete any work left unfinished. In total the council will have paid about £148m to Carillion since 2012.	A contract with liquidated construction giant Carillion to carry out work in Oxfordshire has been terminated early.
+text: During their early days as the Silver Beatles in Hamburg in the 1960s, they performed as Sheridan's backing band. Starr wrote on his Twitter: "Goodbye to Tony Sheridan... I had a great month 1960-61, playing with him was great." Described as a catalyst in the Beatles' rise to fame, they played on Sheridan's recording of My Bonnie. After being spotted by producer Bert Kaempfert, it was their first studio session for Polydor as The Beat Brothers in June 1961. Later that year, teenage fan Raymond Jones requested the song in Brian Epstein's record store. Epstein promised to order it and later became the Beatles' manager, whom many still regard as the "fifth Beatle". Returning to Germany in 1961, the young Beatles and Sheridan continued their collaboration and - at Kaempfert's instigation - recorded seven tracks. A 1962 show at the Star Club in Hamburg, where the Liverpool band played many of their early shows, was a watershed performance - featuring Starr on drums - and helped catapult the Beatles to fame. According to reports in the German media, Sheridan died on Saturday 16 February following a long illness. Sir Paul McCartney has issued a statement on his website. He said: "Tony was a good guy who we knew and worked with from the early days in Hamburg. We regularly watched his late night performances and admired his style. He will be missed." In the early 1960s, the singer-songwriter toured with rock 'n roll pioneers Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. He had German Top 10 singles Let's Slop and Skinny Minnie and with the Fab Four's early commercial success, My Bonnie charted in both Britain and the US. During his later years, Sheridan lived with his third wife, Anna Sievers, in a farm house in the north of Germany. She died of cancer in 2011.	Ringo Starr has paid tribute to Tony Sheridan, an early supporter of The Beatles, who has died aged 72.
+text: Mr Lai was arrested on Monday under a controversial security law imposed by Beijing, but has now been bailed. The pro-democracy tycoon was among 10 people detained on charges including colluding with foreign forces. But Hong Kongers have rallied behind the newspaper, buying stocks in the company. The stock closed on Tuesday at HK$1.10, up from its close of HK$0.255 just 24 hours before. The paper, which offers a rare, unvarnished take on Hong Kong and China's leadership, said more than 500,000 copies were printed, five times the usual number. In extraordinary scenes streamed by the paper on Monday, a handcuffed Mr Lai was led through his newsroom as nearly 200 police officers raided the building. The move sparked global condemnation of the escalating crackdown on dissent. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said China had "eviscerated Hong Kong’s freedoms". On Tuesday, the newspaper's front page showed an image of Mr Lai in handcuffs with the headline: "Apple Daily must fight on." He was released on bail early on Wednesday local time and greeted by a crowd of cheering supporters. Hong Kongers rally behind the paper In some parts of the city Hong Kongers were seen queuing for a copy as early as 02:30 as vendors reported selling out of the popular tabloid founded by Mr Lai. "(I bought these) to hand them out to others, I'm afraid a lot of people can`t get their copies," a woman, who only gave her name as Chan, told the BBC while buying 16 copies. Online subscriptions are also reportedly up 20,000 this week. Shares of holding company Next Digital, which had initially dropped on Monday, almost reached a 12-year high on Tuesday. This came as activists called for supporters to buy the stock. However, there are concerns that investors with ties to the mainland could also be buying up shares. Louise Wong, a senior executive at Next Digital, told the Nikkei Asian Review that "if someone could get over 5% of the holdings, he or she could ask for a seat on the board". Global outcry Mr Lai, who is viewed as a hero by many in Hong Kong for his direct criticism of Beijing’s top leadership, is the highest-profile detainee under use of the new legislation so far. But on the mainland, he has long been labelled a traitor. Hours after his arrest, prominent youth activist Agnes Chow and Wilson Li, a freelance journalist, were also arrested under the same law. Ms Chow was released on bail late on Tuesday. She told reporters: "It's very obvious that the regime is using the national security law to suppress political dissidents." The arrests renewed criticism from Washington, London and the United Nations of attacks on the city’s freedoms. "I’m deeply troubled by reports of the arrest of @JimmyLaiApple under Hong Kong’s draconian National Security Law," tweeted US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “Further proof that the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] has eviscerated Hong Kong’s freedoms and eroded the rights of its people,” he wrote. Similar sentiments were expressed in Britain, which has already said it will suspend its extradition treaty with Hong Kong and offer a pathway to citizenship for many of the city's residents, in the light of the new law. "This is further evidence that the national security law is being used as a pretext to silence opposition," a spokesman for Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Reuters. "The Hong Kong authorities must uphold the rights and freedoms of its people." The controversial security law introduced to Hong Kong in June had already prompted some of the city’s highest-profile activists to flee overseas in anticipation of a broader clampdown on the city’s freedoms. Pro-democracy protests flared in Hong Kong last year over plans to allow extradition from the territory to mainland China. While this proposal was eventually withdrawn, the demonstrations carried on, to reflect widespread demands for democratic reforms.	The holding company of Hong Kong's Apple Daily newspaper has seen its stock rise fourfold, a day after the arrest of its owner Jimmy Lai.
+text: By Jonathan AmosScience correspondent, BBC News, San Francisco The billionaire's rocket plane will carry six fare-paying passengers just above the atmosphere to experience a few minutes of weightlessness. But the vehicle has been designed so that its seats can be removed easily and the space filled with science gear. Passenger flights should begin in 18 months or so; research sorties could start soon after. The US space agency (Nasa) has already chartered the rocket plane. "It's likely we might do some science flights quite early in the programme," explained Will Pomerantz from Virgin Galactic. "Nasa is certainly eager to get their flights conducted - the ones they have already purchased. "It may also give us some additional time to show off the reliability and the operations of the vehicle, which would give our tourism customers even more confidence. "I think that if they see a Nasa flight has gone up and gone well, that will make them feel better about their purchase," he told BBC News. Mr Pomerantz was speaking here at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the largest annual gathering of Earth scientists. His intention was to inform this community of the capabilities of SpaceShipTwo (SS2), as the vehicle is sometimes called. The Virgin executive said geoscientists might want to use SS2 to pursue a range of research fields, including atmospheric chemistry, climate studies, space weather, or even to carry out simple Earth imagery. The ship will have 43cm-diameter (17in) windows with high quality glass through which to point camera lenses. It is likely some groups will want to fly their experimental sensors on the plane before committing the technology to an orbiting satellite, Mr Pomerantz added. SpaceShipTwo is an air-launched vehicle. It will be taken aloft to about 50,000ft (15,200m) by its carrier aircraft WhiteKnightTwo. On release, SS2 will then ignite a rocket engine to climb to a maximum altitude of about 361,000ft (110km). Passengers will ride the rocket plane for the fun of it, but scientists would use it for the same reasons they also fly experiments on the International Space Station (ISS) or on sounding rockets - to access microgravity conditions. The weightless environment provides a unique perspective on physical systems and processes, and is helping researchers to better understand disease and to develop new materials. "We'll get something on the order of four to five minutes of weightlessness," explained Mr Pomerantz. "It depends exactly what quality of microgravity you require for your experiment, but it's somewhere in that range. "Generally speaking, we're similar to or perhaps slightly less than a sounding rocket, depending which sounding rocket it is, but we offer a much larger volume and mass capability. "The other difference is that sounding rockets take quite a lot of g's; those things really jump off the rails and often will pull 10 g's on lift-off. Because SpaceShipTwo was designed for tourists, it's got a much gentler ride. That could be very important to some scientists." Virgin Galactic recently signed a deal with the Houston company Nanoracks to design and build SS2's payload mounting system. The intention is that is uses the same standards as those already specified for the ISS. The costs of chartering the entire volume of SS2 for science would be broadly comparable to price charged to a full cabin of tourists, Mr Pomerantz said. Tourists are being asked pay $200,000 (£124,000) per seat. Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos	Sir Richard Branson wants his tourist spaceship also to become a high-altitude science platform.
+text: HMRC delisted more than 300 Guernsey-based schemes last week after changes to conditions were introduced. Fiona Le Poidevin, deputy chief executive of Guernsey Finance, said the island had been "singled out". Just three QROPS (Qualifying Recognised Overseas Pension Schemes) based in the island were included on the list. The changes to the conditions by the UK government followed concerns the schemes were being used to avoid tax. Ms Le Poidevin said: "HMRC's amendments... were clearly focused on targeting abuses in the system, and Guernsey has always upheld itself as a model of compliance with the QROPS regulations." She added: "It is confusing and frustrating that HMRC has now delisted almost all Guernsey schemes while most of those from other jurisdictions remain listed as QROPS." Ms Le Poidevin estimated that the delisting of more than 300 schemes could have an impact on about 200 jobs in Guernsey.	Guernsey Finance has described changes made to QROPS pension schemes by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) as an "unjust attack" on the island.
+text: Pre-tax profit for the year to end of January fell to £66.6m. Sales slipped from £6bn to £5.9bn. Waitrose also blamed pension costs associated with parent firm John Lewis. That meant the grocer's annual bonus pot, shared between 58,970 staff, was cut from £87m to £80m. The Waitrose figures were originally published in March as part of the annual results of John Lewis. Waitrose warned it was operating "against a backdrop of exceptionally tough market conditions and continuing food price deflation". Supermarkets have been engaged in a bitter price war for several years as a result of the rise of German discounters Aldi and Lidl in the UK. Waitrose has until recently been thought to have been largely immune from the effects of the rise of the discounters outperforming the so called "big four" of Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's and Morrisons. But Waitrose faced tough trading over the crucial Christmas period when it posted a 1.4% fall in like-for-like sales, excluding fuel, over the six weeks to 2 January. Over the year, like-for-like sales were down 1.3%. In April, Waitrose boss Mark Price stepped down from the supermarket, with retail director Rob Collins replacing him. Mr Collins is continuing the firm's strategy of offering shoppers additional reasons to frequent its supermarkets, opening wine and juice bars, cafes and specialist bakeries. In March, John Lewis reported pre-tax profits of £305.5m for the year, down from £342.7m a year earlier.	Waitrose supermarket has reported a 17% fall in annual profits as it warned of "exceptionally tough" conditions in the grocery sector, its latest filing at Companies House has revealed.
+text: By John CampbellBBC News NI Economics & Business Editor Economic output was up by 1.2% compared to the previous quarter. That followed a weak first quarter in which declining output led some analysts to warn the economy could be entering recessionary territory. The service sector was the biggest contributor to second quarter growth, with output increasing by 0.7 percentage points. The statistics are measured using the Northern Ireland Composite Economic Index (NICEI). That is roughly equivalent to Gross Domestic Product (GDP). They are the most up-to-date official figures for the local economy. Annual growth (comparing Q2 2018 with Q2 2017) was 1.6% compared with a UK GDP growth of 1.2%.	The Northern Ireland economy bounced back to growth in the second quarter of this year, official figures suggest.
+text: The change to the law will be backdated to 31 January, the date of the first confirmed coronavirus case in the UK, the government said. It means any will witnessed remotely from that date onwards will be legally accepted. This measure will remain in place until January 2022. The time period could be shortened or extended if deemed necessary, the Ministry of Justice said. Under the current law, a will must be made in the physical presence of at least two witnesses but social distancing measures have made this difficult. For a will to be legally valid, as the law stands you must: During lockdown, lots of people have turned to video conferencing software as a communication solution, using platforms such as Zoom or FaceTime. Ministers said wills witnessed using this sort of technology would be deemed legal, as long as the quality of the sound and video was sufficient to see and hear what was happening at the time. The change to the legislation to include video-witnessing of wills will be made in September. Two witnesses - who are not beneficiaries - will still be required, helping to protect people against undue influence and fraud, the government said. Electronic signatures will not be permitted. Justice Secretary Robert Buckland said: "We know that the pandemic has made this process more difficult, which is why we are changing law to ensure that wills witnessed via video technology are legally recognised. "Our measures will give peace of mind to many that their last wishes can still be recorded during this challenging time, while continuing to protect the elderly and vulnerable." However, the government said the use of video technology should remain a last resort and people must continue to arrange physical witnessing of wills where it was safe to do so. Wills witnessed through windows are already considered legitimate, provided there is clear sight of the person signing it. Emily Deane, technical counsel at Step, a professional body comprising lawyers and accountants, said: "We are delighted that the government has responded to the industry's calls to allow will witnessing over video conference. "By removing the need for any physical witnesses, wills can continue to be drawn up efficiently, effectively and safely by those isolating." She also welcomed the move to apply the change retrospectively, saying it would provide reassurance to anyone who had had no choice but to execute a will in this manner prior to this legislation being enacted.	Wills witnessed remotely via video link will become legal in England and Wales to make it easier for people to record their final wishes during the pandemic.
+text: Volodymyr Tsemakh, 58, was seized this year from a separatist-held part of Ukraine. He is reported to have played a key role in the rebels' air defences. Dutch-led investigators voiced concern they may be unable to interview him. He is reported to be on a list of prisoners that Moscow wants exchanged with Ukrainians it holds in Russia. On 17 July 2014, the aircraft was travelling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was hit by a missile over eastern Ukraine. Most of those killed were Dutch citizens. The downing of the aircraft came amid intense fighting between Ukrainian troops and Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine. More than 13,000 people have died in the conflict over the last five years. A team of international criminal investigators said in 2016 that the missile had been brought from Russia and fired from a field controlled by Russian-backed separatists. What are the circumstances of Mr Tsemakh's release? The suspect was charged with terrorism offences following his reported seizure from rebel-held territory at the end of June. According to details reported by investigative website Bellingcat, he was smuggled out unconscious - possibly in a drunken stupor - disguised as an elderly man in a wheelchair, in what has been described as one of Ukrainian special forces' most successful operations. He is reported to have been in detention in Kiev since then. He was released from custody but the court in Kiev said his movements would continue to be restricted pending his trial in October. However, he has not been electronically tagged, and the BBC's Jonah Fisher in Kiev says nobody is expecting him to show up in court. Ukraine and Russia are currently negotiating a prisoner swap, which include 24 Ukrainian sailors captured off the Russia-annexed Crimea in November. Mr Tsemakh is said to be on the exchange list, but his fate has become a stumbling block. Meanwhile Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking at around the time of Mr Tsemakh's release, said that the talks were being finalised and the swap could involve a large number of people. He added that the date of the exchange would soon be announced. Why is he sought as a witness? The Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT) concluded in May 2018 that the missile system involved belonged to the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile brigade, based in the western Russian city of Kursk. It produced evidence that it said proved how the missile system had reached eastern Ukraine. Russia has denied any involvement in the incident. Arrest warrants have been issued for four men - three Russians and a Ukrainian - on suspicion of murder in connection with the tragedy. Mr Tsemakh is not among the suspects but is a "person of interest" in the investigation. One of the suspects, Igor Girkin, has said he was head of the separatists' air defences in Snizhne, close to where the JIT says the missile was fired from. International prosecutors have said they would like Mr Tsemakh to remain in Ukraine so they can ask him further questions. Last week, Dutch prosecutors urged the authorities in Ukraine not to allow him to travel to Russia, out of concerns it could mean he would be prevented from taking part in their investigation. Forty European politicians have sought assurances to this effect from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office has also objected to Mr Tsemakh's release, saying that he would not be safe. "We believed that detention was the only possible preventive measure for Mr Tsemakh. His life might be threatened," said spokesman Oleh Peresada. "He is an important element of the truth-seeking in this case. We understand that our northern neighbour [Russia] is known for rough treatment of people who are a danger to them." What happened to MH17? The flight was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, travelling over eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014, when it disappeared from radar about 50km (30 miles) from the Russian border. Footage later emerged of the crash site in the Donetsk area. Investigators said the aircraft was downed by a missile which exploded just above and to the left of the cockpit, causing it to break up in mid-air. A total of 283 passengers, including 80 children, and 15 crew members were on board.	A Ukrainian court has released a potentially key witness to the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 that killed all 298 people on board in 2014.
+text: One officer had her arm broken, another was threatened with a broken bottle and a third had a vehicle driven at him. The council's environmental scrutiny committee said so many incidents had happened it was impossible to take action against everyone. The cabinet noted the report but have not made a final decision. Councillors were told they have a duty of care to ensure personal safety of employees. Bob Derbyshire, chairman of the scrutiny committee, said: "Members were alarmed at the levels of aggression and incidents of assaults directed at civil parking enforcement officers (CPEOs) since the transfer of duties from South Wales Police. "After reviewing the evidence, especially the established procedures and practices in other authorities, the committee recommends that the council provides all civil parking enforcement officers with a suitable badge camera system as soon as possible." He said as well as improving safety it would also help provide legal evidence if an officer was assaulted or threatened. Enforcement teams The committee also called for the council to work with South Wales Police to ensure that immediate support is provided for the capital's 45 CPEOs who become involved in a difficult situation with a member of the public. Traffic wardens have already been issued with cameras in Swansea and Anglesey. The committee also found that Swansea and Neath Port Talbot enforcement teams were considering a car camera system to increase coverage of patrols, while Bristol had already introduced this. But in its recommendations, it stopped short of asking for this to be considered in Cardiff. The issue was discussed by the council's cabinet on Thursday as part of a report into enforcement and nuisance parking in the city. A final decision will be taken by the cabinet at a future meeting. The council took over parking control from police-run traffic wardens three years ago.	Parking enforcement officers in Cardiff could be fitted with body cameras because of regular assaults while attempting to issue tickets.
+text: West Midlands Police said a van shunted a car into a 29-year-old man and trapped him against a parked vehicle in Coventry on Tuesday evening. Occupants of the two vehicles fled the scene and "did not a care for how badly he was hurt" when they left him lying in the road, police said. It happened in Longford Road at 18:00 GMT. No arrests have been made. Officers said the victim was hurt by the Star Fish Bar. Driven off Police said a Mercedes Vito collided with a passing Zafira, shunting it into a parked Ford Fiesta. Officers said the Vito, with the cloned registration plate of KU09 CEK, was immediately driven off. It was later found abandoned and burnt out in Grindle Road. The occupants of the Zafira, also on cloned plates of FM57 KRG, gathered their belongings from the car and also made off, police added. Officers have not said if the two vehicles are connected. Shop worker Caner Kockiri, 22, said he had just served the victim chips and seconds later heard a "bang" and "scream" outside. "I went over to him, but he didn't look good," he said. "He was in shock and there were a lot of people gathered around him. Me and a lady tried to keep him talking until the ambulance arrived." Det Sgt Paul Hughes said: "This was a truly horrific incident where an innocent pedestrian has been left with life-changing injuries by motorists who had not a care for how badly he was hurt. "We need to hear from anyone who can help us trace the drivers of these two cars, or anyone who has dash cam footage of the incident." Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, on Twitter, and sign up for local news updates direct to your phone.	A pedestrian needed his leg amputated after he was involved in a "horrific" hit-and-run collision.
+text: The 84-year-old, who played the British spy in seven films between 1973 and 1985, praised Craig's performances in his new book, Bond on Bond. "I loved Casino Royale and Daniel Craig. He is a wonderful actor, certainly the best actor to play Bond," he said. He added he thought the 44-year-old had "the best build of any Bond". Recalling his years as 007, the veteran actor said: "Back then I could leap out of a chair without fear of my knees cracking. "[I] could chew a toffee without fear of losing a tooth; could admire my flowing locks and my bronzed, slim torso. "With a twitch of the old eyebrow I set pulses racing across the world, they say. These days it's my pacemaker that keeps my pulse racing." Craig's third Bond film, Skyfall, is due for release in the UK on 26 October. A new trailer for the movie was unveiled last month, showing Bond being "killed" in action and his boss M typing up his obituary. It also gave fans the first glimpse of Bond villain Silva - played by Oscar winner Javier Bardem - in action.	Sir Roger Moore has said he believes Daniel Craig is the best actor to have played James Bond.
+text: South Wales Police are investigating after a 28-year-old man died in the Butetown area of the city on Wednesday evening. A 34-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of administering heroin and has been bailed. As a precaution, officers are liaising with drug intervention staff to raise awareness among users. Det Sgt Dave Bancroft said: "We continue with our daily enforcement on the streets of Cardiff and work closely with the harm reduction agencies to encourage individuals to stop consuming drugs, particularly heroin." Anyone with information should contact police on 101 or Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.	A man has been arrested following the death of a man from a suspected drugs overdose in Cardiff.
+text: By Zoe KleinmanTechnology reporter, BBC News The pattern of veins inside your finger is said to be more distinctive than your fingerprint, and is being heralded by some experts as a more secure alternative to the chip and pin (Personal Identification Number) card system currently favoured by British banks. Electronics giant Hitachi already manufactures a PC-compatible finger vein scanner, which is about the size of a computer mouse and contains LED lights and a video camera. Currently retailing online for £195 plus VAT each, they are not a cheap option. "It is the fastest and most accurate technology we've seen to date," said Roberto Fiorentino, chief executive of British firm Croma Security Solutions, which has fitted finger vein-based security systems in UK hotels, airports and most recently a police armoury. "I have no doubt we will see this technology operating in banks - and perhaps cash machines - in the UK High Street in the future." A trial currently underway at Southampton General Hospital's intensive care ward has so far shown that health conditions such as high and low blood pressure do not seem to affect a patient's finger vein pattern to the extent that they become unrecognizable. 'Cover your pin' According to the UK Cards Association, fraud losses on cards in the UK alone totalled £185m in the first six months of last year. So what's gone wrong for the humble chip and pin? "Wherever you've got an interface between money and the customer you've got an opportunity that criminals can exploit," said DCI Dave Carter at the Dedicated Cheque and Plastic Crime Unit (DCPCU) of the Metropolitan Police. By installing a small digital camera above a cash machine criminals can literally watch people keying in their pin codes to access their accounts. They then trap the accompanying cards in the machine, sometimes using metal loops or false sleeves - to recover afterwards. "The best tip I can ever give anybody is cover your pin," said DCI Carter. "It prevents so much fraud." 'Bad guys' In itself, chip and pin technology is not that bad, according to computer security expert Brian Krebs in the US. "The chip and pin solution is pretty good. It's not perfect, but a big part of security is about making it more expensive for the bad guys." One issue is that it has not been adopted worldwide. American cash machines still read data from a magnetic strip on the back of cash cards, so UK cards also have to contain this strip so that they can be used abroad. According to Mr Krebs, who has blogged extensively about the various kit used by criminals in the US to target cash machines - they can skim the data contained on that magnetic strip just by using a cheap MP3 player - although more complex software is then required to decode it. A cloned card can then be made fairly easily without the owner even realising the data has been taken. "Anything with a magnetic strip on it can be wiped and re-encoded," said Mr Krebs. DCI Carter maintains that a cloned British card would be flagged at a foreign cash machine because part of a card number identifies its country of origin - and a cloned card containing UK data would be missing its chip. If you spot something attached to a cash machine that looks illegitimate, think carefully before you touch it, warned Mr Krebs. "More often than not the people who put it there are within visual distance of the machine," he told the BBC. "They're expecting to collect $50,000 (£31,000) to $60,000 - what happens if you pull on it and something comes off? If it's after hours and the bank is closed, it might not be a bad idea to put it back." Mr Krebs thinks biometrics are still a long way off. "I think it's like leaping six generations ahead," he said. "We don't need to go to biometrics for this." 'Non-starter' Ross Anderson, an academic in the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge University, who has spent 20 years researching bank-related fraud, is also unconvinced. "It's a complete non-starter," he told the BBC. "You can't just change all the systems because you come along with a new piece of technology." He does however agree that there are "significant risks" attached to using cash machines. "I personally won't use online banking, and I only use a cash machine with an account which has relatively little money in it," he said. However he accepts that he may be "excessively risk averse" because of his line of work. "From the point of view of the customer, the only thing that matters is whether you get your money back," he said. "You have no control over tech security."	Go to a cash machine in Japan or Poland and there's a good chance you'll find a finger-sized scanner next to the keypad.
+text: The Pass Out rapper hailed the E4 comedy as "one of the most honest British comedies to come out this country in a very long time". He added: "If I got a call to do the movie I'd be there in an instant." The third round of the hit TV series aired in autumn 2010, with production scheduled to begin on a full-length film soon. Tinie Tempah, speaking to BBC 1Xtra News at MTV's Brand New for 2011 event, added: "I'm a very big fan of the show. "Whether we like it or not we've all had those characters in our school. I connected with it immediately." The Inbetweeners film, which sees the four main characters travel to Malia for a lads holiday, is due to be released in summer 2011.	Tinie Tempah has told Newsbeat he wants to be in the forthcoming Inbetweeners movie.
+text: By Emily YoungBBC News, Poland "I've done my job here, I fought with communism and now... democracy prevails," says the 71-year-old, who still lives in the picturesque town of Gdansk in northern Poland, home to the shipyards where he made his name leading the strikes that would eventually become the catalyst for the fall of Soviet communism. "If somebody had told me [when I was younger] that I would be the leader to bring down communism... I never would have believed them. That is why I am the happiest man in the whole galaxy." But Mr Walesa, who went on to be Poland's president as it transformed into a capitalist economy, is not entirely satisfied with the way things have worked out. "Under communism everybody was equally poor and now some people - not necessarily the smartest - have wealth and most people don't have it." The historic shipyards where he worked are no longer the economic force they once were. The famous Gate 2 - centre of the solidarity strikes - is now a tourist attraction with a souvenir shop beside it. There is more activity further along the docks - but parts of it are an expansive wasteland. As we arrive, the final touches are being made to a ship by workers at the Gdansk Shipyard Group Towers (GSG Towers). After seven years and tens of millions pounds, it may be the last ship to be made from start to finish by this particular company, which went bankrupt in 1997 before being bought up by new investors the following year. The shipyard was designed to make big ships that need big investments with big lead times, explains Adam Kowalski, vice-president as GSG Towers, and the market now is about small ships. In addition the global competition means that it is just not economically viable anymore. "We have diversified into three businesses now - wind farms and turbines, offshore constructions such as oil and gas platforms and pieces of ships for bigger customers," he says. It's a thoroughly capitalist story of adapting to the market to survive, symbolic of Poland's transition from communism, and the way that it has embraced capitalism. Of all the former communist states, it has been the most economically successful. It has seen steady, uninterrupted growth and was the only EU country to avoid recession after the financial crisis. At the other end of the country from the shipyards, in southern Poland lies the manufacturing plant of Fiat Poland - or FSM as it was known in its state-owned communist days. When Fiat bought the company in 1992 it was one of the first major privatisations by a foreign investor post-communism. The Italian company streamlined the operation to turn it from a loss-making business into a highly efficient, profitable one with state-of-the-art technology. FSM used to make lawnmowers, bikes, shaving equipment and even machetes for Cuba with which to cut sugar cane. Now the factory just makes cars - churning out 4,700 a week (with another plant making powertrains). The workers at its plant in Tychy describe a complete transformation. "The conditions were very different from the 70s... the level of hygiene is nothing to compared with conditions we have now, " says Jozef Filipiak. "We used to joke that whoever was the least hygienic went further up in this company." Indeed in the company's own handbook the former boss of FSM is quoted as saying: "Quality was like a weather forecast - you just hoped everything would work out well." It goes on to say that FSM operated "like a confederation of 20 independent and spread out entities, each managed as a separate company, frequently competing against each other". The workers who've been there since the communist days don't remember it all badly. One tells me about the cheap holidays the company used to provide for workers, in the Polish countryside or on the Black Sea, and another about the childcare facilities. There's a sense that while it may all be more modern now they've lost some of their security. Their livelihoods depend on the success of the company - and they know from bitter experience that when the factory makes fewer cars, jobs will go. "I remember in the 70s we had only a part of production and took no wider responsibility," says Wojciech Checinski. "Now if we don't make the car we have no money." But for the moment the future at Fiat Poland looks bright. Production of the next generation Fiat 500 will be ramped up towards the end of next year and a new five-door version is expected to be built there in early 2016. As Poland builds on its transition to capitalism - one man is watching the country especially carefully. "I'm an old man and I'm thinking about the other life," says Lech Walesa. "I will be watching from up there and looking at what you're doing down below."	"My work here is done." Twenty-five years after leading Poland to its first democratic elections, that is the message of the former Polish solidarity leader Lech Walesa.
+text: The bill - which would have allowed for criminal suspects to be extradited to mainland China - prompted outrage when it was introduced in April. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets and the bill was eventually suspended. But protesters have continued regular demonstrations, which spiralled into a wider pro-democracy movement. It is the worst crisis for Hong Kong since the former British colony was handed back to China in 1997. It has also presented a serious challenge to China's leaders in Beijing, who have painted the demonstrators as dangerous separatists and accused foreign powers of backing them. The proposed bill would have allowed for Hong Kong to extradite criminal suspects to places it does not have an extradition treaty with, including mainland China, Taiwan and Macau. Critics of the planned law had feared extradition to mainland China could subject people to arbitrary detention and unfair trials. The bill's formal withdrawal meets only one of five key demands emphasised by some protesters, who have often chanted "five demands, not one less" in Hong Kong's streets. The others are: Connie, a 27-year-old protester, told Reuters news agency the move was "too little, too late". "There are still other demands the government needs to meet, especially the problem of police brutality," she said. Carrie Lam, the embattled Hong Kong leader, has insisted that other demands by protesters are outside her control. The protests - which began peacefully - now often descend into violent running battles between Hong Kong police and hardcore demonstrators who have vandalised shops and hurled petrol bombs at security forces. Police have used water cannon, tear gas and rubber bullets in response. Live rounds have been fired on a few occasions, and an 18-year-old was shot by police in the chest on 1 October. The Financial Times newspaper reports that China's government is drawing up plans to remove Ms Lam, a figure loathed by protesters whom Beijing has thus far stood by. If Chinese President Xi Jinping approves the plan, the paper says, she will be replaced by an interim chief executive after calm returns to Hong Kong. Ms Lam's office told the BBC: "We do not comment on speculation." China's foreign ministry said the FT report was "a political rumour with ulterior motives". Separately on Wednesday, Hong Kong released the murder suspect whose case led to the extradition bill in the first place. Chan Tong-kai is accused of murdering his pregnant girlfriend in Taiwan last year before fleeing back to Hong Kong. But Hong Kong and Taiwan do not have an extradition treaty, and his case was cited when the government proposed amending the law.	Hong Kong's legislature has formally withdrawn a controversial extradition bill that has sparked months of unrest.
+text: Retailer Laura Ashley filed for administration as venues across the UK closed their doors, and airports warned they could shut down "within weeks". It comes after the government outlined new advice to avoid unnecessary travel and contact with others. And watchdog the OBR told MPs some businesses will 'inevitably' fail. The head of the Office for Budget Responsibility, Robert Chote said Britain was facing something akin to a wartime situation for its public finances and a temporary spike in borrowing would be sensible. On Monday, the Prime Minister said people should work from home where possible, and stay away from pubs and restaurants. People in at-risk groups will be asked within days to stay home for 12 weeks. The number of people who have died with the virus in the UK has reached 55. More than 1,500 people have tested positive for the virus in the UK - but the actual number of cases is estimated to be between 35,000 and 50,000. The UK's shift in strategy comes as Europe plans to ban all non-essential travel throughout the Schengen free-travel zone, as more countries close their borders. In Boris Johnson's first daily update on Monday he acknowledged the economy was facing "a severe blow" because of the virus. The key new measures he announced included: Under the guidance, people who should be "particularly stringent" in minimising their social contact are: Why has the UK plan ramped up? The UK's plan has shifted because the scientific modelling showed we were on course for a "catastrophic epidemic". A strategy of just slowing the spread of the virus, but not trying to stop it, would have overwhelmed intensive care units. The modelling by Imperial College London has been heavily informed by the experience in Italy and is influencing decisions at the heart of government. Its calculations predicted 260,000 deaths in the UK. Instead the plan is to drive down the number of cases to very low levels, which the models predict will limit deaths from coronavirus to the thousands or tens of thousands. However, this approach comes with a major problem - there is no exit strategy. Without the immunity that would build up if people were infected, then cases would soar as soon as measures are lifted. The report said these could need to be in place until a vaccine is available, which could take up to 18 months. We are in this for the long haul. The expected economic announcement comes less than a week after new Chancellor Rishi Sunak published his Budget, which included £12bn specifically targeted at coronavirus measures to get the country through the outbreak. Mr Sunak is also expected to appear at the now daily Downing Street news conference later. BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg said the £12bn announced in last week's Budget now looked potentially "completely inadequate" in the light of the way the crisis had developed. However, she said she would be surprised to hear pledges similar to those on the drastic scale made by French President Macron, who promised hundreds of billions of euros on Monday. Help for the airline industry, which has been crippled by travel bans and a collapse in demand, is expected to be among the new measures, according to BBC political correspondent Chris Mason. Business closures Pubs, theatres and music venues have expressed anger about the impact of the government's new guidance on their businesses. Many have been critical that the prime minister advised people to stay away from social venues while not forcing premises to close, which could have given them financial protection. Theatres and music venues around the UK, including the National Theatre, London Palladium and Royal Opera House, have announced they are to close from Monday night until further notice. Other businesses affected: Meanwhile, teachers' union NASUWT said a lack of advice for schools was causing a "rising sense of panic", adding that a "definitive decision" was needed on how to protect staff and pupils. A World Health Organisation special envoy, Dr David Nabarro, welcomed the government's decision to shift strategy and advise greater social distancing to tackle the pandemic. But he said further testing was needed to "understand much more precisely how the outbreak is advancing". He told Radio 4's Today programme: "I would like to stress that in every other country positions are having to be shifted as we know more about the outbreak." England's deputy chief medical officer Professor Jonathan Van-Tam said there were "significant moves afoot" to increase testing for the virus by the NHS. But he added that "for now" it was going to be focused on where it would "help us most", such as patients in intensive care. Meanwhile, some legislation will pass through the Commons unopposed this week as MPs feel the pressure to tackle the virus. Emergency legislation on the outbreak, which will be introduced to Parliament on Thursday, and the government's Budget will get "nodded through", rather than opposition MPs calling for a vote. The cabinet and shadow cabinet are also due to meet. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn met the prime minister on Monday evening and demanded support for the self-employed and those who cannot get statutory sick pay. He described the government's communication strategy as "worse than inadequate", adding that they did not share the science and rationale behind their decisions with the public. Mr Corbyn - who is 70 - said he would not follow advice to self-isolate and would carry on his duties as normal. On Monday the total number of people in the UK to test positive for the virus rose by 171 in a day to a total of 1,543, according to the latest Department of Health figures. The latest cases include 30 more from Wales and 18 in Scotland. Most of those who have died in the UK have been people over the age of 60 with underlying health conditions. In Monday's briefing, Mr Johnson said the UK was approaching "the fast growth part of the upward curve" in the number of cases. Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK's chief scientific adviser, said the UK is now "three weeks" behind Italy. Italy, the worst-affected nation outside China - where the virus originated - has more than 25,000 cases and has suffered more than 2,000 deaths. Do you work in the retail or service industry? How have you been affected by coronavirus? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk. Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also contact us in the following ways:	Britons and UK businesses are feeling the impact of unprecedented coronavirus measures, as the chancellor prepares to unveil plans to help the economy.
+text: Jarring photos of facilities in the Rio Grande show 51 female migrants held in a cell made for 40 men, and 71 males held in a cell built for 41 women. Adults were packed in standing room only cells for a week, with others held in overcrowded cells for over a month. One facility manager called the situation "a ticking time bomb". "We are concerned that overcrowding and prolonged detention represent an immediate risk to the health and safety of [Department of Homeland Security] agents and officers, and to those detained," inspectors said in the report. The inspectors, from the US inspector general, visited seven sites throughout the Rio Grande valley in southern Texas. At the facilities, the inspectors found that 30% of the detained children had been held for longer than the 72 hours permitted. Some had no access to showers or hot meals and had little access to clean clothes. "When detainees observed us, they banged on the cell windows, shouted, pressed notes to the window with their time in custody, and gestured to evidence of their time in custody," like facial hair, the report said. They described detainees clogging toilets with blankets and socks in order to be released while the cells were fixed. The report says these conditions directly contradict the US Customs and Border Protection's (CBP) own standards. The inspectors called upon the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to take "immediate steps to alleviate dangerous overcrowding". According to the CBP, the Rio Grande has the highest volume of migrants on the southwest border, recording almost 250,000 apprehensions so far this year - marking a 124% increase from 2018. On Tuesday, the DHS said they would build two tents to house additional migrants by the end of July. The agency added that fewer children are in their care than earlier this month. The DHS had 2,800 children in detention on 7 June, according to government figures. By 25 June, less than 1,000 were in custody, it said. In recent weeks, conditions at these facilities have been at the foreground of US politics. Lawyers were given access by a judge to one facility in Clint, Texas, where they reported appalling conditions inside. Children were "locked up in horrific cells where there's an open toilet in the middle of the room" where they ate and slept, one of the lawyers told the BBC. Last week lawmakers passed a bill to send $4.6bn (£3.6bn) to address the ongoing crisis at the border, amid growing outrage over the conditions. The detention facilities "will shock the conscience of this country," Democratic White House contender Beto O'Rourke said after a visit to a migrant centre. Democrats, who have been touring the facilities in the past week, have decried the conditions inside, with one Democratic congresswoman claiming that border agents had told a detainee to drink from a toilet bowl. Border officials have disputed her allegation, saying a sink in the cell that holds drinking water and drains into a toilet below was broken during her visit, and that migrants were given bottled water instead. A Trump administration official, who did not wish to be named, told CBS News that "the toilets are connected to the sinks and the sinks dispense safe drinking water". "The sink on top of the toilets broke. But as soon as the sinks broke, border patrol put out jugs of water for migrants to drink right when that happened. The jugs were right there for everyone to drink." The row erupted as immigration officials said they would investigate a secret Facebook group of more than 9,000 current or former immigration agents. The group had allegedly been mocking migrants and using slurs and insults to describe visiting lawmakers. You may also be interested in: Is there a crisis on the US-Mexico border?	A report from an internal US watchdog has found "dangerous overcrowding" in migrant detention centres in the south and urged authorities to act.
+text: By Helier CheungBBC News, Washington DC George Floyd is not the first African American whose death in police custody sparked protests. There were also rallies and calls for change after Tamir Rice, Michael Brown and Eric Garner were killed by police. But this time seems different, with the response more sustained and widespread. There have been demonstrations across the US - in all 50 states and DC - including in cities and rural communities that are predominantly white. Local governments, sports and businesses appear readier to take a stand this time - most notably with the Minneapolis city council pledging to dismantle the police department. And the Black Lives Matter protests this time seem more racially diverse - with larger numbers of white protesters, and protesters from other ethnicities, standing with black activists. A number of different factors combined to create "the perfect storm for rebellion" over George Floyd's death, Frank Leon Roberts, an activist who teaches a course on the Black Lives Matter movement at New York University, told the BBC. Floyd's death was particularly 'gruesome and obvious' A police officer, Derek Chauvin, kept his knee on Mr Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes - even as Mr Floyd repeatedly said "I can't breathe" and eventually became unresponsive. The incident was clearly recorded on video. "In many previous instances of police violence, there's a possibility of an ambiguous narrative - there's a partial view of what happened, or the police officer says they made a split-second decision because they feared for their life," Mr Roberts said. "In this case, it was a completely unambiguous act of injustice - where people could see this man [Floyd] was completely unarmed and incapacitated." Many who joined the recent protests were first-time protesters, who said seeing George Floyd's death made them feel that they simply couldn't stay at home anymore. "There are hundreds of deaths that aren't caught on video, but I think the gruesomeness and obvious hatred of the video woke people up," Sarina LeCroy, a protester from Maryland, told the BBC. Similarly, Wengfay Ho said she had always supported the Black Lives Matter movement, but George Floyd's death was a particular "catalyst" that prompted her to take to the streets for the first time. It "prompted a lot more emotion, and the call for change is so much more urgent right now". It comes during a pandemic, and high unemployment "History changes when you have an unexpected convergence of forces," argued Mr Roberts. Mr Floyd's death came in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic that has led to Americans being ordered to stay in their homes, and sparked the highest level of unemployment since the Great Depression in the 1930s. "You have a situation where the entire country is on lockdown, and more people are inside watching TV... more people are being forced to pay attention - they're less able to look away, less distracted." The pandemic has already changed the way we live and work, and led to many Americans at home "asking themselves what parts of normal are no longer acceptable", he added. And on a practical level, the US's 13% unemployment level means that more people than usual can protest and campaign without juggling work commitments. 'It was the last straw' Mr Floyd's death came shortly after the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. Mr Arbery, 25, was shot on 23 February while jogging in Georgia, after residents said he resembled a burglary suspect. Breonna Taylor, 26, was a health worker who was shot eight times when police entered her flat in Kentucky. Both their names have featured on placards at the latest Black Lives Matters protests, with demonstrators being urged to chant Ms Taylor's name. Mr Roberts described Mr Floyd's death as "the last straw for many communities", adding that the fact this happened during the summer, when people want to go outdoors, is also significant. The fact that this is an election year also means that politicians are more likely to pay attention and respond, he said. These protests appear more racially diverse While there is no hard data on the ethnicity of protesters, many of the demonstrations appear to have a high proportion of supporters who are not African American themselves. For example, in Washington DC, tens of thousands took to the streets on Saturday - and about half the crowd appeared to be non-black. Many protesters brought placards that specifically highlighted their desire to be allies to the movement. Part of this could be down to a shift in opinion. A poll for ABC suggested that 74% of Americans felt that the killing of Mr Floyd was part of a broader problem in the treatment of African Americans by police. This was a sharp rise from a similar poll in 2014, following deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner - where 43% of Americans felt that those incidents reflected a broader problem, ABC reported. While the Black Lives Matter movement has "always been multi-racial... white folks in the US don't really have a vocabulary for talking about race", Mr Roberts said. "It's uncomfortable, and they think any conversation about racism is an attack on their very existence, or feel they don't have licence to speak out in case they offend someone." However, he said he now sees more white allies speaking up, and "feeling more comfortable with being uncomfortable". In addition to huge rallies in major cities, there have also been protests in small towns, including in Anna, described locally as one of "the most racist places" in Illinois and Vidor, in Texas, which was once infamous as a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan white supremacist group. More on George Floyd's death The fact that the circumstances around Mr Floyd's death seemed particularly clear-cut may have also made it easier for people to unite. In one opinion piece, titled "My tiny, white town just held a protest. We're not alone", journalist Judy Mueller said she was "gobsmacked" to see about 40 people at a vigil in Norwood, Colorado. The vigil organisers there said "support for police and Black Lives Matter are not exclusive", while a local town board trustee, Republican Candy Meehan, said "I don't think this is a political matter… wrong is wrong." Black activists have welcomed the broadened support. Eric Wood, a DC resident, said he joined demonstrations after Trayvon Martin's death in 2012, and Breonna Taylor's death earlier this year, but the latest wave of protests were "probably the biggest yet". "African Americans and minorities have been protesting this [racism] for years. Our voices clearly do not hold as much power as if we've got some of our white counterparts to help us." Meanwhile, Mr Roberts argued: "History has been clear that the people who need to change before the dam breaks are people who have been beneficiaries of the existing systems." Did police actions have an impact? The vast majority of protests across the US were peaceful - and in several cases local police officers also showed their support. However, there were some high-profile confrontations and clashes between protesters and police. Last week, authorities forcibly removed peaceful protesters from a square outside of the White House. Shortly afterwards, President Donald Trump crossed the street to have his photo taken in front of a church. Dozens of journalists covering the protests have also reported being targeted by security forces using tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray. Some demonstrators took to the streets after they felt police used excessive force. Ben Longwell and Justine Summers said they were medical workers who decided to join the protests in DC - despite the difficulty of maintaining social distancing - as a result of police actions. "This is the first time in my life I've been afraid of the police," Mr Longwell said. Meanwhile, Ms Summers said she had not planned to take part - but "when I heard about how violent the police were getting… it seemed like a thing that I needed to do". One poll conducted for CNN suggested that 84% of Americans felt peaceful protests in response to police violence against African Americans was justified, while 27% said violent protests were also justified - although support for violent protests was split sharply along political lines. "The reality is we don't want anyone hurt. But we also have to realise that as a political and media strategy, for better of worse, rioting is often a way for activists to ensure that cameras stay on the issue," said Mr Roberts. Where could these protests lead? Many demonstrators have been calling for specific changes - including making it mandatory for police officers to wear body cameras, reducing funding for police forces, or encouraging more people to vote. Mr Roberts said it was too early to tell whether the current protests would lead to lasting change - "remember the civil rights movement [of the 1950s and 1960s] went on for over a decade." However, he was also hopeful, saying: "We live in a country where it only takes one Rosa Parks-like moment to change things." Rosa Parks was arrested after she refused to give up her seat for a white man in 1955 - sparking boycotts, and a mass movement which eventually led to ground breaking civil rights legislation in 1964. Many protesters in DC over the weekend also felt that they were on the cusp of a historic moment. "We are at a point where things could really change," said Laura Hopman, adding that she brought her two nine-year-old sons with her because "I want them to be a part of this - to make it a turning point in their lives and many other peoples' lives." Dylan Pegram, 10, was also with there his dad, on his first-ever march. "I found it kinda stressful, but at the same time it's kinda good, because we need change," he said.	Thousands of Americans are taking to the streets to protest about racism - many for the first time in their lives. Why has this particular tragedy struck such a chord?
+text: Mr Glas, who was arrested on 2 October, is the highest-ranking politician to be indicted in the massive Odebrecht corruption scandal. Prosecutors accuse Mr Glas of taking $13.5m (£10.2m) in bribes from the Brazilian construction giant, which he denies. He could face up to five years in jail. Read: Odebrecht's massive web of corruption Mr Glas has been vice-president of Ecuador since 2013 and was re-elected to the post in February. But with corruption allegations mounting against him, he was relieved of his duties by President Lenín Moreno in August. As part of a plea deal, former top Odebrecht executive in Ecuador Jose Conceicao Santos revealed that the company had paid $33.5m in bribes since 2007 to secure infrastructure contracts in the country. Prosecutors say that more than a third of that money went to Mr Glas in payments made via his uncle, Ricardo Rivera. Mr Glas and 12 other people, including his uncle, have so far been charged with conspiracy but prosecutors said more serious charges could follow. The scandal has tainted politicians in several other countries, including Mexico, Peru and Panama as well as Brazil, where Odebrecht is based.	A judge in Ecuador has ordered that the country's Vice-President, Jorge Glas, stand trial over corruption allegations.
+text: By Rachel SchraerHealth reporter The ONS regularly swabs a random sample of the population to estimate levels of the virus, even in people who don't have symptoms or don't get tested. Almost half of the infections picked up look like they are probably caused by the variant first identified in India. But national data suggests it is still confined to a handful of areas. An estimated 60,000 people in the UK were infected with coronavirus in the week leading up to 22 May, an increase of roughly 10% from 54,000 people the previous week. That equates to 0.09% of the population - or one in 1,080 people. On Friday national data showed 4,182 people had tested positive for Covid, 134 were admitted to hospital and 10 died. So there is still not a lot of Covid around compared with the winter peak. But there have been signs of increases in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland in the previous fortnight. In Wales, cases remain stable. So far, this rise across the UK is small - but data suggests there are larger rises concentrated in just a few local authorities. The ONS data is not broken down by local authority, since they don't swab enough people in each area to give accurate estimates. So it's good for spotting national trends, but less good at picking up local variation. While the overall increases are small, this hides big spikes in areas with lots of cases of the Indian variant, including Bolton, Blackburn and Bedford. These national figures might partly be skewed by surge testing in areas of concern, which then picks up more cases. Public Health England and ONS data suggest roughly 40-50% of new cases were the B.1.617.2 variant found in India as of the last week in May. The difference this time - compared with previous waves - is the vaccine, which should be breaking the link between infection and illness. After two doses, the jabs are roughly as effective against the India variant as they are against the Kent variant. In Bolton - which has the highest case numbers in the UK - the vast majority of hospital patients are not fully vaccinated and most cases are in people who are not, or who only just became eligible to have the jab. Nationally, the number of patients in hospital has continued falling. But in the North West, which is particularly affected by the B.1.617.2 variant, hospital admissions are starting to go up. Since cases in the UK as a whole have only just started to creep up, there may be a bigger rise in admissions to follow - there is always a lag before an infection translates to an illness which is severe enough to send someone to hospital. That's why a five-week gap was left between each step of easing lockdown restrictions, to give enough time for those effects to be fully seen. With this recent rise in cases, the next week or two will be crucial in seeing whether and by how much it pushes up the numbers of hospital admissions and deaths. These figures will be key factors when government ministers decide whether the 21 June relaxations can go ahead. Graphics by Daniel Dunford and the Visual and Data Journalism Team	Coronavirus cases in the UK remain low, but there are signs of a small increase, Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures suggest.
+text: DPD Ireland will be temporarily suspending its collection service from Great Britain into NI and the Republic of Ireland from 23 December. The company said it would only affect a small part of their business and not parcels travelling from NI to GB. Parcels to the EU will be routed directly "avoiding congestion we are already seeing at Dover and Calais". Parcel Motel, which uses a "virtual address" in County Antrim allowing shoppers in the Republic of Ireland to avoid added costs through international shipping restrictions, is suspending that service. RTÉ reported the company was taking the decision because the UK is leaving the single market and customs union. In a statement it said: "As of 31 December, our virtual address services in the UK will be temporarily suspended, until such time as a final Brexit decision has been implemented and our services have been adapted to meet the new requirements. "As a result, all parcels crossing the new border between Britain and Ireland will be subject to customs formalities affecting the cost and transit time of your shipment." Parcel Motel said it was working on a new offering to meet post-Brexit requirements and will consider the reintroduction of the service. The company is also suspending its service which allowed customers to send and return parcels to the UK on 31 December. DPD Ireland has also suspended its virtual address service "until a solution is developed to manage the customs controls". Formal agreement The UK and European Union had previously announced formal agreement on how the new Irish Sea border will operate in January. Separate negotiations to reach a post-Brexit trade deal are still taking place. A special deal for Northern Ireland, known as the protocol, formed part of the Withdrawal Agreement which took the UK out of the EU earlier this year. The protocol will keep Northern Ireland in the EU single market for goods even as the rest of the UK leaves it at the end of this month. The two sides had been negotiating on how the protocol should be implemented.	There will be some disruption to parcel delivery in NI as two companies suspend services due to Brexit.
+text: By Joe KearneyBBC News NI Shop-bought sponges, tinned fruit, jelly and copious quantities of cream were hardly going to make it into a Heston Blumenthal recipe book. But yet the finished product was presented with all the pride of a caveman who single-handedly had taken down and cooked a woolly mammoth. It was great, and so was my dad, also called Joe, but this year - like countless other fathers, mothers and children - the chair he sat in will be empty. Ideally, Christmas is all about celebrating with our nearest and dearest, but the reality for many is that that simply isn't possible. So how can we get through the holidays when those who helped make it such a special time are no longer here? 'We lived one breath by one breath' Esther Simpson came from London to study at Queen's University in Belfast in 1992 and a year later met Colin, the young architect, who'd make her stay in the city. A wedding in December 1995 made that Christmas extra special and by the time their 10th anniversary rolled around, four children, Hannah, Rachel, Ben-Judah and John, had been added to the mix. Life in east Belfast was an idyllic, family one, brought to a shuddering halt by the doorbell ringing in October 2017. "The first we knew of Colin's death was police liaison officers arriving. I think there was a lot of numb shock for all of us," explained Esther. Colin had turned 50 five days earlier and had completed a 80km cycling sportive the week before. As Esther says: "Death from a massive heart attack was not on anyone's radar". The family survived "one breath by one breath". In November, Esther sat her children down - then aged 20, 18, 15 and 12 - and asked them about Christmas. "I tried to give them as much choice as possible and do things democratically. In the end we put up a tree, but didn't send cards. We did presents and bought one for Colin, too," she said. "We did part of the day by ourselves but went to friends for Christmas dinner. They're the kind of friends who would have let us curl up in silence or sob on their sofa." Esther also took comfort in the Willowfield Parish church where she and Colin were active members, but nothing had prepared her for "just how painful and how long grief is". "I happened to know the children and young person's co-ordinator at Cruse and she sent an information pack after Colin died with a note saying the waiting time for counselling was four to five months," she said. "I referred myself and my three younger children about seven weeks later. We had counselling the following summer. They 'get' grief "We went on a Get Together residential weekend for families affected by bereavement six months after Colin died. This was especially helpful for my children, to meet other young people who just 'get' grief. "Unfortunately, the Get Together project has just finished as National Lottery funding ended and no new funding has been found. That leaves a massive hole in bereaved family support in Northern Ireland. "I also joined WAY (Widowed and Young) which provides online support and meet-up options with other local people. "I am blessed with an amazing network of friends and family who are extraordinarily good at listening." Last Christmas was, as Esther puts it, "easier and harder". Easier because they had done it "and survived", harder because grief caught the family unaware and the numbness that, in some ways, had protected them a year before had now been swept away. The fact that the children, who were all at key stages of their education when Colin died, have done so well is a huge source of pride for Esther. "One of them, after I commented on how amazing it was that they had even done their exams, let alone got the grades they had, turned round and said: 'Death has taken enough. It's not having any more'." Esther says she thinks about Colin all the time - and offers this advice. "Something that has helped me when the days I dread are looming is the thought that on the morning after I am likely to still be breathing. "Sometimes the next breath is all you need to choose to do." 'How will I ever cope?' Last Christmas was "horrendous" for Kirsty Doherty. Four months earlier she lost her precious baby, George, at just seven months. "I didn't cook, I spent the day in my pyjamas and cried on and off. We visited his grave and I just broke down. This wasn't normal or what any mummy or daddy should have to do on Christmas Day, it was absolutely heartbreaking. "I just thought to myself, 'how will I ever cope having to go through this every Christmas?' It was so so painful. To see everyone's happy photos on Facebook with their complete, perfect families just broke me." When Kirsty and her partner, Johnny, who live in Coleraine, found out they were expecting their second child together, George, they were thrilled. But a routine scan near the end of the pregnancy showed the baby's brain hadn't developed as it should. A rare condition called Agenesis of the corpus callosum meant the part that connects the two hemispheres in the brain had failed to develop. Having already had a son, Riley, who has autism and severe learning difficulties, Kirsty was naturally worried about how she would cope. George was born on 25 January but had breathing difficulties. "We were told to prepare for the worst but, after a week, he came off life support. He was being fed by a tube but he was improving and after four weeks we got him back to our local hospital." Kirsty and Johnny brought their new baby home to meet his brother Riley and sister Grace. They knew George would have complex needs, but Kirsty said: "He was our beautiful son and we would deal with it". However, just three weeks later feeding problems saw him brought back to the Royal Victoria Hospital where staff carried out tests. "In their opinion they didn't think he'd make it to a year old. Our world shattered before us, our wee son was going to die, something no parent ever wants to hear, it's the unthinkable... the unimaginable." Kirsty didn't want her son to spend his final weeks in a hospital. She said: "It was then the NI Children's Hospice was mentioned. They offered for us to go stay there as a family and make some lovely memories in George's final days. Four precious weeks "It was so lovely we got to stay altogether as a family, take him swimming and do lots of arts and crafts. We had four precious weeks." On the day that George died, Kirsty was numb and heartbroken, but relieved his suffering had ended. To help process what she was going through, she started a Facebook blog called George and the Giraffe to document her feelings and encourage other bereaved mums to reach out. Kirsty said: "In January 2019, I set up a private support group page called Stars above the Rainbow for anyone who'd experienced miscarriage and baby loss. "I've made lots of friends through it. I've got to know one mummy, in particular, who lost her little baby a few months after we lost George. She only lives two minutes from me and also used the services of the Children's Hospice." Facing her second Christmas without George feels "slightly easier than last" for Kirsty. A few weeks ago, she other the other mums, who meet once a month, had a Christmas wreath-making night, "all in memory of our little babies". "I wanted to do something special on Christmas Day that devoted my time to George, it was then that I saw the NI Hospice was arranging an event on the beach in Portstewart called Freeze Knees. "Basically I have to run into the water and have a splash about. I must be crazy." And Kirsty has some advice when it comes to surviving Christmas after the loss of a loved one. "Be gentle with yourself. Don't feel forced to attend any events, just do what you want to do. People will understand if you cancel at the last minute. "Cry lots if you have to. It's totally normal."	I'll never forget the trifle. It was my father's one offering to the Christmas dinner menu - indeed pretty much his only culinary contribution throughout the calendar year.
+text: A group of owners says the decision on fee levels was based on inaccurate figures and did not properly consider the impact on vulnerable people. It also says the authority did not adequately consult home owners when setting the rate. The council said its payments were fair and were rising 6.6% in 2012/13. 'No choice' Devon Quality Care Forum (DQCF), which represents the four care home owners, won its call earlier this year for a judicial review which has started at Cardiff Administrative Court. Alan Beale, managing director of South West Care Homes Ltd which is a member of the DQCF, said: "We are disappointed that legal action has become necessary. "We felt we had no choice but to take this legal action to ensure a secure future for our residents and their homes." A spokesman for Conservative-controlled Devon County Council said: "We are disappointed that after receiving a 6.6% rise in fees this year, these few home owners continue a costly legal dispute that we can ill afford, and that detracts from the business of meeting the care needs of vulnerable people in Devon. "We believe that we have acted sensibly and fairly in determining fee levels and will contest the case vigorously. "We will, of course, abide by any decision from the court."	Care home owners have mounted a legal challenge against Devon County Council over how payments were decided for looking after residents.
+text: Commissioner Adam Simmonds appointed three new assistant commissioners on Tuesday. Lib Dem county councillor Brendan Glynane said one of the those appointed was the commissioner's election agent. Mr Simmonds said the selection process was "open and rigorous". The three new assistant commissioners are Iain Britain (for justice), Kathryn Buckle, Mr Simmonds' former election agent (for governance) and Peter Heaton, Mr Simmonds' press officer (for public involvement). 'Pure cronyism' Mr Glynane, who is also a member of the Northamptonshire police and crime panel, said: "It really is unbelievable. The Conservative police commissioner has given his campaign staff permanent tax-payer funded jobs at £65,000 a year. This is pure cronyism. "What makes matters worse is that in his budget he reduced the funds available for frontline policing. We could have had 45 more police officers on the street [for the cost of the commissioner and his assistants]. "Instead we have Conservative party political activists, with no record of involvement with the police. The Conservatives have made the wrong choice yet again, choosing cronyism and jobs for the boys and girls over making our streets safer." Mr Simmonds said: "After short-listing and an open and rigorous selection process we appointed the best people to understand what we are dealing with now and in the future. None of them is a member of any political party. "They were advertised at the beginning of February, nine people were short-listed and then faced an independent assessment from someone outside the county, then a written assessment and then a panel interview. "The turnout at the next PCC elections is likely to be higher than last year. People will be more aware of the impact PCCs are making to deliver on public priorities in tackling crime. Right now, we have a hard job to get on with."	A Lib Dem group leader has accused the Tory police and crime commissioner for Northamptonshire of appointing "party political activists" with no police experience as his deputies.
+text: Talks chaired by Dr Haass and Prof Meghan O'Sullivan broke up without a deal on New Year's Eve. Consensus has yet to be reached on his final proposals, but Dr Haass said he believed in the longer term the parties would agree a deal based on his plans. "These ideas provide a new baseline," he told Foreign Affairs. "Whether it's next week, next month or next year, sooner or later the five parties are going to have to come back to those three issues. "The range of compromise is not going to be fundamentally different from what was in the negotiations that just took place. "Even if we didn't quote-unquote succeed now, something like this will have to take effect if Northern Ireland is really going to move forward."	NI's five executive parties will agree "sooner or later" on compromises over flags, parading and the past, former US diplomat Richard Haass has said.
+text: His agent said he "passed away peacefully yesterday after a long illness surrounded by his wife and family. He will be deeply missed". The actor, who died on Wednesday, was the Archbishop of Canterbury in 2016's The Crown and played Neville Chamberlain in 2017 film Darkest Hour. He worked in theatre, film and TV. Pickup's career break came in 1964 with a role as a physician in Doctor Who episode The Tyrant Of France. In 1967 he played Don John in a BBC studio recording of Franco Zeffirelli's famous production of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. He also starred in the films The Mission and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and played Norman Cousins in the Marigold Hotel films in 2011 and 2015, which also starred Dame Judi Dench and Dame Maggie Smith. His extensive television work included a 2015 episode of Downton Abbey and 2014's Call the Midwife Christmas special. He also made appearances in shows including Vera, Coronation Street, Doc Martin, Parade's End, Holby City, The Bill and Silent Witness. Pickup told the PA news agency in 2012 that his favourite role was playing the writer George Orwell in TV movie Crystal Spirit: Orwell On Jura, which told the story of him writing his acclaimed novel 1984. Last year he starred in horror film End Of Term, which starred former Doctor Who actor Peter Davison. Follow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	Actor Ronald Pickup, who is best known for his roles in the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films and The Crown, has died aged 80.
+text: MP Rebecca Pow urged people to support a move to restore the Wellington Monument, saying it could have an impact on the government. The world's tallest three-sided obelisk, standing at 75ft, was built as a tribute to the Duke of Wellington. It was recently fenced off due to falling stone debris posing a risk to the public. The National Trust said it was looking at several repair options. Conservative MP for Taunton Deane Ms Pow said: "There are a plethora of reasons why we should restore this much-loved local feature for future generations. "It's a wonderful beacon in the area in a beautiful location and is enjoyed by thousands..." Related Internet Links The ups and downs of Wellington Monument - National Trust Rebecca Pow MP	An MP's petition to raise awareness of a deteriorating Somerset monument is being supported by the National Trust.
+text: By Gary Anderson & Holly WallisBBC News At Oxford Circus, where tourists, office workers and shoppers usually battle for space on the pavement, the streets have been noticeably quieter than usual. Ahmed Waqas, who runs a souvenir stall nearby, had ordered extra stock and planned to work longer hours to take advantage of the expected Olympic business boom - but has already given up any hope of extra sales. Ahmed, 27, says: "It has been a disaster - it is so quiet, the tourists suddenly disappeared in the third week of July and they are not coming back. "Our sales are down about 50% on last year. I blame hotels that put up their prices and scared people away." Easy journeys At Selfridges, there are plenty of customers, but still fewer than might be expected at this time of year. One employee can be overheard telling a customer: "Everyone's either in Stratford, or the Londoners who usually shop here have gone away until the Olympics are over." Selfridges said in a statement that the last week had been "quieter than normal". "As expected, there has been a reduction in visitors to the West End since the Olympics began, which has had some impact on our footfall too." Data collected by research group Experian seems to support this - it said the number of people going to stores in east London on Monday and Tuesday was 9.6% lower than a year ago, while footfall in west London fell by 4.5%. It said: "We think this is as a result of people mainly going to the shopping centre adjacent to the Olympic Park." But while London 2012 may have been a headache for some businesses, for some commuters and sports fans it has dramatically improved life in the capital. Mia Brown, 23, who works in one of the big department stores, says: "I travel in to work every day from Streatham in south London. I thought I would have to get up early to get in on time but my journey has been so much easier since the Olympics started." Graham and Lesley Carson, from Oxford, are staying in the city for the duration of the Games and plan to attend as many events as possible. Lesley, 48, says: "Normally if you come to London you expect Oxford Street to be overcrowded but it's empty - it's so civilised. "Everything's running so well, it feels like they've transported the Disney experience to London. The organisers have done us proud." Businesses 'complacent' Her husband Graham, 47, says city centre businesses have no-one to blame but themselves. He says: "If they thought the business was just going to fall into their lap, they were being complacent. "If you are out at the Olympic venues, all the local businesses have entertainment or big screens - there is a real buzz. "None of the businesses up and down Oxford Street are offering anything to try and bring people in." Transport for London said the number of Tube journeys was up by a small margin from an average 3m weekday trips normally expected in the summer, while Docklands Light Railway (DLR) journeys had gone up significantly. TFL said: "The public transport system remains busy with Tube journeys up by 10.5% on Tuesday and record DLR ridership on Monday, up 65% on what would be expected at this time of year. "Journeys to stations serving the West End on Monday remained at the same levels seen this time last year." At Piccadilly Circus, dozens of young tourists are gathered at the foot of the fountain - but the traffic is flowing freely. Strange feel The vast Cool Britannia souvenir shop seems to be doing a roaring trade, but supervisor Rajees Chundavida, 30, says they would expect to be busier. He says: "We were doing OK in June and the first half of July but we are slightly down for the last week or so. "We would normally do very well from tourists coming in to central London on coach tours, but they just haven't been turning up since the Olympics started. "I think the tour companies listened to all the warnings about terrible traffic in the city and decided not to come here, but there are no bad traffic jams." But a spokesperson for Games organisers Locog insisted London was "open for business" and was "breaking all records for foreign guests staying in hotels". "In the long term, the aim is to attract more visitors to experience the capital in 2013 and beyond - to harness the additional long-term tourism benefits that we estimated to be in the region of over £950m over the next five years. "It is not unusual for host cities to experience some displacement at Games time, with transport busy at unusual times across the network and retail footfall and spend in uncommon areas." And some tourists are simply bemused by talk of a "deserted" London. Cheryl and Barbara Anderson timed their trip from Montreal, Canada, to coincide with the Games, even though they have not managed to get tickets. Cheryl, 51, says: "We saw on the news that traffic is supposed to be way down on normal and we thought, 'wow, how bad must it be normally?' But I suppose we don't have anything to compare it to. "And we thought the Tube trains were busy. We had no idea that it can be hard to get a seat."	Some businesses in London have suggested that the Olympics have deterred visitors and that their profits have shrunk as a result.
+text: The West Bromwich Albion player died in 2002, aged 59, from a brain condition normally linked to boxing. His family met FA chairman Greg Dyke on Sunday after a long-running campaign. The coroner at the footballer's inquest ruled Astle's brain had been damaged by heading heavy leather footballs in the 1960s and 70s. Daughter Dawn Astle said a study would now be carried out looking at former players and instances of dementia. The Justice For Jeff group has previously called on the FA to carry out research into the risks of heading footballs and players suffering concussion. The striker was originally thought to have died from Alzheimer's disease. 'No punches pulled' Neurosurgeon Dr Willie Stewart, who carried out an examination of Astle's brain, also met Mr Dyke, alongside Astle's widow, Laraine, of Swadlincote, Derbyshire. Dawn Astle described the meeting as "brilliant" and said the family finally felt as if they had been listened to. "I didn't pull any punches," she said. "I told him that we felt 12 years ago, when Dad's brain was examined, there was enough evidence for the FA to be considering 'have we got a problem here with our former players?' "I said 'you didn't do anything, so me and my sister did.'" Mr Dyke said the meeting was "constructive" and that the FA was working to address the "complex issue". "We will keep in touch with family and have outlined our plans to look at what research is needed next and take the subject forward on a global level because, as we have seen in the recent World Cup, head injuries are not just prevalent in English football," he said. The FA said it would now be working with partners including the Professional Footballers Association to establish the exact terms of the study. The Premier League introduced new rules on how to deal with head injuries last week.	The Football Association has agreed to carry out research into head injuries in the sport after meeting the family of former England striker Jeff Astle.
+text: By Robbie MeredithBBC News NI Education Correspondent The figure comes from analysis from the Migration Observatory at Oxford University. It found that 0.08% of Northern Ireland's population is made up of refugees resettled from the conflict in Syria. That is higher, as a share of population, than Scotland, Wales or any region of England. In Scotland, the number of resettled refugees makes up 0.06% of the population. In Wales, the figure is 0.04%, while the north east is the area of England with the highest share at 0.06% of the region's population. The Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme (VPRS) was announced by the UK government in 2015. It aimed to resettle 20,000 refugees from the conflict in Syria in the UK by 2020. The first group to come to Northern Ireland arrived in December 2015. By 17 October 2019, 1637 Syrian refugees had arrived in Northern Ireland under the VPRS scheme. That is around 9% of the total settled in the whole of the UK under the scheme. Belfast, Antrim and Newtownabbey Council and Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon Council are the areas with the highest numbers of Syrian families. English classes According to the Department for Communities, almost half (46%) of those resettled in Northern Ireland under the scheme are children under the age of 18. Many have suffered disruption to their education due to the Syrian conflict and have spent time in refugee camps. Many also come to Northern Ireland knowing little or no English. In west Belfast that has led to the Full Service Community Network, Greater Falls Extended Schools and International House Belfast combining to enable some staff in the area's schools to get an enhanced Certificate in English Language Teaching. That helps them to help Syrian refugee and other newcomer children learn English more quickly and effectively. Anas, who is taking four A-Levels at All Saints College, is one of the pupils to benefit. "There were two bombs which hit my city so after that we travelled to Iraqi Kurdistan and we lived in a camp for three years," the 17-year-old told BBC News NI. "Our life got hard and we wanted to go to somewhere better." "We came to Northern Ireland in August 2016 and we really enjoy it here. "Education is perfect and the schools are perfect, and we got a lot of help. "The weather was a bit challenging but I'm used to the weather now." He wants to go to university in Northern Ireland to study biomedical sciences. His fellow A-Level student Rawan also wants to work in the health sector. Her family fled Aleppo when the war in Syria began and she arrived in Belfast in 2016 having not been to school for three years. "Everything changed and I started to go to school again," she said. "The people were so nice and helpful. "When I came here I was very nervous with no language and it's so, so hard, but they tried to make it easier for us. "I remember my first week in school as it was so, so hard. But we had extra classes to learn English and the teachers were so nice as they kept talking with us even if we didn't understand. "Now, it's a big change as I can understand and speak a lot compared to three years ago. "Now I really like the weather too."	Northern Ireland has resettled proportionately more Syrian refugees than any other part of the UK.
+text: More empty seats on flights contributed to a 7.5% fall in underlying pre-tax profit to A$852m ($656m; £527m), while revenue slipped 3.3% to A$8.18bn. The results were better than guidance given by the airline. Shares rose more than 5% in morning trading in Sydney to A$3.73, although the stock is flat over the past 12 months. Chief executive Alan Joyce said: "The international market is tough because of capacity growth and lower fares, and Qantas International is not immune from those pressures." Wi-fi in the sky The airline planned to remain disciplined on capacity, keep costs down and introduce new aircraft and offerings such as high-speed Wi-Fi. Qantas will start flying the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner this year. Qantas also said it expects to start offering free onboard Wi-Fi on domestic routes in the coming weeks, followed by international services later in the year. The company did not give annual profit guidance as the short-term outlook remains subject to variable factors, including "oil price movements, foreign exchange movements and global market conditions". In the year to June 30, Qantas posted a record net profit of A$1.42bn and announced its first dividend payout to shareholders in seven years. That followed cuts of A$2bn to costs and restructuring, with thousands of jobs axed and dozens of aircraft sold or orders deferred.	Lower fares and stronger competition have taken their toll on profits at Qantas for the six months to December.
+text: The deal went through despite objections from the UK government. On Saturday the Department of Energy said it opposed the deal "in its current form" and expressed concern about "possible future sanctions" on Mr Fridman and his LetterOne fund. There are fears that the deal could run counter to sanctions imposed over the crisis in Ukraine. "We are delighted to have completed the acquisition of Dea," said Mikhail Fridman, chairman of LetterOne. "We are convinced that the current macroeconomic environment and the low oil price, give us an opportunity to achieve our ambition." A report in the Financial Times said Mr Fridman had threatened legal action against the UK government if it attempted to block the acquisition. As part of the deal, LetterOne is creating a new subsidiary, L1 Energy, to be run by former BP chief executive Lord Browne. "The sale of RWE Dea demonstrates that even in difficult conditions, we continue to realize our plans. Both parties negotiated good value for money, and RWE can now focus fully on its core business," said RWE AG's chief executive Peter Terium.	German energy company RWE has closed the sale of 12 North Sea oil and gas fields to a Russian oligarch.
+text: By Robbie MeredithBBC News NI Education Correspondent Draft proposals have been put forward by negotiators representing the Post-Primary Transfer Consortium (PPTC) and Association of Quality Education (AQE). A consultation will now take place. However, BBC News NI understands a common test is unlikely to be in operation for at least two to three years even if there is agreement. Grammar school principals and boards of governors will be part of the consultation on the new proposals. There have been two separate tests run by the AQE and the PPTC since the state-run 11 plus exam came to an end in 2008. Primary school children aged 10 and 11 can choose to sit either test, both tests, or decide not to sit them. They are used to decide which pupils are admitted to the vast majority of grammar schools. Both organisations have now put forward proposals for a joint test. BBC News NI understands that the proposals include: There are some significant differences between the current AQE and PPTC tests. Currently 29 schools use the AQE test alone to admit pupils, 27 use the PPTC test alone and 7 use results from both tests. Parents pay a fee to enter their child for the AQE tests, unless they are eligible for free school meals. In 2018, that fee is £50, whereas PPTC do not charge a fee for entrance to their test. 'Encouraging progress' The formats of the current tests also differ. The PPTC test involves two multiple choice Maths and English papers taken on one day set by GL Assessment, a company specialising in educational tests. There is also a supplementary PPTC test paper which can be taken on a separate Saturday. The AQE test involves three papers taken over three Saturdays, which pose a series of English and Maths questions and tasks. The GL Assessment test is used mainly by Catholic grammars, while the AQE test is used mainly by other grammars. Every year about 2,000 pupils sit both tests, which can mean they sit five transfer tests on five successive Saturdays. In a joint statement to BBC News NI, AQE and PPTC said "encouraging progress" had been made. "Provisional agreements on the financial model which could support an assessment offering access to all grammar schools, the style of test paper and the number of separate tests were presented by the negotiating teams in the last fortnight to the groups' respective AGMs," they said. "Schools have been asked to reflect upon the direction of travel and to report, where necessary, to their boards of governors." 'Absolutely exhausted' However, BBC News NI understands that grammar schools will face additional expenditure in the event of a single test. Additional costs - of around £4,000 in some cases - may be the main difficulty before a common test can be confirmed. Primary school principals, governors, teachers and parents will also be consulted before any single test comes into effect. Cathy Humphrey, principal of Groggan Primary School near Randalstown, welcomed the proposal. "To expect children, age 10 and 11, to sit tests on four Saturdays in the run up to Christmas is just too much," she told BBC Radio Ulster. "I've two children who came through the system myself and by the time they have done the fourth test, the children are absolutely exhausted." Cathal O'Doherty, headmaster of Our Lady Queen of Peace Primary School in Belfast, also said that one test was "better than three or four". However, he added that a lot would depend on what form the new test would take and he warned the changes could cause even more disruption for teachers trying to prepare children for the exams. The 11-plus examination was abolished in Northern Ireland in 2008 by the education minister at that time, Caitríona Ruane. Nevertheless, a significant number of children enter the transfer tests each year. Academic selection remains a contentious issue. In 2017, a policy group run by the Department of Education (DE) criticised the impact of selection.	Proposals for a common transfer test to select pupils for grammar schools have been agreed by the two organisations that run the exams.
+text: Investigations into corruption are rising but too few forces are gathering intelligence to prevent it happening, the Inspectorate of Constabulary found. HMIC looked at issues such as how police interact with the media and the acceptance of gifts and hospitality. Inspector of Constabulary Roger Baker said HMIC was concerned progress was "inconsistent" and lacked "urgency". 'Low' staffing levels Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary looked at 44 forces to assess progress against recommendations made in a 2011 report into police relationships. Inspectors found in the progress report that although police forces registered gifts and hospitality, there was "little evidence" that chief constables were questioned about items they received. Staffing levels in some anti-corruption units had fallen or were very low, inspectors found. The report acknowledged it could be difficult to challenge people in senior positions but said checks must take place at "all grades and ranks". It also found a further clampdown on the use of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, was needed. A total of 357 instances of potentially inappropriate behaviour were identified on social media, spread across 185 profiles, HMIC said. Offensive language, comments on police procedure, negativity towards work and extreme opinions on government were among the examples, it said. The Without Fear or Favour report found no evidence corruption was endemic in police relationships with the media and others. But it revealed concerns that few forces provided any policy or guidance in relation to key integrity issues. 'More to do' "HMIC found that the police service is responding to our 2011 report, Without Fear or Favour, by making improvements to how it identifies, monitors and manages integrity issues; but we are concerned that this progress is inconsistent, and lacks a uniform sense of urgency," said HM Inspector of Constabulary Roger Baker. "Integrity is fundamental to the core values of the police and what it means to be a police officer. As such it must be at the heart of every action carried out and word spoken by police officers and staff. "HMIC will therefore continue to monitor and inspect the service‟s progress in order to provide the public with confidence that all forces are adhering to high standards in these respects." The Association of Chief Police Officers' (ACPO) lead on professional standards, Chief Constable Mike Cunningham, said: "This report, in common with other independent analysis from bodies such as the Independent Police Complaints Commission, confirms that the majority of officers and staff, at all levels, seek to act with integrity. "Since 2011 the police service has for the first time introduced national guidelines covering gifts and hospitality, relations with the press and secondary employment. These changes are now being bedded in across the 44 forces." HMIC said: "While some progress has been made, particularly by putting in place processes and policies to manage threats to integrity, more needs to be done. "The pace of change also needs to increase, not least to demonstrate to the public that the police service is serious about managing integrity issues."	Police forces in England and Wales must improve plans to combat corruption in the service, inspectors have said.
+text: Emily Rycroft, from Grimsby, became stuck in the building on Monday evening after going inside to collect an essay. The 21-year-old told her mother who tweeted Radio 2 stars Jo Whiley and Jeremy Vine. After the DJs retweeted the plea, a key holder was found and she was let out after a couple of hours. Ms Rycroft, who is studying philosophy, politics and ethics, said: "I was going home from my boyfriend's house and I thought I would stop and pick up an essay that had been handed back in. "I thought I'd nip to the toilet downstairs, had five minutes to spare before they closed up, but I think someone fancied going home early. "They had locked the doors and must not have heard or seen me come in. I rang my mum and she thought I was joking." Her mother, Gillian, set about tweeting the celebrities whose retweets were seen. Security staff then let Ms Rycroft out of the building "It was amazing [to be let out] - so nice to feel the air again," she said. A university spokesman said: "As soon as our security staff were informed of the incident they attended and released the student. "The building was being locked a little earlier than usual and we apologise for any distress this may have caused the student and her family."	A student who became locked inside Brighton University overnight was let out after a social media plea from her mother was picked up by celebrities.
+text: Stephen Gill, 52, was walking with his wife on Redcar beach on Saturday when they spotted a girl in the water and realised she was screaming for help. He and another man threw a rope to the child and fell into the water before managing to pull themselves and the girl to safety. Cleveland Police said those who tried to help the girl were "heroes". Mr Gill said the 10-year-old and her friend aged 11 had spotted big waves and went to look. They both got washed into the water from a ramp, however the 11-year-old managed to pull herself out. Mr Gill, an accountant, said: "It was windy and a high tide and we saw water going over the barrier and thought 'that's cool we'll go have a look'. "We saw a young girl swimming in the ocean and thought that was unusual, then we realised she was floundering and screaming for help. She was being washed against some steps by the power of the waves. "I found a rope and jumped over the barrier and threw it to the girl." He said that the girl grabbed the rope, but he could not pull her out because she was a "dead weight." By this stage another man was trying to help and they both ended up getting pulled into the water. Mr Gill said: "I was holding on to the guy and he was holding on to the girl and we managed to pull ourselves out on to the steps. "It was total instinct, there was no thinking about it, it was all adrenaline. "I'm just so pleased she's okay. "My wife is so proud and called me a hero - that feels weird." Police said the girls suffered bruising and were cold from being in the water, but were otherwise unharmed by their ordeal. They were checked over by paramedics but did not need hospital treatment and were left with their parents. PC Stewart Shepherd of the Cleveland force said: "There's no doubt their quick-thinking meant a far less serious outcome and I would describe these men as heroes." Follow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk. Related Internet Links Cleveland Police	A man who ended up falling in the sea trying to pull a girl aged 10 to safety says he "acted on instinct".
+text: Lt David Boyce and L/Cpl Richard Scanlon, from the 1st The Queen's Dragoon Guards, were providing security in Helmand province at the time. The soldiers had been serving with the Formation Reconnaissance Squadron. The deaths bring the total number of UK military personnel killed in operations in Afghanistan since 2001 to 388. Lt Boyce, 25, from Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, and L/Cpl Scanlon, 31, from Rhymney, Caerphilly, were caught in the explosion while in the Yakchal region of Nahr-e Saraj, Helmand. Lt Boyce was deployed on 21 October in command of 1st Troop, B Squadron, 1st The Queen's Dragoon Guards. He studied international relations at the University of Exeter before joining the Army in 2009. Lt Boyce's family said he had brought sunshine into the lives of all the people he knew. In a statement they said: "David was honoured to be a cavalry officer who embraced military life with a passion. We are immensely proud of all that he achieved in such a short life and take comfort knowing that he died doing what he loved. "He brought sunshine into the lives of all those he knew. David will be dearly missed by his loving family and girlfriend Jodie." Lt Col Jasper de Quincey Adams, commanding officer of the 1st The Queen's Dragoon Guards said he represented everything that is great about the British Army. Col de Quincey Adams said: "He led from the front, setting the very highest standards, and inspired his men and peers alike. "Tall, powerful and with an infectious smile he, like so many officers of his generation, was committed to his men and determined to succeed on the operations." Comrades also said Lt Boyce was "full of laughter and mischief" and a larger-than-life character. L/Cpl Scanlon was deployed to Afghanistan on 18 October 2011. He had also served in Bosnia in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 and 2005. His family said he would be sorely missed by all who knew him. They said in a statement: "Richard was a fun loving young man who enjoyed life to the full. He had a great love for his family - always helping them out whenever he could when needed. "Richard was a great character and he will be sorely missed by his family and all who knew him. There will never be anyone else like our Richard." Col de Quincey Adams said he was "one of life's great characters" and an experienced soldier who was calm under pressure. He said: "We will miss him terribly, barracks life will have lost some of its sheen, but our tragic loss is insignificant compared to that of his family; his mother, stepfather, father and sisters Lisa and Emma, all of whom he loved so much. "Lance Corporal Scanlon will never be forgotten and our memories of him will forever be cherished."	Two British soldiers killed when their armoured vehicle struck a makeshift bomb in Afghanistan have been named by the Ministry of Defence.
+text: Sean CoughlanEducation correspondent "Almost no-one inside or outside government thinks they will survive." Before last month's general election, the position of tuition fees in England looked unassailable. The government had rammed through legislation at the last minute, increasing fees to £9,250 per year. And the proposal by Labour to scrap tuition fees had been met by university leaders with a polite shrug. But there seems to have been a huge sea-change in attitudes. 'Indefensible' interest rates So what has made such a difference? "The straw that broke the camel's back," says Lord Adonis, has been "indefensible" interest rates of 6.1%. This has focused attention on the scale of debt from higher fees and interest rates - spinning upwards to £50,000 so far for an average graduate, with fees set to increase every year with inflation. "It's about as bad a political gambit as you could imagine," says Lord Adonis. "Can you seriously see the Conservatives going in to the next election with fees at £10,000, interest rates at 7% and debts at £60,000?" He argues that a reformed version of the fee system could have survived with cross-party support, but now it has become irredeemably toxic. Even if fees were "cut drastically", he says, it would still not be enough for young people, who will want them to be completely scrapped. And a partial reduction would still mean a financial black hole, with "lots of political pain for not much gain". The inescapable outcome, says Lord Adonis, is that an entirely different approach will be needed to fund universities. The sense of political doom hanging over fees, he says, reminds him of the poll tax. Student vote Lord Adonis is the type of reforming Labour politician the Conservatives like to applaud. With a minority government hanging by a parliamentary thread, any cross-party push on reforming fees would cause ministers deep problems. And concerns about fees are emerging. Conservative MP Nick Boles, writing in the Guardian, said charging high interest before students had even finished their courses was "simply unacceptable". The meter on interest charges starts running as soon as courses begin, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies saying students would owe £5,800 in interest charges before they even graduated. "It is unutterably depressing for hard-working students to see the amount they owe spiralling upwards, before they have even started paying it off," Mr Boles wrote. The election saw huge swings to Labour in university seats - and any Conservative MP defending a narrow majority might want to review a system that will see tuition fees rising every year. This is also a very middle-England issue. More than half a million young people start university each year. According to the IFS, middle earners could end up paying £40,000 in interest charges, on top of what they have borrowed. Rising debt Prof David Green, vice-chancellor of the University of Worcester, says the current fee arrangements have "lost credibility" when they become a long-term pay cut for people such as nurses. For nurses and midwives, he says, it will mean "their debt never diminishes in real terms until it is eventually written off after 30 years". "Instead, they will simply receive a take-home pay cut of 4.7% and a shackle of a growing £50,000 debt. "This makes absolutely no sense when there is a significant and growing national shortage throughout England of both nurses and midwives." The way interest is levied is also under scrutiny. Estelle Clarke, a former City lawyer on the advisory board of the Intergenerational Foundation think tank, says student loans have less consumer finance protection than a basic product such as a credit card. She says if they were properly regulated, they would be unlikely to apply the monthly compound interest used for student loans. And if inflation goes up further - as is entirely possible - interest charges for students will also rise, adding to student loan debts that have already passed £100bn. This could become even more complicated, as the government is planning to sell off students' debts to private investors. 'No fees v no cap' So what will happen next? Any rowing back would mean taking a political hit and accusations of a U-turn. But sticking to the current plans would mean committing to a long upward curve in fees, which would be even more controversial by the next election. The Education Secretary Justine Greening says there needs to be a more honest debate about the cost of scrapping fees - both in financial terms to the public finances and in removing the funding for extra places. "I'm someone who was the first person in my family to be able to go to university, and that matters to me a huge amount," says Ms Greening. "I think the debate has revolved around what's the best way to enable access to our universities. "We've seen a debate about whether that's no fees or no cap. "When you bring a cap in, that means fewer students have a chance to go to university. "We know that when there are fewer places at university, who gets them? "We know that it's students who are doing better in our school system - and that tends to be students from better-off families. "I really do feel that the Labour party should come clean to young people about the consequences of its no-fees policy. "They should be frank with people that what they've said in the run-up to the election about effectively writing off student debt was a false promise."	"This is only going to end one way," says Lord Adonis, Labour peer and one of the architects of an earlier version of tuition fees.
+text: One ministerial source told the BBC the longer delay could be up to two years, amid reports of a cabinet row, but No 10 said no decision had been made. EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said the EU would not grant a delay without a "concrete plan" from the UK about what they would do with it. Under current law the UK will leave the EU with or without a deal in nine days. MPs rejected the withdrawal deal Mrs May has negotiated with the EU for a second time last week by 149 votes. They also voted in favour of ruling out leaving the EU without a deal, and in favour of extending the Brexit process. The prime minister had hoped to have another try at getting MPs to back the deal this week - but Speaker John Bercow effectively torpedoed that with his surprise intervention on Monday. She still hopes to ultimately get it in front of MPs for a third go, but says even if that happens and they vote in favour of it, the UK will need a short extension to get the necessary legislation through Parliament. A cabinet source told the BBC she therefore plans to ask the EU to agree to postpone the UK's departure until 30 June, but with an option of a longer delay as well. Mrs May has warned Brexiteer Tories that a longer extension will be needed if her deal does not get through Parliament. One ministerial source told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg there was "no agreement" around the cabinet table when a delay was discussed. Another cabinet source said they were frustrated that the PM had not been clear about which delay option she would be arguing for. Commons leader Andrea Leadsom is said to have criticised colleagues, saying they now amounted to a "Remain cabinet", not a "Brexit cabinet". Chancellor Philip Hammond said ministers all wanted the "shortest possible delay" but cabinet members "have different approaches to how we should do this". Any delay will have to be agreed by all 27 EU member states and Mrs May is heading to Brussels on Thursday to discuss the options with fellow leaders. What happens next? Meanwhile, former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who campaigned to remain in the EU, told BBC Newsnight that the question of whether to have another referendum was "for a later time". Although leaving without a deal was still the default position, Mr Blair said a no-deal Brexit "won't happen", adding that the challenge now was making any extension to Article 50 count. Mr Blair called for a delay of between nine months and a year to "allow Parliament to reach a conclusive opinion on the central Brexit question - soft or hard?" On Monday, the Speaker said he would not allow a third "meaningful vote" in the coming days on "substantially the same" motion as MPs rejected last week. Mr Bercow declined to discuss the reasons for his decision when questioned by the BBC, as he made his way in to Parliament the following day. Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay suggested a third vote on the Brexit deal could take place next week - after Mrs May has sought a delay. On Mr Bercow's ruling, he said it was important to "respect the referee" and abide by his decisions - but, he added, the Speaker himself had said in the past that if Parliament was guided only by precedent then "nothing ever would change". Mr Barclay suggested that MPs would "find a way" to get another vote, if the government manages to persuade enough of them, including the 10 Democratic Unionists, to change their mind and back the deal. What is the EU saying? At a news conference in Brussels, Mr Barnier said it was up to the 27 EU leaders to decide whether to grant a delay, based on what was in the "best interest" of the bloc. But for a longer delay "there needs to be a new event" or a "new political process" - so that "we are not back in the same situation as today". "Extending the uncertainty without a clear plan would add to the economic cost for our business but will also incur a political cost for the EU," said Mr Barnier. "It is for the British government and Parliament to decide very quickly what the UK wants to do next." Mr Barnier also warned that UK MPs voting against "no deal" would not prevent it from happening, saying that "everyone should now finalise all preparations for a no-deal scenario". BBC Europe editor Katya Adler said the EU had "little trust" in the prime minister, with some leaders wanting to see proof from Parliament that MPs would support a longer delay before the EU signed up to it. She said there was "irritation" that those at Westminster appeared to be "inward-looking" and were not taking into account the cost of a delay to the EU. And she said the EU's final decision on a delay may not be given this week, with talk of an emergency summit on 28 March. Earlier, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she would struggle until the last possible moment to achieve "an orderly Brexit", saying the interests of Germany, Britain and the EU were at stake. Taoiseach (Irish PM) Leo Varadkar and European Council president Donald Tusk released a joint statement after their meeting in Dublin. "They agreed that we must now see what proposals emerge from London in advance of the European Council meeting in Brussels on Thursday," it said. What about the opposition parties? Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the Speaker's intervention showed Mr Bercow was "ensuring Parliament is taken seriously". He said he had spoken to Conservative and Labour MPs about a so-called Norway-Plus style of future relationship with the EU - a closer one than Mrs May's deal would bring about - calling it an "interesting idea" which had not got his "complete support". When asked about another referendum, he said: "The issue has to be put to the people after Parliament has made some kind of decision." He said a public vote had to be on a range of options, saying: "It cannot just be on Theresa May's deal or Remain - there has to be some choice for the people." Mr Corbyn also held "constructive" talks with the Westminster leaders of the SNP, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and Green Party about the potential to unite around a closer future relationship with the EU, a Labour spokesman said. But Liz Saville Roberts, Plaid Cymru's Westminster leader, suggested the Labour leader had not really engaged during the meeting with the case for giving the public the final say on Brexit. "We were there to talk about a People's Vote and the only thing I felt he was comfortable talking about was Labour's version of Brexit," she said.	Prime Minister Theresa May is writing to the EU to formally ask for Brexit to be postponed.
+text: Lord Judge lambasted measures in the Wales Bill which he said could allow UK ministers to change assembly legislation without Parliament's say. The independent peer called including the a "constitutional aberration". A Wales Office spokesman said the power was simply to "fine tune" the new devolution settlement. The proposed Wales Bill - which devolves new powers to the Welsh assembly including over fracking and changes the way it makes laws - is being considered in its final stages in the House of Lords. The row erupted as the Lords discussed amendments to the bill, including giving the Welsh Government the powers to ban high-stakes gambling machines and scrapping a clause allowing UK ministers to block some laws made in Wales about water. Lord Judge, the most senior judge in England and Wales between 2008 and 2013, was critical of measures - known as the Henry VIII clauses - contained in the bill which he said would allow laws passed by the Welsh assembly to be changed by ministers in London without Parliament's consent. Lord Judge said: "This is the malevolent ghost of King Henry VIII wandering through the Valleys of Wales." "Actually it is an insult to the democratic process which this Parliament created when the National Assembly of Wales was created," he added. Lord Judge said the House of Lords should be "embarrassed" that it had allowed such a measure to be put in place in Scotland. Plaid Cymru peer Lord Wigley, also criticised the clauses, describing them as "arcane and undemocratic". This is not the first time a row has broken out during the passage of the bill, last year First Minister Carwyn Jones said measures in it amounted to an "English veto on Welsh laws". But the Wales Office denied the clauses gave UK ministers any more power than Welsh ministers, insisting they were "simply a power to do the fine tuning needed to implement the new devolution settlement for Wales set out in the Wales Bill". A spokesman said: "A significant number of assembly acts give Welsh ministers reciprocal powers to change parliamentary legislation without Parliament's approval in order to implement assembly legislation. "This power is part and parcel of the consequential powers held both by UK ministers and Welsh ministers." The spokesman added that Welsh Secretary Alun Cairns had written to First Minister Carwyn Jones and Presiding Officer Elin Jones committing himself to working closely with the Welsh Government and the assembly "on any regulations that need to be made which modify assembly legislation". A Welsh Government spokesman said: "It is clear that the former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, shares our concerns about provisions he describes as a 'constitutional aberration'. "It is disappointing that the UK government has not felt able so far to respond effectively to our, and his, arguments." The UK government also faced calls to guarantee Welsh communities would never again be sacrificed to provide water for England. In 1965, the village of Capel Celyn was flooded to create the Tryweryn reservoir to provide Liverpool with water, under a law passed in 1956. Last month Welsh Secretary Alun Cairns said he would scrap his ability to block some laws made in the assembly about water under changes to the Wales Bill. But Lord Wigley said the amendments failed to deliver on the promise, instead stating a protocol may be put in place to protect English consumers and Wales. Labour peer and assembly member Baroness Morgan of Ely called for the UK government to clarify exactly what was in the protocol. But Lord Bourne said Tryweryn could not happen again and the issue was unaffected by the Wales Bill. The bill is scheduled to be discussed in the House of Lords again on 10 January.	Powers allowing the UK government to overturn laws made in Wales have been criticised by a former lord chief justice as an "insult" to democracy.
+text: She was speaking at her first press conference since taking over the IMF. Later she told the BBC a solution for eurozone debt had "to be comprehensive, cohesive and not ad-hoc, as sometimes has been the case in the past". She also said she was confident about Portugal because there was cross-party support for its austerity measures. And she defended her appointment as the latest in a long line of French IMF heads, saying, "I don't feel specifically French or European, I feel very much a member of the whole community." BBC economics editor Stephanie Flanders said that it was not just the support of European governments that won Ms Lagarde the job and that she had also been supported by China and Brazil. Ms Lagarde said she wanted to improve diversity at the IMF. She pledged to push ahead with reforms to give emerging markets greater sway at the international lender. "The world is going to continue to change," she said. "We have these tectonic plates that are moving at the moment, and that needs to be reflected in the composition of governance and employment at the fund." 'No special treatment' "First of all, let's focus on those connections and those connecting-points between economies, within economies, and make sure that our services and our advice are actually properly including that particular aspect," she told reporters. "For the fund to be credible, its analysis, its work, needs to be candid, needs to be credible, needs to be even-handed. There is no one category of country that deserves special treatment and another one that will receive harsh treatment." Turning to the third "C", comprehensiveness, she said: "We cannot only analyse the economy by looking at some of the traditional standard criteria... the comprehensiveness of our approach must be enhanced." Ms Lagarde also said she would be completing a training programme on ethics. Her predecessor Dominique Strauss-Kahn quit to fight sexual assault charges in the US. He denies assaulting a hotel maid in New York on 14 May and was recently freed from house arrest in the city. The IMF is usually led by a European, while the World Bank is led by an American, but with the rapid growth of countries such as India and China, it has been suggested that people from elsewhere in the world might be considered for the jobs. In the end, Ms Lagarde was chosen ahead of Mexico's Agustin Carstens. She takes over at a tricky time for the IMF, with a second bail-out for Greece being discussed and the ratings agency Moody's saying there is a growing risk that Portugal will also need a second bail-out.	Christine Lagarde, the new head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), says she wants the fund to be more connected, credible and comprehensive.
+text: "Light Through Tall Windows" was recorded in the Mackintosh library by the GSA choir on Sunday. It will be released next year to help pay for the restoration of the the Grade A-listed building whose upper floors were gutted by fire in 2014. It will also fund a planned expansion of the art school's Garnethill campus. "Light Through Tall Windows" is a collaborative work between two GSA alumni. 'Creative response' The lyrics were penned by writer and broadcaster Muriel Gray while the music was composed by Jamie Sansbury, founder and musical director of the GSA Choir. Describing the work, Mr Sansbury said: "This piece is an attempt to set down, in a more tangible way, the joy the Mackintosh building instils in students and staff at the school, the enduring enlightenment it represents, and the impact that has upon them for the rest of their lives. "The work is dedicated to the staff, students and alumni of the GSA. "When we completed the piece we knew that we wanted the choir to premiere the work, and we hoped that it would be an important creative response to the fire, but it was only much later that the possibility of recording in the library itself - the very heart of the building - came about." The work is now on pre-order with a release scheduled for early 2017. All proceeds of sale will go directly to the Mackintosh Campus Appeal. The art nouveau Mackintosh building was badly damaged by fire on 23 May 2014. An investigation by the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service concluded the blaze was caused by flammable gases from a canister of expanding foam. The report said the gases ignited as they came into contact with the hot surface of a projector.	A new choral work, inspired by the fire which damaged Glasgow School of Art's (GSA) Mackintosh building, has been recorded to help fund its restoration.
+text: One was planned in Boston last year, but it was cancelled when the borough council agreed to set up a task force to address their concerns. Boston and Skegness's Conservative MP Mark Simmonds has warned that the march could be hijacked by extreme groups. But campaigners feel they are still not being listened to. Organiser Dean Everitt said: "I think there's been a lot of waffle going on and not a lot of straight answers. "We are seriously reconsidering putting the march back on." 'Suck in people' Mr Everitt plans to hold a public meeting within the next three weeks where he and other campaigners will vote over whether to hold a march. It follows a task force meeting on Friday, when Mr Simmons gave evidence about his experiences of migration to Boston. A significant minority of the town's population is from Eastern Europe. Mr Simmonds said the "significant increase" in economic migration had been the most noticeable change since he was first elected to represent the area in 2001. After the meeting he said: "I very much hope that the march won't take place. "Inevitably it would suck in people who I don't want to see in Boston. "As happened before there would clearly be an anti-march protest from the anti-fascist league and that is not the sort of thing we want to see in a nice Lincolnshire market town like Boston."	Campaigners in a Lincolnshire town are "seriously considering" holding a protest march to highlight their concerns about immigration.
+text: City of Sheffield Water Polo Club usually trains at Ponds Forge but has recently been using Manvers Lake near Wath instead. Despite many pools recently reopening, Sheffield City Council said it was "unaffordable" to reopen Ponds Forge. Head coach Chris Motley said the future of the club was being put at risk. More stories from around Yorkshire "Without Ponds Forge, I can see us not existing in the next 12 months," he said. "Swimming through duck poo at seven or eight in the morning isn't really what the players want to be doing. "It has given them a chance to meet up with team-mates and get used to throwing a ball around again, but it's certainly not sustainable if we're looking at what we have been doing over the last few years and producing so many top-class athletes." The pool is also a training base for Sheffield Diving and City of Sheffield Swimming Club. Ponds Forge is operated by Sheffield City Trust, which said it had been working closely with the city council to reopen as many leisure facilities as possible following the coronavirus outbreak. It said: "We have no plans to close down Ponds Forge permanently and will continue to closely monitor the situation regarding large-scale events and look to reopen as soon as is practical and reasonable to do so." Councillor Mary Lea said the council could not support the opening of the pool as it would be "unaffordable". She said: "We hope to reopen the centre as soon as regulations allow commercial activity to resume, alongside general public use. We do not yet know when this will be. "We understand the impact that the continued closure of these facilities has on the clubs and athletes who train here and we recognise their importance to the city." Follow BBC Yorkshire on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk or send video here.	A prestigious water polo club has been forced to take its practice outdoors to a lake as the swimming pool it uses for training remains closed.
+text: Separate polls conducted by The Washington Post/ABC and CNN/ORC both found Mr Obama with 60% approval. A majority approve of his economic policy, but polls show a deep divide between Democrats and Republicans. The nation's first African American president will hold his final press conference later on Wednesday. Only Presidents Ronald Reagan, Franklin D Roosevelt and Bill Clinton have handed over the White House keys with higher favourability ratings. The paradox - Anthony Zurcher, BBC News, Washington President Barack Obama is set to leave office with some of the highest popularity ratings in his presidency. The man who will replace him, despite having some of the lowest ratings of any incoming president, is poised to roll back much of his legacy. A closer look at these recent surveys helps explain the apparent contradiction. The US is sharply divided along partisan lines, with Mr Obama touting high support among Democrats and low ratings with Republicans. Throw in that voters in key Midwestern swing states feel more pessimistic about the state of the nation - many of whom backed Mr Obama in 2008 and 2012 and switched to Donald Trump in 2016 - and it's a recipe for a narrow presidential win for the Republican Party. Mr Obama's reservoir of goodwill as he departs, like Hillary Clinton's popular vote victory in November, must be cold comfort for Democrats shut out of the Washington corridors of power. In 2001 they were in a similar situation, with Bill Clinton riding an even higher wave of support, and it took them six years - and an unpopular war - to climb out of that political hole. About a quarter (25%) of Americans view him as one of the greatest presidents, however about the same number (23%) view him as a poor president. Among Democrats, Mr Obama has near-universal support (95%), however just 18% of Republicans approve of his eight years in office. Mr Obama's approval continued to climb during the bitter 2016 presidential election, as views of the economy improved. When Mr Obama took office in 2009 only 5% of Americans rated the economy as "great" or "good" according to the Washington Post's figures, and that number never rose about 20% during his first four-year term. Although few now rate the economy as "excellent", those rating it as "poor" have dropped from 62% to 14% during Mr Obama's presidency. On Tuesday a Washington-Post/ABC News poll found the President-elect Donald Trump has one of the lowest approval ratings of any incoming president in history. He dismissed the poll as "rigged" after it was found that his 40% approval rating is lower than any arriving president since Jimmy Carter. Obama legacy How reality derailed the Obama dream Did Obama improve US race relations? Obama and the tale of US jobs Unexpected things named after Obama	Two new polls show President Barack Obama leaving office with one of the highest approval ratings for any departing US president.
+text: The watchdog has carried out a probe into the social network following concerns that members were unaware of the extent of the firm's activities. It covered data gathered from third-party sources as well as via Facebook's other apps, including Instagram. The US firm has said it will appeal. Specifically, the FCO has ruled that: The watchdog added that an "obligatory tick on the box" to agree to all the company's terms was not a sufficient basis for "such intensive data processing". The ruling only applies to the firm's activities in Germany, but is likely to influence other regulators. Facebook claims the Federal Cartel Office has overstepped the mark by pursuing a data privacy matter that Facebook says falls under the remit of another regulator. It has one month to challenge the ruling before it becomes legally effective. If the order is upheld, the company must develop technical solutions to ensure it complies within four months. If it refused to do so, it could in theory be fined up to 10% of its annual revenues. Data sharing The FCO's justification for the case is that it believes Facebook abused its market dominance to gather the data. "In future, Facebook will no longer be allowed to force its users to agree to the practically unrestricted collection and assigning of non-Facebook data to their Facebook user accounts," explained Andreas Mundt, the FCO's president. "The combination of data sources substantially contributed to the fact that Facebook was able to build a unique database for each individual user and thus to gain market power." The ruling could affect the firm's use of the Like and Share buttons on external sites, which lets Facebook track each visitor's internet protocol (IP) address, web browser name and version, and other details that can be used to identify them. This is true, even if users never click on the buttons. Likewise, the Facebook Login, which lets users avoid having to type in a unique username and password for each service, shares similar device-identifying information. In addition, the company runs a scheme called the Facebook Pixel, which adds code to a third-party site to let its owners track whether ads run on Facebook converted the people who saw them into buyers. The FCO was also concerned by the fact that Facebook shares some of the data gathered by Instagram, WhatsApp and its other services with its namesake platform. The firm recently announced plans to go further and integrate the technology behind the chat services of Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Facebook defends such practices on the grounds that: In a blog, it added that the FCO had overlooked steps it had already taken to be compliant with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, which came into force last year. "The GDPR specifically empowers data protection regulators - not competition authorities - to determine whether companies have lived up to their responsibilities," it said. "And data protection regulators certainly have the expertise to make those conclusions." "The [FCO] order threatens to undermine this, providing different rights to people based on the size of the companies they do business with." But the UK-based campaign group Privacy International has said that if the German ruling holds, Facebook should extend the same rights to its other users. "Privacy harms are directly caused by the business models of companies in dominant positions, which can impose excessive collection of data on people who have become 'captive users'," said the group's head of advocacy and policy Tomaso Falchetta. "Facebook should unify its privacy protections for its operations globally." The FCO is also pursuing a separate probe into Amazon. It is exploring whether the retail giant has acted illegally in its relations with the third-party sellers who use its platform.	Germany's competition regulator has told Facebook to substantially restrict how it collects and combines data about its users unless they give it explicit consent.
+text: A local man in his early 50s was pulled from the water at about 18:00 BST on Saturday said coastguards and police. A search was carried out following concern that other swimmers might have been in the area, but no-one else was found. The man was declared dead at the scene after efforts to revive him failed. 'Sad time' Sgt Colin Taylor from Devon and Cornwall Police said he was trying to contact two women who had tried to revive the man to help the inquest investigation. "I know many people witnessed the events on the packed beach but it is the identity of the two Samaritans that I very much need to establish," he said. He said the man, who has not yet been named, was a "familiar and friendly acquaintance of many of us". "The next of kin have been informed and our thoughts are very much with them at this sad time," he said. Police, ambulance, St Mary's RNLI and coastguards were all involved in the operation. Harbour pair rescued Two people have been rescued after one of them got into difficulties while swimming in Newquay Harbour. Coastguards were called about the incident at about 06:30 BST on Sunday after the pair decided to go for a swim. Both were rescued by a nearby fishing boat which had a lifeboat crew member on board who was alerted to the situation by his pager going off. Matthew Rogers, from the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, said: "We know it's all too tempting to go for a swim when the weather is good. "But our advice remains the same, be careful, swim at lifeguarded beaches and don't go into the water if you've been drinking."	A man has died after getting into difficulties while swimming at Porthcressa beach in the Isles of Scilly.
+text: The message, posted on Twitter and Instagram, appears alongside a picture of a smiling Charles. Normally, the heir to the throne's birthday is celebrated with gun salutes in Green Park, the Tower of London and in other parts of the country. However, ceremonial gunfire has been suspended amid the Covid-19 pandemic. The prince's birthday comes near the end of an eventful year. In March, he contracted coronavirus and travelled to Scotland to self-isolate for seven days after displaying mild symptoms. At the time, the Duchess of Cornwall tested negative for the virus and self-isolated for 14 days. The Prince of Wales later said he "got away with it quite lightly". Earlier this month, palace sources told the BBC Prince William had also tested positive for Covid-19 at a similar time to his father. Prince Charles, who is patron of more than 400 organisations, is the eldest son of the Queen. He became heir apparent on the death of his grandfather King George VI, when his mother succeeded to the throne in 1952 - when he was just three years old. He took the title, the Prince of Wales, in July 1958 when he was nine. Now 72, Prince Charles is grandfather to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's three children - George, Charlotte and Louis, as well as Archie, the young son of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex who live in California. The official Twitter account for Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall later thanked people for their birthday wishes alongside an autumnal picture of the prince in his kilt.	The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have wished Prince Charles a very happy birthday on their official social media accounts, as he turns 72.
+text: By Reality Check teamBBC News He has accused the body of mismanaging the coronavirus pandemic when it emerged in China, and of failing to make "greatly needed reforms". We've been looking at some of the charges President Trump has levelled against the WHO and the health body's responses. Claim 1 "The WHO failed to adequately obtain, vet and share information in a timely and transparent fashion." This has become a regular theme of Mr Trump's criticism of the WHO, and in his letter to its head Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on 18 May, he renewed this attack saying the WHO "consistently ignored credible reports of the virus spreading in Wuhan in early December 2019 or even earlier, including reports from the Lancet medical journal". The editor of the Lancet, Richard Horton, has written a letter in response, saying: "The Lancet did not publish any report in early December 2019 about a virus spreading in Wuhan. The first reports we published were from Chinese scientists on Jan 24, 2020." In response to the criticisms levelled at it, the WHO says it acted properly in accordance with the information it was given by China, sharing it with medical and scientific experts around the world, including from the US. The WHO says it was told by China of "a pneumonia of an unknown cause" on 31 December 2019. And this was flagged on WHO social-media accounts on 4 January. Then, on 5 January, the WHO put out an official statement saying it had asked for more information about the illness from the Chinese authorities. On 12 January, China publicly shared the genetic sequence for the new coronavirus. On 20 and 21 January, a regional WHO team visited Wuhan. A public statement was issued by the WHO on 22 January setting out what they had discovered. On 28 January, Dr Tedros went to Beijing to discuss the outbreak with China's leaders. By the end of January, the WHO had declared the outbreak a public-health emergency of global concern. It has also been reported that WHO experts (drawn from 15 countries including China) met a week earlier to discuss whether to issue a global alert but could not agree among themselves. Claim 2 "Through the middle of January, it parroted... the idea that there was no human-to-human transmission happening despite... clear evidence to the contrary." President Trump identifies a critical few days here when the messaging from the WHO was evolving rapidly. On 14 January, the WHO tweeted: "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission." But the same day, the head of the WHO's emerging diseases unit, Maria van Kerkhove, appeared to contradict this, suggesting to journalists that "limited" human-to-human transmission had been observed in Wuhan. She did however stress that there was no clear evidence of "sustained" transmission between people. It wasn't until 22 January that the WHO confirmed there was clear evidence of human-to-human transmission in Wuhan. The WHO has denied media reports that it delayed making this evidence public at China's request. Claim 3 The WHO has "an alarming lack of independence" from China. In his recent letter to the head of the WHO, Mr Trump, accuses the organisation of being too close to China, failing to remain objective in its handling of the outbreak. It's certainly the case that the WHO has publicly praised China's response to the coronavirus outbreak and its "commitment to transparency", something that has clearly angered the US president in recent weeks. However, many other experts and political leaders, including Mr Trump, have also praised China's initial response to the outbreak. On 24 January, Mr Trump was effusive in his support for China's efforts. Dr Michael Ryan, of the WHO, says the organisation wanted to keep the lines of communication open with China as it battled to contain the virus. The WHO has also been accused of being unduly influenced by Beijing over the status of Taiwan. The issue here is that Taiwan is not a member of the WHO, as the island is not recognised by the UN. The WHO, however, says it does engage with Taiwan and share information with it. Taiwan says it raised the alarm about the possible human-to-human spread of the virus at the end of December after some of its scientists had visited Wuhan. Taiwan says its warnings were ignored or not taken seriously. But the evidence published so far shows Taiwan's exchanges with the WHO did not specifically mention human-to-human transmission. Claim 4 "One of the most dangerous decisions... from the WHO was... to oppose travel restrictions. They actually fought us." The US restricted travel from China and other countries from 2 February. But there is no record of the WHO publicly criticising this move. And it would have been highly unusual for it to do so. But it had, on 10 January, put out advice recommending no international travel restrictions in response to the virus. And this was reconfirmed in a statement at the end of February, saying travel bans were not usually that effective and could have an adverse social and economic impact, although they might be justified for a short period of time at the start of an outbreak. Read more from Reality Check Send us your questions Follow us on Twitter	President Trump has formally started the process of pulling the US out of the World Health Organization (WHO) and says funding will now be redirected elsewhere.
+text: Jon Platt was taken to court after refusing to pay a £120 fine for taking his daughter, aged six, to Florida. He had argued the law only required children to attend school regularly. The council said it wanted to know why the court decided there was no case to answer. Mr Platt took his daughter on holiday with the extended family, despite an absence request being rejected by the school. At a magistrates' court earlier this month he successfully argued Section 444 of the Education Act required parents ensured their children attended school "regularly", and did not put restrictions on taking them on holidays in term time. Matter of law His daughter had a 93.8% attendance rate the previous academic year. Isle of Wight Council said it has started the formal process of appeal to the High Court for clarification on a matter of law. Council leader Jonathan Bacon said: "The recent media attention given to this case shows that there is interest, concern and, above all, uncertainty as to what constitutes 'regular attendance' for the purposes of the legislation in question. "The Isle of Wight Council has received clear advice that the magistrates may have failed to interpret and apply the law correctly in making their decision. "Where the law created by Parliament is uncertain, the appeal courts have the ability to lay down a binding ruling as to the correct interpretation of the law."	Isle of Wight Council begins a High Court appeal after the case against a father who took his child on holiday during term-time was thrown out by magistrates.
+text: Instead the 64-year-old who opened fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel towards an open-air music festival on Sunday evening has been described by news outlets as a "lone wolf", a "granddad", a "gambler", and a "former accountant", but not a terrorist. We do not know yet what motivated Paddock to carry out the deadly attack. There has been no link found to international terrorism and no confirmation of mental illness. Yet on social media, many have been pointing out that if Paddock had been a Muslim, the term "terrorist" would have been used almost immediately to describe him, as a link to Islamist terrorism would be assumed even without evidence. Celebrities, TV personalities and academics have all been discussing why this hasn't happened in this case. According to Nevada state law, an "act of terrorism" is described as follows: "Any act that involves the use of violence intended to cause great bodily harm or death to the general population." At federal level, the US defines "domestic terrorism" as activities that meet three criteria - "dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law", those that are intended to intimidate or coerce civilians or governments, and which occur primarily within the US. The FBI, too, suggests there must be an intent to "intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives". This element seems to be key - is the perpetrator of violence not only attempting to cause mass harm but trying to influence government or further a particular ideology? Many on social media shared an image of a definition of Nevada state law and questioned why, despite the clear outline, the sheriff of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Joseph Lombardo said during a press conference about Paddock: "We do not know what his belief system was at this time. Right now, we believe it is a sole actor, a lone-wolf-type actor." On Twitter the phrase "lone wolf" has been used more than 200,000 times since Monday's attack. The words "terrorist attack" have been used more than 170,000 times as people argued about why there seemed to be a clear disparity between how white suspects and those of colour are described. On Facebook the discussion has also been escalating. Mursal in Indonesia said: "He's not considered an international terrorist? Maybe because his face is not Arabic!" Muslim American Facebook user Mahmoud ElAwadi expressed his sadness at hearing the news, but described how the attack would not affect white people in the way his family was affected by Islamist attacks. "Every mass shooting means my wife's life is in danger because she chose to cover her hair, that my son will be attacked at school because his name is Mohamed, that my 4 year old daughter will be treated unfairly because she speaks Arabic, unless the terrorist is a white and Christian then suddenly he is a mentally sick person and everything is normal." Value judgements At the BBC there is clear guidance on the use of the words terrorist, or terrorism. BBC editorial guidance says: "There is no agreed consensus on what constitutes a terrorist or terrorist act. The use of the word will frequently involve a value judgement. "As such, we should not change the word 'terrorist' when quoting someone else, but we should avoid using it ourselves. "This should not mean that we avoid conveying the reality and horror of a particular act; rather we should consider how our use of language will affect our reputation for objective journalism." Despite an overwhelming majority of comments criticising officials and the media for not labelling Paddock a terrorist, there were some counter arguments and suggestions as to why. By UGC and Social News Team, additional reporting by BBC Reality Check	As details emerge about the Las Vegas gunman who killed at least 58 people and injured more than 500 others, an online debate has begun about why Stephen Paddock has not been labelled a terrorist.
+text: They turned down the challenge by Imperial Tobacco which claimed the measures were beyond the legislative competence of Holyrood. Lord President, Lord Hamilton, sitting with Lord Reed and Lord Brodie, ruled on the matter. The government measure had been delayed pending the court case outcome. Public Health Minister Michael Matheson said he was "delighted" with the ruling, adding that the display ban would help, "prevent the children of today becoming tomorrow's smokers." Imperial Tobacco's challenge against the legislation was originally rejected by Lord Bracadale in 2010. This latest ruling said that the measures in the Tobacco and Primary Medial Services (Scotland) Act 2010 were not outside the scope of the Scottish Parliament's powers. The SNP government wants to ban the open display of cigarettes and prohibit the use of vending machines for the sale of tobacco. In the appeal judge ruling, Lord Hamilton said of cigarette displays: "Such display is conceived to encourage the purchase of such products. As the consumption, particularly by smoking, of such products is believed to be adverse to health, the section is designed to inhibit, without prohibiting, their purchase." 'Ready access' He said the vending machine ban was concerned with a different but linked problem - "the ready access by children and young persons to tobacco products by way of automatic vending machines". Lord Hamilton explained: "Such ready access is conceived to be harmful, as if facilitates the acquisition and ultimate smoking, by children and young persons, of tobacco products. "The section is designed, again by a criminal sanction, to prevent children and young people, as well as other persons, from having such ready access to tobacco products. "The risk which the smoking of tobacco products is perceived to present is to health, primarily of the smokers as consumers but also of those non-smokers who may be exposed to a smoke-filled environment and by 'passive smoking' suffer adverse affection." Lord Hamilton said it was not without significance that the UK parliament had already made equivalent measures for England and Wales. He said the 2010 act, if valid, would restore rather than adversely hit a common market. Scottish Labour's health spokesman Dr Richard Simpson said the SNP government needed to ensure that the display ban was implemented as soon as "practicably possible". He added: "While legislation must be legally watertight, the fact that the UK parliament has already made equivalent measures for England and Wales suggests that Imperial Tobacco's challenge was more of a delaying tactic."	Appeal judges have rejected a bid by a major tobacco firm to challenge Scottish government plans to ban the open display of cigarettes.
+text: In 2012-13 local authorities in England made a "profit" of £594m from parking activities, the organisation said. Seven of the 10 greatest surpluses were in London - including all the top four. The largest was £39.7m in Westminster. The foundation said the record revenue came as spending on roads fell but the Local Government Association said councils were on the side of motorists. The figures were calculated by adding up income from parking charges and penalty notices and deducting running costs. The combined "profit" of £594m was up 5% on the equivalent figure for 2011-12, which was £565m. However, 52 of the 353 parking authorities across England reported a deficit. 'Not allowed' The RAC Foundation, a motoring research charity, said budgets submitted to central government for the current financial year showed the surplus for 2013-14 was likely to be even higher. The only areas outside London to make the top 10 were Brighton and Hove, Nottingham and Manchester. In September, the government announced plans to tackle authorities making a profit from parking. Communities Secretary Eric Pickles said cameras used to catch people parking illegally could be banned and unnecessary yellow lines could be reviewed. At the time he told the BBC: "What this is about is raking in pretty large sums of money to fill the councils' coffers. "The law's pretty clear. It says you're not allowed to do that." Professor Stephen Glaister, director of the foundation, said: "It is a case of deja vu. Once again English councils have made record amounts from parking. "Yet overall spending on local roads has fallen by 9% over the past three years with road safety expenditure down by as much as 20%. "The government's recent decision to consult on changes to parking rules and regulations is timely and we have always argued that at the very least all councils should publish an annual parking report to explain how much money is collected from drivers and, just as importantly, where that cash is going." 'Parking bullies' But Peter Box, chairman of the Local Government Association, said many councils already did publish such reports "to be open and transparent with residents and combat the deep-rooted misconception that they are being used to raise money". He also insisted councils did not make a profit from parking because surplus income was spent on projects such as road improvements and subsidised bus travel. "This report further peddles the myth that councils are using parking charges to raise money," Mr Box said. "The reality is that the average motorist is paying 30 times more to Whitehall in charges and taxation each year than they do to their town hall through parking." However, the government again suggested councils were indeed using fines to generate income. A spokeswoman for the Department for Communities and Local Government said: "Parking fines have become an unjust form of arbitrary taxation, corrupting Britain's justice system and fleecing innocent drivers. "This government is taking action to rein in the town hall parking bullies."	Councils are making record surpluses from parking charges and fines, according to the RAC Foundation.
+text: Holyrood's justice committee has called for views on the legislation which created Police Scotland and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service. The services had each consisted of eight regional organisations before national bodies were set up in 2013. MSPs want to examine how effective the move has been. The mergers came into effect following the Police and Fire Reform Act of 2012. Since then, Police Scotland in particular has faced criticism over a number of issues. The service is currently looking for its third chief, while the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) - one of several bodies created by the legislation - is on its third chief and third chairperson. In a statement, the justice committee said it would scrutinise the reform act to see if there were parts which could be improved, as well as looking at areas where it was "working well". It also wants to "engage" with organisations created by the legislation, as well as those who closely interact with them. Justice committee convener Margaret Mitchell said the last five years had seen "unprecedented change" in fire and police services. She said: "While undoubtedly there are examples of resilience and partnership working, there have also been some problem areas identified since the mergers. "In particular, the committee is keen to establish whether the issues faced by the services are to be expected as 'teething problems' or whether legislative changes are needed after five years." 'Evolving challenges' A Scottish government spokeswoman said the reforms had provided national specialist capabilities "that would not have been possible in the past, allowing us to respond more effectively to the evolving challenges of keeping people safe in a modern Scotland". She added: "Ministers recognise that a change of such scale and significance as the formation of Police Scotland and the SFRS was always likely to present challenges but the independent evaluation of reform - published in February - is clear about the benefits we have seen delivered." Scottish Conservative justice spokesman Liam Kerr said: "Police Scotland's challenges have been well documented and, to be frank, after five years a lot of the teething issues should have been sorted out. "The creation of a national fire service has not been without its problems. "There are major reforms currently under way which offer a chance to reshape a service that will be fit for the future. "However, there are legitimate concerns that must be addressed if the public are to have confidence that local communities will continue to be protected." The committee's call for evidence on the legislation runs until 24 May.	An inquiry has been launched into the centralisation of Scotland's police and fire services, five years to the day since it took place.
+text: By Jonathan AmosScience correspondent, BBC News Astronauts used the platform's robotic arm on Tuesday to lift the Leonardo cylinder out of the Discovery shuttle's payload bay and berth it to the underside of the 350km-high lab. Leonardo will be used as extra storage space on the ISS. Originally built to transport cargo to and from the station inside shuttles, the module is now being left in orbit. This has required making some modifications to the module, the most important being the addition of extra shielding to protect it against small meteoritic impacts. The journey up with Discovery was its eighth trip to the ISS. First flown in 2001, also on Discovery, the module was one of three so-called Multipurpose Logistics Modules built under an agreement between the Italian space agency (Asi) and the US space agency (Nasa). In return for providing the MPLMs, Asi was given seats on shuttle flights for its astronauts. The next individual to benefit from the arrangement will be Roberto Vittori, who will fly to the ISS in April when the shuttle Endeavour undertakes its final mission. Leonardo was built in Turin by Thales Alenia Space. The company has now provided over half of the pressurised volume on the US side of the station. This includes the cargo vessel on the recently attached Johannes Kepler space freighter; the connecting Nodes 2 and 3; the main structure of Europe's Columbus laboratory; and the Cupola observation deck. "People in Italy and the rest of Europe may not realise how much of the space station was built in Turin," said Luigi Quaglino, senior vice president of space infrastructures and transportation at TAS. "I think it's better known in the States because when we go to Nasa we have a lot of a appreciation for what we did. And I have to say, it was not a surprise when we signed the contract for Cygnus," he told BBC News. Cygnus is the next big project for TAS at the space station. It is a robotic cargo ship being developed in partnership with the American Orbital Sciences Corporation. TAS is making the pressurised container on the front of the ship that will hold the supplies being taken up to the ISS; Orbital is making the propulsion and control unit on the rear, and the rocket that will blast Cygnus into orbit. The first Cygnus should fly before the end of the year. Leonardo's instalment means just one more permanent European piece of hardware awaits delivery to the ISS. This is the European Robotic Arm, which will be carried into orbit on a Russian Proton rocket, together with a Russian laboratory, in May 2012. Thales Alenia also has inflatable module technology it would like to send to the ISS and is in discussion with the various space agencies to see if there might be an opportunity to get a model in orbit this decade. "Today, all we can say is that we continue to do some studies and development activity, but there is not yet a decision," said Mr Quaglino. "This is not excluded because we are still talking with the Italian space agency and we try also to have an agreement with Esa or with Nasa directly to have a mission. So, it's something we keep working on but a real mission has yet to be fixed. It's an important technology for the future but the exploration programme has to be defined, and like everyone we are waiting for that to happen." Shuttle Discovery is now half-way through its final mission. Once the shuttle returns to Earth next Monday, it will be prepared for museum display. Nasa plans only two more orbiter flights - Endeavour's mission and a final outing for Atlantis. Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk	The last of Europe's permanent modules has been attached to the International Space Station (ISS).
+text: Father Paul Moore, 83, committed the crimes in various locations in Ayrshire between 1977 and 1996. Moore was jailed for nine years at Glasgow High Court in March but this was cut to eight by a panel of three judges. Sentencing judge Lady Rae told Moore he was guilty of despicable crimes. At his trial in March, the court heard how Moore abused one boy at a school, another at a leisure centre and a third on the beach at Irvine in the 1970s. He was also found guilty of indecently assaulting a student priest in 1995. Judge Lady Rae told Moore he was guilty of despicable crimes and a gross breach of trust, whilst praising the victims' considerable courage in coming forward. Moore's legal team appealed against the sentence for the student priest attack and this was upheld by a panel of three judges at a hearing in Edinburgh, with the sentence cut to eight years. The youngest of Moore's victims was just five when the priest abused him in his primary school. The court heard that Moore groomed some of his victims by taking them swimming or out for meals before sexually abusing them. A BBC Scotland investigation revealed five years ago that Moore confessed his abuse to his bishop in 1996. Bishop Maurice Taylor, 91, gave evidence in the trial and told the court Moore admitted he had "an attraction to young boys" and had "a desire to abuse minors". The bishop sent him to a treatment centre in Toronto and to Fort Augustus Abbey in the Highlands. Moore - who was identified in court as Francis Moore but was known as Father Paul - was removed from the pastoral ministry after his admission but continued to live in a house bought by the church. After sentencing in March, the Catholic Church in Scotland said it wished to "sincerely renew" its apologies to victims.	A Catholic priest jailed for sexually abusing three children and a student priest has had his sentence reduced on appeal.
+text: Turkey's president vowed to "suffocate" efforts to begin training members of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and create what he called a "terror army". Ankara considers Kurds fighting for the SDF to be part of a terrorist group. Syria's government decried the "blatant attack" on its sovereignty, and Russia warned it could lead to partition. With the help of air strikes from a US-led coalition, the SDF has captured tens of thousands of square kilometres of territory from Islamic State (IS) militants. In October, the alliance took full control of the northern city of Raqqa, the de facto capital of the "caliphate" declared by the jihadist group in 2014. Since then, SDF fighters have been advancing south-eastwards along the Euphrates river valley. Why is the US creating the border force? News of the coalition's plan to work with the SDF to train a new Syrian Border Security Force (BSF) was first reported on Saturday by The Defense Post, which quoted a spokesman as saying that 230 individuals were currently participating in the "inaugural class". The coalition said on Monday that its goal was to create a force with about 30,000 personnel "over the next several years". About half will be Kurdish and Arab SDF fighters and the other half new recruits. The BSF will be tasked with securing the long sections of Syria's northern border with Turkey and eastern border with Iraq that are under SDF control, as well as parts of the Euphrates river valley, which effectively serves as the dividing line between the SDF and Syrian pro-government forces. "A strong border security force will prohibit Daesh's freedom of movement and deny the transportation of illicit materials," the coalition said, using a different term for IS. "This will enable the Syrian people to establish effective local, representative governance and reclaim their land." Why is Turkey concerned? Turkey has consistently opposed the coalition's support for the SDF because the force is dominated by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia. Ankara considers the YPG an extension of the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has fought for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey for three decades. Washington disagrees and insists the YPG has been vital to the battle against IS. On Monday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the US had acknowledged it was "in the process of creating a terror army on our border". "It is for us to suffocate this terror army before it is born," he said. Mr Erdogan added that preparations were complete for a Turkish military operation against the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in north-western Syria, and that it might start "at any moment". Troops deployed at the border were already hitting YPG positions inside Afrin with heavy artillery, he noted. What do other countries say? The Syrian government called the creation of the SDF border force "a blatant attack on the sovereignty and territorial integrity and unity of Syria, and a flagrant violation of international law". "What the American administration has done comes in the context of its destructive policy in the region to fragment countries... and impedes any solutions to the crises," an official at the foreign ministry was cited as saying by the Sana news agency. The source warned that Damascus considered any Syrian fighting for militias sponsored by the US to be "a traitor to their people and nation". Russia, which backs the Syrian government, said the US move might lead to the "break-up of a large territory along the border with Turkey and Iraq". "This is a very serious issue that raises concerns that a path towards the partition of Syria has been taken," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.	Key powers involved in Syria's civil war have criticised US plans to help an allied Kurdish-led militia set up a 30,000-strong "border security force".
+text: After two days of talks with senior officials, he said efforts to push Pyongyang towards abandoning nuclear weapons had international backing. He stressed that denuclearisation was a condition for lifting sanctions. It was Mr Pompeo's first visit to the North since last month's summit between Kim Jong-un and President Donald Trump. The North Korean leader says he is committed to denuclearisation, but how this will be achieved is unclear. How did the North see the latest talks? Mr Pompeo did not meet Mr Kim. Instead, on Friday and Saturday he held talks with Kim Jong-chol, seen as the North Korean leader's right-hand man, on how to proceed with denuclearisation. Afterwards, state media carried a statement saying the US had gone against the spirit of the summit by acting unilaterally to put pressure on the country. "We had anticipated the US side would come with a constructive idea, thinking we would take something in return," the statement said, warning its "resolve for denuclearisation... may falter". "The US is fatally mistaken if it went to the extent of regarding that [North Korea] would be compelled to accept, out of its patience, demands reflecting its gangster-like mindset," it added. The statement, by an unnamed foreign ministry official, was in sharp contrast with the account given by Mr Pompeo as he left North Korea for Japan just hours before. He said the talks had "made progress on almost all of the central issues". North Korean state media often carries uncompromising language, and some analysts and officials speculated the use of the term may be a negotiating tactic. How has Mr Pompeo responded? After talks with the foreign ministers of Japan and South Korea on Sunday, the secretary of state said his efforts to press the North on nuclear weapons were legitimate. "If those requests were gangster-like, the world is a gangster, because there was a unanimous decision at the UN Security Council about what needs to be achieved," he told reporters in Tokyo. He added: "When we spoke to them about denuclearisation, they did not push back." He also admitted that the "road ahead will be difficult and challenging". After the Singapore summit in June, which also saw the US promise to end military drills with South Korea, Mr Trump claimed that the North no longer posed a nuclear threat. However, the president has since renewed sanctions on North Korea, while US intelligence officials have said there is evidence North Korea continues to upgrade the infrastructure for its nuclear and missile programmes.	US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has dismissed accusations by North Korea that he engaged in "gangster-like" behaviour during a visit there.
+text: More than 600 people on board the Ruby Princess later tested positive for coronavirus and 10 have since died. The ship remains off the coast with nearly 200 sick crew members on board. Police in New South Wales said they would look into whether national biosecurity laws had been broken. Australia has so far reported 5,548 coronavirus cases and 30 deaths. Those sickened on cruise ships account for nearly a tenth of all cases in Australia. The country has imposed strict social distancing measures and clubs, cafes, parks and gyms have been closed in a bid to contain the outbreak At a news conference, New South Wales Police Commissioner Mick Fuller said there were "many unanswered questions" about the incident. He said that, by law, vessels were only allowed to dock and disembark passengers if the captain could assure the local authorities that their ship was free from contagious disease. Mr Fuller said there were "discrepancies" involving the information provided by the ship's owners, Carnival Australia, and the requirements of the law. "The only way I can get to the bottom of whether our national biosecurity laws and our state laws were broken is through a criminal investigation," he told reporters. Mr Fuller said that the day before passengers disembarked in Sydney a worker made an emergency call about two people who needed medical assistance. He said police were assured by the operating company that the coronavirus was not an issue on the ship. "From that perspective, there are many unanswered questions," he added. The New South Wales government has faced mounting criticism for allowing people off the ship but has insisted that the decision was based on expert advice. Mr Fuller added that Carnival Australia had said it would fully co-operate with the inquiry. The company has not yet commented publicly on the criminal investigation. The Ruby Princess with about 2,700 people on board arrived in Sydney last month after an 11-day cruise. According to NSW Health, about a dozen passengers had reported feeling unwell and had swabs taken for Covid-19. One was taken by ambulance to hospital. But other passengers on board weren't told of this. Instead, they streamed off the boat at Circular Quay - some of them coughing and spluttering, according to witnesses. The busy area leads directly into the city centre, with transit links to the airport and outer suburbs. Elisa McCafferty, an Australian woman who flew home to London with her husband immediately after disembarking, told the BBC: "Nothing was said at any time about anyone being sick onboard. It was a distinct lack of information coming through from Princess [Princess Cruises which is owned by Carnival] the entire time." A day after the ship docked, officials revealed cases of Covid-19 had been confirmed in three people who had been on board, prompting a scramble to track down everyone who had been on the ship. Ms McCafferty said she only learned of the danger when she checked her phone at Heathrow Airport. "I was just absolutely petrified. We had just been on two full flights - what if we had infected someone?"	A criminal investigation has been launched in Australia into how cruise ship passengers were allowed to disembark in Sydney despite some exhibiting flu-like symptoms.
+text: UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced a £60,000 payment for bereaved families of NHS staff on Monday. The Scottish government said it was already working on its own scheme. Health Secretary Jeane Freeman wrote to the health and sport committee on 24 April. A Scottish government spokeswoman said: "The health secretary confirmed last week that the Scottish government is establishing a scheme that provides a death in service lump sum and survivor's benefits to all staff directly employed by NHS Scotland boards, including NHS bank and NHS locum staff. "We are working with partners to finalise the scheme's terms and conditions and aim to publish further details by 1 May, with scheme benefits applying retrospectively, to ensure that no-one is disadvantaged." The scheme will provide benefits in circumstances where staff are not part of an existing NHS pension scheme and where workers would not be entitled to the maximum pension benefit under existing arrangements, it would make up the difference. 'Should the worst happen' In her letter, Jeane Freeman said: "I am truly humbled by the exceptional hard-work, commitment and on-going dedication to service that has been demonstrated by our NHS staff across Scotland, as we take forward our response to this pandemic. "They have the right to know that should the worst happen we will continue to support their families and loved ones, in accordance with our NHS values and principles."	The Scottish government is in the process of putting together its own death in service benefit for NHS staff who die after catching coronavirus.
+text: A section of the River Parrett in Somerset between the village of Moorland and the M5 will be worked on. Large quantities of silt will be removed at the weekend to increase the river’s capacity to carry floodwater. Villages on the Somerset Levels flooded in 2014. At the time, the Environment Agency said it would provide an action plan for a long-term solution. Farmer and campaigner James Winslade said the news was “reassuring”. He said: “Any maintenance is really important. “That section hasn’t been maintained since maintenance was stopped 25 years ago so its really important to keep this dredging going.” The Environment Agency’s chief press officer John Rowlands said: “It’s really complicated but once the jigsaw pieces are in place the benefits will be felt across a much wider area. “People will still see a very full river because its tidally impacted, but what we will hopefully see is that because the channel has less silt in it the water levels will reduce quicker. “It is really important that the river is at a level sufficiently low enough for pumping stations to operate.” Chairman of Somerset Rivers Authority David Hall said: “Work along this stretch of the River Parrett is important for three main reasons. “Firstly, it will reduce flood risks for properties in the Northmoor area. Secondly, it will help to reduce agricultural damages, particularly from spring and summer floods of the kind that we saw locally back in 2012. “Thirdly, because of the better possibilities, it creates for managing flows of water around the Somerset Levels.”	A river is due to be dredged to help reduce the risk of flooding to surrounding areas.
+text: The 17-year-old was attacked near the Blue Bell Lane and Glade Road junction in Huyton, Knowsley at about 18:20 GMT on Wednesday, Merseyside Police added. He was taken to hospital with leg injuries described as serious but not life-threatening. A 26-year-old man from Huyton has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder and possession of a firearm. He remains in custody for questioning. Merseyside Police believe the shooting was a "targeted" attack and have appealed for any witnesses or CCTV footage. Det Insp Tony O'Brien said: "Thankfully, while serious we believe [the boy] will recover from his injuries. But the consequences of firing a gun in a residential area could easily have been far worse. "This will have been a horrifying experience for the victim, and of course deeply distressing for people who live locally." Police said a Section 60 order, which gives officers enhanced stop and search powers, will be in place in Huyton, Knotty Ash and Page Moss until 04:00 GMT on Friday.	A teenager was shot in the leg as he rode his bike by another cyclist in a "horrifying" attack, police said.
+text: Windermere in the Lake District partially froze as temperatures dropped to a low of -10C (14F). Windermere Lake Cruises staff said this was the first time since 2009 they had seen large parts turn to ice. Director John Woodburn said: "Back in the early 1980s, it was even possible to walk across part of the frozen lake between Lakeside and Fell Foot." "At that time, I recall one of the team trying to break through an 8in (20cm) layer of ice with an ice pick, but it was frozen solid and as you can imagine, it was a thankless task," he added. Strong winds forecast for the weekend are expected to see the ice this time around disappear by Monday. Windermere Lake Cruises has suspended operations due to the current lockdown but a small number of staff are working on essential maintenance such as warming up engines to prevent frost damage. Derwent Water in the Lake District also partially froze this week due to the extreme weather conditions.	Parts of England's longest lake have begun to freeze for the first time in more than 10 years.
+text: And over the past 16 years breeding starlings have declined by over 60% in Wales, says the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). Almost 30,000 people took part in its Big Garden Birdwatch in Wales. In the first survey in 1979, the number of starlings seen in gardens in Wales was 15. This year it was about four. RSPB experts said large displays of the birds seen at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) nature reserve in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, last November and December, as well as a big roost at the pier at Aberystwyth creates a false impression that starling numbers are doing well. They are beginning research into the breeding decline and say possible reasons include changes in their feeding habitats and soil changes reducing the availability in the insects they eat. RSPB senior conservation scientist Ian Johnstone said: "It would be a tragedy if the numbers continue to plummet and we will do all we can to help stop this happening." The RSPB points out that starlings are in decline across other parts of northern Europe. In all, 500,000 birds were recorded in the garden survey in Wales with a massive rise in the number of sightings of goldfinches along with blue tits, great tits and magpies. The RSPB is expecting a good start to the breeding season as it expects the milder weather will have helped more to have survived the winter. Over 3,500 pupils and teachers took part in the schools' version of the survey in the last two weeks of January.	A survey of garden birds in Wales shows starling numbers are at an all time low since figures started being recorded 30 years ago.
+text: George Zographou, 18, from Bristol, fell ill at the Boardmasters Surf and Music Festival in Newquay on Friday. His sister Nicole said on Facebook, "George took his final breaths on Wednesday August 16th at 13.34 all by himself without the machine. The three of us holding his hand." Public Health England (PHE) has confirmed the teenager's death. The teenager, who was a student St Brendan's Sixth Form College was expected to receive his A-level results tomorrow. The college said it would be getting extra teachers in to support George's friendship group and those who would have known him. A welfare room would be available for students who were upset and a representative from Public Health England would be be there to answer any concerns, it added. It has had two confirmed cases of meningococcal infection since the spring of 2016. The Deputy director of health protection at PHE's South West Health Protection Team, Mike Wade, said his thoughts were with teenager's family. "We want to reassure people that all appropriate public health actions are being taken," he said. "We do not believe that this case is related to the previous cases at St. Brendan's because they occurred 14 months ago. Additionally, they had not attended the college since the end of the summer term at the beginning of July." He said other festival goers, who had been in close contact with the teenager had been given antibiotics as a precaution. On twitter the school expressed its shock at the news. The festival's organisers said their thoughts and sympathies were with Mr Zographou's family and friends. The festival ran from Wednesday 9 August to Sunday.	A teenager who became ill with meningitis at a festival has died, public health officials have confirmed.
+text: The Kent County Councilreportstates 49 out of the 597 schools in the county have either an acting head or an executive head teacher, who is in charge of several schools. Teachers have blamed low morale and a focus on statistics for the problem. But the council said there was "no crisis". Nigel Utton, who is the chairman of the Kent Association of Head Teachers, said the recruitment problem mostly affected primary schools. He said: "Primary school colleagues have said they had never known morale be so low in the profession. "Education has been reduced to statistics. We came into the profession to educate children and what we're doing is adding up numbers and columns." 'No crisis' John Walder, secretary of the National Union of Teachers in Kent, who said: "When I went to parents evening 30 years ago we were talking about what my son and daughter were doing or not doing. "But now of course it's all a discussion about statistical information." Mike Whiting, cabinet member for education at the council, said the county was not facing a teaching crisis. "I think there's some national trends around recruitment and retention and Kent is obviously not immune to those pressures," he said. "We are moving forward and looking at how we can support head teachers."	Nearly 50 schools in Kent are without a dedicated head teacher with some advertising up to three times to fill a vacancy, according to a council report.
+text: Across the UK, millions of pupils missed classes as about 18,342 schools - 67.5% - were closed. In England, the Department for Education (DfE) said 13,349 out of 21,476 state schools - 62% - were shut. Schools Minister Nick Gibb said it was "irresponsible to strike while negotiations are ongoing". The DfE said 14% (2,951) of schools were partially open and 16% (3,351) were fully open. The status of the remaining 8% was unknown. The figures on closures relate to state-funded schools in England, including academies and free schools. In Wales, more than 1,500 out of 1,776 schools closed their doors. In Scotland, figures from the local authority body Cosla suggest just 33 of the 2,700 state schools were open. In Northern Ireland, about two-thirds of the 1,200 schools closed their doors. Pension cuts University and college students faced cancelled lectures as the UCU lecturers' union joined the dispute. School and university staff are angered at being asked to work longer and pay more for reduced pension returns. But the government says that rising life expectancy means that the current pension scheme is unaffordable - and that the revised arrangements will still represent a good deal. Education Secretary Michael Gove said teachers lived longer than many other workers and it was "only fair" that they contributed more to their pensions. Mr Gove said he would be meeting union bosses on Thursday as part of ongoing talks about changes to the TPS (teacher pension scheme). But Mary Bousted, general secretary of the ATL, told a protest rally in Manchester: "We are not here to say that there must be no changes. "We are here to say to the government: stop treating us with contempt. If you need to change public sector pensions because people are living longer, show us your sums. Make your case." UCU general secretary Sally Hunt said: "Our members are unlikely militants and would much rather be in the classroom than on the picket line. "However, they are not prepared to sit back while their living standards are attacked and will fight to protect their pensions. They want proper negotiations to secure a resolution to the dispute, not more government spin." NUT leader Christine Blower rejected claims that teachers' pensions were unaffordable. "This is a government that is determined to press ahead with reform regardless of need," she said. Staff in the NUT, NASUWT and ATL backed the strike - and, for the first time in its 114-year history, the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) took strike action. The UK-wide strike was supported by AHDS and EIS in Scotland, INTO in Northern Ireland and UCAC in Wales. The disputed pension changes apply to the scheme for teachers in England and Wales - but staff in Scotland and Northern Ireland are warning that the proposed shake-up could be applied to their schemes too. 'Benefits no-one' Many parents were told last week that schools were going to be closed for Wednesday's strike. Local authorities put lists of closed schools on their websites. Mr Gibb said: "Strikes benefit no-one - they will disrupt pupils' education, hugely inconvenience parents, and damage teachers' reputation. "It's irresponsible to strike while negotiations are ongoing. Many parents will struggle to understand why schools are closed when the pension deal on the table means that teachers will still be better rewarded than the vast majority of workers in the private sector. "Reforms to public sector pensions are essential - the status quo is not an option. The cost to the taxpayer of teacher pensions is already forecast to double from £5bn in 2006 to £10bn in 2016, and will carry on rising rapidly as life expectancy continues to improve. "The Teachers' Pension Scheme will remain one of the best available - but it's going to be fairer for the taxpayer by keeping costs under control."	Strike disruption has hit thousands of schools across the country, as public sector workers walked out over pension reforms.
+text: Fred Henley, from Clacton, Essex, was to be awarded the Ushakov Medal by Russia but the offer was withdrawn after intervention by the UK Government. Whitehall officials said the honour went against rules governing medals given by other countries. Mr Henley described the government's action as "insulting". He had taken part in the convoys which delivered aircraft, tanks, munitions and food during the darkest days of the war. Crews fought enemy submarines, aircraft and the atrocious weather. Mr Henley said: "As we got up into the Arctic Circle things got really bad. We had attacks by German bombers from Norway. "There were U-boats strung about the area but the main thing was the cold. "Ice formed on the superstructure which we had to chip off to keep the ship stable". Last year he received a letter from the Russian Embassy offering him the Ushakov Medal for his courage in the Arctic. A few weeks later, he received another letter from the Russians, saying the Foreign Office had blocked the presentation. Mr Henley was angry and said: "I thought it was insulting". The Russians had to get permission from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to present the award and this had not been given. In its letter to Mr Henley, the Russian Embassy said it was with deep regret they could no longer make the award because of "British red tape". The Russian Embassy in London said: "This decision gives us grounds for deep regret. We hope that the British authorities will reconsider this bureaucratic formality and review their position." The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) said: "Rules on the acceptance of foreign awards clearly state that in order for permission to be given for an award to be accepted, there has to have been specific service to the country concerned within the previous five years. "Additionally, permission cannot be granted if they have received, or are expected to receive, a UK award for the same services. "All British Veterans of the convoys were eligible for the Atlantic Star. "A lapel badge (the Arctic Emblem) was introduced in 2006 and some 10,000 have been issued." American and Commonwealth servicemen who fought alongside the Russians or were on Arctic convoys have received Ushakov Medals without objections from their governments but no British citizen has been able to receive the honour. 'Russians know the rules' Cyril Banks, from Bishop's Stortford in Hertfordshire, also served on the Arctic convoys and was told he would receive the Ushakov medal and then it was withdrawn. But he was also presented with the Legion d'Honneur from France in 2012 for clearing mines for the Normandy landings almost 70 years ago. The French were allowed to award their medal but the Russians were denied. The FCO said: "A general award has already been made by Russia and when this exception was allowed it was announced that there would be no others. The Russians should know the rules." In April 2012, Prime Minister David Cameron asked leading diplomat Sir John Holmes to review the policy on military medals as regulations are not always strictly enforced. Sir John has recommended that there should now be a fresh look at the policy on the acceptance of foreign awards. Fred Henley's story is told on Inside Out Monday BBC1 7.30pm	A serviceman who sailed on convoys to Arctic Russia in World War II has been denied a campaign medal.
+text: By Jonathan AmosBBC Science Correspondent, Pasadena The InSight probe aims to study the world's deep interior, and make it the only planet - apart from Earth - that has been examined in this way. Confirmation of touchdown came through on cue at 19:53 GMT. It ended an anxious wait in which the robot radioed home a series of updates on its descent. Nasa's mission control at California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) erupted into cheers when it became clear InSight was safe on the ground. The agency's chief administrator, James Bridenstine, celebrated what he called "an amazing day". President Trump had rung to offer his congratulations, he told reporters. And the director of JPL, Mike Watkins, said the success should remind everyone that "to do science we have to be bold and we have to be explorers." InSight is now sitting on a vast, flat plain known as Elysium Planitia, close to the Red Planet's equator. Before landing, Nasa had dubbed it the "biggest parking lot on Mars". The first picture of this landscape came back very quickly, within minutes. It showed a smudged, fisheye view of the robot's surroundings. The image was taken through the translucent lens cap of a camera positioned on the underside of the lander. The dust kicked up in the descent obscured much of the scene, but it was still possible to make out a small rock, one of the probe's feet and the sky on the horizon. A later picture captured by a camera on InSight's topside was much clearer. What happened in the landing? Like all previous landing attempts at Mars, Insight's race to the surface - the first attempt since 2012 - was a tense affair. Stage by stage and metre by metre, the robot reported back its progress. It had entered the atmosphere faster than a high-velocity bullet, using the combination of a heatshield, parachute and rockets to bring itself to a gentle stop. InSight's first critical task on landing was to deploy its solar panels, which were stowed for the descent. The robot absolutely had to start generating power to operate its systems and to warm equipment in the sub-zero temperatures that persist on the Red Planet. Notification of the panels' set-up came seven hours after landing. One of the big achievements in the InSight mission so far has been the role played by the two briefcase-sized satellites that were sent to Mars along with the robot lander. It was these mini-spacecraft, called MarCO A and B, that relayed the probe's signals back to Earth during the plunge to the surface. The duo cost less than $20m and their technologies are now sure to feature much more prominently on future interplanetary missions. And as if to underline their capabilities, the little satellites also took a picture of Mars. "Having successfully brought all the data back from InSight during its exciting entry, descent and landing (EDL) sequence - what you see before you is an image taken roughly 4,700 miles from Mars, about 10-15 minutes after EDL itself," explained MarCO chief engineer Andy Klesh. What is different about the InSight mission? This will be the first probe to dedicate its investigations to understanding Mars' interior. Scientists want to know how the world is constructed - from its core to its crust. InSight has three principal experiments to achieve this goal. The first is a package of Franco-British seismometers that will be lifted on to the surface to listen for "Marsquakes". These vibrations will reveal where the rock layers are and what they are made of. A German-led "mole" system will burrow up to 5m into the ground to take the planet's temperature. This will give a sense of how active Mars still is. And the third experiment will use radio transmissions to very precisely determine how the planet is wobbling on its axis. Deputy project scientist Suzanne Smrekar uses this analogy: "If you take a raw egg and a cooked egg and you spin them, they wobble differently because of the distribution of liquid in the interior. And today we really don't know if the core of Mars is liquid or solid, and how big that core is. InSight will give us this information." Why do we need to know this? Scientists understand very well how Earth's interior is structured, and they have some good models to describe the initiation of this architecture at the Solar System's birth more than 4.5 billion years ago. But Earth is one data point and Mars will give researchers a different perspective on how a rocky planet can be assembled and evolve through time. InSight chief scientist Bruce Banerdt said: "The small details in how planets evolve are what we think make the difference between a place like Earth where you can go on vacation and get a tan, and a place like Venus where you'll burn in seconds or a place like Mars where you'll freeze to death." Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos	The US space agency Nasa has landed a new robot on Mars after a dramatic seven-minute plunge to the surface of the Red Planet.
+text: By Sean ClareBBC News For almost all of the 25 years that Karen has worked in adult social care, she has had contracted hours and been paid a full-time wage for a full month's work. But when her local council started using a new private care company, she and her colleagues were transferred to zero-hours contracts. Overnight, Karen says, their salaries were cut in half to about £300 a month. Caring mainly for elderly people with dementia and other personal care needs, she says the move impacted her approach to work. "I'd like to think I still did the same job, cared for them in the same way - but I lost that spring in my step." 'No security' On a zero-hours contract, an employee is only paid for the hours the employer needs them. "You feel bullied. You start at 06:30am, could work till 11:30am, then be told there's no more work for you today," explains Karen. "But if you say you can't work that day they don't tend to ring you again because they say you're not turning up - it makes you feel unworthy." Government figures for England suggest there are over 300,000 zero-hours workers in adult social care alone. Some welcome the use of these contracts, arguing that they give employees flexibility over their own work schedules, as well as benefitting employers. Calum, a 17-year-old housekeeper at the holiday operator Center Parcs, says having a zero-hours contract enables him and other students working there to fit work around their studies. "The job suits me," he says. But days away from his two-year anniversary with the company, he says he has been told he is no longer needed. "They make it quite clear when you start - you've got no employment rights and no job security until you've been employed for two years. And now they want to terminate me." Center Parcs spokesman Simon Kay says he cannot comment on individual cases but says: "We only offer this type of contract to employees who benefit from the flexibility." Those aged 18 to 24 - already hit hard by the recession - are among those most likely to be on zero-hours contracts, the latest research suggests. "If we ever turned down a shift then they'd (employers) see us as unreliable and cut our hours for weeks to come," insists one 18-year-old who works for 1st Energy in Essex - a claim dismissed as "nonsense" by its chief executive, Sean Rider. However, another student working at a tourist attraction in Beer, Devon - who also wishes to remain anonymous - says he was just pleased to get the work. "I'd been looking for a job for nine months," he says. "I'm probably the best person to hire on this type of contract as I don't have to do any budgeting or family planning." 'Slept on sofas' Meanwhile, for those in the more advanced stages of their career, having an unpredictable income can mean life's plans have to be put on hold. One 40-year-old further education teacher has told the BBC that she is still living with her mum because her zero-hours contract prevents her saving for a deposit and getting a mortgage. "One month you could be earning £1,000, the next it could be £600. It's incredibly frustrating," she says. And she is not alone. Pat is almost 50. Until recently, his job involved trying to get donations over the phone for some the UK's best-known charities - Cancer Research UK, Oxfam, the National Trust, Save the Children. He says colleagues were happy to be on flexible contracts when there was more work around. But with the start of the recession, he says Pell and Bales - the telemarketing company he worked for - decided to put its employees on zero-hours terms. It meant his shifts could suddenly be cancelled at just 24-hours notice and it could be weeks before there was more work. "I'd have the landlord screaming at me for the rent," he says. "The fridge would be empty. I'd have to lean on friends for help, I've slept on sofas - lots of us did. It's the only way to keep going." Responding to the comments, Pell and Bales chief executive Derwyn Jones says: "We try to provide our employees with the type of contract they want," pointing out that many staff are musicians, students or actors who appreciate the flexibility. Ian Brinkley, director of the Work Foundation think tank, says there is a huge spectrum of people affected by the rise of zero-hours contracts. "At one end - in domestic care, retail, hotels - it's exploitative and pretty awful. But on the other hand, 25% [of workers on such contracts] are students and those in post-grad as teachers. "For them it's probably a much better experience and gives a degree of flexibility."	There could be as many as four times more people than previously thought in jobs that do not guarantee them work, new figures suggest. So what is it like to be on a so-called zero-hours contract?
+text: The firm had received complaints from owners of new Model 3 vehicles in China who found their cars' computers used the older chip. In a statement, Tesla said it would upgrade the hardware free of charge, when supplies allowed. The chip in question is used by the car's Autopilot system. Autopilot provides semi-automatic driving, for example by taking control of steering, accelerating and braking. Owners of new Model 3 vehicles produced in China expected to find the 3.0 processor in their cars - but found the 2.5 version instead. The 3.0 chip has been included in new Tesla cars since April last year. It processes images 21 times faster than the 2.5 version. The first Tesla Model 3 vehicles made in China were delivered to customers on 7 January. However, due to the coronavirus outbreak, Tesla's factory in Shanghai closed at the end of January. It reopened on 10 February.	Tesla has revealed that it installed older, slower processors in new cars because of supply chain issues caused by the coronavirus outbreak.
+text: Colin Worton, brother killed by IRA at Kingsmills "If the decision is to bury the Maze, then I welcome it. "It simply should not be put on the shelf and then brought out to re-erect at a later stage. The whole lot should be flattened. "The IRA don't know what the truth is. It reinforced my decision what happened last Sunday whenever they walked through Castlederg. They have no respect for anybody. "Terrorists cannot justify unjustifiable murder and this was what the Maze was going to be. The Maze was going to be a shrine, no matter what the DUP said. "A terrorist is a terrorist. I don't care where they come from or who he is or what he is. "A terrorist that murders innocent victims, their story should not be told. These people are anything but human, they are animals. Their views should not be taken on board. Nobody should glorify terrorism." Alan McBride, wife and father-in-law killed in Shankill bomb "I have sympathy for where Colin is coming from, the whole victims question is extremely emotive. "I have always felt the story of the Maze prison should be told, it is right that it is told - it happened. "People need to go there, they need to learn from our conflict and we need to make a very definitive statement that these types of things should never, ever happen again. "For me the question wasn't about should a peace centre be built at the Maze/Long Kesh or not, it's how it was going to be done and how the story was going to be told. "I think the story can be told with sensitivity. People could visit and they could make their own minds up about what went on here. I don't think it needs to be the coat-trailing triumphalist sort of shrine that people are talking about. "I think the scaremongers have won the day. "It is right we park this for now, let the dust settle. I believe, fundamentally, as a society we have to learn from the horror of what happened here, I don't know that it needs, necessarily, to be something that glorifies terrorism at all. "Let's tell the story warts and all and let people make their mind up." Orange Order's Deputy Grand Master Alistair Smyth "This commonsense decision will be broadly welcomed across the wider unionist family, but more importantly by those who suffered directly as the result of the vile terrorist campaign waged by republicans. "Their resolve, dignity and quiet determination over recent months is to be greatly admired. "The Orange Institution, which has lost 337 brethren as a consequence of terrorism, consulted internally among our membership and directly with various victims' groups on this deeply emotive issue. "From these conversations it was made abundantly clear those concerned will never countenance the prospect of a so-called peace centre at the very site, where those who inflicted nothing but anguish and sorrow upon the law-abiding majority, were quite rightly incarcerated for their horrific crimes. "We make no apology for standing up for the rights and entitlements of innocent victims." Progressive Unionist Party leader Billy Hutchinson "We welcome the remarks by the first minister as a positive step. The PUP has been the only party to hold a consistent position on the Maze site and our opinion remains that it should be razed to the ground. "However, while this is a welcome step it does not go far enough. We need to ensure the issue is dealt with once and for all. We believe the only sensible option in relation to the Maze is to de-list the buildings and flatten them to the ground." NI21 leader Basil McCrea "I firmly disagree with the stance the first minister has taken on the Maze. The DUP is in the middle of a crisis of confidence which is resulting in a crisis of confidence within unionism. Rather than face down the extremes within his party and on the streets, from a weakening position Peter Robinson has allowed the DUP to revert to type. "NI21 supports the development of a peace centre at the Maze site. A centre dedicated to learning about and celebrating the delivery of peace can benefit our entire society going forward. Unfortunately, unionism is in a pattern of walking away from the table, then coming back and getting a worse deal than was originally offered. The main way to ensure that any peace centre does not become a 'terrorist shrine' is to take ownership of the project, define it and ensure it is a positive success. "Today, Sinn Féin must be delighted that the language of a 'terrorist shrine' is back on the agenda and unionism looks weak and increasingly intolerant - despite what the first minister says, his opponents' day is not over. NI Commissioner for Victims and Survivors Kathryn Stone "Our team has spent some time this morning talking to members of our Victims and Survivors Forum and I think it is true to say that some members of the forum are triumphant, feeling that this is a vindication of their view that the peace building and conflict resolution centre should never have gone ahead at the Maze. "Others feel completely dismayed, bewildered that this decision should have been taken. It is important that it is recognised that the job of the commissioner for victims and survivors is to represent that diversity of views. "One person said: 'I am very disappointed, I personally feel we need to get beyond this, it was a good opportunity to work towards reconciliation. This is a step backwards.' "Another person, in contrast to that, has said: 'This is the best news we have had in a long, long time. There should have been no shrine, now or ever, send the money back'." Former republican prisoner Paul Butler "This is a huge decision to scupper the peace centre. But we have been here before. "This is more to do with divisions within unionism between the DUP, the UUP and the TUV, and also those within the DUP who have never came to terms with being in power and having to share power with Sinn Féin. "It is not going to happen at the present. But what Robinson has done - along with the DUP - is that he is looking at future elections and the battle for hearts and minds within unionism. But they will have to come back to it. If they do not, the Maze/Long Kesh site is going to be a wasteland. "If we want to get back to putting something positive on it, the DUP is going to have to come back to talk to Sinn Féin and sort this out." Alliance Party MLA Trevor Lunn "This cowardly move by the First Minister may gain the DUP more votes, but in reality they have failed to earn the trust and respect of voters which would allow them to lead a constituency through a difficult issue. "He has proven himself to be weak - issuing this from Florida to avoid dealing with his partners in government and the press on such a significant decision. "There are serious questions that must be answered, including how much this project has cost so far. Planning fees, architect fees, business case preparation and EU funding disregarded, all amounts to a considerable sum. I would predict the DUP has cost the public purse several million that will never be recovered. "Alliance has always recognised the importance of acknowledging and coming to terms with our past, if we are to move forward in building a shared society for everyone. We continue to support the Maze/Long Kesh development and recognise the economic potential it has for Northern Ireland. But we have always said that anything approved for the site must promote reconciliation, be inclusive of all perspectives and not celebrate terrorism or glorify violence." Willie Frazer, Families Acting for Innocent Relatives "The innocent victims and members of FAIR, and indeed wider afield, welcome the news that the Maze has been shelved but that does not mean that this battle is over. "We have warned the political representatives that unless they deal with victims like ourselves and represent the views of the wider Protestant unionist community this process will only be going backwards. "There is a reluctance to deal with the genuine victims and their concerns. Even with the situation with Mr Haas there is a continual attempt to keep us away from him and a refusal to let us engage with him. Nobody wants to move on as much as the victims but not at the expense of glorifying terrorism and demonising our loved ones, thereby justifying the murders and maiming of thousands of innocent people."	There has been strong reaction to the statement by First Minister Peter Robinson that it would be wrong to proceed with the Maze peace centre without consensus.
+text: Mr Corbyn told the BBC: "Anyone's entitled to raise an opinion on it, and they will." Labour's defence spokesman has said the party's position should not change before the next election. In his interview, Mr Corbyn also questioned whether air strikes against so-called Islamic State were working. In other Labour conference developments: Labour's leader, who was re-elected by an increased margin on Saturday, is hoping to unite his party at its conference in Liverpool. But there have been rows over proposed changes to the internal party rules and on Monday Labour's shadow defence secretary, Clive Lewis, was said to be upset at last-minute changes to the section of his speech about Trident, the UK's nuclear missile system. Mr Lewis reportedly said later it was time for Labour to stop "picking at the scab" of its Trident policy. Asked to clarify Labour's policy on whether to go ahead with renewing the multibillion pound system, Mr Corbyn told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg that "the position is that Parliament has voted on Trident, the existing party policy was for renewal", adding that he was "not a supporter of nuclear weapons". The party's defence review, led by Mr Lewis, would continue, he said. Labour was divided when MPs voted in favour of Trident renewal voted in July. Asked whether he accepted the party's current policy, Mr Corbyn - a longstanding CND campaigner - said: "Of course I know what the party policy is and of course I understand the decision that was taken. "Does it mean there are people in the party who have a moral objection to nuclear weapons, yes there are." He predicted problems to come for the government with the costs of the project, currently estimated at £31bn, and said he would never want to trigger a nuclear bomb if elected as prime minister. Labour is united on the need for a nuclear-free world, he added. Mr Corbyn was also asked whether he would continue with UK air strikes against so-called Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq. The Labour leader opposed both interventions and is a former chairman of the Stop the War Coalition. "I am not sure it's working," he said. "I think there has to be a political solution, which brings together everyone with the exception of IS to isolate them." Pressed on whether he would call a halt to the military action, he said: "As a Labour prime minister I would bend every muscle I have got to bring about a political settlement and peace." On taking office as PM he would "look at all the evidence" and decide how to bring this about, he added. The Labour leader said it had been "a very busy year" since he was first elected last summer having entered the 2015 leadership contest as an outsider. "It's fun and I enjoy it," he added.	Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn says he accepts his party's policy is to renew the UK's nuclear weapons - but will continue to speak out against it.
+text: In the 1950s President Gamal Abdul Nasser pioneered Arab nationalism and the non-aligned movement, while his successor Anwar Sadat made peace with Israel and turned back to the West. The protests that ousted President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 raised the hopes of those seeking democratic reform and an end to decades of repressive rule. But it was the Islamists who initially benefited, before they were themselves swept away by the military and secularist protesters, prompting speculation about a return to authoritarianism. Regional importance Egypt's ancient past and the fact that it was one of the first Middle Eastern countries to open up to the West following Napoleon's invasion have given it a claim to be the intellectual and cultural leader in the region. The head of Cairo's Al-Azhar Mosque is one of the highest authorities in Sunni Islam. But the historic step by President Anwar Sadat to make peace with Israel in the 1979 Camp David agreement led to Egypt being expelled from the Arab League until 1989, and in 1981 Mr Sadat was assassinated by Islamic extremists angry at his moves to clamp down on their activities. President Hosni Mubarak took a more conciliatory approach, but Islamic groups continued their campaigns sporadically. They have been responsible for deadly attacks that often targeted tourists and resort areas, and began to harass Egypt's Coptic Christian community. While providing stability and a measure of economic progress, Mr Mubarak's rule was repressive. An emergency law in force nearly continuously since 1967 muzzled political dissent, and the security forces became renowned for brutality. Corruption was widespread. Encouraged by the protests that overthrew the long-term leader of Tunisia, mounting popular anger burst to the surface in huge anti-government demonstrations in January 2011 that eventually ended President Mubarak's long rule. The protesters' hoped-for transition democracy proved elusive, however, as post-revolutionary politics became polarised between the newly ascendant Islamists on the one hand and the military as well as liberal and secular forces on the other. A growing Islamist militant insurgency has also shaken Egypt's stability. Following a year of interim military rule, the first presidential elections in half a century were won by Islamist Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi in 2012. But a year on, growing dismay at the government's actions among many Egyptians - primarily secularists, liberals and Coptic Christians - boiled over in another wave of protests. Siding with the demonstrators, the military ousted Mr Morsi and violently suppressed the protest sit-ins held by the Brotherhood in response. The new authorities outlawed the Brotherhood, started drafting a new constitution and curbed media freedom. The army chief, Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, won the presidency in May 2014 elections. His rise has left some fearing an effective return to military rule, while others are more apprehensive of a campaign of violence by the jihadist Ansar Beit al-Maqdis in Sinai. Geography and economy Egypt's teeming cities - and almost all agricultural activity - are concentrated along the banks of the Nile, and on the river's delta. Deserts occupy most of the country. The economy depends heavily on agriculture, tourism and cash remittances from Egyptians working abroad, mainly in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries. However, rapid population growth and the limited amount of arable land are straining the country's resources and economy, and continuing political turmoil has paralysed government efforts to address the problems.	Long known for its pyramids and ancient civilisation, Egypt is the largest Arab country and has played a central role in Middle Eastern politics in modern times.
+text: The Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill creates police commissioners and changes the balance of power with chief constables. POLICE COMMISSIONERS At the heart of the government's proposals is a complete overhaul of the local control of police forces. There are 43 forces for England and Wales and the government says it won't be merging them. Instead, it says it wants to strengthen local democratic control by creating Police and Crime Commissioners for each force. The commissioner will be directly elected and will hold the chief constable to account - meaning they will be able to hire and fire chief constables. According to the legislation, the commissioner's basic duties will be to publish a "police and crime plan", set local police and crime objectives and the budget. The commissioner will also set the amount of the "precept" that their local electors have to pay, the part of police funding collected through the council tax. The chief constable will appoint all other officers and will "retain responsibility for the direction and control of the police force". The police commissioner takes over the responsibilities of the current police authorities - but they will have the additional power of being able to sack a chief constable. Under the current system, chiefs are appointed by the force's police authority in consultation with the Home Office. Each force in England and Wales outside of London will elect a police commissioner in May 2012. The commissioners will be able to hold office for two terms. London is being treated differently because the Metropolitan Police Commissioner is Britain's top police officer with national duties including co-ordinating counter-terrorism. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner is appointed directly by the Home Secretary who has to take the view of the Mayor of London into account. Police Authorities will be scrapped. Instead, they will be replaced by a new body called a policing and crime panel. Police authorities oversee the budget and workings of a force and are comprised of local councillors, magistrates and other independent members. The new panels will scrutinise the work of the commissioner, rather than the chief constable. They will comprise local councillors and other co-opted members. In its original consultation on the future of policing, ministers said they wanted to see the "police family extended" by encouraging more people to volunteer to help out. In the 1950s, there were almost 70,000 Special Constables in the UK. Today, there are about 14,000. The government says it wants a "step change" in the level of volunteering and is also asking people what they think about a new category called police reservists. The government has not spelled out the role of a reservist, what powers they would have, or how that would differ to the specials. Secondly, ministers suggest that local people could take part in "joint patrols with the police, looking out for their neighbours". it's not clear at this stage whether any of thes The other pillar of the proposed reforms is at the opposite end of the policing spectrum and concerns tackling organised crime. The former Labour government created the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) to take on an umbrella role in the fight against major criminal operations. The new body, to be created under future legislation, will include Soca and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. The NCA, which will have a chief constable and two key "commands" - one focusing on organised crime and the other on border policing. It will have its own officers but will also be involved in the "tasking" of local forces who are involved in the same kind of work. For instance, there are 3,000 officers around the UK involved in border work. In theory, the NCA will better co-ordinate their efforts. This model has worked successfully in counter-terrorism where there is a national co-ordinator in the Metropolitan Police who draws on teams based in forces around the UK. Policing is devolved in Northern Ireland and Scotland. The NCA is expected to have some kind of responsibilities with bodies in those parts of the UK - but the exact relationship and jurisdiction remains to be decided. Ministers have considered but ruled out two alternatives to the NCA. The first would have been mergers to create regional police forces, which would have met local opposition. The other would have been to "top slice" the existing 43 forces to create a British version of the FBI, which is often criticised for being too far removed from local intelligence.	Home Secretary Theresa May has launched major reforms of policing in in England and Wales.
+text: He said Turkey had strong evidence Khashoggi was killed in a premeditated and "savage" murder at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October. He also called for the suspects to be tried in Istanbul. He demanded Saudi Arabia provide answers about where Khashoggi's body was, and who had ordered the operation. The Saudi kingdom has provided conflicting accounts of what happened to Khashoggi, a US resident and Washington Post contributor. After weeks of maintaining he was still alive, the authorities now say the 59-year-old was killed in a rogue operation. Mr Erdogan's address coincided with the start of an investment conference in Saudi Arabia that has been overshadowed by the Khashoggi case. Dozens of government and business leaders have pulled out, but Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman appeared at the event on Tuesday. Many world leaders have condemned the murder of the prominent Saudi critic and demanded a full investigation. US President Donald Trump says he is not satisfied with the Saudi explanation but he has also highlighted the kingdom's importance as a US ally. CIA director Gina Haspel has been sent to Turkey to review the matter. What did the Turkish president say happened? Fifteen Saudi nationals, Mr Erdogan said, arrived in Istanbul in three teams, on separate flights, in the days and hours leading up to the murder. A day before the killing, he said, some members from the group travelled to Belgrad forest, near the consulate - an area searched last week by Turkish police looking for the body. He also described how the team had removed the hard drives from the consulate's surveillance camera system prior to the arrival of Khashoggi, who was visiting to obtain documents for his forthcoming marriage. A man who looked like Khashoggi, wearing his outfit, glasses and a fake beard, was among a group who left the consulate the same day as the killing, the president added. On Monday, CNN broadcast images appearing to show that Saudi operative leaving the consulate. President Erdogan confirmed 18 people had been arrested in Saudi Arabia over the case. He told MPs from his ruling AK party the 18 should "be tried in Istanbul", adding that "all those who played a role in the murder" would be punished. What did he say about the Saudis? Mr Erdogan called for an independent commission to be set up but said he was confident in King Salman's full co-operation. He did not mention the crown prince, widely seen as the most powerful figure in the kingdom. Many believe he ordered the killing, although the Saudis deny this. BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says Mr Erdogan's speech was notable as much for what it left out as for what it left in. There was no mention of the much-discussed audio tape from inside the Saudi consulate which Turkish media say reveals gruesome details of the murder. Trailed as something that would expose "the naked truth", the speech fell well short of many people's expectations, our correspondent says. Where do the Saudis stand? King Salman chaired a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, after which a statement said that Saudi Arabia would hold to account those responsible for the killing, whoever they might be. State media also said the king and the crown prince had held a meeting in Riyadh with members of the Khashoggi family, including Khashoggi's son, Salah bin Jamal. Mr Erdogan also spoke to family members by phone on Tuesday, offering condolences and saying he would do all he could to solve the murder. Saudi Arabia has given conflicting accounts up to now, initially saying Khashoggi had left the building alive, then later saying that he had been killed in a "fist-fight" inside the consulate. On Sunday, the Saudi foreign minister acknowledged Khashoggi had been murdered but said the leadership had not been aware of the "rogue operation". "The individuals who did this did this outside the scope of their authority," Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told Fox News. "There obviously was a tremendous mistake made, and what compounded the mistake was the attempt to try to cover up." He said that Saudi Arabia did not know where the body was. An unnamed Saudi official told Reuters news agency on Sunday that Khashoggi had died in a chokehold after resisting attempts to return him to Saudi Arabia. His body was then rolled in a rug and given to a local "co-operator" to dispose of. President Erdogan demanded in his speech on Tuesday for this individual's identity to be revealed. In addition to the arrests, the Saudis say they have sacked two of the crown prince's aides and set up an organisation, under his leadership, to reform the intelligence agency over the killing. According to Reuters news agency, quoting Turkish and Arabic intelligence sources, one of the sacked aides appeared via Skype during Khashoggi's questioning. Saud al-Qahtani was quoted as giving the instructions "bring me the head of the dog", after the two men traded insults. The sources say President Erdogan has a copy of the Skype audio but is refusing to hand it over to the US. Who is at the investment conference? BBC's Sebastian Usher in Riyadh There's an odd mixture of unreality and hard-faced pragmatism here. Attendees say they're here to stay with the opportunities Saudi Arabia provides for the long haul - however much pressure may be building in the short term. But that means that the urgency and outrage over the killing of Jamal Khashoggi that is fuelling the news outside is absent here. As President Erdogan was delivering his explosive speech, the conference here announced $50bn (£38.5bn) of investment in 12 mega-deals. The contracts were signed with a flourish by a host of foreign CEOs with their Saudi partners to the applause of the audience. It was no doubt intended as a resounding vote of confidence in the vision of Saudi Arabia's future laid out by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. But that future and those investments could still turn sour, despite the mood of optimism and self-approbation exhibited here.	The killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi was planned days in advance, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has told MPs from his ruling party.
+text: Farmers said they are worried ahead of the EU transition period ending. An Agriculture Bill will return to the House of Commons next week after a House of Lords session this month. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said it "will not compromise on our high environmental protection, animal welfare and food standards". "We are a world leader in these areas and that will not change," a spokesman said. Steve Elnor, who runs a family farm near Grantham in Lincolnshire, said his business faces "a massive threat from the government's apparent determination to tear apart the USP of British food in order to strike trade deals in desperation", adding farmers "have the overwhelming support of the public". "We are facing a revolution and I worry it is something that we, and many other family farms up and down the country, won't be able to adapt to," he said. "We face uncertainty from 1 January, 2021, not knowing what the market and prices will be." Lord Tyler, a Liberal Democrat peer on the House of Lords Agricultural Committee in Lords, said he backed efforts to "support British farmers and protect our food supplies from adulterated and expensive imports". Follow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.	Dozens of tractors circled Melton Mowbray to raise concerns over post-Brexit farming and food standards.
+text: William Quigg, 77, of Bridge of Weir, Renfrewshire, showed no emotion as he was sentenced at the High Court in Livingston. The offences took place between 1980 and 1986 at addresses in Glasgow. One of his victims Ian Johnstone, who has waived his right to anonymity, told BBC Scotland he was pleased with the sentence. Mr Johnstone said: "It has been a 31-year fight to get justice, but I am satisfied with how justice has been delivered. "Ten years will afford Quigg much time to contemplate his offences and the effects they had on his victims." Mr Johnstone added that the sentence was significantly less than the time he has had to deal with the consequences of the paedophile's crimes. He added: "I hope others affected by Quigg will now feel brave enough to come forward. "Justice works no matter how long ago the offences took place. " Quigg, who was convicted last month, was told by Lord Burns that the abuse he perpetrated was "of the most grave kind". 'Breach of trust' The judge said one of the boys had told the jury he had submitted to sexual abuse by Quigg rather than being sent back to a care home. He said: "I can't ignore the serious breach of trust that these offences represent. You exploited them for your own sexual purpose." Quigg was told his name would remain on the sex offenders register indefinitely. Mark Stewart, defending, told the court the case was one of extreme abuse which represented a gross breach of trust. He said: "It's a matter of practical fact that he is a man who is 77 years of age now. "It's accepted that he faces a significant custodial sentence. "He understands he may not live to see his liberation from this sentence." 'Severe sexual abuse' Quigg raped Mr Johnstone when he was aged between 12 and 15 and sexually abused another teenage boy. Mr Johnstone said he was abused by Quigg on a daily basis after he was placed with a foster family in Clydebank, West Dunbartonshire. He told BBC Scotland: "Over the five or six years I was with them sexual abuse was basically a daily occurrence. "And severe sexual abuse occurred on many occasions." Mr Johnstone said he first complained about Quigg, a former Scout leader and Scout commissioner, in 1989 but it took 30 years for him to finally be brought to justice. Quigg admitted sexually abusing one boy who was aged between 12 and 15 but he denied raping Mr Johnstone and sexually abusing him from the age of 12 to 16. But the jury did not believe him and convicted him of all the abuse.	A former scout master and foster parent has been jailed for 10 years for sexually abusing two children.
+text: Speaking to staff on Wednesday, the director general said there was a real danger the BBC could be "diminished" by negotiations with the government. The charter dictates what the BBC does, how it is funded and how big it should be. It is renewed every 10 years. Lord Hall has already said the BBC should be more "aggressive" in making the case for the licence fee. On Wednesday, he asked staff to act as "ambassadors" for the broadcaster, "speaking up for the BBC against those who would bring it down". He also called on programme-makers not to give critics any ammunition, by "spending every penny of the licence fee as if it were your own". Analyis - David Silito, Media Correspondent The language was stark. A moment of "high risk", the BBC in danger of being "diminished" and "stuck in an analogue cul-de-sac", unable to adapt to the rapid changes in digital media. Tony Hall's speech expressed the fears within the corporation about what may happen in the forthcoming negotiations with the government over its next charter. He said the BBC's independence would be under "colossal scrutiny" in the months to come and warned that some may use charter renewal to influence the way the BBC reports on politics in this election year. The BBC, he says, will always address complaints but will resist what he called "naked bullying". The charter review will be carried out by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in the same year as a general election, and Lord Hall warned negotiations could become politicised. "There may be some - I hope only a few - who try to use the impending charter review to influence our coverage of politics in this most sensitive of political years," he said. "We will never let that happen, because to do so would betray the public and the ideals of the BBC." He added the journalists should report "without fear or favour". "We will get things wrong," he said, "It's inevitable [but] we will reflect and put things right where we have. "But we will never confuse justifiable complaints with naked bullying."	The BBC is entering a period of "high risk" as it navigates the renewal of its Royal Charter, says Tony Hall.
+text: By Mark DevenportPolitical editor, Northern Ireland That is the opinion of one councillor from the cross community Alliance party, Maire Hendron, speaking during Belfast City Council's meeting on Monday night. Seen from afar, riots over which flag flutters above a council building may appear inexplicable, but national identity remains a source of deep division in Northern Ireland. Disputes about flags and symbols have been a regular occurrence over the decades. The Good Friday Agreement settled the dispute between London and Dublin about sovereignty, with both governments and the major political parties recognising the "principle of consent", namely that it's up to the will of the majority voting in a referendum whether Northern Ireland remains in the UK or becomes part of Ireland. But in working class areas of Belfast, Protestants and Catholics still live apart, sheltered behind peace walls, in areas often festooned with different national flags and contrasting murals. Hurt There's no sign of Belfast City Council overturning its decision to fly the flag just on designated days. Sinn Fein's Council leader Jim McVeigh said the loyalists protests were pointless as the council will not perform a U-turn. Unionists continue to complain about the hurt caused to their community. But the Alliance party, which controls the balance of power on Belfast council, said the designated days option was in line with the recommendation from Northern Ireland's Equality Commission as an approach that would promote good relations between both sides. One proposal suggested by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) last month was to fly the union flag over the cenotaph which stands in the grounds of Belfast City Hall. The idea was taken from a compromise reached at neighbouring Lisburn council. Alliance have indicated they are open to the suggestion, which has now been handed over to a council committee. Any progress on this proposal is unlikely to be immediate, as it would be subjected to what is known as an "equality impact assessment", which could take several weeks. Others, such as the Northern Ireland Conservative Party, have expressed concern that putting a union flag 356 days a year on the Belfast war memorial could "diminish the flag and debase and politicise a place of remembrance". Alienation The DUP and Ulster Unionist leaders, Peter Robinson and Mike Nesbitt, are setting up a "unionist forum" to try to channel the protesters' frustration into conventional political activity. This forum will certainly discuss issues such as deprivation and educational underachievement, which contribute to the sense of alienation felt in some loyalist communities. But it doesn't have the power to order the flag back up the council flagpole. Moreover the unionist leaders find themselves under pressure from different quarters. The other Stormont parties argue that only a cross community approach will produce dividends, while some loyalist protest leaders have called for an end to the entire Stormont settlement, demanding Peter Robinson's resignation as first minister in order to trigger a return to direct rule from London. Review With no sign of any change at Belfast Council, unionists have taken the flag dispute elsewhere - securing a review of the limited flag flying at another council in Craigavon. Last month unionists attempted to push through a similar review extending the number of days the union flag is flown over Stormont's parliament building. But the plan was blocked by nationalists and Alliance who boycotted a meeting to discuss the proposal. Last spring, when the union flag wasn't quite such a hot topic, Sinn Fein brought a different idea to the commission that runs the Stormont Assembly. Earlier this year, a Belfast newspaper reported Sinn Fein's proposal for the Irish tricolour to be flown alongside the union flag. However the proposal didn't generate the necessary support. Republicans might favour a similar approach at Belfast City Hall, but far from improving the situation it would probably only exacerbate tensions. Other Northern Ireland councils, such as Down district, fly their own flags - an approach which - if copied by Belfast - would guarantee neutrality but is unlikely to satisfy loyalist protestors. Inside Belfast City Hall you can still see a large antique union flag amongst the memorabilia on display. Outside the council building sports not one, but five flagpoles. If some flag expert, or in more technical language a vexillologist, came up with an assortment of flags that could keep everyone happy, surely the city's hard pressed Chamber of Commerce would offer them at least one day's free shopping.	Belfast's reputation is being dragged through the gutter and Northern Ireland is an object of derision around the world.
+text: On Tuesday morning, India accused Pakistan of firing on Indian posts in the Jammu region. On Monday, Pakistan summoned India's deputy high commissioner, saying a civilian had been killed on the border. It is the latest in a series of accusations and counter-accusations, with each side blaming the other for violations of the 2003 ceasefire. Last week, India accused the Pakistani army of killing five of its soldiers - something Pakistan denies. The BBC's Charles Haviland in Islamabad says that the bad-tempered mutual accusations have called into question the possibility of the two countries' prime ministers meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly next month. The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon landed in Pakistan on Monday for talks with the prime minister and president on disaster management as the monsoon season get under way. But his spokesman said that Mr Ban urges both India and Pakistan to resolve the latest flare-up in hostilities peacefully. Volatile border Pakistani troops fired on Indian posts in the Ramgarh sector, in Samba district, early on Tuesday morning, Indian media reports said. Firing was also reported on Indian posts in Poonch district on Monday night, they added. On Monday, Pakistan said that a male Pakistani civilian was killed when India fired on the common border early on Monday. India offered a different version of events, saying that soldiers responded to shelling but that no injuries were reported from the Indian side, Reuters reports. Last week, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said it was imperative to restore the ceasefire on the disputed Kashmir border following the violence. The diplomatic tension has been accompanied by disturbances within Indian-administered Kashmir, where a curfew is in force after clashes between Muslims and Hindus left three dead and 20 injured on Friday. The violence reportedly erupted after Hindus objected to Muslims chanting anti-India slogans after prayers Claimed by both countries, Kashmir has been a flashpoint for over 60 years. The two sides agreed a ceasefire along the Line of Control in November 2003. But both have blamed each other for occasional cross-border firing which has resulted in several soldiers and civilians being killed or wounded. Thousands of people have been killed in Indian-administered Kashmir since an armed revolt against Indian rule erupted in 1989.	India and Pakistan are continuing to trade accusations over alleged breaches along the disputed border in Kashmir.
+text: Wiseman currently supplies 75% of the Co-op's milk and from August that will increase to 100%. The deal will see 350 farmers becoming dedicated suppliers for the chain. The Co-op said the farmers would receive a premium rate for providing some 363 million litres of milk a year to about 4,000 stores. Billy Keane, managing director of Wiseman, said: "We are very pleased to further extend our relationship with The Co-operative Group, and delighted that this important customer has taken the decision to set up a dedicated group of dairy farmers drawn from the Wiseman Milk Partnership." Tim Hurrell, chief executive of the Co-operative Group's food business, said: "Wiseman has been a valued supplier to The Co-operative for many years, has consistently demonstrated high service levels and has proved to pay, on average, a higher standard farm-gate milk price to British dairy farmers than any other major liquid milk processor. "Wiseman is focussed on sustainability and its flagship site at Bridgwater is one of the most efficient and environmentally advanced dairies in the world."	East Kilbride-based dairy company Robert Wiseman has won the contract to be the sole supplier of own-brand milk to the Co-operative group.
+text: A new Audit Scotland report said more public projects have gone ahead as a result of using private money. But auditors warned "private finance comes at a cost". Audit Scotland said payments worth more than £40bn will be made for £9bn worth of public projects under contract. These payments cover the cost of financing, building and maintaining the buildings. The Scottish government no longer uses any of the private finance mechanisms covered by the report. However, auditor general Caroline Gardner, said greater transparency is needed over decision-making to show projects represent value for money. She added: "The Scottish government has accepted the costs of using these contracts to increase total infrastructure investment. "But the impact on future budgets is significant, as is the overall amount of money that will be repaid." The Audit Scotland report looked at the role of Private Finance Initiative (PFI), Non-Profit Distributing (NPD) and hub contracts in public sector infrastructure deals. There are a total of 80 active projects using PFI, first introduced under John Major's Conservative government. They saw private consortiums build facilities, such as schools, in return for regular payments over as many as 30 years. Longstanding criticism of how much private profit is made out of this funding approach saw the SNP administration introduce its own version of private financing, NPD, when it took power in 2007. NPD was designed to cap excess private profits and there are a total of 15 schemes, such as the delayed new children's hospital in Edinburgh and the completed M8 motorway upgrade. In addition, there are 41 hub schemes which allow for new community facilities, such as social housing or medical centres, to be built using public and private partnerships. Audit Scotland said the Scottish government had not been clear enough about how decisions have been taken about which projects will use private finance, or how well this approach is achieving the best balance of cost and benefits in practice. Auditors also found: Research commissioned by The Guardian and The Ferret in 2018 showed many private finance projects to build schools, hospitals and roads have links to offshore tax havens and the majority of profits go to companies located outside of Scotland, This is similar to the PFI model where scores of schools built in Scotland are at least partially owned by offshore investment funds. A Scottish government spokesman said: "As the report recognises, NPD and private financing through hub companies has enabled £3.3bn of additional investment in Scotland's infrastructure that would not otherwise have been possible, given budgetary constraints placed on the Scottish government by the UK government." He said infrastructure investment can unlock economic potential, the government publishes explanations of its financial decisions and that it will reflect on the report. The Scottish government is developing a new Mutual Investment Model (MIM) of private financing and Audit Scotland has called for more detail on this. Related Internet Links Guardian and Ferret report into NPD offshoring	The cost of repaying private finance deals used to pay for new roads, schools and hospitals will have a "significant" impact on public spending, watchdogs have warned.
+text: A policeman has been arrested in connection with the death of the 14-year-old student. The government of President Nicolas Maduro has condemned the incident and promised a full investigation. Last year, 43 people from both sides of the political divide were killed in several months of protests. Local reports say the student was hit in the head by a rubber bullet during a clash between hooded protesters and the police. 'Give up violence' Home Affairs Minister Carmen Melendez confirmed the arrest of a policeman, who has been named as 23-year-old Javier Mora Ortiz. Ms Melendez made an appeal for "peace and tranquillity" in Tachira state near the border with Colombia. President Maduro went on national television to regret the death of the student and call for an end to violence. "There is no reason for violent protests. I make an appeal to our country, and especially the young, to give up violence. Hatred will not lead to anything," he said. "Give up all violence, lads. And rest assured that if a government official breaks the law I will be the first one to go after him." 'Right-wing coup' Dissatisfaction with the shortage of many staples, as well as rampant crime and high inflation, led thousands of people to take to the streets in Tachira and the neighbouring state of Merida a year ago. The protests quickly spread to the rest of Venezuela, but died down after several months. However the economic crisis has deepened in recent months. Venezuela, a major oil exporter, has suffered with dropping prices in international markets. New anti-government protests began last month, albeit in a smaller scale. The opposition says the left-wing policies of the past 16 years - initiated by late President Hugo Chavez - have failed, pushing the country into economic disaster. Mr Maduro says the opposition and right-wing sectors outside the country have been boycotting the country's economy and preparing a coup against his socialist government. Last week, the mayor of Caracas, veteran politician Antonio Ledezma, was arrested and charged with plotting to overthrow the government. The move was condemned by the opposition.	A Venezuelan teenager, Kluiver Roa Nunez, has been killed in the western city of San Cristobal in a protest over the worsening economic crisis.
+text: It's the first time such a commercial has been broadcast in Great Britain. Pro-life groups and some religious organisations want the 30-second ad to be banned. Marie Stopes International says it simply wants to make women aware of their options. The advertising campaign shows several different women each of whom "is late". The word abortion isn't mentioned and the charity offers a number of other services related to pregnancy and sexual health. However, critics say it is clearly designed to point women towards getting terminations. The adverts will not be screened in Northern Ireland where abortion law is different. Abortion - the law Abortion has never been made legal in the UK. However, a law introduced in 1967 gave doctors in England, Scotland and Wales a number of legal defences for being able to carry them out. These include the physical or mental health of the mother and any other children she has. Also, if the child is likely to be severely mentally or physically handicapped. Two doctors have to agree to the abortion, or one, in the case of an emergency. Conditions are stricter for abortions carried out after 24 weeks. In Northern Ireland abortions are illegal usually, unless the mother's life is at risk. Abortion - the numbers The most recent official figures for abortions in the UK are from 2009. In England and Wales, 189,100 terminations were carried out, down from 195,296 in 2008. 40,000 were given to women under the age of 20. In Scotland, there were 13,005 abortions, down from 13,817 in 2008. 3,214 were given to women under 20. In Northern Ireland, between 70 and 80 abortions are carried out every year. However, it is estimated that more than 1,000 women travel elsewhere in the UK seeking a termination. Abortion - the critics Abortion is hugely controversial. Many of the most vocal critics come from church groups. Pope Benedict XVI has called the practice "today's gravest injustice". The Church of England is also against abortion, but accepts that it may sometimes be necessary to protect the health of the mother. Most mainstream Muslims take a similar approach. Pro-life campaigners may also have non-religious moral objections. Many opponents of abortion believe that a foetus should be given the same rights as any other human and that abortion is murder.	An advert for Marie Stopes International, a charity which gives advice on abortions and unplanned pregnancies has had its first screening on Channel 4.
+text: By Sarah Jane GriffithsEntertainment reporter The verbatim script is based on interviews writer Michael Wynne has carried out with nurses, doctors, managers, politicians and paramedics. Wynne told the BBC he hoped it would "make people think in a different way". It will take place all around the London theatre building, which will be transformed into a hospital setting. Wynne spent 18 months interviewing NHS staff, private healthcare workers and policy makers, using sections of the interviews to form the "immersive" play. "I got some real inside access, so some of the material and subjects are areas that people don't really know about, even though it feels like the NHS is talked about a lot," Wynne said. "On the whole people really wanted to talk and had amazing stories and were really passionate. "But," he admits, "it is such an emotional subject, sometimes people were quite cagey. "One of the people I interviewed, on the release form he just wrote at the bottom, 'don't stitch me up', you know. So it's been complicated at times. "I'm still waiting to hear back from a couple of people, to see if they'll let us use all their material." 'Timely and thrilling' The Royal Court had originally hoped to stage the play in an old hospital, but after delays decided to go with its own theatre as a venue. Wynne said they wanted it to run before the election as it was sure to be such an "important issue". "Partly that was just from all my interviews, and finding out what was going on financially and on the front line with staff," he said. "I felt it might bubble to the surface more." The Royal Court's artistic director Vicky Featherstone called it "timely and thrilling" to be putting on the "moving and incisive play" this season. "The NHS has become one of the most criticised yet vital parts of our society and the debate around it will play an important part in the run up to the election," she said. Who Cares is billed as giving "unheard perspectives on the past, present and possible future of our NHS", and Wynne hopes it will make an impact. "I think theatre is really good for debates. I studied politics which is why I really love that in theatre," he said. He added the play would pose several questions about the NHS: "Do we appreciate it and do we take it for granted? Do we not realise how lucky we are at times, especially when you look at other countries - not just in terms of having to pay but in terms of the treatment that you get? "So I do want to throw it back to the audience and make them think... or emotionally connect in a different way." Wynne also hopes the hospital setting will help stir emotions. "That idea of an immersive production, that you feel like you're in a ward or a waiting room - because we've all had those experiences - hopefully it will make you feel more before the play's even started," he said. "I've mainly focused on the professional side - I haven't really interviewed patients, so my idea was that the audience will be on the patient journey." "It starts off in a waiting room - in a rehearsal room in a building next door - and goes through to the ward. There's a garden, then we're going to go up the back stairs and go through rehearsal rooms, dressing rooms and then up to the theatre upstairs where the climax will be." Because of "the scale and ambition" of the project, it has three directors on board - Debbie Hannan, Lucy Morrison and Hamish Pirie. Rehearsals start on Monday and the play will run from 10 April - 16 May, with around 50 people at each performance. It is just one of the productions announced as part of the forthcoming season at the Royal Court, with Gary Owen's Violence and Son and Debbie Tucker Green's new play Hang also on the bill. Hang is billed as a "morally challenging and taut three-hander", looking at the relationship between a victim and the perpetrator of a crime. It stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Clare Rushbrook, previously seen together on screen as Brenda Blethyn's daughters in Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies. A UK tour for the Royal Court's award-winning play Constellations, written by Nick Payne and directed by Michael Longhurst, has also been announced. It follows sold-out runs for the play at the Royal Court Theatre and the West End, starring Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins, and on Broadway starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson. Constellations will visit The Ambassadors theatre in Woking, Liverpool Playhouse, Bristol Old Vic, Nuffield Theatre in Southampton, The Lowry in Salford Quays, Cambridge Arts Theatre, Richmond Theatre and Brighton's Theatre Royal from May.	The debate around the future of the NHS has inspired a new play, Who Cares, being staged by the Royal Court in the run up to the general election.
+text: The new facilities at the armed forces treatment centre feature a range of resources including a new swimming pool and gym. Lydia Cross is a child patron of Help for Heroes after losing both her legs to meningitis. "It felt really exciting, but I was really nervous", she told BBC News. "I think I can make a difference about what happens to these injured lads, so I think I should help them," she added. Opening the centre Prince William paid tribute to staff and the charity: "What is achieved here is, in truth, but the tip of the iceberg. "This country has been elevated by Help for Heroes to a state of realisation and proactive support for our military that has made me very, very proud to be British." Lydia's mother Jodie Cross described the day as "overwhelming" for her daughter but said meeting other people like her had been "really good for her". She said her daughter supported the charity after realising it helped people who, like her, have lost limbs. Prince William and his brother Harry have previously met patients undergoing treatment at Headley Court after being injured in conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The centre began its work after World War II for RAF personnel, but in 1996 became the main UK military rehabilitation centre for all three armed forces.	A nine-year-old from Devon has helped Prince William open a new Help for Heroes rehabilitation centre at Headley Court in Surrey.
+text: The project would channel streams above Corwen to keep the town safe from water while generating electricity. Regeneration agency Cadwyn Clwyd said the sale of power could earn £40,000 a year for a community group running the 20-year project. Denbighshire council and Corwen's Rhug Estate are also involved in the plans. Cadwyn Clwyd energy officer Silas Jones said a feasibility study showed water from the Nant y Pigyn stream 152m (500ft) above the town flowing at 45 litres a second could power a 55 kilowatt generator housed in a purpose-built building in the town. In turn, that could generate enough electricity to power more than 30 homes. 'Real boost' Mr Jones said: "We have worked with Denbighshire council who have a project to prevent persistent flooding caused by a culvert that runs through the town, under buildings. "They have encouraged us to develop the hydro power plan and the two will run side by side, with the flood defence scheme benefiting the hydro scheme." The project would use water that drains down the Nant Cwrddu and Nant y Pigyn streams to power the generator. It would also reduce the risk of the Nant Cwrddu stream flooding under the Owain Glyndwr Hotel after heavy rain. The Welsh government announced funding for the £1.8m flood alleviation work earlier this month. If the additional £300,000 start-up costs for a hydro power project can be raised with local backing, a guaranteed income would be generated through feed-in tariffs. Huw Jones, a Denbighshire county councillor for Corwen, said: "The flood alleviation scheme is taking place and that makes the hydro project possible. "If we can get local people and local organisations involved then it can be a real boost to Corwen for years to come." A public meeting is due to be held at the Corwen Sports Pavilion on 12 September at 18:45 BST in a bid to find local investors and people to run the project.	A £2m flood relief project for a Denbighshire town could include a hydro electric generator creating power and cash for the area, it is claimed.
+text: By Rachel SchraerBBC Reality Check That would almost reverse the reduction in police numbers since the Conservatives came to power. Between March 2010 and March 2018, police forces in England and Wales lost 21,732 officers - a drop of 15%, according to Home Office figures. Annual figures which use March as a snapshot have been published for decades and those show that 2018 saw the lowest number of police officers since 1981. Numbers of police community support officers (PCSOs), who patrol the streets, have fallen by nearly 40% during this period, from 16,688 in 2010 to 10,139 in 2018. These cuts came as part of austerity measures brought in by the Conservative and coalition governments from 2010, in an attempt to reduce the deficit. In the rest of the UK, policing is devolved. In Scotland, there were 30% more police officers in March 2018 than there were in 1985 - and since 2010 numbers have remained more or less stable. There has been a recent fall though, with numbers of police officers in the first three months of 2018 at the lowest level since 2009. In Northern Ireland, there are fewer police officers than there were 20 years ago, but the fall has been much smaller than in England and Wales. Overall police budgets, excluding counter-terrorism grants, fell by 20% between 2010 and 2015 when the overall policing budget was protected in real terms, although not every force was to benefit. Last year, the government announced the biggest rise in funding to the police since 2010, of "up to" £970m more than the year before - some of which was pledged specifically to help recruit more police officers. The figure is "up to" this amount because, while £452m comes directly from central government, the rest is based on police and crime commissioners (or in some places the mayor) choosing to raise more in council tax from their local populations. This article was originally written in February 2019. It has been updated to reflect the latest figures on police numbers. Read more from Reality Check Send us your questions Follow us on Twitter	New Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced plans to recruit an extra 20,000 police officers in England and Wales.
+text: It is one of only two left in the world to have been restored to its original specification and is airworthy. The fighter, based at Imperial War Museum Duxford, Cambridgeshire, could fetch up to £2.5m at auction in July. Proceeds will go to the RAF Benevolent Fund and Oxford University's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit. The Mk I Vickers Supermarine Spitfire was originally piloted by Old Etonian Flying Officer Peter Cazenove during the evacuation of Dunkirk. Despite radioing-in to say "Tell mother I'll be home for tea," he was shot down on 24 May 1940, crashed on the Calais coast and was captured. 'Particularly special' He ended up in the Stulag Luft III prisoner of war camp, where British airmen launched their famous Great Escape in 1944. But despite failing to escape, he survived and returned to the UK after the war. The plane remained hidden in the sandy beach of Calais until the 1980s when strong tides exposed the wreckage. However, it was not until the parts were bought by an American collector and shipped to the UK that the mammoth task of restoring it began at the former home of RAF Duxford. Now the Spitfire has been returned to its original glory and is going under the hammer at Christie's in London on 9 July. John Romain, chief engineer at the Aircraft Restoration Company, which undertook the project, said: "It came to us quite literally in boxes of parts that had been removed from the beach in France. "We spent five years restoring it back to its original state. "This one is particularly special. It is very unusual to see a Spitfire like this go to auction."	A rare RAF Spitfire once flown by a Great Escape veteran and painstakingly restored over five years could fetch millions of pounds for charity.
+text: Figures obtained from South Central Ambulance Service (SCAS) showed, from April 2009, there was an average of 140 crashes a year involving ambulances, response cars and motorcycles. In the year from April 2013, there were 157 collisions. The service covers Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Hampshire and Oxfordshire. John Newell, a driving educator at SCAS, said: "The majority [of the collisions] were slow manoeuvring incidents. It's very unusual for them to happen at high speed. Serious accidents are very, very rare." Breaking the down the figures, obtained through a BBC Freedom of Information request, there were 148 collisions in Berkshire in the five years from April 2009, 310 in Hampshire and 240 across Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire.	Ambulances and emergency response vehicles in the south of England were involved in nearly 700 accidents in the space of five years.
+text: The data was issued by the Information Commissioner's Office after a request by satellite system-maker Viasat. It shows five fines totalling £790,000 were imposed on the public sector and one £1,000 penalty on a private firm. The ICO said that it could only impose fines if strict criteria had been met. Expensive accidents The release covered self-reported personal data security breaches between 22 March 2011 and 17 February 2012. Over this period the ICO said 730 events had been flagged up as being potentially liable to a penalty or other action. The private sector reported 263 cases, while 467 were reported by government and other public sector bodies. These included: Of the 433 breaches resolved over the period, six resulted in local councils being fined. The biggest penalty was a £140,000 charge imposed on Midlothian Council after it repeatedly disclosed personal data about children and their carers to the wrong recipients. The private sector company singled out was ACS: Law. Its data controller was fined £1,000 after a hack attack and subsequent security breach resulted in sensitive details about 6,000 people being published on a third-party website. Some of the emails stolen included references to people's sex lives, health and financial status. The ICO said at the time that it would have imposed a larger £200,000 fine had the firm not ceased trading and its owner not been of limited means. Unknown breaches The chief executive of Viasat's UK division praised the ICO's efforts to police the public sector, but claimed the private sector "still has a relatively free rein". "While the ICO offers free training and auditing to organisations to help address these issues, so far the private sector in particular has been slow to take them up meaning that further incidents may be waiting to be discovered," said Chris McIntosh. Public sector organisations might be more susceptible to the ICO's toughest penalties because they handle sensitive data on a day-to-day basis. But commisioner's office told the BBC it would impose financial penalties whenever its criteria were met "regardless of the sector the organisation falls into". "The course we choose will always depend on the circumstances of the individual case," an ICO spokesman added. Since the period detailed in the release, data breaches have continued to occur. Recent examples include the accidental publication of the home and email addresses of 38,000 people who applied to run the London Marathon; loans company Student Finance England sending an email to 8,000 customers which included other recipients' email addresses; and Scotland Yard sharing email addresses of more than 1,000 victims of crime with other victims.	The UK's private sector accounted for more than a third of all reported data breaches over 11 months, but less than 1% of the resulting fines, according to a Freedom of Information request.
+text: The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that strikes on Khan Sheikhoun by Syrian government or Russian jets had caused many people to choke. Later, aircraft fired rockets at local clinics treating survivors, medics and activists said. A Syrian military source denied the government had used any such weapons. Russia's defence ministry meanwhile insisted it had not carried out any air strikes in the vicinity. If confirmed, it would be one of the deadliest chemical attacks in Syria's civil war. What happened? The warplanes are reported to have attacked Khan Sheikhoun, about 50km (30 miles) south of the city of Idlib, early on Tuesday, when many people were asleep. Hussein Kayal, a photographer for the pro-opposition Edlib Media Center (EMC), told the Associated Press that he was awoken by the sound of an explosion at about 06:30 (03:30 GMT). When he reached the scene, there was no smell, he said. He found people lying on the floor, unable to move and with constricted pupils, he added. Mohammed Rasoul, the head of a charity ambulance service in Idlib, told the BBC that his medics had found people, many of them children, choking in the street. The Syrian Observatory (SOHR) quoted medics as saying that they had been treating people with symptoms including fainting, vomiting and foaming at the mouth. An AFP news agency journalist saw a young girl, a woman and two elderly people dead at a hospital, all with foam still visible around their mouths. The journalist also reported that the same facility was hit by a rocket on Tuesday afternoon, bringing down rubble on top of doctors treating the injured. The source of the projectile was not clear, but the EMC and the opposition Local Co-ordination Committees (LCC) network said warplanes had targeted several clinics. Pro-government journalists later cited military sources as saying there had been an explosion at an al-Qaeda chemical weapons factory in Khan Sheikhoun that was caused either by an air strike or an accident. How many victims are there? The SOHR put the death toll at 58, including 11 children, but Mr Rasoul reported that 67 people had been killed and that 300 were injured. The pro-opposition Step news agency meanwhile said 100 had died. One aid agency, the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organisations (UOSSM), put the death toll at more than 100 and said that the figure was likely to rise. The EMC said it had stopped counting the victims because there were so many. It posted photos showing what appeared to be at least seven dead children in the back of a pick-up truck. There were no visible traumatic injuries on their bodies. What substance was used? The SOHR said it was unable to say what exactly was dropped. However, the EMC and LCC said it was believed to be the nerve agent Sarin, which is highly toxic and considered 20 times as deadly as cyanide. Chemical weapons expert Dan Kaszeta said that determining whether Sarin was involved simply by examining video clips is problematic. He added that Tuesday's attack could have been the result of one of any number of chemical agents as they tend to "behave the same in terms of their physiological effects on the human body". Sarin is almost impossible to detect because it is a clear, colourless and tasteless liquid that has no odour in its purest form. Has Sarin been used in Syria before? The government was accused by Western powers of firing rockets filled with Sarin at several rebel-held suburbs of the capital Damascus in August 2013, killing hundreds of people. President Bashar al-Assad denied the charge, blaming rebel fighters, but he did subsequently agree to destroy Syria's chemical arsenal. Despite that, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has continued to document the use of toxic chemicals in attacks in Syria. In January 2016, it said blood samples taken from the victims of one unspecified attack showed victims had been exposed to Sarin or a Sarin-like substance. Other reported use of chemical agents: What has been the reaction to Tuesday's attack? UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura said it was an "horrific" attack and that there should be a "clear identification of responsibilities and accountability" for the attack on the rebel-held town. French President Francois Hollande accused the Syrian regime of a "massacre". "Once again the Syrian regime will deny the evidence of its responsibility for this massacre," Mr Hollande said in a statement. UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said that President Bashar al-Assad would be guilty of a war crime if it were proved his regime was responsible. "Bombing your own civilians with chemical weapons is unquestionably a war crime and they must be held to account," he said. The UK and France, which said that reports suggested it was a "particularly serious chemical attack", have called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. There was no immediate comment from the government, but a Syrian military source told Reuters news agency that it "does not and has not" used chemical weapons. The OPCW said it was "seriously concerned" about the alleged chemical attack, adding that it was "gathering and analysing information from all available sources".	At least 58 people have been killed and dozens wounded in a suspected chemical attack on a rebel-held town in north-western Syria, a monitoring group says.
+text: Car Park Party has been described by Henley Festival organisers as the UK's "first socially distanced and safe entertainment experience". Henley Festival and Henley Royal Regatta were both cancelled in March. Car Park Comedy, Car Park Karaoke and Car Park Cinema will take place from 9 to 11 July at the festival's usual location. Chief executive Nick Mattingley said the events would be "in line with the latest social distancing measures, giving the highest level of reassurance to attendees". Stand-ups supplied by the Comedy Store take to the stage on Thursday, and there will be showings of Mamma Mia and The Greatest Showman on Friday. A singalong concert from the Massaoke Band will take place on Saturday, with performances of show tunes and 80s hits. Organisers say a traffic management team will be at the site at Lion Meadows, to ensure vehicles are parked 2m (6ft) apart and tickets will be scanned through windows "so no human contact is necessary".	A music festival cancelled due to coronavirus will be replaced by three "drive-in" events.
+text: Sally Le Page said her parents were surprised when a technician used two "bent tent pegs" to find a mains pipe. She contacted all the UK's water companies, and a majority confirmed engineers still use the centuries-old technique. However, a number said the equipment was not standard-issue equipment. The process of using divining rods, also known as dowsing, has been in use for hundreds of years. 'No evidence' A dowser will typically hold the rods, usually shaped like the letter Y, while walking over land and being alert for any movement to find water. Evolutionary biologist Ms Le Page, whose parents live in Stratford-upon-Avon, first contacted Severn Trent Water via Twitter. It replied: "We've found that some of the older methods are just as effective than the new ones, but we do use drones as well, and now satellites." Other companies which gave a similar response were: Ms Le Page said: "I can't state this enough: there is no scientifically rigorous, doubly blind evidence that divining rods work. "Isn't it a bit silly that big companies are still using magic to do their jobs?" In a statement issued later, Severn Trent said: "We don't issue divining rods but we believe some of our engineers use them." All the companies emphasised they do not encourage the use of divining rods nor issue them to engineers, and said modern methods such as drones and listening devices were preferred. Northern Ireland Water, Northumbrian Water, South West Water and Wessex Water said their engineers do not use them.	Water companies are using divining rods to find underground pipes despite there being no scientific evidence they work, an Oxford University scientist found.
+text: Leanne Barnett's twins, Olivia and Ruby, aged 21 months, were born with phenylketonuria or PKU. The condition, which means they cannot eat large amounts of protein, affects about one in 10,000 UK babies. Mrs Barnett says she has been quoted up to £75,000 per twin for a yearly Kuvan prescription. A petition calling for the drug to be made cheaper and available on the NHS has gained over 16,500 signatures. Mrs Barnett, from Kingswood, South Gloucestershire, said she had had to give up her job to make sure her daughters followed a strict diet, because people with PKU cannot process protein through the body properly. "If they have too much protein their levels will go high, which can cause behavioural problems, and it can cause brain damage and mental disorders," she said. "Everything that they eat or drink, I have to check labels. "I have to weigh [their food] to make sure they only have eight or nine grams of protein a day." The recommended daily amount of protein for a toddler is 13 grams. The drug Kuvan helps people metabolise an amino acid found in some proteins, but is not available in the UK. "I think we are the only country in the EU that doesn't have it, because it's too expensive," said Ms Barnett. She currently gets low-protein food for the twins on prescription from the NHS and bakes her own low-protein bread. She has added her support to an online petition set up earlier this year asking for the US company that makes the "life-changing" drug to reduce its cost. "It would make a massive, massive difference to our lives if we had it," Ms Barnett added. Related Internet Links Phenylketonuria - NHS	The mother of twin girls who have a rare genetic condition is supporting a campaign for a drug that can treat it to be made cheaper.
+text: An tUltach was founded 90 years ago and has published work by celebrated poets such as Paul Muldoon and Frank Ormsby. Foras na Gaeilge said the magazine team had known since last summer that its funding would end on 30 June. The journal's Réamonn Ó Ciaráin said without the £16,000 yearly grant from Foras, its future was "in serious doubt". "Our most recent edition is coloured red because we're 'dearg le fearg' which means red with anger," he said. "The people who are supposed to be supporting and promoting our Ulster dialect and who were charged by the Good Friday Agreement to take resolute action on the language are instead taking resolute action seemingly to do away with what is a very noble publication." In a statement, Foras na Gaeilge said it would be in discussions with the Irish language body Conradh na Gaeilge "We will be discussing funding priorities between now and the end of June," a spokesperson for the cross-border organisation said. Foras na Gaeilge, which was set up in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement to promote the Irish language, is cutting the number of Irish language groups it provides "core funding" for, across the island of Ireland, from 19 to six for "economic reasons". None of the six are based in Northern Ireland.	One of Ireland's oldest literary magazines has warned it might have to close because its funding has been withdrawn by the organisation set up to promote the Irish language.
+text: Somer and Areeb Umeed Bakhsh say their lives would be in danger if they are sent back to Pakistan. The Rt Rev Susan Brown said Christians in the Muslim country were at risk from Islamist extremists. The family's appeals have previously been rejected, with officials arguing they could live elsewhere in Pakistan. But Mrs Brown called on the Home Secretary Sajid Javid to provide Somer, 15, and Areeb, 13, with permanent sanctuary in the UK. She said: "The story of this family has touched the hearts of tens of thousands of people who want those in authority to know how upset they are that they are being treated so dispassionately. "All both boys want is to be the Scots they are and not sent to a country where Christians are persecuted and threatened by Islamic extremists." Death threats The brothers and their parents, Maqsood and Parveen, fled to Glasgow in 2012 from Faisalabad in Pakistan after their father was subjected to death threats due to their Christian faith. The UK government has repeatedly rejected the family's plea for asylum, with officials claiming they can live peacefully in another part of Pakistan. But Mr Bakhsh claims his name and photograph has been circulated among extremist groups and nowhere in the country is safe for them. The family's campaign to stay in Scotland has been backed the UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour MP Paul Sweeney and SNP MSP Bob Doris. Two judicial reviews against the asylum refusal have been dismissed, the most recent at the Court of Appeal in January 2015. A Home Office spokeswoman said: "The UK has a proud history of granting asylum to those who need our protection and every case is assessed on its individual merits." A judicial review against the asylum refusal was dismissed in November 2013 and a second judicial review was dismissed at the Court of Appeal in January 2015.	The Church of Scotland Moderator has handed over an 85,000 signature petition in a bid to prevent the deportation of two teenage brothers.
+text: The blue whale challenge is reported to involve people being set a series of tasks over 50 days - ending in the person taking their own life. There's no evidence the game has reached the UK, or whether it's real. Newsbeat has spoken to a number of police forces who say they're aware of the challenge. In it, individuals are given tasks by an anonymous "master". These are reported to escalate from straightforward demands, like watching a scary film, and become increasingly dangerous. Hertfordshire Constabulary is advising parents "to be vigilant and monitor children's internet usage". Woodlands School in Basildon, Essex, has sent parents a letter explaining the risks involved with the game with the aim of stopping it from happening. "There's no evidence to say anything untoward is going on with the blue whale challenge in our school, but we feel it's best to keep parents and carers informed," deputy head David Wright has explained to Newsbeat. "We [want to] make sure they can help us. We've all got a duty of care for our young people." Unconfirmed Russian media reports have linked the deaths of two teenage girls to the challenge. The name of the game appears to be a reference to the way some blue whales beach themselves on purpose and die. Bulgaria's Centre for Safe Internet has told the Balkan Insight that the game is most likely a rumour which has been spread online. It says there's no concrete evidence for the existence of the blue whale challenge. For help and support on suicide visit BBC Advice. Find us on Instagram at BBCNewsbeat and follow us on Snapchat, search for bbc_newsbeat	Several police forces are warning parents about a social media "game" which has reportedly been linked to teenage deaths in Russia.
+text: The authority has set out plans to increase harbour wall heights, repair sea wall foundations and replace peninsula walls over the next 35 years. It said similar plans were also being drawn up for Swanage. Economic growth councillor Tony Ferrari described the strategy as "hugely exciting and ambitious". The council said Weymouth, which is already affected by flooding, was at risk from a predicted 1.3m sea level rise over the next 100 years. The council's strategy includes the replacement of seven sections of harbour walls including North Quay Road, Custom House Quay, and Westwey Road and raising nine sections including Commercial Rd, Cove Row and Nothe Parade by 2030. By 2025, the authority said it planned to repair the Greenhill section sea wall foundations and by 2035 it would complete improvement works, including works to the promenade. Four sections of peninsula walls are also due to be replaced by 2027. About a quarter of the total cost would be funded by Dorset Council, the authority said. The strategy is due to be discussed by the council's cabinet on 6 October.	"Huge scale" engineering works costing more than £115m are needed to protect Weymouth from coastal flooding, Dorset Council has said.
+text: Laura KuenssbergPolitical editor@bbclaurakon Twitter The huge outcry when the experiences of activists like Bex Bailey emerged was perhaps the first, not the last word. Late last night more claims emerged. A shadow cabinet member, Debbie Abrahams, was temporarily replaced while an investigation into her behaviour proceeds. She, in return, made her own claims, that she had been badly treated by the Labour leader's office over a period of months, and as such, is making her own complaints. This afternoon, the Financial Times reports another member of the Labour shadow team, Karl Turner, behaved inappropriately to a party member, although he has denied the claims. Those new allegations both follow the painstaking investigation by my colleagues at Newsnight a few days ago that featured accounts from many different members of Commons staff, including claims that the Speaker himself had behaved badly towards staff. Those allegations were also denied. But the questions around Commons' culture and John Bercow's own behaviour are building today. He faces an urgent question from the Green MP Caroline Lucas. And the Tory MP, Andrew Bridgen, has put down a motion calling for an independent investigation. It is hard to overstate the influence the Speaker can have in Parliament. They don't just chair debates in the Commons, and pick and choose MPs that ask the questions. The Speaker also represents the Commons to The Queen, and is the boss of the House of Commons Commission - the organisation that runs the place. Any questions about his behaviour elevate the significance of the concerns. It is nearly six months since the first significant allegations emerged. The Leader of the House of Commons, Andrea Leadsom, announced a new code of conduct for MPs last month, to crack down on bad behaviour and make it easier for those with concerns to come forward. She told the BBC on Monday that she was disappointed by the allegations of bullying made against Speaker Bercow and others and said strong action was required in response. And the clerk of the House, David Natzler, admitted in a letter to staff seen by Newsnight: "There is no doubt in my mind there are unresolved issues over bullying and harassment, which needs to be addressed. The public testimony of colleagues confirms that." With new claims emerging again, it seems clear the House, which seeks to represent us all, is a long way from being in order.	Sadly, if you have been around Westminster for a long time, it is not entirely surprising that allegations of bullying and bad behaviour by those in politics persist.
+text: The energy giant said oil had been observed on the sea surface, and seemed to be moving north. The oil was released into the water from the Clair platform on Sunday. BP said: "At present, we believe the most appropriate response is to allow the oil to disperse naturally at sea, but contingencies for other action are being prepared." The company added: "The most likely volume of oil to sea has been calculated from platform data as 95 tonnes. "Both direct observation from surveillance flights and oil spill modelling continue to show the oil moving in a northerly direction away from land. "The most recent surveillance flight already indicates significant dispersal of the oil at the surface." 'Await findings' The Clair platform is 75km (46 miles) west of Shetland. It was shut down after the leak. Environment Secretary Roseanna Cunningham said: "I am closely monitoring the situation, which I understand to be the result of the rig discharging 'produced water' containing a much larger than usual amount of oil. "The oil residue is moving away from the shore and, as such, there is a low risk to bird species at this time of year. The nearby Faroe-Shetland Sponge Belt Marine Protected Area is home to deep-water sponges 400-600m below the sea surface. "Marine Scotland have advised that allowing the oil to weather naturally is the least harmful option for this internationally important marine habitat." 'Serious questions' Mick Borwell, the health, safety and environment policy director at industry body Oil and Gas UK, said: "We will await the findings of the investigation and will see if there are any findings that can be shared with industry. "However the UK oil and gas industry does it utmost to prevent accidental releases by investing heavily in a wide range of physical barriers as well as developing training and procedures that influence human behaviours. "Every operator has emergency response plans in place and use a wide range of response techniques to monitor, contain and recover accidental releases. "Industry takes its responsibilities towards safety and the environment extremely seriously in all its operations." WWF Scotland director Lang Banks said: "In the interests of protecting their staff and the marine environment, serious questions need asked about how this spill occurred. Until those questions are answered the platform should remain out of operation."	An oil spill of about 95 tonnes from a platform off Shetland is heading away from land, BP has said.
+text: The group includes the emergency services, health authorities, customs, an animal charity, Age Concern and a pyrotechnic professional. It has urged islanders to attend organised displays, which will be held on several dates. The group has asked anyone holding a private display to finish by 21:00 GMT. It said as the professional pyrotechnicians in the island could only safely provide a limited number of displays on any one night, two additional days had been designated for professional displays only. The safety group said in 2010 there had had been no bonfires reported as out of control, but at least one person had received burns from a sparkler.	Keep domestic firework displays to Saturday, 5 November 2011 is the message from the Guernsey group set up to promote firework safety.
+text: By Greg CochraneNewsbeat music reporter The London folk outfit's second album The First Days Of Spring, released in August, saw lead singer Charlie Fink pour open his heart about the break down of his personal relationship with singer Laura Marling. Still aching, it's a pain he has to revisit each night when performing the intimate songs live but one he says is getting easier. "Yeah I think so," says Fink staring at his feet. "Playing a personal song is such a surreal process anyway. You kind of have this layer of relief about it. "It's strange because a lot of the album is about loss and with what's happened this week you start thinking you're singing about your guitar." Stolen gear Indeed, if licking his emotional wounds night after night wasn't difficult enough, the quartet's equipment was stolen from outside a gig in Manchester last week (29 September). At the time Fink described the loss as "devastating". Since then two men have been arrested on suspicion of theft. "We've managed to find the trailer that got stolen but it hasn't got anything in it," says Fink. "We've got the number plate of a van and two people have been arrested so that is promising. "We're going to carry on doing all the shows on the tour and everything so it's business as normal." 'Rocky' sound Business as normal for Noah And The Whale means already writing new songs. "It feels like a little relief," sighs Fink. "You can just go in there and write the songs and play the songs and it can be simple." "I'm listening to a lot of Lou Read at the moment and that's kind of creeping into the sounds. I want to do some rock stuff on this record because I want to do it whilst we're all young and rocking." It's a side to the band they've visited briefly before with a collection of uncharacteristically raw punk tunes released under the title The A Sides last Christmas. "It might be slightly more sophisticated than that," he smiles. "That was just about energy and playing the room together. The way we've been thinking about it is like Crazy Horse with strings." "It's a fun process to do that without worrying about a film at all now." For the moment they can enjoy the fact that the movie which Charlie directed and wrote to accompany The First Days of Spring is enjoying praise outside the music bubble from film critics such as the BBC's Mark Kermode. "Of this whole project the thing I feel is the greatest success of it," he beams. "The philosophy behind doing it was to create an album with a film which was a fully immersive experience, a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. "It feels like on this album we've picked up some new audience," he settles on. "I think that the same is true for the reverse though.	It's been a tough few months for Noah And The Whale.
+text: Rain is expected to affect south west, mid and north west Wales on Friday night into Saturday, and again on Sunday night into Monday morning. The Environment Agency is advising people travelling home after Christmas to plan their journey carefully and allow extra time. Floods hit rail services, roads and properties in south Wales last week. Rain has been falling across Wales throughout the festive period, and is set to continue into the new year. Combined with last month's heavy rainfall, the Environment Agency said the ground was saturated and remained sensitive to further rain. There is currently one flood warning for the River Ritec at Tenby, Pembrokeshire, and seven flood alerts remain in place across Wales. The agency warned it was likely the rainfall forecast over the weekend would lead to further flood alerts and warnings. Last weekend, heavy rain brought: The agency advised people travelling home after Christmas to plan their journey carefully and allow extra time as driving conditions could be difficult. Graham Hillier, from Environment Agency Wales, said: "We're asking people to take extra care and to be on their guard as heavy rain is expected to fall across the country and the risk of flooding continues. "Our officers have been working hard over the Christmas period to keep rivers clear of blockages that could cause flooding to make sure our flood defences remain in good condition. "We're advising people to be alert to the risk and keep an eye on weather forecasts, local news reports and the latest flood alerts or warnings in their area over the next few days." The agency reminded people about the dangers of flood waters and warned them not to walk or drive through flood water.	There are warnings of flood risks across Wales after forecasts of more heavy rain.
+text: The death of David Brickwood, 74, is being treated as murder, following the assault at the house in Lindsay Avenue in the Abington area of the town. Mr Brickwood, who was attacked just after 02:00 BST on Saturday, died at Northampton General Hospital, police said. A major incident room has been set up to investigate Mr Brickwood's murder. Dozens of people have paid tribute to Mr Brickwood on social media, describing him as "a caring and lovable chatty guy", a "true hardworking gent" and a "legend of Abington". Det Ch Insp Mick Graham, of Northamptonshire Police, said: "Fortunately, incidents of this nature are incredibly rare, and I would appeal to the public to contact us if they know anything about Mr Brickwood's death, or what may have happened in the hours leading up to this incident."	A man has died after what police described as a "violent and dreadful" attack in his Northampton home.
+text: Andrew RT Davies has joined other politicians condemning the comments by north Wales AM Michelle Brown about Labour MP Chuka Umunna. UKIP's chairman Paul Oakden has said the AM's actions will be investigated. Ms Brown said she accepted her language was "inappropriate" and "apologised to anyone" offended. The former legal adviser from Mostyn in Flintshire called the Streatham MP a "coconut" during a conversation in May 2016 with her then senior adviser, Nigel Williams. She was also recorded using an abusive remark about Tristram Hunt, who was then Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central. Mr Williams, who was her senior adviser for 12 months, was sacked by Ms Brown in May. Ms Brown said in a statement: "The point I was making is that because of his considerable wealth and privilege, Chuka Umunna cannot possibly understand the difficulties and issues that the average black person faces in this country any more than I can, and I stand by that assertion. "I do however accept that the language I used in the private conversation was inappropriate and I apologise to anyone that has been offended by it. "As far as the language I used about Mr Hunt is concerned, it was a private conversation and I was using language that friends and colleagues often do when chatting to each other." Speaking on BBC Radio Wales' Sunday Supplement programme, the Welsh Tory leader said: "The language is completely unacceptable and it's regrettable in the second decade of the 21st Century that that type of language is held by people who hold public appointment. "From my view, if that person was in the Conservative Party - they would be suspended. "As I said - it is completely unacceptable language." Mr Davies joins both Labour and Plaid Cymru in the assembly calling for action over the comments. The Labour Group has condemned the "absolutely outrageous language" and said "anything less than immediate suspension would be a clear endorsement of Michelle Brown's racist slur". Its chairman, Delyn AM Hannah Blythyn, has written to the National Assembly's Standards Commissioner, calling for an immediate investigation. She told Sir Roderick Evans: "I believe that these comments constitute a clear breach of the Code of Conduct for Assembly Members. "I would ask that you look into this matter at the earliest opportunity." Plaid leader Leanne Wood said: "This racism reflects poorly on our parliament - the National Assembly for Wales - and that's why her party should take action on this." A second UKIP AM has also moved to distance herself from her colleague's comments. Caroline Jones told BBC Wales' political editor Nick Servini on Sunday Supplement: "Inappropriate language is not condoned by myself or anyone else in the party." However, she refused to be drawn on what action she thought the party might take, and said that was a matter for the investigation ordered by its chairman. On Saturday, UKIP AM David Rowlands said he "thought we'd put that racist language behind us as a party". "I don't know if there's been any provocation but I'm very disappointed that anyone in my party should be using that language," said the South Wales East AM. This is not the first controversy Ms Brown has faced - in February, she was forced to deny claims she had smoked "recreational drugs" in a Cardiff Bay hotel room. Her spokesman said the smell was caused by the AM smoking a strong tobacco product.	A UKIP AM who made a racial slur about an MP would have been suspended from the Conservative Party, says the Welsh Tory leader.
+text: Hundreds of protesters have already left PolyU but dozens remain inside. The campus - the scene of some of the most intense clashes witnessed during months of anti-government protests - is surrounded by police who are arresting for rioting any adults trying to leave. Six people were arrested on Wednesday for an attempted escape via the sewers. The group included two men climbing out of an underground drain and four people - three men and a woman - who had removed a manhole cover and lowered a rope into the drain to assist them, police said. "It was complicated and dark down there, I wanted to get home as soon as possible," one young man who unsuccessfully attempted a sewer escape told BBC Chinese. "But how else could we leave the PolyU campus?" The four-day campus siege at PolyU - Hong Kong Polytechnic University - has been one of the most dramatic confrontations in the wider protest movement that has paralysed the city for more than five months The protests started after the government planned to pass a bill that would allow suspects to be extradited to mainland China. The bill was eventually withdrawn, but the demonstrations continued, having evolved into a broader protest against alleged police brutality, and the way the former British colony is administered by Beijing. PolyU is the last of five Hong Kong universities that protesters had occupied in the last 10 days. Fewer than 100 hardcore demonstrators remain on the campus after days of violent clashes with security forces. Many have surrendered to police or emerged as part of medical evacuations. More than 1,000 people have been arrested. Those under 18 were allowed to go home but had their details registered. Several small groups of protesters seeking to avoid possibly years in prison if arrested on rioting charges have reportedly attempted a dangerous escape route through the sewers. They have descended into the tunnels armed with torches and gas masks. The fire brigade have now blocked the main entrance into the sewers within the PolyU campus to thwart such escapes. On Tuesday and Wednesday divers searched the tunnels for any protesters who might have been trapped but found none. Whether any protesters have successfully escaped via the sewers remains unclear, despite rumours on campus to the contrary. The two arrested on Wednesday made it about half a kilometre from the university when they emerged and were arrested. Bowie, a 21-year-old student who made an attempt, told Reuters news agency: "The sewer was very smelly, with many cockroaches, many snakes. Every step was very, very painful. I'd never thought that one day I would need to hide in a sewer or escape through sewers to survive." Her group spent an hour swimming in the fetid water, but when they emerged, were crushed to realise they were still within the university grounds, she said. Tunnelling out of campus is just the latest escape plan hatched by increasingly desperate protesters. On Monday, dozens slid down ropes from a bridge, fleeing on waiting motorcycles. Police said nearly 40 of them were later arrested. Some have tried to flee under cover of darkness while many others have tried to get through police lines, some being beaten before being arrested.	Some of the last protesters remaining at a besieged university in Hong Kong have tried to escape and evade police by crawling through sewers.
+text: Following last week's election Thanet District Council became the first UKIP-controlled authority in the UK. Chris Wells, who plans to lead the authority, said his party's pledge to pursue a CPO is expected to go ahead. The airport, which closed in May 2014, has been earmarked for development. 'Wasted money' Its current owners, Trevor Cartner and Chris Musgrave, said in a joint statement: "We are of the opinion that the advancement of a CPO process by Thanet District Council will fail. "There is no foundation on which a CPO process can be progressed and this has more to do with politics than the interests of the public. "If Thanet District Council continue they will have wasted taxpayers' money on a venture they could not win." Two concepts for the area have been revealed, each with residential areas, commercial space and parkland. Mr Wells said: "The first thing we do now is put forward a proposal for council and cabinet to approve an indemnity partner in the context of moving a CPO forward. "And we will be doing that in the course of the next few days, as promised."	The owners of the former Manston Airport site have said any attempt by the newly elected UKIP council in Thanet to pursue a Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) will fail.
+text: Operator Stagecoach Supertram said the vehicle manufacturer Stadler had advised it to temporarily withdraw the fleet. It is not known why, but in April the service was suspended because a of a fault on the undercarriage of one of the vehicles. The vehicles run on trams tracks and railway lines. Stagecoach Supertram said: "We are unfortunately unable to run any tram-train services until further notice. "This follows advice by the manufacturer, Stadler, that we need to temporarily withdraw the fleet . "A further update will be provided as soon as we have been updated by Stadler." The company said it could not provide details about the number of services affected but added that it was unlikely it would resume before Monday. Stadler has been contacted for a comment. The service launched in October 2018 - two years later than scheduled at a cost of £75m which was five times its original budget. It is being trialled on a two-year pilot scheme.	Tram-train services between Sheffield and Rotherham have been suspended for the second time this year.
+text: It was, after all, officially confirmed by organisers earlier this month that they would top the bill at Worthy Farm come June. But Janet Jackson's Twitter feed tells a slightly different story. The R&B star was added to the Glasto line-up on Friday - a bill which also features the likes of Stormzy and Kylie Minogue. The version of the Glastonbury poster Jackson has tweeted, however, has seen her bumped up to the top slot. It's unclear whether the singer's team asked for this version of the poster to be made or whether Glastonbury offered it (we've asked them both). But we think it's unlikely Janet was up late one night on Photoshop doing it herself. Here's the original Glastonbury poster: And here's the new version, posted by Janet Jackson: Jackson is making her Glastonbury debut this year, with her first UK date in eight years. More than 60 acts are on the line-up so far, including George Ezra, Miley Cyrus, Anne-Marie and Liam Gallagher. Some fans clearly felt that, if anything, Jackson should be promoted to an even higher slot: Many were just feeling the love for the apparent edit and having plenty of fun with it on Twitter: Glastonbury is expected to announce the rest of the bill closer to the festival itself. The event sold out in just half an hour last October, but cancelled tickets will be put back on sale on Sunday, 28 April. Organisers recently confirmed that The Prodigy had been booked to play prior to frontman Keith Flint's death earlier this month. It's not the first time a line-up has been altered to bump an artist up the pecking order. Last month, The Sherlocks admitted photoshopping the Y Not line-up poster so they appeared higher than The Amazons. In the original, released by Y Not Festival, The Sherlocks featured on the fourth tier of acts. But in the one they shared they were in the third tier. "We just thought we'd do it for a bit of a laugh. Now everyone's talking about it," the band's drummer Brandon told Newsbeat. A spokesperson for Y Not said there was only one official poster. Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	You may have thought The Killers and The Cure were headlining this year's Glastonbury Festival.
+text: By Ashley GoldBBC News, Washington Children and guns in the US are too often a deadly combination. Of the 18,330 incidents recorded by Gun Violence Archive so far this year, 202 children under the age of 11 were injured or killed. In some cases, guns were not locked away from children in the home at all. What happened in the latest case? A young girl in Detroit fatally shot herself after finding a handgun under her grandmother's pillow. Police said the girl found the gun in an upstairs bedroom and shot herself while the grandmother was downstairs. Two other young children, aged one and three, were upstairs at the time but were not hurt. Have there been other similar incidents? The cases for this year do not end there. For a grim look at the full numbers, the Gun Violence Archive keeps track of gun violence incidents in the US. What do the figures say about children? The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence estimates that every day, seven children and teens die from gun violence, with about 41 being shot but surviving. The group estimates that 2,677 children aged 0 to 19 die from gun violence each year, with another 14,822 surviving gun injuries. Of the deaths, 124 are unintentional. One out of three homes with children have guns, according to the Brady Campaign, with 1.7 million children living in a house with a unlocked gun. In the US, it is common to hear stories of children shot while playing with loaded guns or finding guns in drawers or unlocked bureaus. Are these incidents on the rise? It is hard to determine whether shootings by toddlers have increased this year, or they are being reported on more often. This month, the Washington Post reported that toddlers, defined as a one, two or three-year old, have shot at least 23 people this year. And last year, the newspaper reported that toddlers were shooting people about once a week. So according to the Washington Post's analysis, the rate of toddlers shooting people has increased - 23 toddler-involved shootings occurred from 1 January to 1 May. Last year in the same period, 18 occurred. The rate has not gone up by all counts, though. According to US group Everytown for Gun Safety, a slight uptick of shootings by children in that age group in a short period does not make a meaningful trend. Long term data on unintentional child shootings is too incomplete to make such comparisons yet, the group argues. "We hope to get a clearer picture on this sad phenomenon as we continue to track these shootings," Valerie Jean-Charles, a communications associate with the organisation, told the BBC. The Centers for Disease Control in the US used to ask Americans whether they store guns in their homes and lock them up. There is no longer federal data on this topic because of laws passed by Congress that keep the organisation from extensive gun research. What can be done about it? The Brady Campaign suggests parents ask "Is there an unlocked gun in the house?" before allowing children to go anywhere where they may not be familiar. As the BBC has previously reported, the inquiry may seem strange to an international audience, but for American parents, it is becoming a routine. "I always ask two questions: do you have a loaded gun in the house and do you have Internet filters," Kate Lacroix, a mother of an 11-year old girl, told the BBC last year. "The responses I get are pretty interesting. But most people say they have never had anyone ask them this before." Safe storage of guns provides some answers. A study published in the Journal of the American Association found that keeping guns locked and unloaded is associated with preventing injuries in homes with teenagers and children. A study published in public health journal Epidemiologic Reviews found that safe gun storage programmes are effective - especially when participants are given a free way to lock up their own firearms. The question US parents hate to ask Is anyone held accountable? In one US case, a woman from Florida was accidentally shot in the back by her four-year-old son. The gun was underneath the front seat of her pickup truck. Laws differ by state, but in Florida, it is illegal for minors to have a gun unless they are under adult supervision. Authorities in Florida said the mother, 31-year-old Jamie Gilt, should have faced a misdemeanour charge for unsafe storage of a firearm - but she was ultimately not charged. Instead, she must complete a gun safety course and provide proof that she is safely storing guns in her home and car. Research from Everytown for Gun Safety shows that 28 US states and the District of Columbia have laws that hold gun owners criminally liable for children's access, but they vary greatly. In Texas, the family member of a child who is shot cannot be arrested for improper gun storage within seven days of the shooting. Provisions of laws in Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee, New Hampshire and Rhode Island also make criminal charges unlikely for gun-owning parents in the event of a shooting.	A four-year-old has killed herself using her grandmother's gun, the latest in a string of shootings that involve young children. Are these incidents on the rise?
+text: The artist, who died in 2011, specified in his will that the artworks should be donated in place of inheritance tax. Freud bought the Corot portrait at an auction in 2001 and it had hung on the top floor of his London home. The Corot will go to the National Gallery while three Degas sculptures will be shown at The Courtauld Gallery. Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot was a leading mid-19th Century French painter who was a particular influence on the Impressionists. His portraits were never exhibited by the artist during his lifetime. The painting, L' Italienne ou La Femme á la Manche Jaune (The Italian Woman, or Woman with Yellow Sleeve) has not been seen in public for more than 60 years and dates from the last years of Corot's life. Prior to Freud's purchase of the painting in 2001, it was once owned by Hollywood star Edward G Robinson. The bronze sculptures, Horse Galloping on Right Foot; La Masseuse (The Masseuse); and Portrait of a Woman: Head Resting on One Hand were cast from wax models by Degas - considered one of the greatest artists of the late 19th Century. Public display Alan Davey, Chief Executive, Arts Council England, called the acceptance in lieu (AIL) scheme "a great success story for this country's cultural heritage". He added the scheme had made "thousands of important pieces of art made available for public display". Culture Secretary Maria Miller said she was "delighted that these magnificent works by Corot and Degas will now be on permanent public display, where they can be enjoyed by all". Freud, who was widely considered to be Britain's greatest living artist before his death at the age of 88, fled to the UK from Germany with his family to escape the Nazis. He became a British citizen in 1939. A retrospective of his work at the National Portrait Gallery last May attracted more than 175,000 visitors in a matter of weeks, making it the gallery's most popular paid-for show.	The estate of British painter Lucian Freud has bequeathed works by Corot and Degas to the nation, under the government's acceptance in lieu scheme.
+text: Work started at St John's Market in June which includes increasing the number of stalls from 90 to 120. Liverpool City Council which bought back control of all city markets in a £1 deal has overseen the work. Its opening on 14 November coincides with the completion of the authority's £3.5m upgrade to the surrounding public realm around Clayton Square. St John's Market's last refurbishment in 1971 was opened by the Queen. Councillor Malcolm Kennedy, cabinet member for regeneration, said the market had become "tired and dated" with "the feel of the 1970s". He said now it has been "totally transformed" and "people will simply not recognise the place". Related Internet Links St Johns Shopping Centre	A Liverpool market which dates back almost 200 years is to reopen next month after a £2.5m revamp.
+text: By Kevin PeacheyPersonal finance reporter Two new coins - featuring the bear from darkest Peru at the Tower of London and St Paul's Cathedral - have been released by The Royal Mint. On Tuesday, they filled the tills at the Mint's museum in Llantrisant, South Wales, and will be circulated more generally in the coming weeks. The coins mark 60 years of Paddington. The first Paddington book was published in October 1958 and the series following his adventures have become classics of children's literature. Last year, the Mint released 50p coins depicting the fictional bear visiting other London landmarks - the train station after which he was named, and the guards outside Buckingham Palace. Now two more of the capital's landmarks feature in the latest designs. Nicola Howell, director of consumer coins at The Royal Mint, said: "Following the huge popularity of the coins featuring the much-loved bear last year, we thought it was only right that Paddington continued his adventures around London on UK coinage. "Paddington Bear is a massive part of British popular culture and is a favourite amongst fans of all ages, who we're sure will be looking out for him in their change." A host of different designs feature on 50p coins. Just this year, they have ranged from another children's favourite character The Gruffalo to a black hole in memory of Stephen Hawking. In addition to placing the Paddington coins in general circulation, the Mint - which is wholly owned by the Treasury - is selling a collector's "mint condition" coin, with the same design for £10 and a gold coin for £850. Any relative buying one for children at such a mark-up will no doubt add the note: "Please look after this coin".	They may not be enough to buy a decent jar of marmalade, but new 50p coins featuring Paddington Bear have entered circulation.
+text: Hull FC supporter Lee Middleton is raising money for Hull4Heroes' plan to build homes for 120 ex-service personnel in Cottingham. The shirt has been designed by local artists and schoolchildren. Mr Middleton raised £10,000 for NHS charities in Hull with a similar project last year. Once built, the 48-unit development - the first of its kind in the UK - will provide housing for ex-servicemen and women and their families. Mr Middleton, who runs Hull FC supporters' group The Mighty Black and Whites, has so far raised £2,000 from the sales of a range of shirts and hoodies. "I was not in the services but I think people tend to get forgotten when they leave and we should help out as a community," he said. "Also, my wife's dad served for 25 years in the RAF and my granddad was in the army in World War Two, so it is a subject close to my heart. "It is hard for all charities at the moment and Hull4Heroes need every penny they can get." The shirts will stay on sale until 31 December. Follow BBC Yorkshire on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk. Related Internet Links The Mighty Black and Whites	A rugby league fan is hoping to raise thousands of pounds for a veterans' village in East Yorkshire through the sale of a specially designed shirt.
+text: By Katherine SellgrenBBC News education reporter The changes could result in GCSE exam results becoming less predictable, Ofqual said. In a letter to Education Secretary Michael Gove, the head of Ofqual, Glenys Stacey, called for a period of stability in the exams system. Her comments are in response to a consultation on school accountability. In February, Mr Gove announced that secondary schools in England would no longer be judged on the proportion of pupils who achieved five or more A*-C grades at GCSE, including English and maths. Instead two new league-table measures will be introduced, examining the percentage of pupils who reach a set threshold in English and maths, and an average points score showing how much progress each child makes between the end of primary school and GCSE level in eight subjects. This followed concerns that current accountability measures encourage schools to "play the system" to boost their league-table standing. In her response to the Department for Education's (DfE) consultation on the changes to accountability, Ms Stacey says she believes the proposals are "very much in the right direction". But she notes that the plans mean the subjects included in the "best eight" measure are counted equally. "You may want to consider giving different weights to the eight qualifications to recognise the particular importance of English and maths in the overall mix." She also says league tables should not "over-emphasise" certain grade boundaries in key subjects. "You will need to make sure you do not over-emphasise grade threshold measures of threshold performance in key qualifications." 'Kept stable' The letter continues: "Ideally, qualifications used in accountability measures will be kept stable over a period of years. "When qualifications change, results vary more than normal - both between schools and from year to year - and this variability is inevitable for several years as reforms work their way through the system. "What is more, with improved GCSE assessment, results are likely to prove less predictable in future years, and more variable school by school. "It is tempting, as soon as something is quantified, to assume it to be a more precise measure than it can ever really be. "This needs to be recognised in the use of accountability measures by DfE, Ofsted and other users." The government has announced plans for major GCSE reform which will see exams sat at the end of two-year courses, rather than in modules throughout, as well as an increase in extended questions and less internal assessment. Revised GCSEs in academic subjects, including English and maths, are due to be introduced in 2015. However, Mr Gove stopped short of introducing a new qualification for 16-year-olds called the English Baccalaureate Certificate (EBCs). A spokeswoman for the DfE said: "Ofqual is clear that the current system is affected by perverse incentives, distorts teaching, narrows the curriculum and places too much pressure on qualifications. "The regulator also says our proposals to develop accountability measures are in very much the right direction. We have recently consulted on proposals and will respond in due course."	The government's planned overhaul of GCSEs in England could see results "varying more than normal" for several years, the exams regulator has said.
+text: She will begin a two-year stint at the university's Centre for New Writing in October. The writer of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit will teach a post graduate MA workshop, MA seminar and lecture to undergraduates. She succeeds Colm Toibin, who completes his year-long tenure and Martin Amis who spent four years at the university. 'Exciting place' Winterson will also hold four public events a year at the university's Martin Harris Centre, with renowned guests from the literary world. "The Centre for New Writing at Manchester is a serious and exciting place," she said. "Students are carefully selected and where there is a deep interest in what writing can do an at individual level and for the wider culture. "I am from Manchester and the north is part of me; how I write as well as who I am. Let's see what happens next." Winterson was born in Manchester and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire. Her first novel, the semi-autobiographical Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, was published in 1985 when she was 25. It went on to become an international bestseller. In August she will publish a novella in the new Hammer Horror series called The Daylight Gate about the Lancashire witches. Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell, from the university, said: "We are certain she will inspire her Manchester students and audiences."	Author Jeanette Winterson is to become a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester.
+text: By Louise CullenBBC News NI But the ultimate sacrifice, made by Thomas and Albert, was never recognised on any memorial. "My grandfather, Thomas, he joined in 1914 at Ballykinler and went to France. Albert, his brother, joined not long after that," said Cyril Hawthorne. "Albert was killed at Messines in the Battle of Passchendaele. "My grandfather was at the Battle of the Somme and that's where he was killed. It seems he was carrying ammunition and a shell hit him and blew him to bits. "There was no grave. My grandmother was sent a certificate - 'missing, believed killed'." The eight Hawthorne brothers headed off to war in 1914 - just weeks after their father had died. The strength of his widow in sending her sons off was praised in a local paper. The family has a longstanding military history, and the absence of two relatives' names on any memorial Cyril could find weighed heavily on him. "I was military myself, so I was always interested," he said. "They were originally from Magheragall, and I said, 'they're bound to be on some of the cenotaphs in some of them wee villages'. "But I couldn't find them. "A man goes out and leaves four kids and a wife, he goes out to fight in France with his brothers - it's hard to take in. "That's when I felt it, and I said there had to be something done." Along with his cousin Marian, he began researching the history. They contacted the British Legion and Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council. "I think it's a slow process, it's only every so many years that they look this sort of thing up and the names go on. But thank God, it's happened for us." Thomas and Albert's names have been added to the war memorial in Lisburn, and this Armistice Day, Cyril will join other family members in laying a wreath where his ancestors are commemorated. "I'm looking forward to it so much. I've everything ready to put on me - my blazer, my grandfather's medals. "They're a hundred years of age, even the ribbon." Cyril and the whole family are prepared for an emotional day. "There's me, with nine grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren - I'm gifted, so I am," said Cyril. "But I never met my grandfather, and that's the sad part. I would have loved to have met him. "I'm proud to be a Hawthorne."	Eight Hawthorne brothers joined the Great War effort. Only six returned.
+text: Sussex Police said officers were called to the middle of Chichester at about 17:30 GMT on Thursday. Two boys, both aged 12, were arrested on suspicion of attempted robbery. The pair, from Chichester, have been released on bail until 12 February while the investigation continues, a police spokesman said. Insp Sharon Sawyer said: "We understand that this incident is likely to cause alarm for members of the community. However, such incidents are rare." Follow BBC South East on Facebook, on Twitter, and on Instagram. Send your story ideas to southeasttoday@bbc.co.uk. Related Internet Links Sussex Police	Two 12-year-olds have been arrested after people reported being threatened with knives in a city centre.
+text: It came into force on 1 May in a bid to give the county's 400 licensed taxi drivers "a more professional image". But after more than 500 people signed a petition in protest, the council's licensing committee agreed to reconsider the issue on Wednesday. The committee decided taxi drivers will be allowed to wear shorts, as long as they are "tailored" and "appropriate". Rhyl taxi driver Colin Howell had described the ban as a "joke" and a "farce". He said: "It's far too hot in a taxi. To wear shorts cools us down and stops fatigue. "The council should stop having silly meetings about taxi drivers wearing shorts and get Rhyl back to being the town it once was. "It's a joke to be honest. It's just a farce." Some drivers in Rhyl have been reportedly wearing kilts to work in protest. The authority's public protection manager Emlyn Jones said six drivers had attended a consultation workshop prior to the policy being introduced and all had been in favour of the ban.	A ban on Denbighshire taxi drivers wearing shorts has been reversed.
+text: Henrique Capriles, an ex-presidential candidate, said the move was in protest at the decision by four newly elected opposition governors to pledge allegiance to the constituent assembly. The Roundtable for Democracy (MUD) regards the assembly as illegitimate. The MUD governors were elected in regional polls this month in which the government won 18 out of 23 states. The outcome of the 15 October elections, which it said were fraudulent - and President Nicolas Maduro's insistence that all new governors bow to the constituent assembly - has caused a rift among members of the opposition coalition. Mr Capriles said on Tuesday that he "would not be part" of the opposition MUD "because it is not unity as a concept or a vision". "It is just some people that grab the bones that are thrown to them," he said. Five MUD governors who won seats opted to boycott a previous event in which 18 newly elected socialist governors were sworn in to the constituent assembly. However, four of them - the governors for Táchira, Mérida, Nuevo Esparta and Anzoátegui - later changed their stance and pledged allegiance, defying their coalition's official position. Mr Maduro, who has described the election result as a victory, said governors who refused to be sworn in by the constituent assembly would not be allowed to take up office. The MUD have published what they say is evidence of fraud in the state of Bolívar, where the government candidate was declared the winner after a two-day delay.	Venezuela's opposition has taken a hit after one of its leading members announced he was leaving the coalition.
+text: The Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) was set up in 2015 to identify perpetrators of chemical attacks. It is due to report later this week on a deadly nerve agent attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun in April. Russia has rejected a separate report from UN human rights investigators blaming the Syrian government. The JIM's mandate expires next month and Russia had been pushing to postpone a vote on its extension until after the report on Khan Sheikhoun was considered. But Russia could not get enough support and instead used its veto to block adoption. Russia, along with the UK, China, France and the US, have veto powers at the Security Council. It is the ninth time Russia has blocked action against its ally Syria, something rights group Amnesty called "a green light for war crimes". The US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, was also scathing, accusing Russia of siding with "dictators and terrorists". But Russian ambassador Vasily Nebenzia accused the US and others of trying to embarrass Russia. "What is taking place today is not very pleasant, it stinks in fact," he said, adding that Russia was prepared to discuss the JIM after the report's publication. The JIM, which involves the UN and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, is the only formal means of investigating chemical weapons attacks in Syria. At its founding it was hoped it could help lead to prosecutions. The attack on Khan Sheikhoun in April left more than 80 people dead and prompted the US to launch missile strikes on a Syrian airbase. Last month a UN Human Rights Council inquiry concluded a Syrian air force jet was responsible, dismissing statements from Russia that the jet had dropped conventional munitions that struck a rebel chemical weapons depot. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has said the incident in Khan Sheikhoun was a "fabrication". He has insisted Syria destroyed its chemical stockpiles under a deal brokered after another deadly attack near Damascus in 2013 although this year the US defence secretary said there was "no doubt" it had retained some.	Russia has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution extending the mandate of the only official mission investigating the use of chemical weapons in Syria.
+text: Ali Issa Ahmad, 26, from Wolverhampton, is said to have been unaware of a law against "showing sympathy" for Qatar. He has been released from custody and has since "departed from UAE", it is understood. He was held by police after reporting the attack, his friend said. Previously, the UAE embassy in London said Mr Ahmad had been charged with wasting police time and making false statements. It previously said he was "categorically not arrested for wearing a Qatar football shirt". Mr Ahmad, who is said to be a dual Sudanese-British citizen, is understood to have travelled to the UAE for a holiday and the Foreign Office said it had been assisting a British man arrested in the UAE and was in touch with the local authorities. Mr Ahmad was arrested after watching Qatar play Iraq in an Asian Cup match in Abu Dhabi on 22 January. His friend Amer Lokie said Mr Ahmad told him he had been assaulted after leaving the stadium and when he later reported the attack to police, Mr Ahmad was subsequently held. The UAE and four other countries in the region are currently engaged in a political and diplomatic stand-off with Qatar, which they have accused of supporting radical and Islamist groups. On its website, the Foreign Office warns travellers to the UAE of a June 2017 announcement "that showing sympathy for Qatar on social media or by any other means of communication is an offence". Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, on Twitter, and sign up for local news updates direct to your phone.	A British man who was detained in the United Arab Emirates after reportedly being assaulted when he wore a Qatar football team shirt to a match has "left custody", the BBC understands.
+text: Alexanda Kotey, 34, and El Shafee Elsheikh, 29, were the last two members of the cell to remain at large. The four, all from London, were nicknamed "the Beatles" because of their British accents. US officials said the "execution cell" had beheaded at least 27 hostages and tortured many more. Families of the men's victims have called for the two seized men to go on trial. Diane Foley - whose son James, an American journalist, was captured and beheaded by IS - told BBC Radio 4's Today programme she wants the men to face life imprisonment. "Their crimes are beyond imagination," she added. Nicolas Henin, a French journalist who spent 10 months as an IS captive, also told Today that he wanted justice. He stressed that any attempt to deny the men of their civil rights would only feed IS's claims of victimisation by the West. Who were the IS 'Beatles'? Who were the Islamic State 'Beatles'? The gangster who ditched drugs for jihad How were they captured? The latest arrests were confirmed by US officials. Officials quoted by US media said the two men had been captured by members of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who are targeting remnants of IS. The UK Foreign Office, meanwhile, said it did not comment on individual cases or investigations. Their capture was first reported by the New York Times, who noted that American officials had wanted to keep the news secret. The aim was "to allow analysts more time to pursue the intelligence leads developed from their detention and prepare raids against unsuspecting Islamic State targets", the newspaper said. The Syrian fighters who apprehended them told US officials in mid-January that the two may have been captured, and the men's identities were later confirmed using fingerprints and other biometric data. The families of the men told the BBC they were not aware of the capture until the story was reported by news organisations. What is the state of IS in Syria? The Islamic State group's self-declared caliphate - its area of control - shrunk rapidly last year. In October, the group lost its "capital" of Raqqa to the SDF. In the beginning of November, it lost Deir-al Zour in Syria on the same day as it lost al-Qaim in Iraq. The SDF is an alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters opposed to IS. The US-backed group has played a key role in driving IS from its strongholds in Syria. The US has said it aims to maintain an open-ended military presence in the country to ensure the jihadist group's defeat. However, the presence of large numbers of Kurdish armed forces in northern Syria has alarmed neighbouring Turkey. Analysis: What happened to all the foreign fighters? Gordon Corera, security correspondent The pair are said to have provided valuable intelligence following their capture. That may be helpful in answering the wider question of what happened to the foreign fighters as the so-called caliphate disintegrated. How many of the thousands of foreign fighters were killed and how many went to other countries or would seek to come home? These men will have been priority targets - but not the only ones. Their capture also raises the issue of what happens next. They could be put on trial in the US, since they were allegedly involved in the killing of US hostages - but there may be some in the Trump administration who would like to send them to Guantanamo Bay. And it is not clear if this is - formally - an issue for the UK Government, as there are reports the pair may have had their UK citizenship stripped from them using powers available to the Home Office. Secret convoy let hundreds of IS fighters escape	Two British men believed to be members of a notorious Islamic State group cell have been seized by Syrian Kurdish fighters, US officials say.
+text: Mark EastonHome editor@BBCMarkEastonon Twitter It was a "glorious summer". Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings, Our dreadful marches to delightful measures. (Richard III, Shakespeare) The tone of our national conversation changed - from its default position of self-criticism and negativity, Britain found itself speaking with a cheerful and optimistic voice. There was a moment when it seemed the British press decided as one that the country wanted to be positive about the Games. Stories of lost coach drivers, missing security staff, chaotic public transport and diplomatic incidents over flags were no longer given space. The editor demanded uplifting tales of Olympian heroics and organisational triumph. Instead of mounting barbed steeds To fright the souls of fearful adversaries, He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber To the lascivious pleasing of a lute. (Richard III) It was an extraordinary shift. We view our world through frames of understanding, the boundaries fixed by agreed narrative. Until mid-July, the story of London 2012 had been shaped by an accepted wisdom that the Games were hubristic extravagance at a time of austerity - not only a colossal waste of money but an event that would expose the shortcomings of a second-rate nation. Something altered that frame, re-worked its carpentry to fit a different tale. Was it the sight of large crowds braving horizontal rain and sharp winds to cheer the torch relay on its journey to Stratford? Was it the absence of chaos on the capital's roads, Fleet Street's finest discovering that London still functioned (even if it had taken wads of cash handed to public transport staff)? Or was it that the head of advertising reminded editorial just how much the paper had invested in its Olympic pull-outs and supplements? (Whoops! I am in danger of slipping into pre-summer cynicism.) Whatever it was, with a ceremony conducted by a now complicit media, London 2012 was woven into the "civil religion" of the nation - afforded the same reverence as flag and anthem. Criticism became almost unpatriotic and those that continued to carp found their words lost on the winds of success and praise. British summertime is always different from the mean time of the Westminster calendar. With the benches empty, the adversarial point-scoring of daily politics is absent too. That does change the tone of national argument and debate. But the summer of 2012 took the discussion into a different space. It was as though our ancient country looked in the mirror and noticed something which belied the thin lips and wrinkled countenance staring back. There was kindliness and fun, self-confidence and competence in twinkling eyes, a look it had almost forgotten it ever had. From the opening of the Olympics to the closing of the Paralympics, Britain banished all traces of a scowl and adopted a welcoming smile. It was not some Micawberesque optimism or ghastly forced grin, but a joyous recognition that our country is a whole lot better than we had allowed ourselves to say. I think attitudes may have changed for good. This summer has reminded us of the values we know lie at the core of our national character: tolerance, charity and general goodwill. At the weekend, as the Olympic stadium overflowed with fun and Paralympian admiration, I was watching another London stage where disability was portrayed as an explanation for evil ambition rather than a motivation for sporting triumph. Mark Rylance's Richard III scuttled across the boards of the Globe Theatre, his withered arm symbolising a malevolent soul. I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, And that so lamely and unfashionable That dogs bark at me as I halt by them; (Richard III) The play is a reminder of centuries of street prejudice against those with disabilities. Today, in the golden shadow of the Games, I wonder whether hostility or patronising pity has been replaced by respect and empathy. The success of the Games Makers has perhaps changed attitudes towards voluntarism - a recognition that it is a vital part of public life, a platform for displaying the generosity of spirit and individuality that are central to British life. The summer may also have made us more self-confident, reminding a country which will need to draw on its stores of resilience that it has much to be proud of: organisational ability; creative talent; the skills to nurture sporting excellence; a sense of humour. Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths. (Richard III)	The UK's national conversation is conducted in sceptical tones but for a few months we have talked in cheerful, optimistic voices. Have we changed our default position for good?
+text: The cash will be spent on schemes across Wales over the next four years. The majority of places will be targeted at 16-24 year olds and will allow people to earn a wage while learning new skills through training providers in areas including IT and construction. It is being funded by £73m in EU funding on top of Welsh government money. Money will be spent on schemes in Conwy, Anglesey, Gwynedd, Denbighshire, Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire, Swansea, Neath Port Talbot, Bridgend, Rhondda Cynon Taff, Merthyr Tydfil, Caerphilly, Blaenau Gwent and Torfaen. Analysis: Business correspondent Brian Meechan This is a significant sum of money targeted at trying to create a more skilled nation to improve prosperity. The Welsh government says it will mean keeping the apprenticeship budget at around £90m a year. The National Training Federation Wales says, in reality, the budget is less than it has been in previous years and the number of apprentices is falling. Apprenticeships has been a key election issue with the parties promising extra money to create many more in the UK in the next parliament. This also lets the Welsh government highlight the role of European funds in the economy with EU membership, another significant election issue, though it will do nothing to change the minds of who want the UK to leave.	A £144m fund to pay for 52,000 apprenticeships in Wales will be announced on Thursday.
+text: Nia Griffith resigned as shadow Welsh Secretary in June, claiming Mr Corbyn had "lost the confidence of the party". The Llanelli MP has now told the Newyddion 9 programme she would take a frontbench post if Mr Corbyn was re-elected leader. The leadership result will be announced on Saturday. Ms Griffith said: "I think it is very important that people come together. "In that context I'm willing to serve if I'm part of a team that reflects every wing of the party." Swansea East AM Mike Hedges, who is a supporter of Mr Corbyn, said he expected a victory for him. He said Welsh Labour MPs should "take heed" of proposed parliamentary boundary changes, where some seats could be merged, because some MPs who have attacked Mr Corbyn could lose out. He added: "It's crucial that MPs pull together so that the party is united not just for the next UK general election but for next year's council elections." Jo Stevens, a member of Mr Corbyn's frontbench but a supporter of his leadership rival Owen Smith, said the Labour leader needed to make compromises to the rest of the party if he wins the contest. The Cardiff Central MP added all party members had to be honest with each other and share the responsibility of building up relations that have broken down between some MPs and supporters of Mr Corbyn. "Politics is not easy," she said. "We have to be grown up about it, have some tough love and make sure we do a better job in the next 12 months than in the past 12 months."	A senior Welsh Labour MP has said she would be willing to serve under Jeremy Corbyn again, three months after quitting the shadow cabinet.
+text: Asked at a business event in Manchester if he would be a candidate, the former foreign secretary replied: "Of course I'm going to go for it." Mrs May has said she will resign once MPs back her Brexit deal. A decision on her exit timetable will now take place after the House of Commons votes on her Brexit bill early next month. Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench Conservative MPs, made the announcement following a meeting between the prime minister and his committee's executive on Thursday. He said it would bring "greater clarity" to Mrs May's intentions. Several senior Conservatives are expected to enter the contest for the leadership, with the winner also becoming prime minister. Asked at the British Insurance Brokers' Association conference in Manchester whether he wanted to be in charge of his party, former London mayor Mr Johnson said: "I'm going to go for it. Of course I'm going to go for it. I don't think that is any particular secret to anybody. But you know there is no vacancy at present." Mrs May's withdrawal agreement with the EU has been rejected three times by the Commons. And she has come under increasing pressure to go after the Conservatives lost more than 1,300 councillors in recent local elections. Many Conservative MPs are also unhappy that Mrs May is holding cross-party talks with Labour in an effort to get her withdrawal agreement through the Commons. Mr Johnson, a leading Brexiteer who quit the cabinet last year over the terms of the agreement, said: "I do think there's been a real lack of grip and dynamism in the way we approached these talks [with the EU]." The MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip added: "We've failed over the last three years to put forward a convincing narrative about how we can make sense of Brexit and how to exploit the opportunities of Brexit." In a Conservative leadership contest, MPs hold a series of ballots, with the candidate gaining the fewest votes eliminated at each stage. Once the field is reduced to two, the winner is chosen by a vote of party members. This wider vote did not occur in 2016, when Mrs May became leader, after the second-placed candidate among MPs - Mrs Leadsom - stood aside. International Development Secretary Rory Stewart and former work and pensions secretary Esther McVey have announced they will run and Commons leader Andrea Leadsom has said she is "considering" doing so. Other widely touted possible contenders include former and current members of the cabinet, including Michael Gove, Amber Rudd, Sajid Javid, Dominic Raab, Jeremy Hunt, Penny Mordaunt and Liz Truss. Publisher William Collins has announced that the biography of David Cameron - whom Mrs May replaced at Conservative leader and prime minister following the EU referendum - will be released in September.	Boris Johnson has said he will run for the Conservative Party leadership after Theresa May stands down.
+text: The breach in Epperstone, Nottinghamshire, left homes without running water for more than 12 hours. Nottinghamshire County Council said its offer of help was turned down by Severn Trent Water (STW). Water supplies were returned to all areas, including Bingham and Radcliffe-on-Trent, by about midnight on Sunday. Live updates and more from Nottinghamshire Jonathan Smith of STW said: "There's learning opportunities for us here, we don't think we did well enough for our customers throughout all of this. "We did get bottles of water out to our most vulnerable customers, like nursing homes, [but] we thought we could get people back on more quickly than we could get water supplies to them". Sally Hall, who was driving through Epperstone on Sunday morning, described how her "car was sucked across the road" into the sinkhole. Councillor Alan Rhodes, leader of Nottinghamshire County Council, said the authority was ready to help the affected areas but was told it was not needed. "The county council offered its services to Severn Trent and we were told we weren't required," Mr Rhodes said. "We could well have helped to make sure vulnerable householders were catered for; we could have helped with any evacuations. "But we were told none of that was required". Mike Godwin, who lives in Bingham, said residents were left without information and had to buy water for people in need. "Thankfully we've got a Facebook group in Bingham that helps and really it was only through that that people knew what was going on" he said. Mr Godwin has now asked Newark & Bingham MP Robert Jenrick to review STW's response.	A water company has admitted it did not deal "well enough" with a sinkhole and burst main which left up to 20,000 homes without water.
+text: By Stephen WalkerBBC News NI Political Correspondent Statues have been attacked as part of the protest over the death of African-American George Floyd in US police custody. Arlene Foster said she understands the desire to protest but said she was sad to see memorials and statues being boarded up. She said it was "incredibly sad to see the Cenotaph boarded up" in London. A statue in London of former British prime minister Winston Churchill was vandalised with graffiti declaring him a "racist". Speaking on ITV's Good Morning Britain programme, Mrs Foster described Mr Churchill as "one of our greatest leaders". She said it was "wrong to erase history" and said it was important to have a "balanced conversation". She also said, as a former girl guide leader, that she praised the work of Lord Baden Powell, who formed the scouting movement. His statue is to be removed from Poole Quay amid fears it is on a target list for attack. Mrs Foster said his organisation had done good "right across the world".	The first minister said there needs to be a "balanced conversation" about the removal of statues across the UK.
+text: The Oscar-winning-star was named one of five new Praemium Imperiale Laureates, along with British sculptor Anish Kapoor. The announcement was made during a Japanese-sponsored arts ceremony in London. The award, worth 15 million yen (£115,000), will be formally presented at a ceremony in Tokyo in October. 'Popular and beloved' "I feel overwhelmed. I've been to Japan twice with the RSC [Royal Shakespeare Company] and I made a lot of really good friends," Dame Judi said. The star, who has had a successful and varied career in film and on stage, said: "I call myself a theatre actor. The greatest body of my work is in the the theatre and the theatre is the thing I really love the best." She also plays spy boss M in the James Bond films. BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten, who is the UK adviser for the prize, said Dame Judi was "one of Britain's greatest actors and certainly most popular and beloved actors". He added: "It's a tremendous honour for Britain, Anish Kapoor and Judi Dench. "It's hugely important given the contribution Britain makes to the arts and I think people will really see the vibrancy of the UK in cultural terms." US artist Bill Viola, Mexican architect Ricardo Legoretta and Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa were also named as laureates. The Queen later congratulated the recipients of the award at a reception at Buckingham Palace. Kapoor, 57, said he had talked to the Queen "about making things and sculpture and the Olympic project that I'm involved in". Previous winners include David Hockney and Richard Attenborough.	Veteran actress Dame Judi Dench said she felt "overwhelmed" to accept one of the art world's most valuable awards.
+text: Those in Afghanistan will be cut from about 5,000 down to 2,500 by mid-January, officials said. In Iraq they will be reduced from 3,000 to 2,500. President Trump has previously said he wants "all" troops home by Christmas. He is refusing to concede the 3 November election to Joe Biden. The withdrawal should be finished by 15 January, US media reported, just days before Mr Biden's inauguration as president. But Mr Trump's reported plan is facing rare criticism from a fellow Republican - Senate leader Mitch McConnell, who warned militants would "love" the idea. Speaking on the floor of the upper chamber on Monday, the Kentucky senator said: "We're playing a limited - limited - but important role in defending American national security and American interests against terrorists who would like nothing more than for the most powerful force for good in the world to simply pick up our ball and go home. "They would love that." President Trump has long called for US troops to come home and has criticised US military interventions for being costly and ineffective. Military leaders were told at the weekend about the planned withdrawals, according to officials quoted by the Associated Press news agency. An executive order is being drawn up but has not yet been sent to commanders, they added. In September, the Pentagon announced it was to withdraw more than a third of its troops from Iraq within weeks - from about 5,200 to 3,000. At the time, top US Middle East commander Gen Kenneth McKenzie said those remaining would continue to advise and assist Iraqi security forces in "rooting out the final remnants" of the jihadist group Islamic State (IS). US-led forces invaded Iraq in 2003 to overthrow President Saddam Hussein, hunting for weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. US forces have been in Afghanistan since 2001. A US-led coalition ousted the Taliban weeks after the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US by al-Qaeda, which was then based in Afghanistan. The Taliban regrouped and became an insurgent force that by 2018 was active in more than two-thirds of the country. The US started withdrawing troops from Afghanistan earlier this year as part of a deal with the Taliban aimed at securing peace in the country. Drawing back troops was a condition of a historic accord signed by the US and the militants on 29 February. However, military chiefs, including Gen McKenzie, have warned in the past that peace negotiations between the Taliban and Afghan authorities could be undermined by a hasty US withdrawal.	The US military expects President Donald Trump to order a further withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, according to defence officials quoted by US media.
+text: In many cases there was no intervention from pupils, teachers or other staff. The research in Dumfries and Galloway has prompted a call for more to be done to tackle discriminatory language. LGBT Youth Scotland said it was clear action was required. The EIS union said teachers used a range of approaches to deal with such issues. The research received responses from nearly 400 pupils across the region. Kerry Riddell of LGBT Youth Scotland said it was an issue that could have serious repercussions for the students involved. 'Real impact' "It is a really big concern," she said. "We know that if a young person hears negative comments relentlessly about their identity, it is not particularly good for your mental health. "It doesn't encourage you to come out if that's something that you were considering doing. "Being in the closet for many years is not good for your mental health either so there's a real impact of that kind of relentless negative language that people hear." She said a lot of the young people using discriminatory terms did not do it out of "badness". "They just need to understand a bit more about the impact of it and that's really where professionals come in," she said. "There is certainly more work to be done in schools to tackle it." 'Throwaway comments' Ms Riddell said people needed to understand that what they thought of as "throwaway comments or banter" were actually "really harmful". Andrew O'Halloran, local EIS secretary, said teachers were aware of the issue but dealt with it in different ways. "It's unfortunate to realise that homophobia continues in our society and our schools," he said. "Teachers should be aware that homophobia is completely out of place in modern society and teachers will be aware that they have to deal with it. "Teachers may choose to deal with it overtly by challenging it, but there may be circumstances where they have to just go away and talk to someone else and this may be based upon knowledge of the class and the pupils in front of them."	A study of LGBT young people has found 80% of pupils had encountered fellow students making homophobic, biphobic or transphobic remarks.
+text: The pipeline took two years and 6,000 workers to build. The 360-mile-long (580km) pipeline from the Thar deserts of Rajasthan to the Gujarat coast passes through 270 villages and 34 major rivers. Edinburgh-based Cairn, which previously had to move oil to the refineries by truck, will now be able to sell through the pipeline. It will be able to gradually increase both production and sales. The unique nature of the Rajasthan crude requires the pipeline to be heated to ensure the continuous flow of oil. There are also 35 heating stations at 20km (12 mile) intervals along the length of the pipeline. Rahul Dhir, managing director of the company in India, said: "Cairn India is delighted that crude oil sales from Mangala, through the pipeline, have started. "It has taken 24 months to link this key piece of infrastructure from Rajasthan to the refineries which will allow for significant production growth."	Cairn Energy has completed the world's longest heated pipeline to pump oil from its Rajasthan field in India.
+text: Dr. Vickramabahu Karunaratne, the leader of the Left Front, currently visiting the northern Sri Lankan town as part of his election campaign said that over 300 families in the Manalkadu camp needs to be sent to Vanni where they come from. He told BBC Sandeshaya that the military was reluctant to allow him to visit camps for the internally displaced people (IDPs) in Jaffna but later allowed on his insistence that the presidential candidates have a right to campaign throughout the island. No income "Although the camps are in the vicinity of the sea they are not allowed fishing and the IDPs have to depend on the food rations," Dr. Karunaratne said. The refugees are held in a military camp environment, he said. Jaffna that has been under the military and the LTTE for time to time, was last captured by the government security forces in 1995. Hundreds of IDPs are still kept in Jaffna, but journalists or independent visitors are not allowed to visit the camps. Dr. Karunaratne, one of the few to gain access, told BBC Sinhala service that the IDPS requested authorities to resettle them in their original lands as soon as possible. But the government insists that the full resettlement will only be carried out after the de mining in the north is completed.	A leftwing presidential candidate in Sri Lanka's forthcoming elections says that refugees in Jaffna still lack basic facilities and struggling to find a way of living.
+text: Nóra Quoirin was "found on a rock" last August by Chong Yue Fatt after a huge search of dense rainforest. Her family have always insisted Nóra would not wander off alone. The inquest which started two months ago has resumed after a witness came into contact with a Covid-19 patient. Nóra's family were staying in Sora House in Dusun eco-resort near Seremban, about 40 miles (65km) south of Kuala Lumpur, when Nóra, who was born with holoprosencephaly, a disorder which affects brain development, was first reported missing a day after they arrived on 3 August. The 15-year-old's body was found on 13 August by the group of civilian volunteers in a palm-oil plantation about 1.5 miles from the holiday home. Mr Chong told the court in Seremban that the hiking group had trekked in the Pantai area many times before, especially Mount Berembun, but not in the specific area that the body was found. The civilian search group had more than 20 people, all civilians and with no recognised guide but it was led by Chan Kai Sian who is scheduled to give evidence on Thursday. He said Mr Chan had been involved in previous searches and Mr Chong joined on 13 August and the volunteer group were split into pairs. "I saw the body," Mr Chong told the court adding that it was 50m (164ft) away from a shed. "When I found the body, the place where I shouted, that's where I remained standing. "We all tried to call by phone but could not get any calls out. And we asked a Malaysian Indian who knows the area very well, and he was the one who told his father to call the fire department, because there's no (phone) line." Mr Chong said said it felt like "one or two hours" before any assistance arrived. He added: "We told all group members not to come close to the body, because (we were) afraid we would tamper any evidence. We just waited until assistance arrived." The inquest continues.	A volunteer who found the body of a London schoolgirl who disappeared from a Malaysian jungle resort said he had to wait "hours" for authorities to arrive, an inquest has heard.
+text: Amol RajanMedia editor@amolrajanBBCon Twitter There are many factors to consider. First, will an appeal cause further distress to Sir Cliff? The corporation has said that it is sorry for the distress caused to him. If they are sincere about that - and my sense is they are - why extend the agony? Second, to fight this verdict is to keep it in the public eye. When confronted with bad news, institutional leaders often think the best thing is to draw a line and move on. An appeal could create the possibility of more adverse publicity. Third, what are the chances of success? Legal advice will be crucial - though no guarantee, of course, of the likely outcome. And finally, this is public money. Sir Cliff is commonly regarded as a national treasure. Why throw more of other people's money - ie licence-fee payers' incomes - at a case in which a national treasure is aggrieved? Against all this, and in favour of a further appeal, there are practical and philosophical points. On the former, what is the cost of not appealing? If the freedom of journalists is diminished as a result of editorial decisions made by the BBC, then not fighting this verdict could lead to resentment in Fleet Street, where the BBC lacks friends. And then there is the principle. Many journalists, inside the corporation and beyond, really do feel that journalism will be damaged. Leading figures in the newspaper industry think this is just the latest slap in the face for an industry in turmoil. If the liberty of journalists to report without fear or favour is reduced, how can an organisation like BBC News sit idly by? What would Lord Reith say? See - it's complex. Ultimately, the legal advice and cost will determine the BBC's actions. Any prudent organisation has insurance for crises like this. But BBC News needs to save tens of millions, and the rest of the BBC much more. At the best of times, every penny spent by the BBC has to be justified. During austerity, that gets ever harder. If the BBC fights, loses, and is seen to have wasted public funds, the current support from Fleet Street could switch to anger, and brutally fast. If you're interested in issues such as these, please follow me on Twitter or Facebook; and also please subscribe to The Media Show podcast from Radio 4. I'm grateful for all constructive feedback. Thanks.	For the BBC, the decision whether to spend more money on this case is a difficult dilemma with high stakes.
+text: Nicola Howell, who worked in accident and emergency at Southend Hospital, was jailed for six months at Chelmsford Crown Court last year. She had lied during the trial of former boyfriend Michael Turner, who feared losing his Met Police job if convicted. A panel of the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) suspended her from working as a nurse for one year. Turner, of Witham in Essex, was jailed for 18 months by Chelmsford Crown Court in November, for perverting the course of justice. Nicola Fleck, who represented Howell at the tribunal, said her client was "an exceptional nurse with excellent clinical skills" who admitted her offence. In suspending her, the NMC said although it accepted the conviction was unconnected to her work as a nurse, in acting dishonestly she "had breached one of the fundamental tenets of the profession".	A nurse who lied about a former police firearms officer caught speeding has been suspended.
+text: Buses will link the Nantyci car park with the town centre and the hospital twice an hour from 9 February. Health officials hope it will make parking "a little easier" during busy times at the hospital. Staff and visitors will be encouraged to leave their cars and take the bus link to ease congestion. "We strongly encourage our staff, patients and visitors to consider using the service which can be conveniently accessed from the A40 and train station," said Sarah Jennings of Hywel Dda University Health Board. Buses will run from 07:00 to 19:00 GMT Monday to Saturday and also link with shops in the King Street area. Carmarthen council and Hywel Dda will fund the revised service, which will involves free parking at Nantyci and a £1 day return fare.	A cure for parking headaches at Glangwili Hospital in Carmarthen might have been found after an extension of a park-and-ride service.
+text: The drinks manufacturer, which co-owns Carrow Works with Unilever, said it would transfer production of Robinsons and Fruit Shoot to its other sites. It said it would offer employees redeployment and "help to find alternative employment". The Unite union said the announcement just before Christmas was a bid to "bury bad news". Britvic said it currently employed 249 people at the site, which it shares with Colman's Mustard. Manufacturing will instead take place at Rugby, east London and Leeds. "Transferring production will improve efficiency and productivity and reduce our environmental impact," the company said. The decision follows a consultation with employee representatives, including the GMB and Unite unions. Chief executive Simon Litherland said: "This was not a proposal that we made lightly and we understand that the outcome of the collective consultation process will be upsetting for our colleagues in Norwich. "It is a sad and difficult time. "I want to thank everyone at Norwich, past and present, for their dedication, hard work and commitment, and I would like to say again that this decision is in no way a reflection of their performance." The Unite union criticised the timing of the announcement and described the closure as "a hammer blow for the workers and the economy of Norwich in the run up Christmas". Its national officer for the food and drink sector, Julia Long, branded the announcement as "a classic case of trying to bury bad news". The move by Britvic has been mooted for several months, with fears expressed for the future of Colman's Mustard, which has been manufactured at the site since 1860. Unilever, which owns Colman's, has previously said it could shut the site if Britvic closed operations. It is conducting its own review and is looking at three sites in the city, including staying at Carrow Works. Unilever has been approached for comment.	Britvic has confirmed it will leave its Norwich site, with the loss of hundreds of jobs in the city, in 2019.
+text: By Ryan MorrisonBBC News The self-confessed compulsive gambler, "Paul", not his real name, says his addiction almost cost him his marriage. He says he has lost most of the value of a house over his lifetime. He said there were no specific gambling services in the island, but that the government does provide services for alcohol and drugs addiction. "Gambling addiction has the same problems as drug and alcohol addiction. The difference is there are no physical outward signs of gambling addiction but the problems are just as severe. "There is nobody on the island specifically trained to deal with gambling addiction supported by the States of Jersey," he said. Jason Lane, from the Jersey Gambling Commission, said there was help available for addicts if they wanted to take it. He said: "Our Social Responsibility Panel is currently evaluating past experience from colleagues in the Health Service to try and get a rough idea of the level of problem gambling. "If people want anonymous online help they can go to our gambling therapy website, which is a dedicated resource funded by the panel." The island has a population of 100,000 and with the 30th betting shop opening, there is now one shop for every 3,333 people. There are 18 within a mile of each other in the island's capital, St Helier. Mr Lane said this was the first increase in the number of betting shops for 50 years. "We've had 29 operators for 50 years and we don't think that there's a big issue with over or under supply in the market," he said. The 30th shop is being opened in St Helier's Broad Street, a popular lunchtime stop for office workers. It is operated by Guernsey based Galliennes. Owner Trevor Galliennes said he was opening in Jersey to test the market before a possible expansion to the UK. Paul said over his lifetime he has probably lost about £250,000 gambling. His lowest point came when he lost £3,000 in an online bet. "I won the money but the website makes you wait three days to withdraw your money, I couldn't wait even 24 hours and lost the lot. It was then that I realised I needed help," he said. "At that time I had about £20,000 worth of debt and that is when my fiancee at the time found the bank statements and said I needed to sort myself out. It was a Monday and I drove out of the house and went to my first Gamblers Anonymous meeting," he said. He said his gambling addiction started when he was eight-years-old, betting on games in the school playground including throwing a coin against a wall. Paul is now a member of Gamblers Anonymous in Jersey, a group that meets regularly to support each other through their addiction. He said the number of people attending meetings had doubled in the past year from about five to about 10, although the number rises over Christmas. "We are a small group compared to the UK where they have 20 to 25 people from a population of 300,000," he said. "To get 10 at a meeting here out of 100,000 people is fantastic, but it doesn't reflect the number of compulsive gamblers on the island." He said it is not really possible to know exactly how many compulsive gamblers there are in the island, but he points out the higher proportion of betting shops as an example of a problem. "In the UK there are five or 10 [betting shops] per 100,000 people making money. In Jersey there are 30 bookmakers and so if that many are sustainable on the island there must be a larger percentage of gamblers using them." Paul says he has been attending Gamblers Anonymous for about 12 years and has been free from gambling for about nine or 10 of them. He said gamblers do not just gamble with money but also with their life as there are not many people that would tolerate a loved one gambling away their life savings. "When the fixed odds betting terminals first came in I started gambling again and in February last year my wife found out and asked me to leave. I felt at the time my marriage was over due to gambling. "With a lot of work, and I now haven't had a bet in over a year, things are going well. We are moving forward," he said. Last year the Association of British Bookmakers said there were about 8,700 betting shops in the UK, a number that had been stable for 10 years. According to the NHS there are about 450,000 problem gamblers in Britain. People with a problem can contact Gamblers Anonymous.	As the 30th betting shop opens in Jersey one gambler claims not enough is being done to help those with an addiction.
+text: By Hannah RichardsonBBC News education reporter Shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt wrote to Mr Gove saying he was concerned problems at Al-Madinah School revealed a "systemic complacency". The government said it was looking into the school before issues became public. A junior education minister warned the Derby free school it had 17 issues to address including poor standards. Free schools are state-funded schools set up by faith groups, parents, teachers and other individuals and groups. They are directly accountable to the Education Secretary as they are not within the local authority sphere of influence. Al-Madinah School was closed for seven days earlier this month after a single day of inspections by Ofsted which found incomplete records of child protection checks for staff. And concerns were raised about female teachers at the school being told to wear the hijab even if they were not Muslim. 'Temporary closure' In his letter to the education secretary, Mr Hunt said: "In the coming days, we expect Ofsted to publish the inspection report on one of your flagship free schools, the Al-Madinah Free School in Derby. "You will be very aware of the high level of public interest and concern generated by the recent temporary closure of the school and the imminent findings of Her Majesty's Inspectorate. "As I am sure you will agree, there should be no excuse for underperformance in any school. But it is especially troubling that 400 pupils should be deprived of a week of schooling because a publicly funded free school failed in its duty to meet basic child safety requirements." He added: "Moreover, the parliamentary under-secretary of state for schools has recently acknowledged that the Al-Madinah Free School is 'delivering an unacceptably poor standard of education', and I am extremely concerned that this situation could be indicative of a systemic complacency on standards." Mr Hunt went on to ask whether Mr Gove was satisfied with current arrangements for spotting underperformance in free schools. 'Completely resolved' He also asked the education secretary to explain how parents would be provided with a "firm guarantee that their children's education and safety is not being put at risk due to the inadequate oversight of your free school programme". The letter also highlighted claims there were warnings from Ofsted regarding potential issues with welfare, health and safety of pupils at the Derby school before it opened in September 2012. Mr Gove was asked to explain what steps were taken to ensure that these "warnings were heeded" and that "all issues were resolved before the school opened". The Department for Education did not address many of these questions in its statement, but it did say: "We were already investigating this school before allegations became public. We discussed the problems with Ofsted and it launched an immediate inspection. "We have received a response from the Al-Madinah Education Trust. Any decisions made will take into account all the available evidence." The Al-Madinah school was among the first free schools in England with a Muslim ethos, catering for all reception, primary and secondary pupils. But concerns over the application of strict Islamic practices led to a scheduled full inspection being brought forward. A statement on the school website said: "Unsurprisingly, there has been a number of rumours circulating. "While unfortunate, my decision to close the school related to a short-term health and safety issue that has now been completely resolved and will not reoccur." The school has been given a deadline of 22 October to address nine further action points and must provide a plan setting out a clear management structure by the start of November. Ofsted is expected to publish its report on the school in the next week or so.	Michael Gove has been urged to monitor free schools more closely after a Muslim faith school was closed temporarily because of safety concerns.
+text: She tweeted that the local council made a decision not to put on the gig but "that will not stop me". Around 200 fans came to see her perform acoustically before she travelled across the city to watch her friend and collaborator MNEK perform. Becky says the date will be rescheduled and fans should keep their tickets. Speaking on Radio 1 Breakfast with Greg James she said: "It was so nice, my band suggested it on our WhatsApp group." When asked whether her gig in Leeds tomorrow is going ahead she joked: "I think it's better for me if I do it out on the street anyway." She explained last night's open-air performance had affected her voice as she sounded quite croaky on the phone to Greg. Becky has steadily built up a reputation as one of the go-to women for dance singles since her appearance on The Voice in 2012. She's most-recently featured on Back & Forth with MK and Jonas Blue, with her biggest hit so far being her 2014 song called Gecko. Fans tweeted their support for Becky. Becky's tour continues in Leeds on Thursday and will travel to Birmingham on Friday. She'll play in Nottingham on Saturday and Bristol on Monday. Follow Newsbeat on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 every weekday on BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra - if you miss us you can listen back here.	Singer Becky Hill sang on the street outside the Manchester Academy after she was forced to cancel a sold-out show due to a burst water pipe.
+text: A New York congressman urged the party to "dump" Mr Bannon, saying: "His act is tired, inane and morally vacuous." The Breitbart News chief is blamed for egging on President Donald Trump to back Roy Moore, who lost on Tuesday. But Mr Trump seems unwilling to drop Mr Bannon, speaking to him for 15 minutes on Tuesday, the New York Times said. Analysts say the president is a reactive politician who relies increasingly on the eyes and ears of allies such as Mr Bannon. 'War on the establishment' The former strategist vowed in October to challenge "every Republican incumbent". He was a passionate supporter of Mr Moore, an ultra-conservative former judge who crashed to defeat in Republicans' first loss in Alabama in 25 years. But despite all the criticism, Mr Bannon is defiant. An unnamed source close to him told Bloomberg: "This doesn't stop Steve's war against the establishment. "All it does is pour gasoline on top of it." New York Representative Pete King launched a highly personal attack on Mr Bannon on Wednesday morning. The Republican congressman tweeted: "After Alabama disaster GOP [the Republican party] must do right thing and DUMP Steve Bannon." He added: "If we are to Make America Great Again for all Americans, Bannon must go! And go NOW!!" Mr King later appeared on CNN to say the former Trump adviser "looks like some kind of dishevelled drunk that wandered onto the political stage", even though Mr Bannon reportedly abstains from alcohol. The congressman also attacked Mr Bannon's "weird alt-right views", which he said did not represent conservative values. He added that he blames the election loss in Alabama on voters' "revulsion" towards Mr Bannon. Illinois Republican Adam Kinzinger referred to Mr Bannon as a "RINO", a derogatory term meaning Republican in name only. "His morally inept strategies are unwelcome here. #YoureFired," Mr Kinzinger tweeted. Steve Law, president of the Senate Leadership Fund, a political group aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, piled in, too. "Not only did Steve Bannon cost us a critical Senate seat in one of the most Republican states in the country, but he also dragged the president of the United States into his fiasco," he said in a statement. "This is a brutal reminder that candidate quality matters regardless of where you are running." Mr Bannon has recently set his targets on Mr McConnell, whom he views as lukewarm on the president's so-called America First strategy. The editorial board of the National Review, a conservative magazine, called Mr Bannon a "cut-rate Svengali... who never met a disreputable political candidate he didn't like". The former Trump strategist was widely credited with honing Mr Trump's populist appeal in last year's election campaign. Mr Bannon left the White House in August to help Mr Trump's administration as "a wingman outside" by returning to his role as head of right-wing Breitbart News, he said. But in Alabama's Republican primary election he backed ultraconservative former judge Roy Moore, finding himself at odds with his former boss. Mr Trump had backed a mainstream Republican, Luther Strange, who lost. Some in Washington began to see Mr Bannon as a potential "king-maker" for the party. Mr Trump later endorsed Mr Moore during his contest against Democrat Doug Jones, who won by a razor thin margin on Tuesday night. The Washington Post reported that Mr Trump made his decision after a long discussion with his former aide.	Republicans are lashing out at former White House strategist Steve Bannon after the party's stunning election loss in Alabama.
+text: By Mark SavageBBC Music reporter "I've toured this festival for years, never disappointed," he told the BBC. "You can always count on me. "I'm basically at the stage where they need to make me headline this thing - because they ain't had no British rappers headline this festival." As if to prove his point, the star drew huge crowds to his set on The West Holts stage on Friday. Running through hits including Fix U, Look Sharp, Bonkers and new single Space, he provided a raucous counterpart to Radiohead's more cerebral set on the Pyramid Stage. Dizzee's appearance put him at the top of the bill on the festival's third-biggest stage, and grime collective Boy Better Know will headline the second-biggest Other Stage on Sunday. But the star asked why US rappers Jay-Z and Kanye West had been made main stage headliners ahead of their British counterparts. "I've been on the main stage, but I need to headline the whole ting," he said. "I've got 15 years of bangers. I'm confident I would tear it up." However, he was careful not to be critical of Glastonbury, where he has delivered crowd-pleasing sets for more than a decade. "It's the biggest festival you could do," he said. "It's a privilege." Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	Dizzee Rascal says he deserves to be given top billing at the Glastonbury Festival.
+text: By David Rhodes & Patrick ClahaneBBC News The research also found two-thirds of coastal areas had seen a real terms fall in wages since 2010. The All Parliamentary Group for Coastal Communities said the findings showed seaside towns were "being left behind". But the government said its £200m Coastal Communities Fund was changing lives. This week BBC News is profiling what life is like in seaside communities across the country as part of the Coastal Britain project. The most deprived places in England are found by the sea, according to government figures. Struggling to pay rent In Penzance in Cornwall young workers said they were struggling to find well paid, long-term employment by the coast. "I love Penzance but I'm also sick of it," said 18-year-old Danny Hammond, who works as a waiter in a local restaurant. "I earn £6.30 an hour, which isn't great and people older than me really struggle to pay the rent or the mortgage." Tamia Mallam, 20, said many people she knew struggled in seasonal jobs connected with the tourism industry. "When I worked In St Ives, between May and September there was lots of work because of the summer season, but then you'll be told suddenly that you're going to be unemployed. That is really tough," she said. "There aren't many prospects for a career around here. It's a choice of working either in a boring retail job or as waitress." Trainee carpenter Jack Slater was more optimistic about his future job prospects. "Lots of my friends have moved away from Penzance to look for better paid jobs and that's why I want to get myself a trade," the 18-year-old said. "I want to stay in Cornwall because it's beautiful and this is my home, and they're always building new homes round here which should mean I'll always have work." The issue of low pay affects coastal communities across the whole country. BBC News has analysed income data collected by the Office for National Statistics for 632 parliamentary in England, Scotland and Wales. Comparable data for Northern Ireland is not avaialble. Taking into account full and part time workers the analysis found: Low wages tended to be prevalent in coastal areas because a higher proportion of people worked in low skilled, low paid seasonal jobs. A major report published by the House of Lords earlier this year said seaside towns had for too long been reliant on tourism to drive their local economies. Mike Hill MP, chair of the all Parliamentary Group for Coastal Communities, said "for a long time coastal communities have felt forgotten". "Many of these areas have lost industries like shipbuilding that once provided thousands of well paid jobs," he said. "There's research that shows that without major changes, by 2030 places like my own constituency of Hartlepool could see lots of young people leave coastal areas, which underlines why we need the right investment to protect the long term future of our coastal towns." At its party conference in September, Labour promised to build 37 offshore wind farms, which it claimed would generate more than 60,000 new well paid jobs in coastal areas. The government said since 2012 its dedicated Coastal Communities Fund had invested more than £200m in seaside areas, while more than a quarter of the 100 towns initially selected to share its £3.6bn Stronger Towns Fund were on the coast. Jake Berry, minister for the Northern Powerhouse and Local Growth, said these initiatives had begun to transform people's lives. "For years government has only talked about creating growth in our cities. But we are investing in coastal areas and we've given councils across the country a real terms increase in their budgets for next year," he added. This article is part of a special series from Penzance, Cornwall. BBC News is exploring the challenges and the opportunities for communities in Coastal Britain.	Workers living in seaside areas in Great Britain earn on average £1,600 less per year than those living inland, BBC News analysis has found.
+text: More than 13,000 people have signed the petition which was set up by Conservative Bristol North West MP Charlotte Leslie. Campaign group TRASHorfield has criticised it saying it has been signed by people who do not live locally. Approval for the supermarket will be subject to a judicial review next week. A judge is due to consider whether Bristol City Council looked at the effect of the new supermarket on other retailers' properly. 'Public money' Ms Leslie said the judicial review would come at great cost, despite the unlikelihood plans for the supermarket would be stopped. "The only difference will be that it is delayed and because all of the public money and the Rovers money which was going to go into the stadium has been spent fighting judicial reviews for the Sainsbury's, you just get a lot less of a stadium, which is not a good trade-off," she said. She also dismissed criticism that support for the plans had come from outside Bristol. TRASHorfield, which was granted the judicial review, has said that while it supports a new stadium, this should not come at the expense of the local community. It claims the supermarket would bring "traffic chaos", more pollution and would harm local businesses. Diana Scrafton, a TRASHorfield director, said: "The petition we put together, which had 6,500 signatures...was done within the local community. "This one was raised all around the country and I don't think that is appropriate. It is a concern for people in the locality."	A petition in support of Bristol Rovers' plans to sell their football ground to Sainsbury's has been handed in to Downing Street.
+text: A spokesperson for Hertfordshire Constabulary said the 54-year-old was "arrested on suspicion of wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm". Police told the BBC in a statement that a man in his 40s had sustained a small laceration to his neck. An ambulance took him to hospital and he was later released after treatment. 'Isolated workplace incident' The arrested man was released on bail until Wednesday 17 July. They were "known to each other," said police, adding that enquiries are continuing. Eight films in the Harry Potter series were shot at the studios in Leavesden, and part of the lot is now taken by the Making of Harry Potter tourist attraction. A spokesperson for Warner Brothers said: "I can confirm that there was an isolated workplace incident at the Warner Brothers studio production facility and the police are now handling the matter." Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	A man has been bailed after an incident at Warner Brothers Studios that left another man in hospital with a neck injury.
+text: The spectrum being sold is below the 15GHz frequency, which is seen as the most useful type because it can be used for a wide range of communications. Mobile phone and broadband suppliers are seeking access to more spectrum. Demand for this is mounting, fuelled by rising use of data-hungry devices such as smartphones and tablets. The sale, which will take place in 2014, will give private operators the chance to buy more spectrum to support the introduction of fourth-generation (4G) mobile services to people in cities, towns and villages across the UK., which will allow much faster download speeds. Alternatively, the spectrum could be used by fixed-line operators to provide wireless access to broadband services. The EE mobile phone network, formed by the merger of Orange and T-Mobile, is the only UK operator already offering 4G. Boosting access The Ministry of Defence (MoD) says it owns a lot of spectrum - around 75% of that which is publicly held. It says it does not need all that and that the part up for sale is being cleared of military users. It is currently used for a broad range of services including defence, emergency services, transport and science. The minister for defence equipment, support and technology, Philip Dunne, said: "We welcome this opportunity to free up much-needed spectrum. "We hope that the sale will help drive the roll-out of new generation networks and universal access to broadband, both of which are vital to the UK's prosperity." The government has been planning to take this action for some time. It said in its 2010 spending review that at least 500MHz of public spectrum below 5GHz would be released by 2020 for new mobile communications uses. Mixed forecasts Recent auctions of extra capacity have proved successful in the Netherlands and the Republic of Ireland. In his Autumn Statement, the Chancellor, George Osborne, said he expected to raise £3.5bn from a separate auction of spectrum coming up in the spring of next year. That is way above the regulator Ofcom's estimate of £1.3bn. Analysts are divided over the potential value. Consultants PwC think Mr Osborne's figure - which was supplied by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility - is within its own estimated range of £2bn-£4bn. But Matthew Howett, regulation analyst at telecom consultants Ovum, said it was too difficult to estimate what companies would be willing to pay. "Trying to guess how much money a spectrum auction can raise is a bit of a fool's game," he said. "It depends on bidding strategies and you don't know how people will behave when they go into an auction "We were all taken by surprise when the government came out with the £3.5bn value." Ofcom's deadline for bidders to register an interest in buying new spectrum was 11 December and five companies are thought to have done so.	The Ministry of Defence says it will auction some of the radio frequency it owns in a move that will increase the capacity for 4G mobile services.
+text: David Yeomans, who runs The Crown Inn, began offering free meals three years ago when the local foodbank said it was running short of donations. He said he used to feed 100 children a day in school holidays, but this has now shot up to roughly 150 children. "A lot of people have lost their jobs and are struggling." Mr Yeomans said. The 33-year-old runs the pub with his partner Luke Skinner and pays for the cost of the meals himself. Mr Yeomans said that Keynsham wasn't a "particularly disadvantaged place" but that job losses due to the coronavirus pandemic had made a big impact on peoples' lives. “We try to give food in a very relaxed manner, so as to make sure people don’t feel embarrassed or ashamed," he said. Manchester United footballer Marcus Rashford tweeted support for The Crown Inn as part of his high-profile campaign for the UK government to extend free school meals to eligible children during half-term. Mr Yeomans is not alone in the West in wanting to alleviate food poverty, with Betsy Gamble, of Street, Somerset, also earning praise for attending her school’s Superhero Day as "Coronagirl" . The eight-year-old's alter-ego has the superpower of being able to give food vouchers to children who need them. During the first lockdown in March, Betsy helped deliver food to vulnerable people and took cream teas to elderly people on VE day. Her mother, Vicki Gamble, 39, said: “She has received so much praise for her actions, both from her school, Elmhurst Junior School, and the local community." Ms Gamble added: “It’s great that Betsy has raised awareness of the issue. “She enjoys helping people and I’m very proud of her.” Follow BBC West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: bristol@bbc.co.uk	A pub owner from Keynsham who spends around £20,000 a year on providing free meals to children during school holidays says demand is on the rise.
+text: Antiretroviral medicine PrEP - or pre-exposure prophylaxis - was made available in England in April. The All Wales Medicines Strategy Group (AWMSG) previously advised the Welsh Government not to fund the treatment because it was too expensive. A trial of the drug began in Wales in April 2017 despite this advice. Vaughan Gething said the drug's price had dropped because of the emergence of generic versions. He said there had been no new HIV cases among those taking PrEP as part of the trial. The drug will now be available as part of routine NHS care. "The provision of PrEP is an important measure in our aim to eliminate HIV and I am proud of what we have achieved to date in Wales," Mr Gething said. "We have made huge progress in developing more modern and effective sexual health services over the last few years." The Terrence Higgins Trust said it was "a huge milestone in the fight against HIV in Wales." A spokesman said: "By making this anti-HIV drug routinely available and recognising its cost effectiveness, its benefits can now be fully unlocked. "The Welsh Government has already committed to ending new HIV transmissions by 2030 and PrEP will now play a big part in achieving this." Scientists have found the drug can protect people at high risk of contracting HIV. PReP, which is taken once daily, is suggested for people who might not have safe sex. In January it was reported there had been a 71% drop in HIV cases in the UK. This was attributed to the increase in PrEP use.	A drug that prevents transmission of the HIV virus is to become routinely available in Wales, the health minister has announced.
+text: Kirsty Maxwell died in mysterious circumstances in Benidorm in 2017 while on a hen party weekend with friends. Her father, Brian Curry, said the family felt "abandoned" by the Foreign Office (FCO) in the days that followed. It comes as a report from MPs said the right to consular support for families should be enshrined in law. Kirsty Maxwell, from Livingston in West Lothian, had only recently married when she travelled to Benidorm for a friend's hen party. The 27-year-old fell from the 10th floor balcony of a room where five men were staying on 29 April 2017. The men were arrested but never charged. Her father said that in the hours following Kirsty's death, there was very little information from the authorities about what had happened. He described how he and his wife took the first flight to Spain they could after a phone call to the family from a Spanish official in "broken English". He said the pair arrived in the early hours of the morning with nowhere to stay and no-one to meet them off the plane. Mr Curry said they ended up in a bus station hotel where they were eventually met by a Foreign Office official the following day. He said: "The girl from the FCO was really nice, but I don't think she had the proper training to deal with what was involved. "There didn't seem to be a procedure, in fact there was no procedure. Everyone seemed to be winging things." Mr Curry described the experience as "harrowing" and said the lack of consular support compounded the family's grief. He added: "I don't think they're prepared for something like this happening. "We felt we were abandoned. We felt quite helpless. We were frustrated, we were angry." Special attention The family's local MP, MP Hannah Bardell, set up a Westminster All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) to look into the consular assistance available to families whose loved-ones had died abroad. Ms Bardell said she took action following the deaths of Kirsty Maxwell and another constituent Julie Pearson, both of whom died in suspicious circumstances. She has called for the creation of the "Pearson Maxwell Protocol" - a joined-up, cross-agency process that "held the hands" of a bereaved family from the point of notification of death, through travelling to the country of death and repatriation. She said MPs had listened to the testimony of 60 families from across the UK to produce their report. Ms Bardell said: "Listening to harrowing evidence through this report, it is clear that changes must be made at the earliest opportunity. "Experts have told us that these families are at risk of re-traumatisation and secondary victimisation as a result of their experiences with the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In a statement, the FCO said it was disappointed that the APPG had not engaged directly with them. They said: "Last year we helped more than 22,000 British people overseas and the feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive. "We are disappointed that the APPG declined our offer to meet with them and explain the professional and empathetic support we already give. We carefully consider all feedback we receive to continuously improve our service."	The family of a Scottish woman who fell to her death from a balcony in Spain have criticised a lack of support from UK authorities following her death.
+text: Critics claim Carmarthenshire council wants to "dump in one place" all housing plans for the county up to 2016, with its proposals for west Carmarthen. It would be the biggest development in the town's history, but the council said it is a "sensible way forward". A consultation period ends in a week. The draft proposals involve earmarking 320 acres (129.5 hectares) of largely agricultural land just to the north of the A40, for the Carmarthen's future growth. Planning applications already approved for the area, which includes the former St David's Hospital site, include separate developments of 153 homes, a 20-bed care home, car parking areas and a new court building. Among the critics is Carmarthen town councillor Alun Lenny who said the long-term proposals for the location were based on flawed population projections and could see more than 3,000 people moving in, increasing its number by around 20%. Opponents claim that such a demographic change would put a strain on health and social services, as many of the homes would only be afforded by people retiring to the area, and that would alter the Welsh-language nature of the town. A proposed link road would also ensure that estates which are created would be used a shortcut by commuters trying to avoid morning and evening traffic jams, they say. Another critic, the Reverend Geraint Davies, 73, a retired Presbyterian minister, said: "It would be horrendous. "The traffic is already stop-start outside my house in the morning and from 4.30 in the evening. People have got very selfish. They don't let you out from your drive. "It's not on. Just because the assembly government says there's got to be a certain number of houses, they have dumped them all here in Carmarthen. "There's lots of things they haven't thought through." Carmarthenshire council's head of planning, Eifion Bowen, said the proposed draft plan would give a framework to coordinate future planning applications.- "We need to take a long-term view. The development of these houses is not going to happen overnight," he said. "It will be there to meet local demand, and whilst the will be an element of inward migration, there's quite a sustained grown in Carmarthenshire's population from within the boundaries of the county."	Plans to allow up to 1,200 new homes to be built in one area in Carmarthen, have been attacked as "building a new town" on greenbelt land.
+text: The record's out on 29 March and the first single Hold It Against Me is at number eight in the chart. The singer, 29, has sold nearly 70 million albums around the world and five of her previous six records have gone to number one in America. Britney Spears has also just made a cameo appearance in US TV series Glee in an episode called Britney/Britanny. Speaking about her latest album on Twitter, the singer said: "I've poured my heart and soul into this album over the last two years. "I've put everything I have into it. This album is for you, my fans, who have always supported me and have stuck by me every step of the way! "I love you all! Sexy and Strong. Dangerous yet mysterious. Cool yet confident!"	Britney Spears has announced that her seventh studio album will be called Femme Fatale.
+text: Derek Moore, Dorothy Bailey, Jason Shingler and William Barks were employees at Wood Flour Mills in Bosley, Cheshire, when they died in July 2015. Owners Wood Treatment Ltd has now been charged with corporate manslaughter. Director George Boden is accused of manslaughter by gross negligence and two managers also face charges. A four-storey building was destroyed in the blast and large fires broke out at the mill on Tunstall Road shortly after 09:00 BST on 17 July. At the time, a firefighter described the aftermath of the explosion as "a scene of devastation". Crews did not leave the site until more than a month after the explosion, which reduced the mill to rubble and left a number of other employees injured, as fires continued to burn. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said the charges were the result of a "lengthy and complex" investigation by Cheshire Police and the Health and Safety Executive. Mr Boden, from Stockport, will face four charges of manslaughter by gross negligence and one health and safety offence when he appears at Stockport Magistrates' Court on 2 December. Managers Philip Smith, from Macclesfield, and Peter Shingler, from Bosley, will appear alongside him charged with health and safety offences. Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, on Twitter, and sign up for local news updates direct to your phone.	A company and its management are facing charges over the deaths of four people in an explosion at a wood flour mill.
+text: Abdulah Husseini, 36, of Spencer Road, Slough, west London, appeared at Preston Crown Court via video link on Friday. He giggled and put his hand over his mouth when Judge Beverley Lunt asked: "Is this the Ross from Friends case?" Joe Allman, prosecuting, replied: "It is the one with the doppelganger, your honour." Mr Husseini, from Tehran, pleaded not guilty to the theft of a wallet in Blackpool on 20 September last year. He also denied five fraud offences by allegedly using or attempting to use a stolen Halifax bank card on 17 occasions in shops between 20 September and 5 November last year. Social media users first pointed out the likeness of the defendant to Schwimmer's character Ross Geller in the popular US sitcom when police in Blackpool posted an image of a man leaving a restaurant and carrying what appeared to be a carton of beer cans. Schwimmer later responded and posted a video on his Twitter account that showed him scurrying through a convenience store carrying a carton of beer before looking up furtively at a CCTV camera. A trial date for the Blackpool theft and fraud offences was set for 4 July.	A "doppelganger" of Friends actor David Schwimmer has denied a string of fraud and theft offences.
+text: Three militants wearing suicide bomb vests entered the college late on Monday, reportedly taking hostages. A major security operation lasted for hours and all attackers were killed. So-called Islamic State (IS) said its fighters had carried out the attack, although officials have blamed another militant group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province, has seen similar attacks by both separatists and various Islamist militant factions in recent years. Hundreds of trainees were evacuated from Balochistan Police College as troops arrived to repel the militants. Local media reported at least three explosions at the scene. "I saw three men in camouflage whose faces were hidden carrying Kalashnikovs," one cadet said according to AFP news agency. "They started firing and entered the dormitory but I managed to escape over a wall." The police academy is home to hundreds of students and many of the cadets who died were killed in the blasts, said Maj-Gen Sher Afghan of the Frontier Corps. M Ilyas Khan, BBC News: 'Militants hit state symbol' This assault has clearly highlighted the woes of Pakistan's south-western city of Quetta not just because of the heavy casualties, but because it came on the very day a judicial commission investigating an earlier attack held its first hearing. That attack in August was carried out on a "soft" target - the emergency ward of a city hospital. The militants have now hit a symbol of the state, though some still consider police to be a softer target in a region where law enforcement has largely slid under the control of the military. It all comes against the backdrop of heightened tensions between Pakistan and its two neighbours, India and Afghanistan. A top military official claimed these attackers had handlers in Afghanistan. But many will point to Pakistan's own alleged use of militants as a state policy, which they say has now started to backfire. Northern Balochistan has been home to Afghan Taliban who have long-standing links not only to elements within the Pakistani establishment but also to al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban groups that have since turned against Islamabad. Why are militants attacking Quetta? The exact sequence of events is unclear but there was intermittent exchange of fire between the attackers and security forces for several hours, according to Dawn newspaper. There were also reports of a hostage situation. More than 100 people, mostly trainees, were injured. Pakistan's army and the paramilitary Frontier Corps took part in the military counter-operation, which Balochistan provincial home minister Mir Sarfaraz Ahmed Bugti said was now over. Two of the militants died after detonating their bomb vests and one was killed by security forces. Pakistani media highlighted the nation's poor security situation after the attack, with leading TV channels changing their logos to black in a mark of respect for the victims, Officials blamed a faction of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi militant group and said the attackers "were in communication with operatives in Afghanistan". However, IS said on its Amaq news agency that its fighters had carried out the attack, releasing an image purported to be of the three gunmen. IS formed a branch for Afghanistan and Pakistan in January 2015 under Hafiz Saeed Khan. He was killed in a US drone strike in July this year. The first suspected IS attack in Pakistan was in April 2015, when three soldiers were killed. It then claimed an attack on a bus in Karachi that killed 45 people, although the Pakistani Taliban splinter group Jundullah also said it was responsible. IS said it also carried out a suicide bombing that killed 88 people at a hospital in Quetta in August, but that too is disputed, with another faction of the Pakistani Taliban, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, saying it was behind the attack. The Pakistani military has been conducting operations against militants in volatile tribal areas near the Afghan border. Balochistan Police College	At least 59 cadets and guards have been killed in an attack by militants on a police college in the Pakistani city of Quetta, officials say.
+text: The band will play the festival as part of a series of European tour dates in summer 2012. They are the third and final headliners to be announced, after Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty were confirmed last month. Biffy Clyro, Elbow, Noah & The Whale and Example will also play the festival, which runs from 22-24 June. Pearl Jam have have released nine albums over their 21-year career. The band will also play a gig at the MEN Arena in Manchester on 20 June. Tickets for Isle of Wight are on sale already with the remaining dates going on sale later this month. The Darkness, Feeder, Professor Green, Wretch 32, Loick Essien, Clement Marfo and the Frontline have also been added to the bill. The date of next year's festival has been moved for one year from its normal slot in early June to avoid a clash with the Diamond Jubilee and half-term holidays. The new weekend is traditionally taken by the Glastonbury Festival, which is taking a year off in 2012. Last year's headliners were Kings of Leon, Foo Fighters and Kasabian.	Pearl Jam will headline the Isle of Wight festival next year, it has been revealed.
+text: Melvin Benn was speaking to Newsbeat ahead of the start of Reading and Leeds festivals this weekend. "I can't control it any more than the government can control it coming into Great Britain," he said. The festival organiser says the best they can do is work hard to limit it and help those who have been affected. There are 90,000 people expected at Reading festival this weekend and up to 80,000 at the Leeds site. "If there is anything here at Reading Festival it hasn't come from Mars," Benn told Newsbeat. "It's come through the ports, it's come through the towns and cities, it's come through all the opportunities the government have got to stop it. "The truth is we all know you just can't stop it but you have to work really hard to limit it." Benn said they work closely with the police to to ensure drug dealers are not active. "Ultimately we have to respond if somebody has managed to buy something that isn't great for them and they are pretty unwell as a result of it," he explained. Benn said they have a "fantastic" medical team to look after people if they suffer bad effects after taking drugs. "That's what the state does in terms of ambulance service and it's what we do here at Reading and Leeds too. The festival organiser admitted the potential for things to go wrong is "phenomenal." "They (fans) are all partying they are all having a laugh, they're full of trying to get up to no good but all within pretty reasonable boundaries. "The potential of things going wrong is fairly substantial but somehow it doesn't." "We've dealt with an awful lot of problems over the year. "I am not even remotely complacent about any single one of them but i am confident we can deal with just about everything that gets thrown at us." While the Rolling Stones were the big news headliners over the summer, Melvin Benn appears to have taken a risk on newer artists. It will be the first time Biffy Clyro headline here. "Interestingly enough, the day tickets for Biffy Clyro in Leeds have sold out before everybody else," he said. "I wouldn't do it because I think I have a responsibility to do it, I do because actually they are phenomenal band waiting to be a headliner." Benn also gave Foals their first UK festival headline slot at Latitude festival. The Oxford band admitted they were worried at first but excited that younger bands were being given this opportunity. "As a festival director, we have got to make sure we are bringing acts through," he said. "After their [Foals] performance [at Latitude] they realised they are a headline act and that was one of the most extraordinary sets I've seen at Latitude. "It will be equally good when they play here this weekend and it will be equally good when they've headlined reading and Leeds because I am certain they will. He thinks it might be a lack of confidence that is preventing some younger acts from being seen as a headliner. "In some ways the UK music scene can be very easy to be overtaken by the American music scene," he explained. "The American industry is so powerful, I do think sometimes the UK acts think, we're only from Britain, are we as good as the Americans? "Trust me they are." Follow @BBCNewsbeat on Twitter or @bbcreadingfest and use the hashtag #bbcreadingfest	The man who puts on some of the biggest festivals in the UK admits he can not stop every illegal drug getting on to site.
+text: Aberdulais in Neath Port Talbot saw the biggest fall but the findings only looked at sales, with one agent saying it did not give a fair representation of prices. The study analysed more than eight million residential property transactions using Land Registry data. Adjusted for inflation, prices in 90.5% of wards were lower in 2017 than 2007. At the other end of the scale, some parts of London have seen massive increases in house prices compared to a decade ago. How have house prices changed since the recession? Average house prices from 2007 to 2017, not adjusted for inflation The findings do not compare the value of people's homes and how that has changed over the 10 year period but the average price for all homes sold in that ward. But in April, a new index by the Principality found the average price in Wales was now at £174,319 compared with a peak of £170,142 in October of 2007. According to the BBC data, the average house price in St Arvans in Monmouthshire is up by 23%, the rise driven in part by the Severn bridge tolls being scrapped next year, according to local property experts. Chepstow-based estate agent Peter Moon said the county as a whole was desirable but "interest really jumped" from Bristol and the south east when it was confirmed tolls would be axed. "The important driving factor here is housing and jobs," he said. "Other parts of Wales, possible employment is more of an issue and that's where there has been a drag in house prices." In Aberdulais in 2007, the average house price was £143,000 but in 2017 the figure was £65,000 - a drop of 64%. Leighton Williams, from Alison George Estate Agents in Neath, said: "Aberdulais is an interesting area where perhaps 50% of the housing is social housing, therefore can't be sold. "In the last 12 months, there have only been 14 sales in Aberdulais - four of which were sold at a price lower than the previous sale price. "One of those was considerably less, 28% less than the previous sale price. "When you've got such a small amount of transactions, one large drop can skew the figures quite considerably," he said. "The average house price for that area is about £120,000 which is pretty standard for Neath as a whole. "There are a lot of flats which will sell in the sort of £60,000 price point, but there are also some very nice individual detached properties in Aberdulais which will sell in the £300,000-plus price point."	Average house prices in 90% of council wards in Wales are lower than 10 years ago, BBC research has shown.
+text: By Sarah RainsfordBBC News, Moscow The militant Islamist group has proclaimed the establishment of a wilayaat, or province, in Russia's mainly-Muslim North Caucasus, suggesting it may be gaining the upper hand in a battle for control over radical forces there. The statement follows an anonymous audio message posted online pledging allegiance to IS on behalf of militants in four regions. But it remains unclear how far - and high - that support may reach among militants previously loyal to the banned, al-Qaeda-affiliated group Caucasus Emirate, which has long sought to carve out an Islamist state in the region. Caucasus Emirate's presumed head has made no comment. Meanwhile, analysts say most militants who have publicly switched support to IS are largely unknown figures. Rooted in the Chechen separatist movement of the 1990s, Caucasus Emirate has committed numerous terror attacks against civilians, including the Moscow metro bombing of 2010 that killed dozens. But its insurgency has recently focused on Russia's security forces. Some fear an upsurge in deadly attacks if the network does indeed affiliate itself with IS. "I don't think they are planning just to separate off a piece of the North Caucasus for themselves, to create a territory controlled by their jihadists," Grigory Shvedov of the internet news agency Caucasus Knot believes. "I think the plan would be to use the region for terror attacks in Russia, which would show their reach and put them 'on the map'," he adds. It is perhaps that heightened danger, coupled with renewed IS gains in Syria, which prompted a rare phone call between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Barack Obama on Thursday. The White House says Islamic State was the top issue for discussion: the leaders' last call in February focused exclusively on the Ukraine crisis. "Of course it is in our mutual interest to co-operate on this with the West, though we disagree on other issues," former Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov told the BBC. "Modern security threats are international, we can't fight them alone," he added - a theme that Russian officials have begun to stress. 'Frustrated rebels' The head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, has dismissed claims of an IS province in the region as "bluff", but also said the threat of the IS "virus" was not being ignored. "We will destroy the devils and bandits without mercy," he pledged. Whilst highly controversial, his tough methods have been relatively successful in suppressing the threat from the Caucasus Emirate in Chechnya - but the usual tactics could backfire badly with IS. "I think a lot of rebels, especially the young, are very frustrated and would support a more radical response," believes Grigory Shvedov, and says that IS would back that. Official estimates of how many Russian citizens have travelled to Syria and Iraq to join IS differ, though the most conservative count is more than 1,000. Just this month, 13 potential recruits were returned to Moscow from the Syrian border, including a teenage female student. On Thursday, Russia's Anti-Terrorism Committee said two people killed in Ingushetia were suspected of trying to recruit fighters for IS.	The head of Russia's Security Council has identified Islamic State (IS) as the greatest threat to world peace and security, and it seems the danger could be getting closer to home.
+text: The bird, which had escaped from a wildlife park, was spotted in Dunragit at the weekend. A member of the public contacted the Scottish SPCA after seeing the red-eye heron come under attack. Insp Arianne Harkness rescued the bird and it was examined by vets before being returned to the Galloway Wildlife Conservation Park. She said: "Once the bird was safe I set about trying to establish where it had come from because it's not native to the UK and was easy to handle which suggested it was used to being around people. "After making some enquiries I was contacted by Edinburgh Zoo who explained that the bird used to belong to them, before being rehomed to Galloway Wildlife Conservation Park in Kirkcudbright some years ago. "I contacted the park's owner, John Denerley, who confirmed the bird was missing after it flew away during bad weather." Insp Harkness said she was glad to get the heron back to its rightful owner and was sure it would be "much happier back in its aviary and safely out of the reach of any buzzards". Black-crowned night herons are nocturnal feeders with excellent vision. They are native to the Americas, Central and Eastern Europe, parts of Africa and Southern Asia. Their diet mainly consists of fish although they also enjoy leaches, earthworms and frogs. They usually live in small colonies.	Animal welfare officers have rescued a black-crowned night heron found under attack by buzzards near Stranraer.
+text: By Angus CrawfordBBC News The watchdog is warning that sellers who have not registered with or been inspected by their local councils could be putting the public at risk. FSA chairwoman Heather Hancock wants Facebook to bring in stricter seller checks on its Marketplace platform. Facebook says its sellers must follow all applicable laws and regulations. Facebook Marketplace allows users to post advertisements for free, to sell a range of goods and services. But rules in force across the UK require people selling food from their homes on a regular basis to register with their local authority. Once registered, they may be inspected and given a food hygiene rating. BBC News found a wide variety of food for sale by unregistered sellers on Facebook Marketplace. This included cooked meals and baked goods - and in one case, a whole deer. Food safety expert Tony Lewis looked at a number of the adverts. "There is no information about what they contain, we don't have a list of ingredients," he said. "How's it been stored, how's it been prepped, have we got a whole load of allergens in there?" He also warns about the potential risk to health. "Listeria is a real threat, in the worst case it could kill you." Doorstep sales The BBC conducted a series of test purchases across the Midlands, buying goat curry, cake, roast chicken and chocolate party cones for children from sellers advertising on Facebook Marketplace. None of the sellers indicated they were registered, had been inspected or had a food hygiene rating. One said they thought those regulations did not apply to people cooking in their own homes. Another, when asked about the possible presence of allergens admitted: "I haven't actually checked." Ms Hancock of the FSA, which is responsible for food safety in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, says Facebook has "an unavoidable moral obligation to help keep people safe". She said "if something goes wrong with this food", the sellers would be in a "terrible mess personally, about the consequences for them and the risk that they're posing to other people". She added: "We'd like that responsibility to extend to asking anybody who is supplying or selling food through the platform - are they registered?" She also wants sellers to be forced to display any food hygiene rating they obtain. Facebook said: "The safety of our community is our foremost priority and if we determine that a listing violates any of our community standards or commerce policies we will immediately remove the listing." It added: "We're in contact with the FSA to discuss the concerns raised and what we can do together on this issue." 'Can be done safely' Tanya Ednan-Laperouse, whose daughter Natasha died in 2016 from a severe allergic reaction after eating a sandwich from High Street chain Pret a Manger, says Facebook must do more, especially when it comes to allergens. Natasha did not know her sandwich contained sesame seeds and after she died her parents successfully campaigned for changes in the law. Food businesses will have to include full ingredients labelling on pre-packaged products by summer 2021. Mrs Ednan-Laperouse says she does not want to stop people selling homemade food, but is demanding they label ingredients clearly. Informing buyers on the doorstep is not enough, she said, adding: "People can get confused, they might forget... Someone might misunderstand what they're saying." Paula Wilkinson runs a business called Mums Bake Cakes, which connects home bakers to customers via a dedicated website. She makes sure all her sellers are registered and insured. There is "absolutely" no reason why properly-registered people should not sell food they have prepared at home, she says. "It can be done safely," Ms Wilkinson added.	Facebook should "take responsibility" for people using its website to sell food from their own homes, the Food Standards Agency has said.
+text: David Johnson has been on long-term leave since June, but had been due to return to work. The fire service and Essex Fire Authority have both refused to state the grounds for the suspension. A Fire Brigades Union (FBU) spokesman said he was "not surprised" by the announcement. Tony Hedley, chairman of the fire authority, said: "At this stage, I can offer no further comment to allow due process to take place. "It should be remembered that suspension is a neutral act." Mr Johnson has had the top job at the fire service since 2005. Members of the FBU took strike action in March over call centre shift patterns and in 2012 there was another walkout over crewing of appliances. 'More uncertainty' Alan Chin-Shaw, secretary of the Essex branch of the FBU, said he was "not surprised - it's just another catastrophic event from Essex County Fire & Rescue Service". "Over the last few years we've had two trade disputes that have been totally avoidable, the complete collapse of a brand new mobilising system, we've had the [now retired] deputy chief fire officer [Gordon Hunter] being suspended and it seems to be part of the day-to-day running of the service," he said. "It's just more uncertainty, but it seems no-one is exempt from the disciplinary processes within the brigade. "I hope he's dealt with in the appropriate manner and in line with the service's policies and the Acas [Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service] Code, which is something not all my members are afforded." The fire service said acting chief fire officer Adam Eckley would continue in his post.	The chief fire officer for Essex has been suspended "pending an internal investigation".
+text: Gates and fences have gone up on the Black Path in Galashiels - from Langlee into the town centre. It was due to be shut from Monday but the public will still have some access while preparatory works continue. Craig Bowman from Network Rail promised there would be alternative routes available once it closed. The path follows the route of the old Waverley line and the restoration of train services between Edinburgh and Tweedbank by mid-2015 means it will revert to its former use. Mr Bowman said there was no choice but to offer alternative provision in future. "We are putting in some alternative accesses which will allow you to get from Tweedbank to Gala on a footpath," he said. "It might not be as attractive a footpath and it is not necessarily as direct - but it will still be possible. "Really that is because there is no alternative - we are building this railway through Galashiels, the Black Path follows the line of the old railway and the railway has to follow a similar route."	Rail contractors have promised to leave a popular Borders path open to the public for as long as they can before work gets under way on a new rail link.
+text: The East of England Ambulance Service (EEAS), which has been dogged by staff shortages, said the recruitment would eventually fill frontline vacancies. It described it a "a great step forward for staff, patients and local communities". Unison welcomed the move. Students will go into double-manned vehicles with qualified paramedics. Paramedic shortage Chief executive Dr Anthony Marsh said: "This programme will secure new employees for the service who will learn on the job and in the classroom. It is a great opportunity for anyone who has ever thought of becoming a paramedic and helping people in their community, sometimes in their greatest hour of need." Unison branch secretary Gary Aplin said the training of students was important, although there was still a shortage of qualified paramedics. He said the new chief executive was starting to restore staff morale. "I believe it will get better," he added. A report by the service last year showed the EEAS had failed in Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire to reach its target of getting to 95% of Category A patients - those in life-threatening situations - within 19 minutes. Earlier this month, it was announced the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) was to withhold 2% of the EEAS's funding after it failed to meet response targets. In recent months the service has been criticised by a health watchdog and MPs, leading to a management shake-up. The ambulance trust covers Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex.	An ambulance trust which was criticised by MPs over response times has launched a campaign to recruit 400 student paramedics.
+text: That works out at a company every three to four weeks, he told Apple’s annual meeting of shareholders on Tuesday. Apple recently delivered its largest quarter by revenue of all time, bringing in $111.4bn (£78.7bn) in the first-quarter of its fiscal year 2021. Mr Cook told the shareholders meeting that the acquisitions are mostly aimed at acquiring technology and talent. Apple's largest acquisition in the last decade was its $3bn purchase of Beats Electronics, the headphone maker founded by rapper and producer Dr Dre. Another high profile purchase was music recognition software company Shazam, for $400m in 2018. Most often, Apple buys smaller technology firms and then incorporates their innovations into its own products. One example is PrimeSense, an Israeli 3D sensing company whose technology contributed to Apple’s FaceID. Apple has also invested in back-end technology that wouldn’t be so obvious to iPhone or Macbook users. Self-driving, podcasts and more Apple's list of acquisitions and investments is extremely varied. In the past year, Apple has bought several artificial intelligence (AI) companies, a virtual reality events business, a payments startup and a podcast business, among others. In 2019, Apple bought Drive.ai, a self-driving shuttle firm, in an effort to boost its own foray into self-driving technologies. In 2016, the company also took a $1bn stake in Chinese ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing, although it wasn’t a controlling interest. Deep pockets Apple is an immensely profitable juggernaut worth more than $2trn, so it has plenty of money to make acquisitions. But even if it has bought 100 companies in six years, Apple appears to be very selective about what it buys. For example, Tesla founder Elon Musk recently revealed that he approached Mr Cook to buy the electric car business when it was struggling in 2013. Mr Cook didn't take the meeting, Mr Musk said. Measured by value, Apple’s acquisitions are actually far more restrained than those of many of its tech rivals. Microsoft paid $26bn for LinkedIn, Amazon paid $13.7bn for Whole Foods and Facebook paid $19bn for WhatsApp. Apple’s ten largest purchases put together would still be worth far less than any of those deals.	Apple has acquired about 100 companies over the last six years, the company’s chief executive Tim Cook has revealed.
+text: She passed away at home with family members by her side, said her son Anderson Cooper, a CNN anchor, after suffering from stomach cancer. Vanderbilt, known as the "poor little rich girl", was the great-great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, a 19th Century tycoon. The socialite, who was married several times, made her name in the 1970s and '80s as a designer jeans pioneer. "Gloria Vanderbilt was an extraordinary woman, who loved life, and lived it on her own terms," Mr Cooper said in a statement. "She was a painter, a writer, and designer but also a remarkable mother, wife, and friend. "She was 95 years old, but ask anyone close to her, and they'd tell you, she was the youngest person they knew, the coolest, and most modern," the statement added. Vanderbilt was not even two years old when her father died. As the beneficiary of a multimillion-dollar trust fund, Vanderbilt became widely known as the "poor little rich girl" in 1934 because of a high-profile custody fight between her mother and her aunt in New York. The aunt eventually won the legal battle, described by the media at the time as the "trial of the century". Vanderbilt was a talented painter and actress. She was also the author of several books.	US artist and fashion icon Gloria Vanderbilt has died aged 95.
+text: The SNP leader was awarded the prize as she celebrated her fifth anniversary of becoming first minister. Ms Sturgeon beat off competition from Green MSP John Finnie and interim Scottish Tory leader Jackson Carlaw. Elsewhere, Sir Paul Grice, the former chief executive of the Scottish Parliament, received a Lifetime Achievement Award. Speaking at the ceremony in Edinburgh on Thursday evening, Ms Sturgeon said: "I'm delighted to receive this award. "This is a recognition of the strong stance the Scottish government and the SNP have taken in protecting Scotland's interests over the past year." The Public Campaign of the Year was won by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) Scotland for its "Nation of Lifesavers" campaign to ensure Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) is taught in all secondary schools. David McColgan, head of BHF Scotland, said: "We'd like to extend a special thank you to Scotland's local authorities who worked with us to make it a reality for all school pupils to be trained in CPR before they leave school."	Nicola Sturgeon has been named The Herald Scottish Politician of the Year for a record fifth time.
+text: There have been proposals to turn the former LDV site in Birmingham into a maintenance headquarters for the rail line, possibly creating up to 250 jobs. Birmingham Chamber Group believes other jobs could come to the region as the scheme brings £40m worth of investment. The new high-speed rail link will run between Birmingham and London. At least two million trees will be planted along the planned route in a bid to reduce the impact on the landscape, the government has said. The project has been opposed by residents groups, councils and a number of MPs. The Woodland Trust said it hoped this was not a token gesture. Last month, Transport Secretary Philip Hammond announced that about half the planned route had been altered, amid serious concerns about its impact on local communities and the countryside. Trains would travel at more than 200mph under the plans.	More than 1,000 jobs may be created in the West Midlands as part of development plans for the High Speed 2 (HS2) rail link.
+text: Matt Hancock told MPs: "We are on track for the dates in the roadmap and there is no impact" to the planned easing of coronavirus restrictions. The UK's supply has been affected by a delayed shipment from India, he said. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said the delays were "a cause of concern". NHS England warned of a reduction in supply in April in a letter sent to local health organisations on Wednesday. In a statement to the House of Commons, Mr Hancock also revealed that a separate batch of 1.7 million doses was held up as it needed to be retested. He said the government was still "on track" to deliver on the "targets to offer the vaccine to everyone 50 and over, and all adults by the end of July". He added that he wanted to give reassurance that "there will be no weeks in April with no first doses". "There will be no cancelled appointments as a result of supply issues - second doses will go ahead as planned," he said. Around 12 million people will receive their second dose next month, Mr Hancock said, adding that they could not be delayed as they had to be delivered within 12 weeks of the first dose. Dates in England's roadmap for easing coronavirus restrictions are conditional on four tests being met, including the vaccine programme continuing to go to plan. Mr Hancock said the roadmap had not been affected by the "changes to vaccine supply that we've been detailing in the last 24 hours". Sir Keir said the vaccine rollout had "been going really, really well" and he was "concerned about the delays". Speaking during a visit to a vaccination centre in Edinburgh, he said: "We need to get to the bottom of it and we need transparency from the government about what the problem is." An expected reduction in the UK's supply in April is partly due to a delay in the delivery from the Serum Institute of India of five million Oxford-AstraZeneca doses, which has been held up by four weeks. A spokesperson for the Serum Institute said: "Five million doses had been delivered a few weeks ago to the UK and we will try to supply more later, based on the current situation and the requirement for the government immunisation programme in India." More than 25 million people in the UK have had a first dose of a Covid vaccine, while around 1.7 million have had a second jab. After opening up appointments to all over-50s on Wednesday, the NHS in England was then told not to offer jabs to younger age groups throughout April. The Scottish government has said it is "confident" vaccine targets will be met, while the governments in Wales and Northern Ireland said they were examining how their own vaccine programmes could be affected. Moderna supplies 'in coming weeks' The rest of the UK's AstraZeneca doses are being produced domestically and the company says there are no supply issues. Pfizer, which produces its vaccine in Belgium, says its deliveries to the NHS are also on track. The UK has also approved a third vaccine, made by Moderna, and Mr Hancock said he is expecting supplies "in the coming weeks". More than 400 million doses of Covid vaccines have been ordered by the UK, including jabs made by Valneva, GlaxoSmithKline, Novavax and Janssen, which are yet to be approved. Predicting what supply is available in the future is difficult. Vaccine production is a biological process so manufacturers can never absolutely guarantee how much will be available. When you are relying on supplies from abroad there's an added element of complexity. The UK only has two plants that are currently producing an approved vaccine - both make the AstraZeneca jab. Stocks of Pfizer come from Belgium. Both these supply routes are currently delivering what has been forecast. A deal was done with India to supply 10 million doses. But it was always made clear the exact date of shipment could not be absolutely guaranteed. The government had understood the full shipment would arrive in time for mid-March and felt it needed to get vaccination clinics ready to do extra doses. They have now had to be stood down. It comes after expectations were ramped up at the weekend after briefing to the media that the target to offer all adults a jab by the end of July could be hit a month early. Those hopes now seem to have been dashed. Another reminder of just how fragile supply is. The Serum Institute of India is the world's largest manufacturer of vaccines and is making one billion doses of the AstraZeneca jab this year for low and middle-income countries. Its chief executive, Adar Poonawalla, has previously called for patience over global vaccine deliveries, saying the company has been "directed to prioritise the huge needs of India". He has also raised concerns about raw material shortages, attributing this to US export bans on specific items needed to make vaccines, such as specialised bags and filters. Earlier this month, it agreed to supply 10 million doses for the UK, but only half of these will arrive this month with the rest delayed for several weeks. Under-50s 'will have to wait' On Monday NHS sources said there would be a big increase in the number of people being offered vaccinations in the coming days after the UK received the first shipment of the AstraZeneca vaccine from India. Prof Martin Marshall, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said over the next two weeks the NHS would be pushing on with vaccinating over-50s and vulnerable people while it had a "bumper supply". He said the announcement of a shortage was "disappointing" news and it would impact "the group we were hoping to start on in April which is the people under the age of 50 without any pre-existing conditions" who would now have to wait until May.	Delays to the UK's Covid vaccine supply in April will not affect people getting their second doses or England's roadmap out of lockdown, the health secretary says.
+text: According to Canada's BNN Bloomberg, the drinks giant is in talks with local producer Aurora Cannabis about developing marijuana-infused beverages. These would not aim to intoxicate consumers but to relieve pain. The firm declined to comment but said it was watching the cannabis drinks market closely. "Along with many others in the beverage industry, we are closely watching the growth of non-psychoactive cannabidiol as an ingredient in functional wellness beverages around the world," Coca-Cola said in a statement. Cannabidiol, a constituent of cannabis, can help ease inflammation, pain and cramping, but has no psychoactive effect. It comes as Canada prepares to follow certain US states in legalising cannabis for recreational use, after years of permitting it for medicinal purposes. It has given rise to a large pot growing industry and some high-profile partnerships. Earlier this year, beer giant Molson Coors Brewing said it would make cannabis-infused drinks with Hydropothecary, while Corona-beer maker Constellation Brands invested $4bn more into pot firm Canopy Growth. A partnership between Coke and Aurora would mark the first entry of a major manufacturer of non-alcoholic drinks into the market. 'Recovery drink' Quoting unnamed sources, BNN Bloomberg said Coca-Cola was in "serious talks" with Aurora but no deal had been finalised. "They're pretty advanced down the path" of doing a deal, one source was quoted as saying. "It's going to be more of the 'recovery drink' category," the source added. Aurora, in a separate statement, said it would not discuss business development initiatives until they were finalised, but added: "Aurora has expressed specific interest in the infused beverage space, and we intend to enter that market." Coca-Cola's shares rose marginally in early trade on Monday.	Coca-Cola is best known for its eponymous caffeine-based drink, but the firm now appears to be experimenting with a different drug: cannabis.
+text: The ICRC urged the government to take stronger action to reduce violence. The Red Cross says the peace deal with the Farc is working. But it warns that it will take decades for Colombia to deal with the direct and indirect consequences of the conflict, including urban violence. 'A long way to go' The government and the Farc (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) signed a peace agreement in November, to put an end to more than 50 years of conflict. In a report, the Red Cross says violence decreased in 2016 as a result of the peace process. The signing of the deal was preceded by a ceasefire and a number of confidence-building measures. But the ICRC calls on the government to do more to demobilise Farc child soldiers, clear landmines and tackle urban violence. It points out that three other rebel groups remain active in the country. "Building a country at peace requires everyone to make an effort and can take decades," the ICRC's delegation head in Colombia, Christoph Harnisch, warned. "The tragedy of missing loved ones, the fear of unexploded ordnance, armed violence in urban settings, threats, the restrictions on the movements of whole communities in areas controlled by armed groups - these all point to there still being a long way to go in Colombia," he added. Some 86,000 people are missing because of the conflict, says Mr Harnisch. The government says 260,000 people have died and 6.9 million people have been displaced since 1964, when the Farc began its uprising. Last month President Juan Manuel Santos's government began formal peace talks with the country's second-largest rebel group, the ELN (National Liberation Army). Two other smaller groups are still engaged in armed struggle against Colombian forces: the Gaitanista Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AGC) and the People's Liberation Army (EPL).	Thousands of people across Colombia are still falling victim to rape, killings and torture despite a peace deal with Farc rebels, the International Committee of the Red Cross says.
+text: A £3.5m refurbishment of Gleneagles Station is complemented by a new £3.9m link road to the nearby A9. New lifts, waiting rooms, toilets, wi-fi access and an improved car park have been installed at the station. Gleneagles hosts the 2014 Ryder Cup in September, and Transport Minister Keith Brown said the investment would provide a "lasting legacy" for locals. About 100 car parking spaces have been created at the station, along with cycle racks and a bus turning area. The new link road is designed to provide safer access to the A9 heading north and south. The £7.4m cost of the work was met by Transport Scotland, Perth and Kinross Council, First ScotRail, Network Rail, and transport group Tactran. 'Lasting legacy' Mr Brown said the road and rail enhancements would help the area welcome golf fans during September's tournament, but noted they were "designed to ensure long-term benefits for the local community". Antonia Beggs, operations director at Ryder Cup Europe, said 250,000 people would visit Gleneagles during the biennial showdown between the USA and Europe. She added: "The creation of the improved road access to Gleneagles Station will provide a lasting legacy to local residents. "We are delighted that these improvements have been put in place to help create a world-class event experience for ticket-holders." An extra 7,500 spaces will be available daily on train services to Gleneagles during the tournament, which runs from 23 to 28 September, and a temporary footbridge will also be installed over the A9.	New road and rail infrastructure costing more than £7m has been unveiled in Gleneagles.
+text: She was found guilty of forcibly entering the apartment of an alleged agent suspected of involvement in last year's chemical attack on Navalny. Denying trespass, she said she had just knocked on Konstantin Kudryavtsev's door, hoping to interview him. Navalny is on hunger strike in jail. Sobol is a key player in Navalny's team - she has presented videos exposing alleged corruption in President Vladimir Putin's administration. She called her sentence "a disgrace" and wore a T-shirt bearing the question: "Where's the criminal investigation into the poisoning of Navalny?" Guards in camouflage gear and bullet-proof vests stood in front of her in court to prevent her filming the proceedings on her phone. Navalny's wife Yulia Navalnaya said on Tuesday she had visited him at the penal colony where he has been incarcerated since February, and he was "cheerful" but weak. They were only allowed to speak by phone, through a screen. Navalny has been on hunger strike for more than two weeks, to demand proper medical treatment. He has complained on Instagram of not receiving medical help for back pain and problems with his right leg, as well as being deprived of sleep. Only an emergency landing and intensive care saved his life last August when he collapsed on a flight over Siberia. Doctors in Omsk treated him and later, after his transfer to a Berlin hospital, toxicology experts concluded that he had been attacked with the Russian nerve agent Novichok. While recovering in December Navalny tricked the alleged Federal Security Service (FSB) agent, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, into revealing details of the Novichok attack. Navalny posted the recording on his YouTube channel. Describing the targeting of Navalny by a team of agents, Mr Kudryavtsev said the Novichok had been planted in a pair of Navalny's underpants. Navalny returned to Russia in January, where he was immediately arrested, then sentenced to two-and-a-half years in a penal colony over an old embezzlement conviction. His return triggered huge street demonstrations by his nationwide network of supporters, and many were detained in a police crackdown. On Wednesday Russian police raided the offices of a pro-Navalny student magazine, DOXA, and charged four staff with inciting children to protest. Last week police searched the home of another journalist, Roman Anin. His investigative website reports on alleged high-level corruption.	One of the closest aides of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny - lawyer and journalist Lyubov Sobol - has been sentenced to a year of community service for trespass.
+text: Paul Bainbridge, 60, has been at Carlisle's Cumberland Infirmary since suffering a stroke last year. Staff were "devastated" and "shed tears" when he tested positive for Covid-19, his doctor Yogendra Jagatsinh said. "He was so poorly we didn't think he would make it," said the consultant in rehabilitation medicine. "We were unsure if he would pull through and be able to fight the virus as he was previously on a ventilator. "We are absolutely delighted he improved and he's back with us. It is an amazing outcome as he was so poorly. "He is thankful to everyone. He's a fighter." Mr Bainbridge is one of 115 patients at North Cumbria hospitals to be given the all-clear. Tom and Sylvia Benson, from Penrith, have also recovered from the virus. The couple, aged 60 and 58, are back at home after two weeks at Cumberland Infirmary. Their daughter, Laura Harding, praised the work of staff, adding: "On the day the left hospital, staff members clapped them as they left side-by-side in their wheelchairs." She said both her mum and dad were "tired" but "slowly increasing their energy levels". Follow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk.	A stroke patient who contracted coronavirus has made an "amazing" recovery.
+text: By Rachel FlintBBC News The authority was inundated with complaints after waste was left on the kerbside during the roll out of the new system in June. Across Wales, formal complaints about bins have more than doubled in the past four years. Bridgend council said it was "inevitably" going to get complaints, but recycling was now at a record high. Since March 2014, the number of complaints to Welsh councils about bins, waste and recycling has risen from 1,244 to 4,719, according to the councils that responded to a BBC Freedom of Information request. They included everything from late or missed collections to bin workers' behaviour and delays for replacement bins and bags. It comes after a number of local authorities, including Conwy, Bridgend and Gwynedd, reduced the frequency of collections, in a bid to hit Welsh Government recycling targets and avoid fines. The majority of the complaints made so far this financial year were in Bridgend, which has received 3,226 complaints since April - 35 times more than the 91 made in 2014-15. Since June, homes with fewer than five occupants have been limited to throwing out two bags of non-recyclable waste every fortnight under a new scheme, run by private contractor Kier. The new scheme has different coloured sacks for cardboard, paper, plastics, caddies for glass and food waste and purple bags for nappies. But residents complained after missed collections and the council admitted the delays had been "unacceptable". Over the Christmas period the council is allowing residents to put out one extra bag of rubbish, but seven months since the changes residents said this was not enough as the extra bag is for wrapping paper, which the council says cannot be recycled. One Wildmill resident said rubbish was piling up as about 40 homes shared communal recycling bins, which were not being emptied often enough. "Over Christmas it will be a nightmare, last year there was rubbish flying around everywhere because all the bins were full and this year they are allowing everyone to be able to put out one extra blue bag... but this has been a real bugbear on the estate for a long time," she said. Freya Bletsoe, independent town councillor for Oldcastle Ward, said: "It's genuinely disgusting that a first-world country where citizens are paying for a waste service are having to put up with said waste piling high in their streets. It's not acceptable." Resident Jocelyn Morgan said the whole system was "not fit for purpose", with rubbish ending up all over the streets and food waste bins full of maggots. A spokesman for Bridgend council said: "With more than five million collections a year, the council was inevitably going to receive complaints while introducing such a huge scheme. "These include a 74% recycling rate recorded between July and September, a recycling increase of 254 tonnes at community recycling centres between June and August, a 957-tonne drop in landfill waste and 278 tonnes of nappies, which have been converted into fibre boards, acoustic panelling and more." In Cardiff, the number of complaints fell from 350 in 2014-15 to 135 in this financial year, but in Merthyr they more than doubled from 353 to 721. Almost half of Wales' 22 local authorities carry out spot checks to see if residents are putting out the right waste, with at least five fining residents who fail to sort their rubbish correctly.	Complaints about bin collections rose by more than 1,400% in Bridgend in the aftermath of controversial changes.
+text: By Tom EspinerBusiness reporter, BBC News It takes a certain kind of courage, and honesty, to admit when you are wrong. Peter Reinhardt will quite cheerfully admit that at one point he was determined to kill the idea behind his now rapidly expanding and very successful business. He had tried two business ideas before with the firm he had co-founded with three friends. Both ideas had failed. He and his friends had wanted to identify and solve a problem facing organisations. The first idea, Classmetric, was "a total disaster", he says. An online tool designed to give professors an insight into how well students were understanding lectures, it fell at the first hurdle, as rather than using the tool, students "went straight to Facebook". But while developing the failed ideas, the co-founders - Peter, Calvin French-Owen, Ilya Volodarsky and Ian Storm Taylor, who has since left the firm - wrote a small piece of computer code that was to become the basis of the successful company, Segment. The code acted as a pipeline connecting customer data from different websites. "We'd built it for ourselves to solve our own data pipeline problems," says Peter. In December 2012 the other three founders wanted to use that small piece of code as the basis of a business model. Peter definitely did not. "I was like, 'That is the worst idea I have ever heard,'" he says. "And so we fought about it, the four of us, all day long." The problem, as he saw it, was that this simple code was open source - that is, it had already been made available to developers at no cost - so Peter could not see how it could bring money in. He went home and hatched a plan that he thought would see the idea off once and for all. The plan was to build "a really beautiful website" that explained what the code did, offering a product based on the code which hadn't yet been built. "We'll put it up in the developer community and we'll see what happens," he says, convinced that there wouldn't be any interest. "And I was thinking to myself: 'This will kill it. For sure.'" He was wrong. Within 24 hours of the website going up, the firm was bombarded with thousands of email enquiries about the product, which hadn't actually been built. "A few hours into it we were like, 'Wow, OK, this is really a thing.' And so by the end of the day it was very obvious that we actually needed to build the product." After five days of little to no sleep, the team had the first version. Although the source code was freely available, the company built a hosted version, selling the product as a service. "It was a massive adrenaline rush," he says. Segment is popular because it lets companies untangle customer data coming from different pieces of analytics and metrics software, as well as data about what and how customers are buying, Peter says. "You can think of us like the plumbing of a company's customer data," he says. Less than a month after first offering the product, the team had 70 companies using it. It was tough to begin with, but Peter says he had a "slightly odd" way of dealing with it. "When I had a particularly intense day, I wrote an email to myself, and I would send it for follow-up two years or four years down the road. "When you read it [years later], it's like, 'Wow, that's not the rose-coloured memory I had of that time.'" In October 2018, about 19,000 companies were using Segment, from start-ups to big players such as IBM, Levi's and 21st Century Fox. But at the beginning, the founders were "really scared of asking people for money", Peter says. "We were coming from a culture that was not about paying for software. We originally were charging $120 per year, and found that many customers were happy to pay $120,000 per year," Peter says. While the private firm is cagey about how much money it brings in, Forbes estimates its 2017 revenue as $45m (£35m). Brandon Purcell, analyst at market research firm Forrester, says Segment has seen such rapid growth because it addresses a big problem - "messy data stored in disparate systems". He says the firm faces competition on two fronts - from other customer data companies, and from big players such as Salesforce and Oracle, and also from Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP from a different direction. While Segment "stands out" due to the flexibility of what it can do, "they're facing off against some behemoths with enormous existing customer bases, so they still face an uphill battle," Mr Purcell says. However, Peter insists that Segment is doing something quite unique, and eventually he wants the firm to go public. He says that as a boss he is "learning very rapidly" and he tries to learn "superpowers" from other members of the executive team. More The Boss features: In common with other Silicon Valley tech firms, Segment is quite egalitarian, he adds. "I really want to hear what everyone has to say, and really make sure everyone has a voice, make sure we're bringing problems out on to the table and working out how to solve them. "It's similar to our approach to customers." And it's an approach that seems to be working so far.	The BBC's weekly The Boss series profiles a different business leader from around the world. This week we speak to Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and chief executive of customer data infrastructure firm Segment.
+text: By Stephen EvansBBC News, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany But it is a losing battle. The pastures they and the sheep need are diminishing. The shepherds blame biofuels. They complain that meadows where sheep have always grazed are being turned over to the growing of crops for power generation. Maik Gersonder tends flocks in eastern Germany. It is getting harder to find suitable grassland because fields are being switched to grow maize (corn), which is processed into ethanol for cars. "We have many problems with it," he told the BBC. "We have to go further to find land to graze the sheep. And it's pushed the price of land up." The price of food on world markets is high at the moment - not quite as high as in 2008, but still very high compared with previous decades. In Germany, where one in eight acres of farmland is now used for biofuels, the price of wheat is at its highest in 25 years. But the farmers who do the growing say that high prices are a recent thing, and that for too long food has been too cheap to grow profitably - so they have turned land over to plants for biofuel. Fuel instead of food Hellmuth Riestock has a big farm north of Berlin - but he is also now a generator of electricity. Alongside the cowshed are big green tanks into which chopped-up plants are put. They are mulched and processed to emit gas, which is then used for power generation. He uses some of the electricity, with the excess being sold to the grid. Last year, the price of his rye was so low it was not worth selling for food - so he turned it into electricity. This year, higher prices mean it will end up going into a mouth rather than a gas tank. He thinks a system where it pays him to grow crops for fuel is not right. "It's a problem that food's been too cheap - so switching land to grow fuel made economic sense. And that's a relationship that needs to be addressed." It is being addressed at the top of government - or rather argued over, because two of the important ministers take opposite views on the impact of biofuels. The country's development minister, Dirk Niebel, said as he toured African countries recently: "We need to put corn on the plate, not in the tank." But the environment minister, Peter Altmaier, disagreed. "There is no connection between the production of biofuel and food prices," he said, "not in Germany, anyway". Crop research 'neglected' Harald von Witzke, Professor of Agricultural Economics at Humboldt University in Berlin, told the BBC that only 3% of the world's farmland was being used for biofuel. This, he estimated, was responsible for perhaps one-tenth of the doubling in food prices since 2000. "So for the time being the expansion of biofuel has had a limited effect on price increases." There are other factors he thinks we should be worried about, like the decline in agricultural research. "Agricultural research in the rich countries has been neglected. It has been cut back and this has resulted in a decline of annual productivity growth." Broadly, food prices fell during the 20th Century. Science and technology delivered new methods, and productivity of people and land rose. That long-term fall is now set to be reversed, he thinks, raising the need for better yields. But he says that in the European Union, "we've started to cut back agricultural research". He says surpluses of food in the richer countries weakened the impulse to improve yields. On top of that, there was a vogue for research into climate change, rather than increasing crop production. He warns that there are likely to be 10 billion people on this planet by 2050, compared with seven billion now. "The growth in demand will be close to a record pace because of continued very rapid population growth. The second reason is increasing incomes and consumption in the newly industrialising countries. "Global demand is growing at a rapid pace. Agriculture faces increasing resource constraints. Land, water and energy are becoming scarcer and more expensive." So, supply failing to keep pace with rising demand will push up food prices. It will also push up the price of farmland, whether to grow crops for food or fuel. It is not new to grow fuel - that is what firewood is. But the drive towards biofuels is intensifying the pressure and sharpening the choices. The shepherds of Germany live a quiet life - but under intense economic pressure.	The shepherds of Germany are worried. There are still about 2,000 of them tending sheep on grasslands, plying their ancient trade and defying time and the intrusions of modernity.
+text: Experts at Cardiff University's Wales Governance Centre have assessed the level of Welsh public spending - by the UK and Welsh governments - and how much is raised from taxes in Wales. Spending was £38bn in the 2014-15 financial year, but money raised from taxes was only £23.4bn. The deficit represents around 23.9% of the size of the Welsh economy, or GDP. The equivalent UK figure is 4.9%, while the estimate for Scotland is 9.7%. The authors said the findings "laid bare the scale of the challenge" as the Welsh Government prepares to take on additional powers. Council tax and business rates are already devolved, with stamp duty and landfill tax following in April 2018. Control over 10p in the pound of income tax is due to follow, although no date has been set for this yet. Taken together these taxes would amount to around £4bn of annual revenue. 'Scale of the challenge' Ed Poole, a lecturer at the Wales Governance Centre at Cardiff University and one of the authors of the report. said: "At around 24% of estimated GDP, Wales' £14.7bn net fiscal deficit is a very substantial gap between the revenues raised in Wales and public spending for Wales. "There is no evidence that the gap between Wales and the rest of the UK is being bridged. "The figures lay bare the scale of the challenge facing Wales as public services increasingly come to rely on own-sourced taxes such as the new Welsh rates of income tax and stamp duty." The Scottish Government publishes estimates for Scotland's fiscal position each year, with the results being pored over by politicians and cited in arguments over whether the country could be independent. No similar exercise has been carried out for Wales since devolution, although estimates were made by the Silk Commission in 2012 and the Holtham Commission in 2009. HM Revenue and Customs now publishes figures for the taxes it collects in Wales each year, and the Office for Budget Responsibility publishes forecasts for how much could be raised in future years from devolved taxes. The Welsh Government said the report was broadly consistent with statistics produced by the UK government and others. A spokesman added: " It is important to note that public expenditure and revenues per head in Wales are similar to those parts of the UK that have the same kind of demographic and economic characteristics." Plaid Cymru said the figures showed the Labour government's "lack of ambition" was "shackling the Welsh economy".	Wales was effectively in the red to the tune of £14.6bn last year, according to new research published on Monday.
+text: He was asked to give "a little clue as to [his] inclinations" about the BBC's forthcoming charter renewal by shadow culture secretary Chris Bryant. The minister responded quoting Mr Bryant's 2005 description of elements of the licence fee as "regressive". "You will have to await our conclusions," Mr Whittingdale added. "I would say I very much agree when you observe 'elements of the licence fee are regressive because everyone has to pay it, so it falls as a greater percentage of the income on the poorest people'." The quote was taken from a 2005 debate in which Mr Bryant went on to say the licence fee was "a good principle because it enables everyone in the country, whether rich or poor, to watch the best programming." Mr Whittingdale has been a critic of the licence fee in the past, saying last year it was "worse than a poll tax" and "unsustainable" in the long term. Some commentators have suggested his appointment could pose a threat to the corporation, prompting Mr Bryant to ask: "Is Auntie safe in your hands?" The current royal charter, which determines the level of the licence fee and the other terms under which the corporation operates, runs out at the end of 2016. The culture secretary agreed with Mr Bryant that its renewal involved "a tight timetable" but that he was "hoping we will be able to renew the charter on time". Before taking over at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Mr Whittingdale chaired the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Last year the committee said the licence fee was becoming "harder to justify and sustain" while conceding "there appears to be no realistic alternative... in the short term".	John Whittingdale has faced questions in the House of Commons about the future of the BBC for the first time since becoming culture secretary.
+text: He was convicted of manslaughter along with his wife, Mairead, and friend Paul Mosley, who were told they would serve half of their 17-year sentences. Mrs Justice Thirlwall told Mick Philpott he was "a disturbingly dangerous man" and the "driving force" behind the plot. Here is a selection of her comments in more detail. Attitude to women You [Mick Philpott] controlled and manipulated those women as you had controlled and manipulated their predecessors. They ran the household and looked after all the children. They went out to work. Their wages and their benefits went into your account. You controlled how money was spent. These two young women were not even permitted to have a front door key. I accept that the level of physical violence had reduced in recent years, but the level of control, aggression and fear most certainly did not. Women were your chattels, there to look after you and your children (for that is how you describe them all). You bark orders and they obey. Witness after witness described the dynamics in your household. You were king-pin, no one else mattered. The children I am quite satisfied that for you the principal purpose of your many children is to reflect on you. Their needs desires and aspirations were very low on your list of priorities, if indeed they featured at all. You craved attention, you enjoyed the limelight, you courted publicity. You were and remain the centre of your world and it is plain that you require everyone in your life, but particularly the women, to make sure that you remain at the centre of their world. You so arranged your life and theirs so that everything was done for the pleasure of Michael Philpott. It has been said on your behalf that you were a good father. I cannot give that description to a man who acted as you did. Ever since the fire your life has been a performance for the public and the police, and then in this court. Your conduct has been punctuated by collapses and shows of distress designed to evoke sympathy where none is merited, designed to manipulate emotion. I accept you have lost six children. I very much regret that everything about you suggests that your grief has very often been simulated for the public gaze. Mairead Philpott I accept that he treated you [Mairead Philpott] as a skivvy or a slave. As became clear during the trial you were prepared to go to any lengths, however humiliating, to keep him happy. But as the evidence came out it was plain that this was not quite the position. This was put beyond doubt when you gave evidence. You pointed out that you had stood up to him in the past. That is why when he asked you for a divorce on no fewer than three occasions you refused him. These were your children. Your first responsibility, surely, was to them. The risks were obvious and overwhelming and anyone who has heard the harrowing wailing from you on the 999 call can hear your realisation that this had gone horribly wrong and your children were in mortal danger. But by then it was too late and you bear your responsibility for that. You put Michael Philpott above your children and as a result they have died. Attempted murder The first relationship with which I am concerned was a relationship with a girl in her teens. You [Mick Philpott] were in your 20s. The relationship was characterised by violence; there were repeated beatings. You were sure that she was having affairs and would come back from your posting in the army to check on her, repeatedly. Eventually she summoned the courage to bring your relationship to an end. You broke into her house, armed yourself with a knife and went to her bedroom where you stabbed her repeatedly in a ferocious attack which left her with life-threatening injuries from which she has never fully recovered. You were convicted of attempted murder and wounding with intent. It is clear... that you have repeatedly used that conviction as a means of controlling other women, terrifying them as to what you might do to them if they did not follow your will. Early relationships You subjected your (first) wife to physical violence throughout your relationship. She never reported anything to the police - she was too afraid to do so. She knew of your past. She believed she could not leave you. She simply hoped that the time would come when you would leave her. And that time came when you took up with a very young Heather Kehoe. She was 16 when she ran away with you. You were in your 40s. She spoke tellingly of life with you; sometimes you were charming, always domineering, always in control. You controlled her through physical and sexual violence, threats and emotional abuse. She, like the two women before her, speaks of the life-long damage she has suffered as a result of her relationship with you. The other partner You were obsessed with Lisa Willis. Indeed it was plain to me when you were giving evidence over more than three days in the witness box that you still are. She left you, taking her children with her. She did not dare tell you she was leaving. She told Mairead Philpott that she was taking her children swimming. She and the children left with the clothes they stood up in and their swimming things. You soon realised what had happened and you set about trying to bring her back. The evidence shows that you tried sweet-talking her. You tried cajoling and then bullying her. She would not come back. You could not stand the fact that she had crossed you. You were determined to make sure that she came back and you began to put together your plan. The fire The jury was spared some of the most harrowing details of the removal of the children from 18 Victory Road. Mercifully their deaths were swift and, it would seem, without pain. No-one could have listened to the evidence of the firefighters and not be moved by what they had done and what they had seen in their efforts to combat the fire and save the children. Your neighbours were traumatised by what they saw; several of them tried to help. Their bravery was required as a result of your callous stupidity. It is clear that they have been shattered, as has the local community generally. Paul Mosley You [Paul Mosley] enjoyed the attention that you gained from your proximity to the fire. You boasted of being arrested and bailed for six counts of murder. You, too, are responsible for the deaths of six children. As a result you have lost all contact with your own children. Unsurprisingly your former partner wants nothing to do with you in the light of all that has become known about your conduct in the course of this trial.	A judge has sentenced Mick Philpott to life for killing six of his children in a fire at his Derby house.
+text: By Trevor TimpsonBBC News Its 1940s control tower looks out over summer fields of wheat and maize in the countryside east of Chichester where, in that other summer 70 years ago, Tangmere's RAF Hurricane fighters were in the front line. Alongside the former runways, huge high-tech glasshouses stretch - 63 acres of them, where thousands of peppers ripen silently for Britain's supermarkets. But in 1940 Tangmere was "right in the thick of the fighting," says Dudley Hooley, education officer at the village's military aviation museum, which attracts over 35,000 visitors a year. Its Hurricanes were in action throughout the struggle for air supremacy meant to pave the way for the invasion of Britain. And on 16 August 1940, when the Luftwaffe was starting to mount massive raids on the main fighter stations, Tangmere suffered a tremendous dive-bomber attack. Two hangars were destroyed, the other three and 16 aircraft badly damaged, workshops, sick bay and officers' mess wrecked and the water supply put out of action. Twenty service personnel were killed - as the churchyard bears witness. Dozens of RAF graves and a few German ones commemorate the struggles of the summer of 1940; a large group of the graves are of ground crew who died on 16 August. Among civilians who died on the base, says Mr Hooley, was an ice-cream seller thought to have been the victim of a direct hit because he and his barrow were never seen again. In the middle of the attack, Pilot Officer Billy Fiske crash-landed his damaged Hurricane on the bomb-cratered runway. This pre-war winter Olympics hero was one of the very first Americans to die fighting for the Allies. Joyce Warren, who was at her grandmother's house by the airfield that day, remembers seeing the planes dogfighting high above and the Stukas screaming down on the base. "One minute it's a perfectly peaceful day, and the next minute you've got this all going on," says Mrs Warren, who is one of the volunteer staff at the museum. "It happened in the middle of the day about lunch time... We had an earth dug-out at that time that my dad had built; my grandmother and I went into that. "I probably was frightened but I think my grandmother was more frightened than I was because she realised the implications." Mr Hooley says 16 August was "quite an amazing day," adding: "Lots of the station buildings were absolutely decimated and some very large holes put in the landing areas. But within 24 hours Tangmere was back up and running again." He admires the courage and accuracy of the Stuka dive bomber crews but says they were "very, very easy meat" for the Hurricanes. Some Battle of Britain experts consider the heavy German losses in the mid-August raids a key turning point, as the Stukas had to be withdrawn from operations over England. This was Tangmere's achievement 70 years ago, and its consciousness of its historic role is real, and growing, according to parish councillor John Perry. "People's main interest may be their job, their television, what they do about the garden - but they carry the Battle of Britain about with them," he suggests. The annual commemoration service is better attended each year, says Mr Perry, and interest in anniversary events is strong. Gerard Vonk, manager of Tangmere Airfield Nurseries' pepper-growing operation, says the firm has seen the state of the site improved greatly during its 22 years there - with its concrete apron and runways no longer a paradise for joyriders and vandals. "It was in the beginning rather a dilapidated area and everybody had a good time on Saturday and Sunday driving their cars and smashing things up. Now it looks much tidier," he says. The 30 or so airfields that were at the heart of the Battle of Britain have had varying careers in the years since. Few have entirely disappeared. Some are still RAF stations (such as Northolt); quite a number are specialist airports (Biggin Hill, Manston) or private airfields (such as North Weald). Three contain prisons (Ford, Eastchurch, Coltishall). Several are now used by the three armed services for other purposes. Heritage questions Westhampnett (Tangmere's satellite airfield) is the Goodwood racing circuit. Kenley - said to be the best preserved Battle of Britain site - is used for training cadets in glider flying. Questions remain of how much more can or need be done to preserve the physical remains of Tangmere's heritage. The 1940 events were part of a history as an air base stretching from 1917 to 1970, which also included its use for the flying of SOE agents to occupied France; for a wing of three Spitfire squadrons commanded by Douglas Bader; and for post-war air speed record successes. Hardly any buildings survive from the Battle of Britain. A former officers' barrack block was saved by campaigners from demolition by developers and listed. It is now scheduled for conversion into flats. The armoury and fire department area which were in "immaculate condition" were lost despite a campaign to save them, says James Liskutin of the RAF Historic Association. "As far as the battle for Tangmere is concerned it's not over yet," says Mr Liskutin. "The control tower and the last remaining emergency services building - if those were established as a tourist centre or as something related to the museum, that would be a victory, because they could use that as an information centre for Tangmere." The control tower - an icon for any airfield - is at the centre of some arguments about the future of Tangmere's heritage. True, it is not of Battle of Britain vintage, but it dates from soon after and replaced an earlier wooden one, possibly on the same spot. "I think it's a shame" that the tower is unused, says Gerard Vonk. But the tower remains derelict and sad - and haunted, perhaps by the ghost of the American hero Billy Fiske, some people say. There are stories of ghosts at the Tangmere museum, too.	Tangmere in West Sussex, one of the country villages made famous forever by the Battle of Britain, seems quiet today.
+text: He was speaking on the sidelines of an economic summit of Asia Pacific nations (Apec), which opened in Manila. Mr Obama earlier pledged monetary and naval assistance to the Philippines, which has competing claims with China in the resource-rich region. China - which claims most of the South China Sea - has repeatedly stated that its dredging work is legal. The land reclamation, which began in late 2013, has turned submerged reefs into islands. China has said it has "no intention to militarise" those islands. The territorial dispute is not officially on the agenda of the summit - but it is expected to cast a shadow over it. China's President Xi Jinping is also in Manila for the summit of about 20 heads of state and governments. 'Defence of our ally' Mr Obama's comments came after his meeting with Philippine President Benigno Aquino on Wednesday. "We agree on the need for bold steps to lower tensions, including pledging to halt reclamation, new construction, and militarisation of disputed island in the South China Sea," Mr Obama said. Meanwhile, Mr Aquino stressed that freedom of navigation and overflight in the busy region must be continuously ensured. Mr Obama landed in Manila on Tuesday, but then immediately boarded a US-donated Philippines navy frigate that operates around the Spratly Islands, which are claimed by both the Philippines and China. "We have a treaty obligation, an iron-clad commitment to the defence of our ally the Philippines," he said on board. "My visit here underscored our shared commitment to the security of the waters of this region and to freedom of navigation." He did not mention China, but announced that two more vessels would be transferred to the Philippines along with a $250m (£164.5m) package to enhance regional maritime security. Analysis: Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, BBC News, Manila America has been taken aback by the speed at which China has built new artificial islands and runways on reefs in the South China Sea over the last year-and-a-half. Now Washington is responding - sending navy ships and even B-52 bombers into the area in recent weeks. The message is clear: The US will not allow China to proceed unchallenged with a takeover of one of the busiest and most strategic bits of water in the world. China's island factory Why is the South China Sea contentious?	China must stop land reclamation in disputed waters in the South China Sea, US President Barack Obama has said.
+text: The first version of the sign appeared opposite a main route into the city, the Portway, in January. It was thought to pay tribute to the sign in the Hollywood hills which had originally spelt out Hollywoodland. The National Trust said the change was "not appropriate" and the sign had been removed. "We can see the funny side of Bristoland, but we always said the sign had a finite life and the change to It's Bland was the point to remove it," said Bill Morris, National Trust head warden for the site. It is not known whether its creator, who remains anonymous, had anything to do with the recent change. "I certainly wouldn't have liked to have put them up - it's a pretty steep slope so it would have been a difficult job," said Mr Morris. "It was fun while it lasted and I hope they can come up with something new." The organisers of arts festival Upfest first brought the sign to public attention. Spokesman Stephen Hayles said there were plans to make it a "more permanent" feature.	An 8ft (2.4m) high Bristoland sign which appeared in the Avon Gorge has been taken down by the land owner after it was changed to read "It's Bland".
+text: Batsford Arboretum were sent seeds from a 200-year-old ginkgo growing 4,265ft (1,300m) from the 1945 atomic blast in Japan by Green Legacy Hiroshima (GLH). GLH manages 170 "survivor trees" and helps grow them around the world. Head gardener, Matthew Hall, said: "I put them in the fridge at work and a few people were worried," but they "look fresh, young and just beautiful". 'Expect some mutations' He was sent 23 seeds from a gingko tree, which was growing in the Shukkeien Garden when the uranium bomb exploded 70 years ago. Almost all the garden's giant trees were burnt except for a 17m (55ft) tall gingko which toppled but survived. Mr Hall was sent the seeds in May and "18 of them were shooting and I'm hopeful that a few more will come through". "As a plants man, you never know what you're going to get and you expect some mutations but these trees look no different from any other." The saplings are due to be planted within the arboretum in Moreton-in-Marsh by spring 2017.	Seeds from a tree that survived the bombing of Hirsohima have germinated at a Gloucestershire botanical garden.
+text: By Michael DempseyTechnology of Business reporter I'm off to try out a new technology that promises to train my brain to relax. Sitting far apart from other passengers in the carriage while wearing a hot surgical mask, I'm hoping it works. I'm meeting Dr Jamil El-Imad who enjoyed a successful career in the computer industry before, in his words, "getting sucked into neuroscience". The Lebanese-born IT expert knew all about computer languages and was intrigued by the similarities between data and the way the brain processes information. Recognising the potential of virtual reality devices he worked on how to use cloud computing techniques to capture and analyse brain signals and create a machine to replicate the meditation experience. Neuroplasticity, the adaptability of the brain, is the science here. Neurons, the circuits of the brain, become stronger the more they are exercised. They are changeable. And they are individual. Neurons gripped Dr El-Imad. He sees our neurons as "a forest where every tree is different". This means that each person needs their own approach to gaining mental resilience. His innovation was to integrate the technology of the electroencephalogram (EEG), which monitors electrical activity in the brain, with a virtual reality headset. The combination means that the response of the subject's brain to images can be measured. The biofeedback can be analysed instantly using the affordable computer power offered by cloud computing, industrial levels of data processing rented over the internet. Murali Doraiswamy, professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Duke University School of Medicine in North Carolina in the US and a former adviser to Dr El-Imad's company NeuroPro, says that meditation and the whole realm of mindfulness are proven treatments for some conditions. "There are many types of mindfulness and it's not a panacea. But in the last 30 years mindfulness has gone from fringe science to the mainstream. It can be as effective as medication in preventing a recurrence of depression. It won't be for everyone, but it can change our outlook." The first contact I get with this system, called the Dream Machine, is when the EEG headset is slipped over my forehead. It's a semi-circular band containing sensors that transmit wireless signals revealing just what is going on in my brain. The EEG headset takes feeds from my level of attention and will register when my mind veers off course. Over multiple sessions this should help subjects to master their own mind and gain more control over their thoughts, which is a definition of mindfulness. The VR headset is not a bulky helmet. In fact there's no sense of the weight due to a springy coil that holds it and takes the weight off your head. Without that weight there's no sense of enclosure either. Hearing ethereal pipe music, I see an island floating in space. Waves lap on a beach and beyond giant Easter Island statues are planted among the rocks and palm trees. White feathers float on the breeze. I am told they symbolise freedom and my breathing keeps them floating. I move on to the beach and find myself on the sand looking towards the statues planted to my right. But a white fog appears in front of me, which ebbs and flows as I try to focus on the faces of the statues. That sea mist keeps returning to block my view because I'm losing my focus on the moment, and hence am not sufficiently relaxed. Focusing on the moment takes some effort. I'm hindered by a journalist's instinct to note events. Dr El-Imad tells me that our minds wander for 50% of our waking hours so excluding other thoughts is a challenge we all face. I capture the statues in sharp definition from time to time and emerge shocked that I was in the machine for five minutes. It felt like two or three as I narrowed my thoughts on the scene in front of me. Beside this set-up a laptop screen reflects the signals the EEG captured leaking out of my brain. It shows areas of my consciousness lighting up. This data is saved for analytic purposes. Anonymised and encrypted it can be sent on to neuroscience researchers. I'm given a score that defines my level of concentration and provides a target for improvement. Dr El-Imad thinks my neurons have behaved pretty well for a first outing, rating 30% concentration. The sense of escape that comes with sliding into a floating island vision did dilute the anxiety spurred by my tube journey. And the hovering Easter Island stage set is just one virtual location option among promised relaxing spots. Rolling out the Dream Machine to the public should not be expensive. NeuroPro uses off-the-shelf technology, with VR and EEG hardware costing no more than £1,000 in total. Possible sites for this service include gyms and fitness centres. Alternatively, it could be installed in chill-out rooms in corporate offices, relieving employees of anxiety and allowing the company to retain good talent. This is where Alastair Campbell, former Labour Party communications chief and mental health campaigner, thinks the technology might have a real impact. Mr Campbell has lectured businesses on the significance of mindfulness and says the corporate world's view of mental health has changed a lot. "We've underplayed the importance of how employees use their brains. I've definitely seen a change. In the City banks now realise that it's not smart if they invest a lot in someone who then burns out." More Technology of Business In a service economy protecting employee brainpower through mental health initiatives makes sense, says Mr Campbell. He's reserving judgement on the Dream Machine itself. "I'm always interested in anything that gets people talking about mental health. You can't spend your life walking around with a Dream Machine on your head but you can train your mind to work differently." The Dream Machine emerged from the mind of a technologist. But Dr El-Imad concedes that a smartphone society is bad for our brains. "We live in an attention-seeking economy, one that distracts us and puts pressure on us. We are not a multi-tasking species!" So it could be our neurons need the Dream Machine to help us dodge the world technology has built. Mr Campbell agrees. "I have to keep reminding myself of the pointlessness of Twitter, of going through your phone all the time."	A trip on London's underground is rarely a relaxing experience, but the Covid-19 pandemic has added an extra level of anxiety for many.
+text: The 600ft (180m) Shotley Railway Pier at Shotley Gate, Suffolk, used to serve the HMS Ganges naval training base. Money raised to save the 122-year-old pier, built by the Marquis of Bristol, will be matched by the Power to Change Community Shares Booster Programme. John Davitt, chairman of the Shotley Pier Group, said: "We are overwhelmed by the support of our investors." Mr Davitt said the structure of the pier above the water level looked "a bit sorry for itself". "That will take a lot of work, but the important thing is the sub-sea structure is basically sound," he said. Mr Davitt said a former pupil at the Ipswich Girls' School, who is now living in Hong Kong, invested a "substantial" sum hours before the deadline to buy shares. Funding group Power to Change Community Shares Booster Programme, which handed over a £5,000 grant to get the project off the ground, pledged last year to match up to £100,000 raised through shares bought by people interested in owning part of the pier. The minimum investment was £25. Spokesman Neil Turton said: "Shotley Pier is among a new generation of community owned enterprises that are bringing valuable local assets into the hands of local people." Once the purchase has been completed, the group expects to carry out the renovations in 100ft (30m) stages over the next three years.	A community is to buy and renovate a dilapidated Victorian pier after raising £58,000 through a share scheme.
+text: By Adina CampbellNewsbeat reporter New figures show childhood obesity levels have not changed compared to last year. But a charity has warned that the Government is still not taking the problem seriously and too many children are bigger than they should be. Figures from the National Child Measurement Programme showed a third of 10 and 11-year-olds in England are classed as overweight or obese. It also found more than one in five children in England are still starting school overweight or obese. The programme records the weight and measurements of more than a million children across England every year. Have your say: Is childhood obesity still a problem? Charity warning The National Obesity Forum says even though these figures have not changed, the recession is having an impact with more people turning to cheap junk food. Tam Fry, from the charity, said working class families are so strapped for cash, they have no choice but to eat unhealthily. He said: "Families on a very low income are probably not being able to provide for their children the proper foods, because cheap food is less healthy than fruit and vegetables. "We believe that families are eating junk more. If you look at the returns from some of the junk food shops they’re rising, but some of the shops that store good, healthy food are finding it more difficult to move it off the shelves. "When you have a less disposable income, then obviously you’re going to look for the convenience stores that specialise in cheaper, less healthy food." A few weeks ago, statistics showed childhood obesity was slowing down across England. The Health Survey for England predicted that by 2020, the number of children classed as obese would be lower than previously thought. Klim McPherson, from the National Heart Forum, thinks we should not be too worried about obesity because people are becoming more aware. He said: "We can really talk about reliability and trends linked to obesity. The Health Survey for England has been monitoring obesity levels since 1993 and our latest predictions show obesity is slowing down in children. "We think it’s down to celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver who’ve had a big splash about healthy eating. There’s also a lot of publicity on the television about healthy eating and the Change for Life programme that the Government are doing is also having an impact." Healthy eating Eleven-year-old Cassandra Henderson from Newcastle has lost three stone in the last six months. In the last year, she has been measured at school and classed as obese, but she’s lost weight by eating better and exercising. "Before I lost weight, I used to eat donor kebabs, burgers, chips and pizzas four days a week. My mum runs a fish and chip shop so I used to pop in most days after school to get my tea," she said. "The first time I was measured, I didn’t want to be. I kept making excuses, but I knew I couldn’t get out of it. I used to hold my breath to try and squeeze myself in and change the weight on the scales, but it didn’t change back then. "I was also bullied for being overweight. People used to call me names on Facebook and threaten me. "But I’ve now changed what I eat and exercise now. I eat things like carrots, cabbage and rye bread with soft cheese. Takeaways are banned. I have a trampoline in my garden and use it four days a week, as well as playing netball and tennis at school." Cassandra’s mum, Claire Henderson, says she can understand why working class families are finding it harder to eat better in the recession. "The price of things these days are going up. Obviously with the recession it is very difficult," she said. "I used to work full-time in the fish and chip shop and Cassandra used to come in for her tea because I didn’t have time to cook. But now I work part time, we avoid takeaways and are eating healthy food together as a family."	An obesity charity says they are still worried about the number of children in England who are overweight.
+text: United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust (ULHT) said its budget deficit was already £40m because of agency staff hire costs and winter pressures. The trust was only recently taken out of special measures. Its deputy chief executive said it needed to recruit more nurses, in order to open beds and generate more income. Reporting a £6.3m deficit for the first month of the financial year earlier, ULHT chairman Ron Buchanan warned board members the financial credibility of the trust could be at risk if steps to reduce the deficit failed. Deputy chief executive Kevin Turner, said "a simple extrapolation" of the figure for April would lead to the £75m deficit. "We know where the issues are. They are all predominantly linked to the fact that we need to recruit more nurses to open more beds to treat more patients to attract more income for our services," he said. "We know what the actions are and it's our responsibility to tackle them." ULHT has more than 200 nursing vacancies and the trust board heard staffing was down to 80% in 12 areas. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced plans earlier to clamp down on "rip-off" agency staff, to plug gaps in the NHS. "Our responsibility is to comply with the requirements of the Secretary of State but we'll work with our trust development authority to make sure we do it in a managed way," Mr Turner said. "It's not just simply a case of switching off the agency staff, we need to maintain our wards safely." ULHT, which runs Lincoln County, Grantham District and Boston Pilgrim hospitals, was taken out of special measures in March.	The trust which runs hospitals in Lincolnshire has said it could be overspent by £75m by the end of the year unless urgent action is taken.
+text: By Sarah DickinsBBC Wales economics correspondent While most people receive Christmas cards, the only cards Tom ever seemed to get each December were those telling him he was out of work. After a three-year apprenticeship with BMW, he was told there was no permanent job; he then joined another accident repair shop for 18 months before being let go. Then it was third time unlucky at a body shop in Llansamlet in Swansea, as winter bit hard. "Expenditure was sky high, also our income was not the best," said Tom, aged 24. "Although we had plenty of work coming through, when Christmas time came along it went so quiet, they weren't able to stay afloat and went into administration." His parents had also had enough by now and so the family stepped in and decided to buy the operation and Scuffed Up was born earlier this year. His mother Thea, who was semi-retired, had her own experience of redundancy from a tourism management job with a national park. "We weren't prepared to see him fail again," she said. "It's purely for Tom. He's very skilled at what he does and we thought we'd give it a go, the business was up for sale and it was a viable option," she said. Tom added: "It was really frustrating. I have a lot of pride and passion in my work. There's no cutting corners. To be made redundant every year, especially around Christmas, was heartbreaking to a degree. To now actually have the opportunity to make this business my own is a dream come true and I'll work as hard as I can." It is mostly a family affair, with Tom's father Alun - a retired lecturer - on reception and his elder brother and sister part of the team too. A worker from the old business has been taken on too and the family are looking at trainees. "Everybody here is on minimum wage," said Thea. "We just need to take small steps at a time, grow the business and hope everyone stays with us. "Everybody who's invested is a director and have very clear roles and it's worked really well. We still feel a little insecure because the commitment is all ours. I've enjoyed employment so to be purely responsible for our own destiny is quite scary - we enjoy the control but it's a huge commitment, financially and emotionally, only time will tell." The Maunders have joined the ranks of the self-employed in Wales, which involves one-in-five of new jobs created since 2010. However it appears that it is still less prominent in Wales compared to the rest of the UK, where self-employment accounts for 32% of new jobs. At the end of 2016 there were 176,000 self-employed people in Wales - a rise since 2010. That proportion varies depending on where you live in Wales and is at its lowest in areas historically dominated by heavy industry, while highest in Powys where farming accounts for about one in three of businesses. Not only are farmers usually self-employed but they are dependent on a string of other self-employed trades like farm contractors, blacksmiths and sheep shearers. In addition, rural communities in Wales have a high proportion of cafes, hotels and restaurants, where self-employment and insecure housing are prevalent. As well as the traditional self-employed, there is also the so-called "gig economy" - people on short-term contracts or freelancing. Victoria Cao, 27, a freelance graphic designer working in Cardiff decided the time was right to try going it alone after five years working for companies in design and digital marketing. She has taken part-time work to bridge the gap to pay the mortgage between the end of a guaranteed regular income and establishing her own business Stray Pixel. "It can be quite scary and it's hard work, but don't let the fear stop you," said Ms Cao. "It's exciting when the email comes in to say you've got work - it's not the same as when you're in full-time employment with someone else. "I'm going to give it a year but in my heart I know I'm going to make it and it's been three months and it's going much better than I expected and I'm really enjoying it," she said. But for Richard Mayled, 47, from Merthyr, his experience of working as a delivery driver for a large company in the Gwent valleys was "an absolute nightmare". He had worked in IT for 25 years but wanted to try something different. Mr Mayled would only find out the night before whether he was working or not and then out of his £120-a-day pay he had to pay £28 each day to hire a van from a specified firm. He still paid the van hire fee even for the days when he wasn't working - and for the period after Christmas he was working as little as two days a week. His diesel allowance was also only 12 pence per mile. "When I was working it could be 12 or 14 hours - you could get a call after 6pm telling you there were another 30 parcels which needed delivering," he said. Mr Mayled was told he was no longer required in January and then it took him until April to be paid what he was owed. His advice to anyone considering gig working is to "read every single detail of what you sign up to." He has now got a full-time job back in IT. Dr Lucy Minford, economics lecturer at Swansea University, said: "Gig workers are weighing up the pros and the cons. There is that lack of job security and workplace pension, but the majority have weighed up and value the variety that it offers, the autonomy, the control over when you work and who you work for and what projects you take on." She says that "gig workers" also have a role to play, especially with smaller companies. "When we talk about entrepreneurs, we're talking about small firms, they're agile, dynamic, responsive to new opportunities and able to change direction quickly. It's an engine of growth. We should be careful about trying to remove that flexible workforce." Between October and December 2016 there were 37,000 people in Wales working on so-called zero hours contracts, 11,000 fewer than the year before. Around 20% of these wanted to work more hours but far more of those indicated they were happy with the arrangement. Overall there are more people working in Wales than ever before. The Conservatives and Welsh Labour both claim credit for that. Unemployment has recently risen a little to 4.8% but for most of the 12 months it has been lower - and below the UK average. What is also below UK levels are our wages. Last year, middle income workers in Wales were paid £492 a week - £47 a week less than the UK average. That is a reflection of the fact that a high proportion of jobs in Wales are relatively low skilled. In contrast Wales on the whole has a lower proportion of high level managerial and professional roles. That in turn impacts on the economy as there is less being spent in shops and on services. Across the UK, growth in the economy is largely as a result of consumer spending. So if on average people in Wales have less disposable income, that partly explains why the Welsh economy lags behind other parts of the UK in several indicators. The latest inflation figures will be dismal reading for those on low pay. Average wages have not been keeping up with the cost of living anyway but with the latest inflation rate rising from 2.3% to 2.7% in one month many households will find it harder to pay for the basics of food, clothing and energy - the elements of inflation that are rising most steeply. Back in the late 1980s and early 90s, as Wales' traditional industries contracted many thousands of people found themselves out of work and understandably attracting new jobs was a priority for all political parties. But we are in very different times now and the political debate is the quality and security of those jobs and about what is the best route to help lift people's standards of living.	When car body repairer Tom Maunder was made redundant for the third time, he'd had enough. So he bought the business.
+text: Amelie de Montchalin said the EU would not sign just "any" deal by the end of the year, saying "substance was much more important than deadlines". The UK has said it could walk away from the talks in June unless there was the "broad outline" of an agreement. The process, to be conducted in English, will begin on Monday. Details of what will be discussed and when have been published, with topics to be covered in the first round of negotiations including trade in goods and services, transport, energy, fisheries and "fair and open competition" in future dealings. Further rounds of negotiations will take place every two to three weeks, alternating between London and Brussels. The session in June, in which both sides will "take stock" of progress made at that point, is likely to prove crucial. The UK has ruled out extending the process beyond the end of the year, when the post-Brexit transition period will end. The UK and EU have agreed a schedule for negotiations based on 11 simultaneous streams, including one on the controversial subject of "a level playing field for fair and open competition". Eighteen days of talks have been scheduled until mid-May but the UK has not agreed to negotiations on defence or foreign policy, which the EU side wanted. The document says the working groups do not necessarily reflect the structure of the final agreement and the arrangements could change. The two sides can also speak to each other outside the formal rounds. The negotiations in Brussels will take place in a conference centre, not at the headquarters of the European Commission, although the "plenary sessions" and meetings between the chief negotiators will be held there. Friday's document, which sets out the terms of reference for the talks, says June's "high-level" meeting between chief negotiators David Frost and Michel Barnier will aim to "agree actions to move forward in negotiations on the future relationship". Speaking at the Chatham House think tank in London, Ms de Montchalin said the EU would "not accept time pressure" and was "not ready to sign any kind of a deal on December 31 at 11pm". "We cannot let our level of ambition be affected by what I would call artificial deadlines," she said. "If the UK decides to shorten the negotiating period, it will be the UK's responsibility. "It will not be our choice on the European side, and that choice will have consequences in terms of the breadth and depth of the relationship we can build... for us substance is much, much more important than deadlines." The UK officially left the EU at the end of January, but is continuing to abide by many EU rules while talks on a permanent trading relationship take place. The UK and the EU have both set out their priorities for the talks, with flash points including the UK's wish to diverge from EU employment and environmental standards in future, its ruling out of any role for the European Court of Justice and the level of EU access to UK fishing waters. The UK has insisted a "comprehensive" free trade agreement, modelled on existing EU agreements with the likes of Canada and Japan, is possible within 10 months and it will decide by this summer whether this is achievable. If the UK decides such a deal is not in prospect, the government has said it will move to World Trade Organization rules from the start of 2021, under an arrangement similar to the one that the EU has with Australia. The EU's 46-page negotiating document, published on Monday, said any trade agreement "should uphold common high standards, and corresponding high standards over time with Union standards as a reference point". Ms de Montchalin said trust between the two sides was vital to a successful outcome and the EU needed to know that the existing withdrawal agreement and its guarantees on citizens rights and the Northern Irish border would be stuck to. Please upgrade your browser Your guide to Brexit jargon Use the list below or select a button	The EU will not be pressurised by "artificial deadlines" in its post-Brexit trade talks with the UK, France's Europe minister has warned.
+text: Former party chairwoman Baroness Warsi said the PM had failed to "acknowledge" or "tackle" the problem and this was "symptomatic" of her wider leadership. Shortly after her comments, the party said 14 members had been suspended for Islamophobic Facebook posts. The Conservatives said "decisive action" would be taken against anyone making offensive remarks. The suspensions followed messages posted on a Facebook group called the "Jacob Rees-Mogg Supporters Group". The page was not affiliated with the MP or the party as a whole but Conservative members identified as using it have been suspended pending an investigation. "When we find evidence of members making offensive or inappropriate comments, we consistently take decisive action," a spokesman said. But Baroness Warsi, who was the UK's first female Muslim cabinet minister, has said her party had "turned a blind eye" to prejudice and become "institutionally Islamophobic". She suggested the "rot had set in" several years ago and accused senior party officials of being "in denial" and presiding over an "opaque" complaints process. In a personal attack on the prime minister, she said Mrs May had "failed to tackle the problem head on". "She doesn't listen, she fails to acknowledge when there is a problem. It's probably symptomatic of the way in which her leadership has dealt with other matters. "Burying your head in the sand is not going to make problems go away." She said efforts to modernise the party had "gone into reverse" since Mrs May succeeded David Cameron as leader, but she ruled out quitting the party, as others have done. "If my party's going though a process of 're-UKIPification' of itself, then it's my job to stand within that party and fight to bring it back to the centre ground." She has written to the party's chief executive Sir Mick Davis urging him to "show leadership" on the issue, because, she said, Mrs May and party chairman Brandon Lewis had not. She said Sir Mick, a former chairman of the Jewish Leadership Council, had a "long history of fighting bigotry" and was "uniquely placed to understand consequences of unchecked hate". Baroness Warsi has been warning about anti-Muslim prejudice in the party for years. Her latest intervention follows a row over former candidate Peter Lamb, who was was due to stand in the Staple Tye ward, in Harlow, Essex, in May's local elections and had previously stood in the Toddbrook ward. Mr Lamb was disciplined by the party after it emerged that he had posted a message on Twitter in 2015, saying "Islam like alcoholism [sic]" and "the first step to recovery is admit you have a problem". Later in the same year, he tweeted: "Turkey buys oil from ISIS. Muslims sticking together," adding: "Do they want us to call ISIS Daesh now so that we don't associate them with Islam?" Mr Lamb was reinstated as a candidate but local party sources said he had quit the party earlier on Tuesday, following the row about his comments. 'Party in denial' In a statement on Twitter, he apologised for the remarks, saying they were "aimed at the extremists that have hijacked Islam and are cowardly hiding behind the religion". Justice Secretary David Gauke rejected suggestions the party had ignored warnings on the issue. "Where there is evidence, we take action, as a political party should. "Whether it is Islamophobia or whether it is anti-Semitism, there is an obligation on political parties to take action and address it. "That is what the Conservative Party does and will continue to do. So I don't accept that criticism." But the Muslim Council of Britain said the level of prejudice within the party was "astonishing" and the claims should be independently investigated. "We've seen MPs, councillors and members engage in bigotry that should have no place in a modern Conservative Party," a spokesman said. "Yet the constructive call by Muslim communities for an independent inquiry into the issue has been ignored again and again. Instead we hear excuses, denials and the responses we would expect when there is an institutional problem."	Theresa May has been accused of "burying her head in the sand" over Islamophobia in the Conservative Party.
+text: Teachers, nurses and firefighters were among about 300 trade union members who gathered in the city on Saturday. They are angry at spending cuts which are likely to see at least 600 Cumbria County Council staff lose their jobs over the next four years. The event, organised by the North West Regional TUC, urged the government to reconsider the pace of spending cuts. TUC northern secretary Kevin Rowan, said: "Cumbria faces some of the toughest economic and social challenges in the country. "It is a deceptive mix of idyllic countryside and deeply impoverished communities. Some of the towns in Cumbria experience the highest levels of worklessness and deprivation in the UK. "The government's savage cuts are seriously undermining Cumbria's ability to recover from the financial crisis." Cumbria County Council, which is a Conservative and Labour-controlled administration, has said tough choices are needed to make savings of about £50m over the next four years. A public consultation on saving options will run until the end of January and a final report will be drawn up by February. Among the proposals are introducing charges for on-street parking in city and town centres and tourist destinations, and reducing the number of household recycling centres.	Public sector workers took part in a rally in Carlisle to protest against planned budget cuts and job losses.
+text: MSPs voted by 105 to 18 in favour of the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Bill. The Scottish government said the move was the right thing to do but Scotland's two main churches were opposed to it. The first gay and lesbian weddings could take place this autumn. Religious and belief bodies can "opt in" to perform same-sex marriages. Ministers said no part of the religious community would be forced to hold such ceremonies in churches. During a debate at Holyrood, MSPs rejected amendments which were said to provide "protection" for groups and individuals opposed to same-sex marriage. The SNP's John Mason tabled an amendment stating that no-one could be "compelled by any means" to solemnise gay marriage, including by a contract or a legal requirement. Mr Mason said that this was similar to a measure included in the bill passed by the UK Parliament allowing same-sex marriage in England and Wales. Health Secretary Alex Neil insisted there were "robust protections for religious bodies and celebrants" in the bill and the amendment was unnecessary. Mr Mason tabled further amendments, including one calling for recognition that "a belief in marriage as a voluntary union between one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others for life is a belief worthy of respect in a democratic society". He said: "This has been the prevailing view in Scotland for centuries, and may now be considered a minority view or even old fashioned, but it is an integral tenet of faith for many Christians, Muslims and others as well as the belief of many of no faith position at all." Mr Mason added: "We have seen volunteers in the third sector removed from the board for publicly supporting traditional marriage." The first same-sex weddings in England and Wales will take place from 29 March, in the wake of legislation already passed by the Westminster parliament. In Scotland, same-sex couples currently have the option to enter into civil partnerships, but SNP ministers brought forward their Marriage and Civil Partnership Bill, saying the move was an important step for equality. MSPs were allowed a free vote, rather than along party lines. 'Not far enough' Mr Neil said passing the bill meant "a historic day in the history of the Scottish Parliament", which received the front-bench backing of Labour's Jackie Baillie and Conservative Jackson Carlaw. Gay rights organisations, including the Equality Network and Stonewall Scotland, and a range of other groups, have supported the legislation. But the Scottish Catholic Church and Church of Scotland oppose the move, and have said they have no plans to conduct same-sex marriages. And the campaign group Scotland for Marriage said the safeguards in the bill did not go far enough. Key measures in the Scottish government's bill include: Quakers have campaigned in favour of same-sex marriage and have said they would allow ceremonies to take place on their premises. Other religious groups which back change include Buddhists and the Pagan Federation. The Church of Scotland - whose ruling General Assembly last year voted to allow actively gay men and women to become ministers - has said the institution stood against homophobia, but added that the "wide spread of opinion" on gay marriage was reflected among members of congregations across the country. As well as the main bill, Scottish ministers have also reached an agreement with the UK government for an amendment to the 2010 Equality Act. Blessings offer The move aims to protect individual religious celebrants, who do not wish to conduct same-sex marriages, from the threat of court action claiming discrimination. Westminster's Marriage Act which became law last July, will allow religious organisations to "opt in" to offering weddings, with the Church of England and Church in Wales banned in law from doing so. The Church of England, the Church in Wales and other faith groups have stated their opposition to gay marriage. A report commissioned by the Church of England has recommended that members of the clergy should be allowed to offer blessings to same-sex couples. The Northern Ireland Assembly is not currently considering any legislation to allow same-sex marriage. The Scottish government's marriage bill was brought forward after a government consultation, which produced a record 77,508 responses.	A bill which allows same-sex weddings to take place in Scotland has been passed by MSPs in the Scottish Parliament.
+text: Kim Darroch quit last year after it emerged he described the US President's government as "dysfunctional", "inept" and "divided" in private letters. The use of "clear and direct" language was not unusual for diplomats when reporting to ministers, he insisted. But its disclosure to the media was a "vindictive" breach of trust, he said. Lord Darroch left his post in July 2019 amid a huge diplomatic row over the leaking of a series of private cables, in which he had questioned the competence of the Trump administration and its handling of major foreign policy issues, such as relations with Iran. In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC's Newsnight, to be broadcast at 22:45 BST on BBC Two, he said he accepted his position had become untenable after his observations became public, leading Mr Trump to describe him as a "stupid guy" and "pompous fool". But he defended his conduct during his three years in Washington, saying it was the job of diplomats to report in unvarnished terms about the workings of foreign governments and how they could affect the UK national interest. "I never regret the terms in which I'd reported," he said. "I spent 40 years in the Foreign Office writing in these terms and people hitherto had thought it a strength and an asset. "There is nothing unusual in reporting in clear and direct terms. Wikileaks shows American diplomats reporting in direct terms and the US embassy was reporting directly about how the UK government was handling Brexit." 'In trouble' He said he knew he was "in trouble" when a confidential letter sent in 2017 to a small group of colleagues, which described the early weeks of the Trump era as "uniquely dysfunctional", appeared in the Mail on Sunday. He said he did not blame the newspaper for publishing the material but believed whoever had passed it onto them had acted in an "irresponsible and vindictive" way. Who is Lord Darroch? Ex-US ambassador 'showed little fury' in person If their aim had been to get him replaced by a Brexit-supporting politician, such as the former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, rather than another career diplomat, they clearly failed, he said. "I blame the leaker taking highly classified information of the most damaging kind to me and to US-UK relations. "If you're in the position of having to write in code because you can't trust your colleagues that way madness lies. You have to trust them and on this occasion that trust was misplaced." The Metropolitan Police launched a criminal probe into the leaking of the material in August 2019, with Commissioner Cressida Dick describing it as a "very serious crime". Boris Johnson, who at the time of Lord Darroch's exit was vying to be the next Conservative leader and prime minister, was criticised for not coming out in support of the UK diplomat and insisting he must stay in post. Lord Darroch said it would have been "nice" if Mr Johnson had done so but understood why he wanted to keep his "options open" given the ambassador had been left "dangling" by the row. Trump-Johnson relations Reflecting on his time in Washington and the current state of US-UK relations, he said the US President was "not a politician" in the conventional sense and it was not a surprise that Mr Johnson was "fascinated" by him. Asked if some of Mr Trump's approach to politics had rubbed off on Mr Johnson, he said it may be influencing his current "negotiating style" over a post-Brexit trade deal with the EU. The PM has been criticised for threatening to change the terms of the legally-binding Withdrawal Agreement with the EU in the event the UK does not negotiate a trade deal. "Trump famously said Theresa May should start Brexit negotiations by suing the EU, a mad dog negotiating style," Lord Darroch said. "If you go back to the PM in 2018, he said if Trump was negotiating Brexit he would create chaos at the start and people would be outraged at what he was saying and there'd be huge rows and there might be a good outcome. "We should think about that. That's when he was becoming dissatisfied with Brexit and now I watch the government conduct its future relationship I wonder if there's an element of Trump." Lord Darroch, who became a member of the House of Lords in January, said he believed the so-called "special relationship" between the US and UK would remain strong whoever won November's presidential election. While Mr Johnson got on better with Mr Trump than his predecessor, this did not mean there would not be "ups and downs" if he were re-elected and that negotiations on a transatlantic trade deal would not be "difficult". And while Mr Trump's Democratic rival for the Presidency, Joe Biden, was an "Anglophile", he was vice-president in the Obama administration which famously said the UK would be at the "back of the queue" for a trade deal if it voted to leave the EU, added Lord Darroch. "Biden said he'd have voted Remain so I have more questions about the relationship with a Democrat," he added. The interview will be aired on BBC's Newsnight at 22:45 BST on BBC Two, or on iPlayer	The UK's former ambassador to the US has told BBC Newsnight he does not regret criticising Donald Trump in briefings later leaked to the media.
+text: Parents have been advised to actively encourage their children to pursue hobbies and interests that require physical exertion. Children aged eight and under have been targeted in the move. Finland is known for producing some of the most physically fit children in Europe. It also produces some of the highest academic results among schoolchildren in the developed world. Finland's Minister for Education and Culture, Sanni Grahn-Laasonen, believes this is no coincidence. Ms Grahn-Laasonen said physical activity contributed to a child's happiness and promoted learning by developing a young person's ability to interact socially. "When children exercise together they develop interaction skills and connect socially, and it's healthy, too," she told local media. How will it affect the school curriculum? The minister's recommendation has been embraced by those who set the educational agenda, with the move expected to have a positive impact on results. Anneli Rautiainen, head of basic education with the Finnish National Board of Education, told the BBC that schools would now be experimenting with new ways of teaching. "In our new curriculum, we are looking at two to three hours a week of physical education and more outdoor activities. But we are also looking at non-traditional ways of teaching," she said. These include removing desks and chairs from some classrooms, so that children are not sitting as much while learning regular subjects. "Some children learn very well sitting at a desk and listening, others would benefit greatly from moving around the room talking with their classmates," said Ms Rautiainen. "The child has an active role. We will emphasise personalised learning. The learning environment should be modern and support different learners." Finland is one of the first countries to put forward these recommendations, which will use classrooms to connect physical exercise with traditional learning. What do young people think? A report published last month by the child and family services change programme revealed that young people in Finland were in favour of more physical activity in schools. The idea was widely supported among those questioned, who suggested using the school gym during breaks and increasing out-of-hours school club activities. What is the current recommendation? Guidelines issued by the World Health Organisation (WHO) suggest that children and young teenagers aged between 5 and 17 should perform at least an hour of moderate physical exercise a day. But the public health body goes on to say that more than an hour will provide additional health benefits, including later in life. Why are Finnish children so fit? Finland's obsession with health dates back to the 1970s, when it had the highest rate of deaths from heart-related issues in the world. This was largely due to a thriving dairy sector, which played a large part in the Finnish diet. In an effort to tackle the issue from a young age, schoolchildren were weighed on an annual basis and the results were recorded in end-of-year reports. If there was a problem, a doctor was called in. This led to the Finnish National Nutrition Council, a government body that issues dietary guidelines, eventually introducing a directive that schools should not only provide free lunches, but that the food should be nutritional. Why is more exercise needed? According to the WHO, Finland's population is still among the healthiest, but economic, social and cultural developments through globalisation are having a detrimental impact. As in many countries, health inequalities are on the rise in Finland. Is Finland ahead of the game? Finland introduced child health clinics way back in the 1940s, a pioneering move that was later introduced in other nations. The primary focus at the time was on physical development and nutrition, early identification of abnormal conditions or disease and immunisation. With this latest focus on physical activity among schoolchildren, Finland remains a leading nation when it comes to the health of its young citizens.	Children should spend at least three hours a day performing physical activities, according to the Finnish government.
+text: The man was walking his labrador in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, on Friday morning when two dogs escaped from a back garden, police said. He tried to stop the attack by huddling over his dog "like a human shield" but suffered injuries to his arm and back as a result. The two dogs have been seized and their owners have been interviewed by police. Insp Paul Shortt, from Nottinghamshire Police, said: "This was a horrible incident and has sadly resulted in one dog's death. "Force dog handlers joined officers swiftly on scene. Despite their best efforts and a number of different tactics to stop the attacks, they couldn't save the dog's life. "Officers did successfully control and contain the animals with no further injury." The force said the man first received treatment at Kings Mill Hospital but was transferred to a specialist ward at Derby Royal Hospital "due to the severity of his injuries". It has warned all dog owners to ensure their animals are secure when they are left unattended. Follow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.	A man has been seriously injured and his dog has died in an attack by two dogs.
+text: Despite this, UK surfers remain very connected, shopping more online than any of their European counterparts. Britons also get a good deal on their net and phone services, with only France offering cheaper prices, according to Ofcom. But the UK remains in danger of falling behind when it comes to next-generation mobile services. Ofcom's sixth international communications report compared the UK with nations around Europe and the world. "Across the globe people are embracing e-commerce and social media with enthusiasm," said Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards. "Our research shows that the UK communications market is performing well with prices, the range of services and innovation standing up well against international benchmarks." Slow-speed Europe It found that superfast services - defined by the regulator of speeds above 24Mbps (megabits per second) - remain more popular outside Europe. In Japan 40% of homes take advantage of such services, and in the US it is around 10%. But this drops dramatically in Europe. The UK is doing better than Germany, Spain and Italy which have only 3%, 2.2% and 1.5% respectively. UK surfers are also keen online shoppers, according to the report - 89% claimed to have visited online shops, with 79% making online purchases during 2010. UK householders are getting a good deal on net services, the research found. A typical basket of communication services - fixed-line phone, mobile, broadband and pay TV - can cost from £114 a month, second only to France at £79. The report found that social networking was popular around the globe, with three-quarters of those surveyed visiting a site such as Facebook, the majority of these on a daily basis. It is most popular in Italy, with 91% using social networking sites compared with 79% in the UK. The UK does well on net TV, thanks largely to the availability of services such as the BBC's iPlayer. More than a quarter of Britons watch TV online every week, higher than any of the other countries surveyed. Small-screen shopping Smartphone growth continues apace with ownership nearly doubling in the UK between February 2010 and August 2011 and take-up higher than in any other European country. UK citizens are also more likely to access news content and social networking sites on their mobiles than any other nation. Where the UK is in danger of slipping is with the availability of next-generation mobile services which will make mobile surfing much faster. Rows among mobile operators mean the auction of the airways to facilitate such services is unlikely to happen until the second half of 2012, with services not available until the following year, Ofcom revealed. Some European countries have already held their 4G spectrum auctions. "There are issues which we will monitor carefully, such as the future rollout of 4G mobile services," said Mr Richards.	Only 4% of homes in the UK are taking advantage of superfast broadband, according to a report from Ofcom.
+text: Sigmar Gabriel said "open talks" with Mevlut Cavusoglu were "held in mutual respect" despite their differences. Relations between the Nato allies and trade partners deteriorated after the failed coup in Turkey in 2016. The talks in Germany came a day after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met France's Emmanuel Macron. On Saturday Mr Gabriel, who hosted Mr Cavusoglu at his home in the central German city of Goslar, said the two had "given ourselves the task to do everything to overcome the difficulties in German-Turkish relations". The pair acknowledged their differences, including Germany's opposition to Turkey gaining membership of the European Union. Germany is also seeking the release of journalist Deniz Yucel, held in a Turkish jail without charge for 10 months. Mr Gabriel said after the talks that it was "time to find more common ground in the future by remembering everything that binds us together". Germany is Turkey's biggest export market and has the world's largest Turkish diaspora. What started the spat? Turkey's relations with its European partners have been frosty for some time, and with Germany in particular. Relations began to decline in March 2016 after President Erdogan filed a criminal complaint against a German TV comic over an obscene poem about the Turkish leader. But relations worsened after the failed coup in Turkey against Mr Erdogan in July 2016 in which more than 250 people died. The subsequent crackdown has seen some 50,000 people arrested and another 150,000 either suspended from their jobs or sacked. Turkey has since accused its European partners in Nato of harbouring coup plotters, prompting Germany and France to complain about the purge. In 2017 President Erdogan lashed out at Germany after the Berlin government refused to let some of his allies campaign for him there before a controversial referendum on increasing his powers. Mr Gabriel had at the time accused Mr Erdogan of an "unprecedented" act of interference in German sovereignty. A majority of Germany's ethnic Turkish voters backed Mr Erdogan in the April 2017 vote. Erdogan takes French journalist to task When President Erdogan led the diplomatic offensive in Paris on Friday, it was clear that differences remained. President Macron told him it was time to drop the pretence that there could be any progress towards Turkey joining the European Union as things stood, detailing concerns over human rights since the failed coup. Mr Erdogan said that Turkey was tired of constantly imploring to join the EU and then lashed out at a journalist who asked about claims that the country sent arms to Syria. The journalist had asked him about a 2015 newspaper report that Turkish intelligence had sent the supplies. Mr Erdogan responded by accusing the journalist of talking like a member of the Gulenist movement, which he blames for the botched coup.	Germany's foreign minister has held talks with his Turkish counterpart in a bid to "overcome difficulties" and improve relations between the nations.
+text: By Nick Triggle and Dominic HowellBBC News The errors were made between January and June. Around 4,000 of them were results of tests, the remainder were letters inviting them for screening or reminding them they were due. Between 150 and 200 of the test results that were not sent out were abnormal results. But it is thought their intended recipients should have received at least one notification from their GP or screening clinic - as women with abnormal results should be sent letters from two or three sources. NHS England are checking this has happened and that abnormal results are being followed up properly with further testing. So far it has contacted nearly half of this group and says no harm has been caused. The service is provided for NHS England by Capita. Around 4.5 million women aged 25 to 64 receive invitations for screening each year. Those aged 25 to 49 are offered screening every three years, with the older age groups invited every five years. The news comes just months after it emerged 174,000 women had not been invited for breast cancer screening after mistakes went undetected for years. Capita was not involved in that service. 'Frankly appalling' In comparison with the breast screening mistake, this problem has been spotted much more quickly. All those who did not receive an invite letter or reminder have been written to. It is believed 10,000 of them have already been tested. A spokesman for Capita said the company "apologises" for the mistake. He said the correct process for "uploading, organising and checking" had not been followed and appropriate disciplinary action was being taken. The senior manager responsible for the contract has left the company. NHS England said there was no current evidence any woman had been harmed and the priority now was to ensure everyone affected was contacted. But Dr Richard Vautrey, of the British Medical Association, said the situation was "frankly appalling". "We know that, because of the nature of this procedure, many patients are already reluctant to attend these appointments, and therefore reminder letters are crucial. "Incidents like this, therefore, will hardly inspire confidence in the system and risk even fewer women getting checked," he said. Dr Vautrey said Capita's handling of the service had been "nothing short of shambolic" and called for the firm to be stripped of the contract.	More than 40,000 women in England have not received information regarding cervical cancer screening after a failure to send out letters by the NHS.
+text: By News from Elsewhere......as found by BBC Monitoring The tiny orange-bellied parrot chick was the only survivor from a group of five that were flown across the island state of Tasmania to be reared by foster mothers in the wild, ABC reports. The emergency intervention was prompted by a worrying fall in the number of parrots returning from their migration last year - only four females were among the 17 birds that arrived at breeding sites in Melaleuca, in Tasmania's south-west. "With only four wild birds available to breed there's no way orange-bellied parrots can recover without intensive intervention," says Dr Dejan Stojanovic from Australian National University, who is co-leading the trial. Strengthening numbers in the wild is critical because those bred in captivity and released as adults have a low survival rate. "Thankfully we've had a foster nestling survive for a week after being moved, which is a huge milestone, but it's also so fragile that anything could still happen," Dr Stojanovic tells ABC. He says the chick is being monitored closely, and at the last check was "all snuggled up to mum and looked great - with a full belly". The orange-bellied parrots' dwindling numbers are in part due to habitat loss on the mainland, where they spend the winter. A captive breeding programme has been in place since 1986, and the current chick-fostering trial was supported by public donations of more than 140,000 Australian dollars (US$106,000; £85,000). Bottom image used under Creative Commons licence. Next story: Calls for Swiss army to accept overweight recruits Use #NewsfromElsewhere to stay up-to-date with our reports via Twitter.	Conservationists trying to save one of Australia's rarest birds say that hopes of boosting the wild population currently rest on the survival of a single chick.
+text: By Andrew WalkerBBC World Service economics correspondent As an EU member, the UK and UK-based firms can sell their goods to EU customers without having to pay additional taxes. Likewise, British firms and consumers can import from the EU tariff-free. The prime minister has already ruled out continued membership of the EU's single market post-Brexit, with many assuming this means the UK will also leave the customs union. So what will we do instead? Essentially there are two options: But what is the WTO? The WTO is an international agency with 164 member countries and its purpose is to promote international commerce. All the leading world economies are members of the WTO, including the UK. European Union countries are also all members, but they act together in the WTO as the EU. Why can't the UK and EU just carry on as before? One of the most important principles of the WTO is that you should not discriminate between other WTO members. The UK and the EU would both have to impose on one another's exports the same barriers they apply to goods from the other WTO member countries. In fact, in the absence of a free trade agreement they would be obliged under WTO rules to do that. What are these barriers? They include import tariffs, which are taxes applied only to imports. WTO members make commitments that they will not raise tariffs above a certain level. Those maximum levels, known as bound levels or bindings, vary from country to country and product to product. The tariffs they actually apply can be, and in many cases are, below those levels. But if you do go below bound levels, you have to do it for imports from all WTO members. How high are these tariffs? For the EU the average maximum tariff is 4.8% for all goods. But there are some big variations. It's generally higher for agricultural produce, 10.9% on average. For most industrial goods it's quite low, but for cars, the tariff is 10%. Assuming the UK were trading with the EU under WTO terms, the figures are an indication of the levels of tariffs British exporters would face on their goods. It would make them less competitive in the EU market than they currently are with no tariffs at all. Why doesn't the UK just change the tariffs it charges? The UK's new schedule will have to have the consent of the other WTO members. It is administratively easier and less likely to be contested if we stick with the arrangement that we already have, as the UK's ambassador to the WTO, Julian Braithwaite. wrote in his blog: "So to minimise any grounds for objection, we plan to replicate our existing trade regime as far as possible in our new schedules." However, the UK would be free to apply lower tariffs. In some cases it is highly likely we would. For example, the EU imposes seasonal tariffs on orange imports when the Mediterranean producers have their harvest. Getting rid of that is an example of what one former trade official described to me as "low hanging fruit". Some economists, including Patrick Minford of Cardiff University and one of the leading members of Economists for Brexit (now renamed as Economists for Free Trade), favour a more comprehensive exercise in cutting tariffs and other barriers unilaterally. But these cuts would have to apply to goods coming from the EU as well. This seems quite simple. I thought negotiations would be complicated? Don't be fooled, some aspects will be more complicated. For some farm produce, for example, the EU has quotas that can be imported at lower tariffs (called tariff rate quotas). We don't yet know how these will be divided between the UK and the remainder of the EU. There is also the question of what happens to that produce when it is traded between the UK and the EU. Currently it is tariff-free. Both will probably want a slice of the other's reduced tariff quota. That will mean either a bigger total quota or a reduced slice for some other country. In the WTO, the EU has agreed to a cap on some of its farm subsidies. We don't currently know what type of system the UK will adopt and potentially this an area of difficulty. The EU however is well below its subsidy cap, and that could make this area less contentious than it might have been. Will higher or lower tariffs be the only change? No. There are many other types of trade restrictions. These include rules on product specifications, labelling, testing, and requirements for authorisation from a national regulator to provide some types of services. The UK would have to decide whether or not to maintain EU rules in these areas. How will trade disputes between the UK and EU be settled? Currently a trade dispute would be a matter for the European Court of Justice. Theresa May has already said that its jurisdiction in the UK will end. If there is a trade agreement with the EU it would probably contain some arrangement for a tribunal to make rulings. If there is no such deal then any dispute would have to go to the WTO's dispute settlement system, which can establish panels to make rulings. Whatever happens, the UK and the EU will be subject to WTO rules. It is just that the membership of the EU and any new trade agreement that might be negotiated allows for deeper integration than is involved in simply complying with the WTO's rulebook.	With Theresa May's end of March deadline for triggering the UK's exit from the EU fast approaching, much remains undecided, not least what will happen to British trade.
+text: It would be paid without any requirement to work and regardless of income from other sources. Mark Drakeford said the idea was "attractive" but said politicians would have a "job" to convince the public. He promised to monitor experiments in Glasgow and Fife but said there were doubts over whether Welsh ministers had the power to introduce such a system. Mr Drakeford was responding to a question in the Senedd from Plaid Cymru finance spokesman Adam Price. The Green Party and the trade union Unite have endorsed versions of the basic income. In 2016, the RSA think tank proposed a basic income of £3,692 for people aged between 25 and 65, using data for taxes and benefits from 2012-13. Universal basic income Mr Drakeford told AMs on Wednesday that no local council had contacted Welsh ministers seeking backing for a basic income pilot. "Nevertheless I intend to monitor the progress of the feasibility work currently being carried out in Fife and Glasgow," he said. "And while there are clear competence questions to be addressed here, UBI [Universal Basic Income] has the potential to make a significant contribution to addressing poverty and inequality. "Were we to move ahead on it we would face headlines of the sort the Sun newspaper used when reporting the Glasgow experiment, saying it was 'doling out pay for no work even for people who have a job'. "So the idea, while attractive in the way that it can simplify and support people who currently have to rely on a very complex set of part-time work, part-time benefits and so on, the political world will face a job of convincing the public." A Welsh Conservatives spokesman said: "This well-intentioned but expensive idea, raises serious questions - not least because most estimates suggest that the basic rate of income tax would need to more than double to pay for it. "This could also have the unforeseen consequence of stifling incentive to take extra work, with devastating consequences for the economy."	A "basic income" paid to everyone could help tackle poverty and inequality, according to the finance secretary.
+text: Taliban militants claimed the attack after a high-level meeting inside the governor's compound, saying they had targeted Gen Raziq and top US commander Gen Scott Miller, who escaped. The local intelligence head was also killed and the governor was critically injured. Three Americans were hurt. The attack in Kandahar city comes ahead of elections on Saturday. In a statement, the Taliban referred to Gen Raziq as a "brutal police chief". It said it had targeted both him and Gen Miller, but the Pentagon denied that the US commander was among the key targets. Initial reports said the attacker was killed in an ensuing shoot-out. The assassination is seen as a hugely significant victory for the Taliban and a major blow to the Afghan and US counter-insurgency campaign. It is the first time since the 2001 US-led military intervention that the top commander of US/Nato forces has been involved in such an incident. US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said the attack would not affect the US military's movements in Afghanistan. What happened? Afghan and international security officials said Gen Raziq was shot in the back as he left the meeting and walked towards an area where the helicopter taking the US group back to Kabul was coming in to land. "Provincial officials including the governor, the police chief and other officials were accompanying the foreign guests when the gunshots happened," said Jan Khakrezwal, head of the Kandahar provincial council. There are reports that the local army commander also died. Local officials suggested that Gen Miller appeared to have been saved by his body armour. The US military only said that he was uninjured. At least two hand grenade explosions were also reported. Gen Miller paid tribute to Gen Raziq, saying he had "lost a great friend". Gen Raziq has long been accused of human rights abuses, including torture. But he was a powerful opponent of the Taliban in their southern heartland and was credited with securing Kandahar. Loss of a powerful Taliban opponent By Dawood Azami, BBC World Service This is one of the most important security incidents of the past 17 years - in which nearly the entire leadership of a province has been eliminated. While Gen Raziq, 40, was the provincial police commander of Kandahar, his influence went beyond his native province. Over the past few years, he had emerged as one of the most powerful military and political figures in Afghanistan. He was considered as one of the strongest opponents of the Taliban and Pakistan and had transformed himself into a symbol of the anti-Taliban struggle in Afghanistan. He had previously survived nearly 20 attempts on his life. In the absence of such experienced and die-hard figures, the Taliban could mount a campaign to increase their territorial control as the loss of an important leader opens a window of opportunity for the militants. Where does this leave the election? Afghan officials had warned that attacks ahead of the parliamentary election were likely. The Taliban has warned voters not to take part in what they say is a ballot imposed by foreigners. Some expressed fears that Gen Raziq's death could keep voters away from polling stations. "Gen Raziq's death will have a huge impact on security and the election in the south because a lot of voters may not feel safe to go to vote," a senior security official told Reuters. The vote is the third parliamentary election to be held since the Taliban were removed from power in 2001. At least 10 candidates have been killed in attacks around the country in the run-up to the vote. There have also been attacks on voter registration centres, including one in April which killed nearly 60 people. The vote is being seen as a test of political reforms undertaken by the Afghan government as well as its ability to organise a free and fair vote. It comes ahead of the all-important presidential elections due in April 2019. What about US forces in Afghanistan? American combat operations against the Taliban officially ended in 2014, but over 8,000 US special forces remained in the country backing and providing training and assistance to Afghan troops. Last year, US President Donald Trump signalled he would keep US boots on the ground indefinitely amid concerns that the Taliban was gaining ground. The US forces are part of the Nato-led Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan, which has more than 16,000 personnel.	A top Afghan security commander, Kandahar police chief Gen Abdul Raziq, has been shot dead by a bodyguard.
+text: By David PittamBBC News, Nottingham The organisation said the events would have been "traumatic" for students who already experience "systemic racism". Nottingham, Loughborough and Oxford are among a growing number of universities offering extenuating circumstances to those who feel their work has suffered. The NUS said others should do the same. Extenuating circumstances could mean more time to work on coursework or another attempt at an exam. Florence Ashaye, a medical physiology and therapeutics student at the University of Nottingham, raised the issue at her university after her mental health was affected. The 21-year-old said: "I've experienced racism myself and seeing that video of George Floyd brought all that emotion back. "To know people do not care about my life because of the colour of my skin [affected me]. "I was so distracted. It's really hard to focus as a black student when people are trying to fight for my rights, it makes you want to be there sharing posts and signing petitions. "It's amazing that they agreed to the extenuating circumstances. It made us feel like actually, they see us, actually, they understand." A spokeswoman for the University of Nottingham confirmed they were offering this to help all students "distressed by current events", but particularly black students. It joins institutions including the University of Oxford, Loughborough and University of the Arts London. The spokeswoman added: "The appalling killing of George Floyd has raised important questions to answer in terms of how we listen to - and learn from - the experiences of Black people and take further meaningful action to become truly anti-racist." 'Traumatic systematic racism' A spokesman for the NUS said more work needed to be done to tackle racism but it welcomed universities being flexible with any students. He added: "The murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests that have shone a light on the systematic racism that black people in the UK experience every day will no doubt have been traumatic for many black students. "As a community, we must tend to the welfare of our black students, activists, officers and staff who are exhausted by racism day in day out." Follow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.	Black students emotionally affected by the death of George Floyd and its aftermath should be offered leniency by universities, the National Union of Students (NUS) said.
+text: Over half of that money will be split between 17 local councils to repair parts of the Wales Coastal Path. And £310,000 will be spent on repairing Aberystwyth's promenade and sea wall. Images of the town being battered by huge waves and high winds were seen around the world earlier this year. Ministers said the spending announced on Wednesday brings the total level of funding after the storms to £10m. Coast Path Finance Minister Jane Hutt said the aim was to "support communities who were hit by the recent bad weather in whatever way we can". She added: "We have already announced over £10m for emergency flood repairs, to restore damaged coastal areas and to help affected businesses. "By providing this extra funding for the Wales Coast Path and the regeneration of Aberystwyth we can make sure that people keep coming to Wales to enjoy everything it has to offer." Three million people are estimated to visit the Wales Coast Path each year, spending more than £30m in the towns and villages nearby. Regeneration Minister Carl Sargeant said Aberystwyth promenade was "already open for business" and would "soon be restored to its former glory". Repairs The money announced for Aberystwyth will be used to repair the surface of the promenade and its sea wall as well as replacing damaged lighting and railings. Conservatives Shadow Natural Resources Minister Russell George said: "While this late announcement of help for storm-hit areas is welcome, there is no substitute for flood prevention and Labour ministers must start investing to help prevent the sort of decimation that hit many of Wales' vulnerable coastal towns this winter." But Welsh ministers maintain Welsh flood defences held up well in the winter storms thanks to "significant investment" and say they allocated £7.2m earlier in the year to ensure damaged defences are repaired swiftly.	Areas hit by winter storm damage will receive a share of £855,000 to ensure repairs are completed in time for the summer tourist season.
+text: Manufacturing and house building showed signs of recovery in May as some firms saw staff return to work. But the Office for National Statistics said the economy was "in the doldrums". As a result of big contractions in previous months, the UK economy is now 24.5% smaller than it was in February, the ONS added. What do the experts make of the latest figures? The return to economic growth in May was described as "disappointing" by economists, who had expected an expansion of 5% or more. The increase came after a fall of 6.9% in March and a record 20.4% decline in April. In the three months to May, the economy shrank by 19.1% compared with the previous three-month period, the ONS said. "The economy was still a quarter smaller in May than in February, before the full effects of the pandemic struck," said Jonathan Athow, deputy national statistician for economic statistics at the ONS. "In the important services sector, we saw some pick-up in retail, which saw record online sales. However, with lockdown restrictions remaining in place, many other services remained in the doldrums, with a number of areas seeing further declines." Are things going to get better now? Mr Athow told the BBC's Today programme that there could be signs of improvement in next month's release of figures. "Some of the survey data we're seeing suggests that as more of the economy reopened and as some of the restrictions were eased, we did see stronger performance in June, but it's really early," he said. "You've got one month of firm data and some indicators suggesting June might be stronger, but there's a long road to go here and we're still trying to figure out what the best data is to understand the overall picture." Which parts of the economy returned to growth? May's modest month-on-month expansion came as sectors such as manufacturing, construction, DIY retailers and garden centres were allowed to reopen. Manufacturing grew by more than 8% during the month, as did construction. What is GDP? Gross domestic product (GDP) is the sum (measured in pounds) of the value of goods and services produced in the economy. But the measurement most people focus on is the percentage change - the growth of the country's economy over a period of time, typically a quarter (three months) or a year. It's been used since the 1940s. It's the main way of determining the health of the UK economy. What's the political reaction? "Today's figures underline the scale of the challenge we face," said Chancellor Rishi Sunak. "I know people are worried about the security of their jobs and incomes. That's why I set out our Plan for Jobs last week, following the PM's new deal for Britain, to protect, support and create jobs as we safely reopen our economy. "Our clear plan invests up to £30bn in significant and targeted support to put people's livelihoods at the centre of our national renewal as we emerge through the other side of this crisis." Can the economy get back on track? A quarter of the economy's output was lost under lockdown in March and April, and May's figures show even firms who are back in business may be struggling to get on track. It's one thing being allowed to open the doors again (and some firms remain mothballed); another to be confident you can do so safely. And then there's the biggest hurdle of all, ensuring customers are willing and able to spend again. As job losses mount, it clear that even some firms who qualify for government help are faltering. Some won't have made it as far. The Bank of England's own chief economist is among those who've voiced hopes for a "V-shaped" recovery - a swift and full bounce back in activity. But history tells us that economies can take years to make up lost ground after a slump. The blow from this crisis was felt within days, convalescence may be tougher. And in the meantime, the livelihoods of many may feel the strain. What are the chances of a speedy recovery? The British Chambers of Commerce said May's "modest rally" in economic growth did little to alter "the UK's historically downbeat growth trajectory". "The pick-up in output in May is more likely to reflect the partial release of pent-up demand as restrictions began to loosen rather than evidence of a genuine recovery," said the BCC's head of economics, Suren Thiru. "While UK economic output may grow further in the short term as restrictions ease, this may dissipate as the economic scarring caused by the pandemic starts to bite, particularly as government support winds down." Thomas Pugh, UK economist at Capital Economics, said the data showed the recovery was "maybe not so V-shaped after all" - a reference to remarks last month by Bank of England economist Andy Haldane, who said the UK was on track for a quick recovery. He said May's figure was "a disappointing first step on the road to recovery" and suggested that "hopes of a rapid rebound from the lockdown are wide of the mark". "Indeed, the path to full economic recovery will probably be much longer than most people anticipate," he added. Has your business or job been affected by the economic downturn? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk. Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist.	The UK's economy rebounded more slowly than expected in May, growing just 1.8% from the previous month, as the gradual easing of lockdown had a modest impact.
+text: A week-long festival celebrating the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community is set to be staged next July. UK Pride will feature events covering "a range of subjects and artforms", its organisers said. Andy Train described it as a "tremendous accolade for us in Hull". A number of towns and cities, including 2017 City of Culture Hull, have hosted high-profile pride events before, but none with a national tag, Mr Train said. "Much like how EuroPride is the focus of the European pride calendar, we're confident that the title of UK Pride will enhance the event given the honour each year by attracting additional funding and promotion," he said. "This will bring even more people to the city during Hull's premier LGBT+ celebration."	The UK's "first ever" national LGBT+ pride event is to be held in Hull - 50 years after homosexuality was decriminalised in Great Britain.
+text: Councillor Ann Lucas was speaking at a full Coventry council meeting ahead of the publication of a serious case review into Daniel's death. Daniel's mother Magdelena Luczak and her partner Mariusz Krezolek were jailed for killing him with, a judge said, "incomprehensible brutality". But Mrs Lucas said the authority would not absolve itself of responsibility. 'Difficult read' Speaking at the meeting on Tuesday night, she said she did not know the details of the report, which is expected to be published next week. "But it is clear from the trial that all organisations involved in Daniel's tragically short life have lessons to learn. That will include Coventry City Council," said Mrs Lucas. "I promise you today that we will not absolve ourselves from any responsibility. "We will not shirk any difficult decisions that we may have to make as a result of this review, and we will deliver any changes needed as a result of the recommendations." She added: "We will be honest and transparent in the way we do this." Conservative councillor John Blundell said he expected the report would be a "very difficult read indeed". "This goes fundamentally to the heart of child protection," he said. "It happened in Coventry, it is only right and proper that we give it full consideration and full attention." Daniel died from a head injury in March 2012. He weighed just over a stone-and-a-half at the time. Luczak and Krezolek were convicted of murder and ordered to serve a minimum of 30 years.	Lessons must be learned from the tragic death of murdered four-year-old Daniel Pelka, a council leader has said.
+text: Flooding caused widespread disruption in February 2014 with homes and major city routes cut off for days - some train services also had to be stopped. The Environment Agency said the planned channel would run from north of Botley Road to Munday's Bridge, Kennington. It said the move would reduce the risk of flooding to the majority of 1,800 properties currently affected. However, Bob Price, the leader of Oxford City Council, warned the Brexit vote could make it harder to find the £20m still needed for the scheme. Originally the agency thought the scheme would need to extend down to Sandford, and include works at Weirs Mill Stream. However, it said its investigations had shown "there are better ways to reduce flood risk, which avoid any work to the Sandford area or any permanent disruption to the residential moorings at Weirs Mill". A public consultation on options for a flood alleviation channel was held between January and March and received 300 responses, the agency said. The scheme will work by diverting flood water across the open flood plain and away from properties which currently flood, it added. Details of the scheme, which will need planning permission before construction can begin, will go on public display at The Assembly Room, Oxford Town Hall between 14:00 and 20:00 BST. Oxfordshire County Council, Oxford City Council, Vale of White Horse District Council, Thames Water and the Oxford Flood Alliance are working with the Environment Agency to develop the scheme. It currently has funding from central government, the Oxfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership, Thames Regional Flood and Coastal Committee, and local councils, but still requires further cash, the Environment Agency said. It added the earliest work could begin would be spring 2018, with construction expected to take up to four years to complete. Oxford City Council's Bob Price said: "Because of the vote to leave [the EU], the impact on the local economy could be significant. "So businesses which previously would have been able to contribute may have reservations because of their worries about the future."	The proposed site of a £120m flood relief channel in Oxford has been revealed.
+text: The Scottish Conservatives' Jamie Greene warned it is "fast becoming the first scandal of this new parliament." The criticism comes after an independent parents group challenged the fairness of the assessments. Mr Swinney told MSPs that pupil grades will be determined by teachers and will not be challenged. During parliamentary questions Mr Greene said there is "growing and widespread concern" over the Scottish Qualification Authority's assessments and awards process. He added that the author of a review into the fallout of the 2020 exams diet, Prof Mark Priestley, described the present situation as an "unfolding debacle". Mr Swinney said the alternative certification model has been designed by the National Qualifications Group 2021, which includes representatives of local authorities, reaching unions, pupils and parents. He said: "The grades of young people will be determined by the judgement of teachers which will be informed by evidence of demonstrated attainment, of student achievement, over a number of assessments rather than an end of year exam." The education secretary said the unavoidable second period of remote learning since January has meant students are doing assessments for this year's model "over a shorter period than was first anticipated". But he added course work has been reduced for most subjects and schools have been given flexibility around which assessment tools they use to inform them of grades. Mr Swinney also said those grades "will not subsequently be overturned by the SQA" and highlighted contingency plans for those pupils who cannot submit evidence by the extended deadline of 25 June. 'Breaking point' In response, Mr Greene said the late addition of assessments has left pupils "at breaking point" and parents "furious". He also highlighted the case of one pupil who had to sit "an unbelievable" 43 exam-like papers in just five weeks and the sharing of exam papers on TikTok. Mr Greene concluded: "This year's exams fiasco is fast becoming the first scandal of this new parliament and the first scandal of this new government. "Who is going to fix this mess and how?" Mr Swinney said the government had faced "extremely difficult decisions" due to the pandemic but again stressed the current model was agreed by several stakeholders. He added: "This is not some model cooked up by the SQA. This a model that has been agreed, as Prof Priestley asked us to do, as a model designed by the whole education system to make sure that we properly record the achievements of young people." 'Inequitable system' On Thursday Scotland's largest independent parents group, warned schools are taking "different approaches" across the country due to the pandemic. Connect said it had understood that the system to help decide grades, after formal exams were cancelled, would be a combination of course work and teacher judgement. Instead the group says the process "simply mimics the very worst elements of the inequitable system it replaces". In an open letter to the first minister and the SQA, Connect executive director Eileen Prior said young people are doing assessments which are, in effect, exams "within school time". And she warned pupils face "an even more challenging timetable than SQA exams" and, with no study leave, have been driven to "cram for tests rather than to learn". In response an SQA spokesman said: "We fully appreciate that this is a challenging time for learners across Scotland. "There is no requirement to replicate a full formal exam or prelim diet this year and that results need to be based on demonstrated attainment by assessment in a flexible way to suit local circumstances. "SQA has provided a flexible and consistent framework for schools and colleges this year, including detailed guidance, material and support, based on assessment standards that teachers and lecturers are familiar with." Related Internet Links Connect	Education Secretary John Swinney has defended the assessment system which replaced the Covid-hit exams after it was a branded a "mess".
+text: Robert Aitken new soundtrack Kildonan features music he wrote for a new smartphone and tablet app. Museum Without Walls: Scotland's Clearances Trail App was created to mark the 200th anniversary of clearances in the Strath of Kildonan. The soundtrack has been praised by Guy Perrotta, producer and director of a double Emmy award-winning documentary. The tracks Pan's Calling and Red River Rant are on the app. Aitken, who was born and brought up in Brora in Sutherland, said: "My aim is to drop the listener into a particular point in time and experience the life-story of a situation. "I want the music to be felt rather than just heard. "With Kildonan it was also important to examine the big themes of life, then and now - to connect the past with our present in what I do not see as time immemorial, but the ever moving cycle of life as time orbital." Jaws star Perrotta produced and director the award-winning Mystic Voices, a documentary film about the 1630s Pequot War between Native Americans and English colonists and their allies. Jaws star Roy Scheider was one of the film's three narrators. Perrotta said: "Kildonan is very different from what is found in some works involving Scottish history, which sometimes resorts to what seems like a stereotypical take on what the music ought to sound like. "Kildonan is a breath of fresh air." Handmade snowshoes Starting in the late 18th Century and running into the 19th Century, the Highland Clearances saw townships occupied by generations of families cleared to make way for large-scale sheep farming and the rearing of deer. Landowners were seeking to "improve" their estates in line with the industrial revolution. Their hope was to make more capital from the land by running shooting estates, or starting industrial-scale livestock farming. In some cases people who had lived on the land for generations left voluntarily, while others were forcibly evicted and their homes burned and demolished. In 1813, about 100 people left the Strath of Kildonan. Several of the families sailed to Hudson Bay, in north east Canada, where they were forced to build their own shelters to protect themselves against severe winter conditions. The following spring, they set off on foot for the Red River Settlement around Lake Winnipeg in Canada where Scottish aristocrat, the Earl of Selkirk, had promised them land. Many made the 100 mile (161km) in handmade snowshoes.	The Highland Clearances of the early 19th Century have influenced a Scottish composer's latest work.
+text: Ministers say the process is "outdated" and ending it would give workers more control and save more than £6m a year by cutting employers' administration. But unions could lose funds and say it is a "vindictive political attack" that will "poison industrial relations". Labour leadership contenders spoke out against the proposal. It follows plans for reforms of union laws, including tighter strike rules. Civil servants, teachers and nurses are among the union members who will have to arrange for the fees to be collected from their bank accounts by direct debit, under the proposals to update legislation in the Trade Union Bill. The government says the so-called check-off system of taking union dues through wages was introduced at a time when many workers did not have bank accounts. It said it was now a "taxpayer-funded administrative burden" on employers. Cabinet Office Minister Matthew Hancock said: "In the 21st century era of direct debits and digital payments, public resources should not be used to support the collection of trade union subscriptions. "We are bringing greater transparency to employees - making it easier for them to choose whether or not to pay subscriptions and which union to join." Committed members Labour leadership hopeful Andy Burnham said the move appeared to be "vindictive", and was "part of an ongoing campaign of demonisation against trade unions". Yvette Cooper said many people found the current system "easy to use and convenient", adding that the government's "assault on workers' rights" would lead to more industrial disputes. Liz Kendall added: "Tory governments always undermine union rights - I'd oppose these attacks and repeal them in government." The TUC said the government was "determined to re-balance power in the workplace, so that workers lose their voice and their rights". TUC's assistant general secretary Paul Nowak said: "If payroll payment for union membership was outdated, it would not be popular with so many of the UK 's biggest private companies with positive union relations. "Instead of going out of their way to poison industrial relations, the government should engage positively with workers and their representatives for the good of public services and the economy." Business Minister Lord Maude said it was "defeatist" to suggest unions would lose members as a result of the reform. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's The World at One, he added: "People want to see a proper set of laws where you know there is going to be a minimum turnout in the strike and a minimum vote in favour of a strike, and that people can't have their lives disrupted in the way we far too often see." The PCS union, which represents workers in Whitehall and around the UK in job centres, tax offices, the courts and immigration, said the plans were "unnecessary and vindictive". It represents workers at government departments including the Home Office, HMRC and DWP which have already ended automatic deductions of union subscriptions. However, a PCS spokesman said the union could end up stronger as a result because it would know its members were absolutely committed to retaining their membership and the union would have more contact with them.	Plans to stop public sector workers automatically paying subscriptions to trade unions through their salaries have been unveiled by the government.
+text: She told the Telegraph: "It's been difficult. I don't enjoy being single. It's not something I wanted. There's nothing nice about it. It's just hard." In another interview with Australia's Sydney Morning Herald, she said she had spent much of the last year "just taking care of my children". "I can't pretend this isn't a tough time in my life," she added. "But I'm trying to get through it by just moving forward and knowing it's part of being human. "Maybe sometimes it appears I am pulling it all together, but really in fact I am just trying to get through my days. "I will eventually balance more and do more work, but because of family issues it's been extremely tough." The actress turned director has been giving interviews about First They Killed My Father, a fact-based drama that premieres on Netflix this month. Set in 1970s Cambodia, it tells of the survival of activist and lecturer Loung Ung under Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. In another interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the 42-year-old said she had been "needed at home" and would go back to work "when I feel it's time". The star said she would do some acting first, because she didn't "have anything to direct that I feel passionate about like" her latest film. Jolie said her first role after taking time off would "most likely" be the sequel to her 2014 fantasy Maleficent. First They Killed My Father had its premiere this weekend at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. A few reviews have started to trickle through, among them a positive one from The Hollywood Reporter's Scott Feinberg. In contrast, his film critic colleague Stephen Farber was a bit lukewarm. The film, he said, was "a well-crafted labour of love that certainly will educate some viewers about the tragic history of Cambodia during the 1970s". "What the film doesn't have is the visceral impact that would take it from a well-intentioned treatise to a searing work of art," he wrote. Writing in Variety, Peter Debruge also had mixed feelings. "Angelina Jolie teams with [producer] Rithy Panh to honour Cambodia with an earnest, impressively cinematic saga that really ought to be more compelling," he wrote. The Netflix film - Jolie's fifth as a director - has not been without controversy, having generated criticism over her description of its casting process. In a Vanity Fair interview, Jolie described how directors had played a game which involved giving money to poor children then taking it away. Jolie subsequently said it was "false and upsetting" that people had misinterpreted her description of how the roles were cast. Vanity Fair responded by saying it stood by its story. Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	Hollywood star Angelina Jolie says she's had a "difficult" time since splitting from Brad Pitt last year.
+text: About 200 members of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union began the ongoing industrial action on Tuesday. The gallery said as much of the venue as possible would stay open but access to some areas would be limited. There have been 56 days of strikes at the gallery since February, including a 10-day strike in May. The industrial action follows privatisation plans which the gallery said would enable it to introduce a new roster to "operate more flexibly and deliver an enhanced service". 'Unnecessary privatisation' The PCS said the action was against plans to privatise 400 visitor services roles and the dismissal of union rep Candy Udwin, who was accused of sharing information about the use of a private security firm. Speaking to BBC London 94.9, Nick McCarthy, the union's director of campaigns and communications, said: "We have no alternative but to go on strike, the privatisation is completely unnecessary. "Today's strike is indefinite until such time as we are able to reach a solution with the gallery. "Millions of tourists won't be able to get access to the vast majority of works of art in the gallery, and that's enormously regrettable, but the blame for this lies with the gallery. We have sought to negotiate, but the gallery refuses to engage on this and seems hell bent on outsourcing this contract." There will be a picket line outside the gallery in Trafalgar Square. In a statement, the National Gallery said it had appointed Securitas as its partner to manage some visitor and security services. There will be no job cuts and terms and conditions will be protected, the gallery added. Susan Foister, deputy director of the National Gallery, said the PCS were unable to provide the gallery with an effective and affordable solution. She said: "We need more flexibility to offer better service to our visitors, we have nearly 6.5 million visitors a year and we want to offer more access, better access and events and activities to as many people as possible."	Workers at the National Gallery are going on indefinite strike in a dispute over privatisation.
+text: With about 50 breeding pairs in the UK, Project Godwit raises black-tailed godwits in captivity to boost numbers. Dr Jennifer Smart and her husband are cycling from Somerset to Cambridgeshire to support the scheme, which usually moves birds around the UK. The pair said the "epic" trip aimed to "boost funds and raise awareness". The population, once thought to be about 100 pairs, had been hit mainly by "flooding and predation", said Dr Smart, a conservation scientist. Project Godwit, a partnership between the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT), collects eggs from the wild, incubates and hatches them in captivity until the birds are released at fledging age to "carefully chosen sites". This has not been possible this year due to lockdown restrictions limiting people's movements or ability to visit nature reserves to monitor the birds' progress. Black-tailed godwit Source: RSPB and Dr Jennifer Smart Dr Smart said: "By taking the eggs and hatching them in captivity we are removing them from the biggest risks at their most vulnerable time. "We are also fast-tracking colonisation at new sites, because spreading them out also reduces the risk." The Smarts, from Cantley in Norfolk, both work for the RSPB and are cyclists but they have never attempted a long-distance multi-day ride. They hope to raise £5,000 for Project Godwit and the International Wader Study Group. They left WWT Steart Marshes in Somerset on 23 August and their route links 11 nature reserves used by godwits released by the project. They are due to arrive at the RSPB's Nene Washes in Cambridgeshire on Sunday. Dr Smart said the "support on the way round has been phenomenal". "It's been really fantastic to meet all the people, the birdwatchers who have been monitoring for us," she said. Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk	Two cyclists are riding 600 miles in eight days to raise funds for a wading bird conservation project hit by coronavirus lockdown restrictions.
+text: They backed the government's European Union Bill, supported by the Labour leadership, by 498 votes to 114. But the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats opposed the bill, while 47 Labour MPs and Tory ex-chancellor Ken Clarke rebelled. The bill now faces further scrutiny in the Commons and the House of Lords before it can become law. The prime minister has set a deadline of 31 March for invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, getting official talks with the EU started. The bill returns to the Commons next week. MPs held two days of debate on the bill, which follows last June's referendum in which voters opted by 51.9% to 48.1% in favour of Brexit. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, a leading Leave campaigner, called the Commons result "absolutely momentous". Speaking on Facebook, he added: "We may be leaving the EU treaties. We are not leaving Europe." The UK would "forge a new identity" and make "an amazingly positive contribution" to Europe, he said. Analysis By Laura Kuenssberg, BBC political editor This time last year few in Westminster really thought that this would happen. The then prime minister's concern was persuading the rest of the EU to give him a better deal for the UK. His close colleagues believed the chances of them losing, let alone the government dissolving over the referendum, were slim, if not quite zero. This isn't even the last vote on this bill. There are several more stages, the Lords are likely to kick up rough at the start. But after tonight, for better or worse, few will believe that our journey to the exit door can be halted. Read Laura's blog Sorry, your browser cannot display this content. Did my MP vote For or Against the Bill? Enter your postcode, or the name or constituency of your MP Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had imposed a three-line whip - the strongest sanction at his disposal - on his MPs to back the bill. Shadow cabinet members Rachael Maskell and Dawn Butler quit the party's front bench shortly before the vote, in order to defy his orders. Also, 13 Labour frontbenchers voted against their own party position, apparently without first resigning. Mr Corbyn said: "Labour MPs voted more than three to one in favour of triggering Article 50. Now the battle of the week ahead is to shape Brexit negotiations to put jobs, living standards and accountability centre stage. "Labour's amendments are the real agenda. The challenge is for MPs of all parties to ensure the best deal for Britain, and that doesn't mean giving Theresa May a free hand to turn Britain into a bargain-basement tax haven." One MP was heard to shout "Suicide" when the result of the vote was announced. 'Detailed questions' Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron, seven of whose nine MPs voted against the government, said: "The Tories and Labour have failed future generations today by supporting a hard Brexit. "Labour's leadership tonight have waved the white flag. They are not an opposition; they are cheerleaders." MPs will discuss the bill in more detail next week when it reaches its committee stage in the Commons, during which amendments to the government's plans will be discussed. The SNP's foreign affairs spokesman at Westminster, Alex Salmond, said: "Next week there will be detailed questions and the calibre of the government will be judged by how they respond to the amendments." Plaid Cymru's Westminster group leader, Hywel Williams, called Labour's stance "deeply disappointing", adding: "This was not a vote on whether to accept the referendum result. It was a vote on whether to endorse the Tories' extreme version of Brexit." Ken Clarke, the only Conservative MP to defy his party by voting against the bill, said the result was "historic", but the "mood could change" when the "real action" of negotiations with the EU starts. Earlier, the Commons voted against an SNP amendment aimed at scuppering the bill. The bill was published last week, after the Supreme Court decided MPs and peers must have a say before Article 50 could be triggered. It rejected the government's argument that Mrs May had sufficient powers to trigger Brexit without consulting Parliament. Talks with the EU are expected to last up to two years, with the UK predicted to leave the 28-member organisation in 2019.	MPs have voted by a majority of 384 to allow Prime Minister Theresa May to get Brexit negotiations under way.
+text: Couples will now be allowed to have two children, it said, citing a statement from the Communist Party. The controversial policy was introduced nationally in 1979, to slow the population growth rate. It is estimated to have prevented about 400 million births. However concerns at China's ageing population led to pressure for change. Couples who violated the one-child policy faced a variety of punishments, from fines and the loss of employment to forced abortions. Over time, the policy has been relaxed in some provinces, as demographers and sociologists raised concerns about rising social costs and falling worker numbers. The decision to allow families to have two children was designed "to improve the balanced development of population'' and to deal with an aging population, according to the statement from the Community Party's Central Committee carried by the official Xinhua News Agency (in Chinese) on Thursday. Currently about 30% of China's population is over the age of 50. The total population of the country is around 1.36 billion. The Communist Party began formally relaxing national rules two years ago, allowing couples in which at least one of the pair is an only child to have a second child. China's one-child policy What was China's one-child policy? Trauma and sympathy shared online Correspondents say that despite the relaxation of the rules, many couples may opt to only have one child, as one-child families have become the social norm. Critics say that even a two-child policy will not boost the birth rate enough, the BBC's John Sudworth reports. And for those women who want more than two children, nor will it end the state's insistence on the right to control their fertility, he adds. "As long as the quotas and system of surveillance remains, women still do not enjoy reproductive rights," Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch told AFP. I lost two siblings - by Juliana Liu, BBC News Hong Kong correspondent I was born in 1979, the year the one-child policy was implemented. And even then, I wasn't supposed to be born. In my parents' work unit, there were also quotas for babies. By the time my mother announced her pregnancy, the quotas were all used up for the year. But kind-hearted officials decided to look the other way and allowed my birth. My would-be siblings were less lucky. As a result of the policy, my mother had to endure two abortions. Even today, she talks about 'Number Two' and 'Number Three' and what they might have been like. Read more personal stories Carrie Gracie: U-turn may not bring prosperity Writing in The Conversation, Stuart Gietel-Basten, associate professor of social policy at the University of Oxford, says the reform with do little to change China's population and is instead a "pragmatic response to an unpopular policy that made no sense". The announcement in China came on the final day of a summit of the Communist Party's policy-making Central Committee, known as the fifth plenum. The party also announced growth targets and its next five year plan.	China has decided to end its decades-long one-child policy, the state-run Xinhua news agency reports.
+text: It follows reports in a German paper of repeated clashes between Theresa May and Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker at a Downing Street dinner. EU sources claimed UK misunderstanding of the talks process, and ignorance about how Brussels works, could lead to no deal being agreed on the UK's exit. Home Secretary Amber Rudd said the reports were "tittle-tattle". She said the emergence of the reports was "not the right way" of negotiating, but the UK was committed to negotiating in "good faith". According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine, the prime minister and Mr Juncker reportedly clashed last Wednesday over Mrs May's desire to make Brexit "a success" and whether the issue of protecting the rights of expat UK and EU nationals could be agreed as early as June. The German newspaper's report of the dinner, which looks to have come via European Commission sources, said that after the PM said she wanted to "make Brexit a success", Mr Juncker's response was: "Brexit cannot be a success. The more I hear, the more sceptical I become." And when she said the UK owes no money to the EU, the president informed her that she was not leaving a "golf club". The German newspaper report also suggested Mr Juncker said there would be no trade deal between the UK and the rest of the EU if the UK failed to pay the "divorce" bill which it is expected to be asked for. Reports also claim that the morning after the dinner last Wednesday Mr Juncker told German chancellor Angela Merkel that Mrs May was "on a different galaxy". A No 10 spokesman said the UK was approaching the talks constructively and in a spirit of goodwill towards the EU, but was also determined to make a success of leaving. In a speech later on Tuesday, Mrs May will suggest the two-year Brexit process will be tough and the other 27 nations are "united in their determination to do a deal that works for them." Ms Rudd said the UK would not be responding to the claims but the government had set out a clear plan and priorities for the talks and Mrs May was the best person to negotiate a Brexit deal that was in the UK's "national interest". "Once you start engaging in gossip, in tittle-tattle in this way, it (will) carry on and who knows where it will lead?" she told BBC Breakfast. "Nobody knows how much truth there is in gossip. But there are ways of conveying what is going on and this is not the right way. "I do not recognise the tone in which this has been reported but I come back to the fact that it does make it clear that it is going to be a complex, potentially difficult negotiation at times and who do we want leading those - we want Theresa May leading them, not Jeremy Corbyn." Analysis: By BBC Europe editor Katya Adler Welcome to the EU/UK dominated Brexit Galaxy of Spin and Counter-Spin. A crazy old place. The galactic atmosphere is such these days that the dimensions of truth are elastic; at times, distorted. Take the arguments this weekend over whether the Downing Street dinner last Wednesday at which Theresa May hosted European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker was a complete disaster or not. Not at all, insists Downing Street. But it was a fiasco, according to Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and thereafter hitting Twitter and headlines across the UK. In Brussels, Politico quotes an EU diplomat saying the dinner went "badly, really badly". He reportedly went as far as to claim the British government was now "living in a different galaxy" to the EU when it came to Brexit expectations. This all seems rather inflammatory, so who's right and who's stretching the truth? The accounts of the dinner were seized upon by European politicians and opposition parties in the UK. Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister who leads the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, said it was time to "get real". He tweeted: "Any Brexit deal requires a strong and stable understanding of the complex issues involved." Labour's shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer said Mrs May's stance was "wrong, not strong" while Lib Dem leader Tim Farron said the backlash in the European media was a "taste of things to come". "The reports show a prime minister who seems to have no idea how difficult these negotiations will be," he said. In his first leader column as Evening Standard editor, former Conservative chancellor George Osborne urged Mrs May to spell out her intentions more clearly regarding Brexit and other issues. "There's nothing wrong with repeating election campaign slogans," the article - published on ex-Tory MP Mr Osborne's first day in the editor's chair - stated. "The problem comes when the election campaign amounts to no more than a slogan. If you ask for a blank cheque, don't be surprised if later it bounces." The Green Party, meanwhile, has said voters should be given the chance to change their minds in a second "ratification referendum". "Whoever wins this election has a mandate to negotiate on behalf of the British people - but that does not mean that they have a right to impose a final deal," said its co-leader Caroline Lucas. But UKIP said Mr Juncker was playing "hardball" and Mrs May should not give any ground. "What is clear is that they won't be able to bully Britain and nor should they," its leader Paul Nuttall told the BBC's Daily Politics. Get news from the BBC in your inbox, each weekday morning	The UK will not enter into "a briefing war" with the European Commission over Brexit talks, Tory sources have said.
+text: The star, 39, apologised to fans after she missed the last four performances of the show's run, which finished on Saturday. Jones, who played a mother whose child has been abducted, said the show subject matter was "deeply affecting". "I'm certain it has contributed to my feeling under the weather," she added. Posting a message on her Instagram page, Jones said she was unable to finish Thursday's matinee at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London after feeling dizzy on stage. "I came back after an illness and it was perhaps too soon," she wrote. "Anyone who knows the show knows it is a highly draining piece and after three months and a sickness I just wasn't able to end the run." 'Taken its toll' She said she had hoped to return to the stage for the final performance on Saturday but was told by her doctor she should not "put myself through it and risk getting ill again". "This show has taken its toll on me," she said. "You as the audience experience it once and always say how you are moved and drained by it. We as performers always think we can push through and carry on but sometimes we just can't." The Bafta award winner said she plans to rest before filming begins for new eight-part BBC series Gentlemen Jack later this month. The series, which is created and directed by Happy Valley writer Sally Wainwright, will be filmed in West Yorkshire and Copenhagen. Jones played the role of Dr Gemma Foster, a woman who suspected her husband of having an affair, in the BBC One drama series Doctor Foster.	Doctor Foster actress Suranne Jones has said she is "so gutted" after pulling out of West End play Frozen due to illness.
+text: The group broke up in 2005, with all four members pursuing solo careers, but got back together in 2009 and played a UK tour last December. Duncan James said: "We have been in the studio. We went back in last year. "We went over to New York and recorded with Jay-Z's people, wrote with Ne-Yo and the stuff sounds really different to anything we've done before." Describing the sound of the group's new direction he continued: "It's a lot up tempo, it's a lot dancier. It's fresh. "And I think that if we do decide to release an album, then we have to step up again and come out with an album that is not what people expect. "The thing I didn't realise about Ne-Yo is that he is such a super talented person. He writes impeccably. It's all him. He does it all." Other projects However the foursome - Duncan James, Simon Webbe, Antony Costa and Lee Ryan - are not only focussing on the reunion. James said he was "really happy" to be starring in musical theatre with a part in newly launched West End musical Legally Blonde. Simon Webbe added: "We've still got individual projects that we're doing and we don't want to rush into it because with Blue it's got to be quality and with quality means time. "I got a deal in America and then I came back to pack my bags and then I got a call saying, 'Boys, let's have a meeting'. "I'm going to give it another go, I'm going back to America at the end of this month." Webbe admits he's itching to get back in the studio again with the rest of the boys. "It was like magic," he said. "It was nothing but jokes. We hardly write songs, it was just us having a giggle and just enjoying each other's time and it's been a long time to get us all in one room and actually do something where we were in control with it as well." A title and date for the release of a new album has yet to be confirmed.	Reunited boyband Blue have confirmed they've written new material with R&B singer Ne-Yo in America.
+text: It ordered Macedonia to pay Khaled al-Masri 60,000 euros (£48,000; $78,000) for arresting him and handing him over to the Americans in December 2003. He spent five months in secret CIA jails for suspected Islamist militants. The verdict is a major victory for Mr Masri who has struggled to clear his name in the US and Germany. Macedonia has said it will not comment until it is formally notified of the ruling, which was welcomed by human rights advocates. The court in Strasbourg found Macedonia responsible for the torture and degrading treatment of the plaintiff not only on Macedonian soil, but also in Afghanistan. It found Mr Masri's account of his ordeal to have been established beyond reasonable doubt. Dumped on road The victim, a German citizen of Lebanese origin, was arrested, held in isolation, questioned and ill-treated in a hotel in the Macedonian capital Skopje for 23 days, the court's press service said. He was then transferred to CIA agents who brought him to a secret detention facility in Afghanistan, where he was further ill-treated for over four months. During the flight to Afghanistan, he was stripped, beaten, shackled, made to wear nappies and drugged, he says. His ordeal ended when he was eventually dumped on a road in Albania after the Americans realised they had got the wrong man. He attempted unsuccessfully to sue 13 CIA agents in US courts. An approach to the German authorities to request their extradition was dropped. Speaking to the BBC in 2007, he said he had been traumatised by the experience. In recent years, he was been involved in several violent incidents in Germany, receiving a suspended sentence for arson in 2007 and a two-year prison sentence for assaulting a town mayor in 2010. Currently still in prison, he is due for release early in the new year, a legal source told BBC News. 'Personal victory' James A Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative and lead lawyer for Mr Masri, greeted the verdict as a "personal victory" for his client. The victim had faced a "wall of silence in the United States and Europe about what happened to him for nine years", he said. "It is also the clearest possible indictment, by the world's leading human rights tribunal, of the illegal abuses associated with the CIA's post 9/11 campaign against al-Qaeda, and of European complicity in those abuses," he added. Amnesty International said the verdict was historic because "for the first time it holds a European state accountable for its involvement in the secret US-led programmes and is a milestone in the fight against impunity". "Macedonia is not alone," it said, in a joint statement with the International Committee of Jurists. "Many other European governments colluded with the USA to abduct, transfer, 'disappear' and torture people in the course of rendition operations. This judgment represents progress, but much more needs to be done to ensure accountability across Europe." The US authorities have long been accused of abducting and interrogating Islamist terror suspects without court sanction in the years since the 11 September attacks on America.	The European Court of Human Rights has awarded a German citizen compensation after finding he was an innocent victim of extraordinary rendition by the CIA.
+text: MiAlgae, a student start-up, uses by-products from the distilling process to grow Omega 3-rich algae for feeding farmed salmon. Founder Douglas Martin said he wanted to "revolutionise" the animal and fish feed industries with microalgae that come from whisky. He has just received a £500,000 investment in his business. Funding has been contributed from Equity Gap, the Scottish Investment Bank (SIB) and the University of Edinburgh's Old College Capital. The investment will help the company expand its team and increase its production. It also plans to build a new plant for its technology at a whisky distillery. Aquaculture is worth about £1.8bn a year to the Scottish economy. MiAlgae, which was founded by Mr Martin while he was a masters student at the University of Edinburgh in 2015/16, said the fish feed was "economical and environmentally-friendly". The microalgae can also be used as a raw material for agricultural food products. Mr Martin said the investment was a "huge deal" for the company. "This investment will fund the initial scale-up steps and de-risk our commercial facility. It certainly sets us on track to achieve our ambitions," he said. "We're looking at multiple industries in the supply side, multiple industries at the product side, then diversification into multiple products beyond feeds. There are lots of things we can do with our products." Kerry Sharp, head of the SIB, said: "This is an exciting new equity investment for Scottish Enterprise into a company that has utilised the circular economy to make an innovative and valuable product. "The funding round will also allow high-value research and development employment opportunities to be created in rural Scotland with the roll-out of the new pilot plant."	An Edinburgh company has developed a process that turns whisky by-products into fish food.
+text: More than 20 power lines were damaged on Monday when severe gales and heavy snow battered the island. A spokesman for Jersey Electricity said just three homes were still without a power supply. Flights at Jersey Airport resumed at 14:00 GMT after being suspended since Monday morning. But the first plane due to land, a British Airways flight from Gatwick, was diverted to a French airport at the last minute. An airport spokesman said: "As a safety precaution, the pilot has diverted the aircraft to Dinard Airport due to current cross winds. "Other aircraft departures are operating as per schedule and a number of smaller aircraft are landing." He said there were crews out clearing the runway and associated areas since 04:30 GMT this morning. The spokesman added: "Passengers have been very understanding and obviously they appreciate these are very severe weather conditions." An education department spokesman said schools in Jersey were likely to open on Thursday after being closed for three days this week. Jersey Police said the majority of main roads have now reopened. Many bus services are running but Liberty Bus said some routes were still restricted. A spokesman for the police said: "Nearly all of the island's footpaths are untreated and in a treacherous state. "With the likelihood of pedestrians walking in the carriageway motorists are asked to drive with consideration for pedestrians."	Work to restore electricity to 200 homes cut off by gales and blizzards has nearly been completed, Jersey Electricity has said.
+text: None of the passengers on the flight from Auckland to Sydney will be required to quarantine in Australia. However they will have to pay for their own quarantine in a hotel when they return to New Zealand. At the moment, the bubble is one-sided, with Australians not allowed to enter New Zealand. Australia and New Zealand are among the first countries in the Asia-Pacific region to loosen restrictions on international travel since Covid-19 travel bans came into effect earlier this year. Singapore and Hong Kong announced on Thursday that they had agreed to quarantine-free travel between the two cities. They did not say when travel would begin. Limited travel and expensive holidays The bubble currently applies only to the state of New South Wales and the Northern Territory, but Australian officials said they hoped to expand to other states soon. Under the deal, New Zealanders can travel quarantine-free to Australia if they have not been to a Covid-19 hotspot for 14 days. But a holiday in Australia could be expensive. Upon their return, New Zealand passengers will have to quarantine at a cost of NZ$3,100 ($2,045; £1,586) for the first person and more for additional family members. About 90% of those travelling with Air New Zealand on Friday were booked one-way, the airline said. Air New Zealand, Qantas and Jetstar all had flights scheduled to arrive in Sydney on Friday. Upon arrival, passengers from New Zealand are kept separate from other passengers, who will be required to spend two weeks in quarantine. Since March, Australia's borders have been closed to everyone except returning Australian citizens and residents and those with special permission. All arrivals are now required to quarantine at their own expense. There is a backlog of around 29,000 Australians trying to get into the country. New Zealand has recorded 1,880 cases and 25 deaths from Covid-19, while Australia has seen over 27,000 infections and 904 deaths. The majority of Australia's cases have been in the state of Victoria, which enacted tough lockdowns to bring the numbers under control. Green shoots for travel industry The limited resumption of international travel between Australia and New Zealand could be an early indication of a slight recovery for the travel industry in the Asia-Pacific region. Singapore and Hong Kong's in-principle deal would require travellers between the cities to test negative for Covid-19 with a mutually-agreed polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, the pandemic led to a 72% drop in international tourists in the first half of the year. However, there has been a rebound in domestic tourism in some markets, such as China. The International Air Transport Association (IATA), which represents 290 airlines, expects traffic to be 66% below the level it was in 2019. The IATA estimates that it will be at least 2024 before air traffic reaches pre-pandemic levels.	The first passengers from New Zealand have arrived in Australia under new "travel bubble" arrangements between the two countries.
+text: During a interview with atheist author Richard Dawkins, the presenter also used the term "religious hogwash" when introducing the story of Genesis. A complainant also accused Mr Paxman of bias against religious belief. The BBC said Newsnight welcomed the Trust's finding that the piece "achieved due impartiality". The Trust's editorial standards committee ruled that Mr Paxman was not deliberately offensive and said it did not believe the Newsnight item was biased. But it recognised some viewers "were unlikely to have expected Jeremy Paxman's typically robust and confrontational interviewing style to extend to the use of the terms 'religious hogwash' and 'stupid people'". The committee said it regretted the offence caused to some viewers by the use of the terms in question on the programme, broadcast on BBC Two on 13 September 2011 The committee partly upheld the complaint regarding offence. A BBC spokesperson said: "Newsnight notes the Trust's finding that viewers may have found some of the comments offensive but also welcomes the finding that the piece achieved due impartiality." In a separate case, the BBC's economics editor was found not to have been biased when she said London's finance services accounted for "a tiny fraction" of the UK economy. But the BBC Trust did rule that due accuracy had not been achieved in Stephanie Flanders' report on 9 December.	Newsnight host Jeremy Paxman caused unintentional offence when referring to a literal belief in the Old Testament as "stupid", the BBC Trust has ruled.
+text: In a statement, the authority said it had banned the app on passenger safety grounds and threatened the firm with a 25,000 euro (£20,000) fine for ignoring the order. Uber said it would challenge the ban. It is the latest setback for Uber, which has faced bans and protests in cities across Europe. The Berlin authority said passengers may not be covered by insurance because they aren't traditional cabs. Uber set up in Berlin in February last year. Fabien Nestmann, general manager at Uber in Germany, said the company would challenge the ban. "The decision from the Berlin authorities is not progressive and it's seeking to limit consumer choice for all the wrong reasons," he said. "As a new entrant we're bringing much-needed competition to a market that hasn't changed in years." 'Competing unfairly' In June, a protest by thousands of drivers of black cabs in London brought part of the city to a halt. London cabbies say Uber drivers don't have to follow the same strict rules. Uber lets smartphone users hail cabs through its software. The company takes a cut of the fare. Earlier this month, senior Labour MP Margaret Hodge said the app was "competing unfairly" with London's black cabs. She has written to Boris Johnson asking why Transport for London allows cars to take bookings through the app without a licence to operate in the capital. Mrs Hodge claims the firm is "opting out of the UK tax regime" but Uber said it complied with "all applicable tax laws".	The mobile taxi app Uber has been banned in Berlin by the city's State Department of Civil and Regulatory Affairs.
+text: Laura KuenssbergPolitical editor@bbclaurakon Twitter But very few of them are willing to say publicly that reform is long overdue. Even though the government is this Thursday expected to announce that councils will be able to raise a bit more cash from their taxpayers towards paying to care for our elderly with dignity, few in Westminster would pretend that's anything like a long-term solution. So what is? Sources say the Cabinet Office is looking at various mechanisms to find some answers. But whatever they come up with, it won't be easy to get other political parties to buy in, especially with a small majority. So maybe it requires a different kind of fix. The BBC has been told that Number 10 was considering plans for a cross-party commission to look at the costs of health and social care, before the referendum. After three former health ministers - Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat, Stephen Dorrell, a Conservative, and Labour's Alan Milburn - launched a bid for a national review to find consensus, David Cameron's team invited the three to present their plan to the government, in a seeming acknowledgement that the current system is not sustainable. Norman Lamb told me: "We went in and talked to them and presented them with a paper and then the whole run-up to the referendum took over and we never got any response from that and then of course there's been a change of government but the need for this government to engage in this and for all parties to stand up to their responsibilities as well, to join a process, to ensure that we reach a one in a generation settlement for the health and care settlement I think is absolutely fundamental." When asked what he would say to Theresa May's team, Mr Lamb replied: "Engage. Talk to us now. "There is an urgency about this. If you keep sleepwalking towards the edge of the precipice, real people up and down our country will suffer." Baroness Cavendish, who held the talks in Number 10 said: "I was very attracted to the idea that we might be able to get cross-party air cover for a solution..... we all know that the 1948 NHS created a system that is now not fit for purpose because it doesn't address the new challenges." She said she did not think the "impasse" could be solved without a process that involves all political parties. Some ministers are known to be encouraging Theresa May's government to consider the idea of a commission. One of its supporters in government told me "there is a recognition that as a civilised society we need to spend more". But another minister said there also had to be a conversation about how much families had to contribute and that maybe "people's expectations" had to be modified. Changes in our society make this one of the hardest questions ministers need to answer. There have certainly been plenty of attempts before. But the reality of what many councils - and more importantly, thousands of families - are now experiencing in their lives, makes it day by day harder to ignore.	It's one of the political "unsayables". Behind closed doors nearly every politician admits that the current system for paying for health and social care is decades out of date.
+text: The Glasgow-based company said core sales rose from £11.4m in 2010 to £13.7m. The group also reported funds under management increased by £3m to £808m. Scottish Friendly said it had benefited from progress with its e-business distribution strategy and the launch of a new website aimed at boosting customer access to its product range. It also put its performance down to a partnership programme with industry names such as Phoenix, Royal London and Eui group - best known for its Admiral and elephant.co.uk brands - as well as a new partnership with parenting website, Emma's Diary. The group also made "a significant return" on the sale of its wrap administration business to Citi last year. 'Great change' Chief executive Fiona McBain said: "These results have been forged despite continued fragility in the economy and in consumer confidence. "It is clearly a time of great change in the economy in general and in the financial services industry in particular. "But this is far from a threat as Scottish Friendly's track record clearly illustrates how change also presents opportunities for innovative organisations such as ours." Scottish Friendly is currently celebrating its 150th anniversary. Its roots stretch back to 1862 when it was originally established as the City of Glasgow Friendly Society.	Financial services group Scottish Friendly saw life and pension sales soar by 20% last year.
+text: Kenny Moyes introduced two people who got through the first stage of the buying process by making a bid using a fake bank letter, a court heard. The evidence emerged in the trial of Mr Whyte who is accused of a fraudulent acquisition of Rangers in 2011. He denies a charge of fraud and another under the Companies Act. David Horne - Sir David Murray's lawyer and one of his most senior advisers - was giving evidence at the High Court in Glasgow. Mr Horne, 54, was part of the Murray Group team involved in the Rangers sale. The jury has heard how Whyte, 46, struck a £1 deal to takeover the club from Sir David in 2011. But, prior to that, a number of individuals were said to have shown interest in Rangers. Kenny Moyes contacted then Ibrox chief executive Martin Bain in 2010 about two people apparently keen to purchase Sir David Murray's controlling stake at the club. The agent - brother of ex-Manchester United boss David Moyes - introduced English-based Rangers fan Ian Anderson and a Dutch national as being keen on a buyout. They were said to have up to 50m euros (£42m) to invest with a letter from a Belgian bank that apparently confirmed this. Mr Horne said "on the face of it" this seemed to be an interest in the club, but said it was discovered that Mr Anderson was a banned director. The bank letter was then found to be a forgery. Mr Horne told Craig Whyte's lawyer Donald Findlay QC: "We let Kenny Moyes down gently as I think he was the victim of a con as well." Mr Findlay: "He had been duped?" Mr Horne: "I believe so, yes." A man named as Vladimir Antonov - said to be a chairman of a Lithuanian bank - was also described as being interested in the takeover of Rangers. Mr Horne said that when the offer came in, he thought: "Oh no." He believed the reaction of the supporters to such a bid would have been "one of horror". 'Motley crew' Among other concerns surrounding Mr Antonov were claims the FBI had been looking at a business deal he was involved in, the trial was told. Mr Horne said "right or not", it had been "certainly of concern". Mr Findlay said these individuals were part of a "motley crew" of people supposedly keen to buy Rangers before Mr Whyte came forward. Prosecutors allege Mr Whyte pretended to Sir David Murray, and others, that funds were available to make all required payments to acquire a "controlling and majority stake" in the club. The Crown alleges Mr Whyte had only £4m available from two sources at the time but took out a £24m loan from Ticketus against three years of future season ticket sales. The court has heard the sale was eventually made to Mr Whyte for £1 but came with obligations to pay an £18m bank debt, a £2.8m "small tax case" bill, £1.7m for stadium repairs, £5m for players and £5m in working capital. The second charge under the Companies Act centres on the £18m payment between Mr Whyte's Wavetower company and Rangers to clear a bank debt. The trial, before Judge Lady Stacey, continues.	The brother of football manager David Moyes was the "duped" middle man in an apparent "con" to try to buy Rangers before Craig Whyte took over the club.
+text: Group sales were up 7.3% versus a year ago, excluding petrol and ignoring the dampening effect of the stronger pound. The result was driven by international demand - notably in Thailand (up 8%), China (6.4%) and Eastern Europe. In contrast, UK like-for-like sales excluding petrol and the effect of VAT fell 0.1%. That was worse than the 0.6% growth expected by market analysts, and Tesco's share price fell five pence to 402p at the start of Tuesday trading in London, while the rest of the market rose. Tesco makes about two-thirds of its sales and profits in the UK. "Tesco was always going to be swimming against the tide with this update," said Richard Hunter, head of UK equities at Hargreaves Lansdown Stockbrokers. He said that market expectations had been too high, given the anaemic UK retail environment. "In all, Tesco seems to be seen as tomorrow's story. The planks to its strategy are in place, particularly in furthering international diversification." Plus points The 0.1% fall in UK sales was nonetheless an improvement on the three months before, when like-for-like sales - which exclude the effect of changes in shopfloor capacity - were down 0.7% from a year ago. Tesco blamed the "cautious consumer environment" and the burden of high fuel costs for the weak underlying growth figure, but said that it was still doing better than rivals. However, there were some plus points in the UK market. The firm pointed to an "excellent performance" in newly opened stores - which are excluded from the like-for-like figures. Overall UK sales excluding petrol were up 4.9%. And sales of its "Finest" food range rose 10%, as "customers seek out quality alternatives to eating out". Meanwhile, Tesco Bank saw a 20% increase in revenue. Tesco plans to start offering mortgages through its rapidly developing financial services arm later this year. 'Good start' Tesco also reported a continuing strong turnaround at its loss-making "Fresh n Easy" US business, where like-for-like sales growth accelerated to 11%. But some individual national markets did underperform the UK, such as post-earthquake Japan (down 6.4%) and the recession-hit Irish Republic (down 3.9%). The results give a first indication of how the supermarket chain has fared since its long-time chief executive, Sir Terry Leahy, stepped down in March. His replacement, Philip Clarke, said: "Tesco has made a good start to the new financial year, despite consumer sentiment in many of our key markets remaining subdued. "Uncertainties remain, but with early, encouraging signs of better performance emerging in both the UK and US, I am confident that this start will provide the platform for another year of growth."	Tesco has reported strong sales growth overseas for the first three months of its financial year, but the UK remains subdued.
+text: Reviewing the UK's record, the United Nations Committee Against Torture cited a report into the abuse of some 1,000 children in custody from 2009-2017. Few cases of such sexual abuse seem to have been investigated, the UN said. The government said it would note the recommendations, adding that the UK had a tradition of protecting human rights. The UN committee called on the UK to ensure all allegations of violence against children in detention were promptly and impartially investigated, adding that the information provided by the UK about the problem was insufficient. It said historical claims of torture by security services in Northern Ireland must be addressed, too. The committee also called for the age of criminal responsibility, currently 10 in England and Wales and 12 in Scotland, to be raised. It added that the UK must report back on the abuse of children in custody and on Northern Ireland within a year. The UN committee, which is meeting in Geneva, published its recommendations on Friday following the review. In particular, it raised evidence from the UK's own Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) of the sexual abuse of more than 1,000 children in detention between 2009 to 2017. Committee member and lead UN expert for the review of the UK Felice Gaer said the IICSA's report was "stunning in detail and in the horror that it sets forth". Urgent review The IICSA looked at young offender facilities, secure training centres and secure children's homes as part of a wider investigation into child abuse in England and Wales. Many of the incidents involved staff inappropriately touching detainees during body searches or instances of restraint. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said it was already conducting an urgent review into safeguarding in the youth estate following the IICSA. In the last decade the number of children in youth custody has fallen by over 70%, it said. Responding to the committee recommendations, an MoJ spokesperson added: "The UK has a longstanding tradition of ensuring rights and liberties are protected domestically and of fulfilling our international human rights obligations. "We note the recommendations of the United Nations Committee Against Torture and will respond in due course."	Grave concerns have been raised about the sexual abuse of children in detention in the UK by independent experts at the United Nations.
+text: About 40 bushfires are burning across the state following a heatwave, said Queensland Fire and Emergency Services. The most serious blaze, 450km (280 miles) north of Brisbane, has destroyed at least two homes, damaged four others and prompted evacuation orders. The conditions have been described as "highly unusual" for this time of year. The largest bushfire is about 50km long and has burnt through approximately 11,000 hectares in the Deepwater National Park. It began on Saturday and is expected to remain a threat in coming days. Most of the other bushfires are being contained, authorities said. Unlike in Australia's drier south, intense fire conditions are unusual in Queensland in late November because it is the wet season. However strong winds, drier than average conditions and a recent heatwave had led to fires across the state, QFES Commissioner Katarina Carroll said on Monday. "In this part of the world we have not experienced these conditions before," she said. "It is unprecedented." The region is forecast to experience further strong winds and hot temperatures this week. Bushfires also damaged neighbouring New South Wales last week. Both states are currently in the grip of drought. No single factor is to blame for extreme weather but climate change is bringing more frequent and severe events, experts say.	Hundreds of Australians have evacuated their homes due to bushfires amid "unprecedented" weather conditions in the state of Queensland, officials say.
+text: Elaine Torrence said many staff were off work having babies themselves so space for antenatal classes was down. In 2010 Jersey saw a baby boom with about 1,000 births, and figures are similar this year, Ms Torrence added. She said she hoped the extra classes put on at the weekend had helped those who wanted to attend the sessions. "We've had a large number of our midwives on maternity leave and a little spate of long term sickness regrettably," Ms Torrence said. "And when activity rises in the unit, by that I mean on the delivery suite, if we had a class planned that evening regrettably we have to cancel that and prioritise where the midwife is needed most." She added: "We had a little flurry of having to cancel our classes but I think we've accommodated most of those women by two extra weekend sessions that we've put on."	There is a shortage of midwives in Jersey because many are on maternity leave, according to the head of midwifery at Jersey General Hospital.
+text: The first minister and SNP leader had previously said she would have to wait for the "fog" around Brexit clears before she sets out a timetable. But she told MSPs that she would speak soon, even if talks over Brexit are extended beyond the 29 March exit date. The Tories said "now is not the time" for another independence referendum. Supporters of independence gathered outside Holyrood while the MSPs were speaking, urging Ms Sturgeon to "activate the mandate" and call a referendum. Ms Sturgeon called for a new independence vote in the aftermath of the EU referendum, which saw 62% of Scottish voters back remain only for the UK as a whole to vote to leave. However, the SNP leader subsequently "reset" her timetable after her party lost 21 seats in the snap general election in 2017. Having previously said she must "wait for the fog of Brexit to clear" before settling on a new plan, Ms Sturgeon told MSPs on Thursday that there was still "water to go under the bridge" on the issue of EU membership. But she said she would set out her thoughts on the timing of a second independence referendum within "weeks". Ms Sturgeon has also been campaigning for a new vote on Brexit, calling on Prime Minister Theresa May extend the current 29 March exit after MPs overwhelmingly rejecting her proposed withdrawal deal on Tuesday. Scottish Green co-convener Patrick Harvie, who also backs independence, asked the first minister if her planned update on independence would happen "even if Article 50 is extended". Ms Sturgeon replied by simply saying "yes", before adding: "Of course, it could be that the extension of Article 50 is simply a reprieve from Brexit, not a solution to it. "There is water to go under the bridge in the next number of weeks. When it has done so, I will make my views on the timing of a choice on independence clear. "It is then, of course, for all of us who support independence - which certainly includes me and Patrick Harvie - to get out there and make the case." 'Now is not the time' Mr Harvie said clarity was needed on independence in light of the "incompetent misrule from Westminster". But Scottish Conservative interim leader Jackson Carlaw told the BBC there was "no way" a new referendum should be called. He said: "As both Ruth Davidson and the prime minister have made clear, now is not the time. "There is no public appetite for a second independence referendum, and I think it's ridiculous of the first minister to add yet further constitutional conflict when there's a tremendous amount of really challenging change the country has to face." Mr Carlaw was echoing the words of Mrs May when she rejected Ms Sturgeon's demands for a referendum prior to the 2017 election. For the 2014 referendum, the governments in Edinburgh and London signed a "section 30 order" paving the way for the vote. Such cooperation was not forthcoming when MSPs voted calling for a new referendum in 2017, but the standoff over the issue was dissipated when Ms Sturgeon put her plans on hold. The first minister has previously downplayed the possibility of a "wildcat" referendum being held without the backing of the UK government, and has suggested that the SNP might instead need to win a fresh electoral mandate to break the impasse with UK ministers. In November 2018, she told a meeting of the Women for Independence group: "Ultimately, if the only way through that is to take that to an election, and ask the people of Scotland to use an election to say 'No, we will have absolutely our right to choose', I think maybe that's what that will take."	Nicola Sturgeon has pledged to set out her plans for a second independence referendum "in the coming weeks" even if the Brexit deadline is extended.
+text: That's what a petition of more than 100,000 people wanted us to be asked, but on Monday night MPs voted we shouldn't by 483 votes to 111. The Prime Minister David Cameron - along with the leaders of the Liberal Democrats and Labour - had called for MPs to oppose the idea. So, they got their own way, but it's caused a big headache for the Conservative leader. Laws and red tape This lunchtime (25 October) he's said there is "no bad blood" between him and those MPs who went against what he had asked for. He added that he knew people felt "strongly" about the issue but he had to "give a lead" on the issue. Mark Williams is 24 and a sales manager from Gravesend in Kent. "I don't think we should be in the EU, we should be separate," he said. "I don't like the laws and red tape they put on everything, it has to be done their way all the time," he added. After seeing 81 of his MPs defy him and vote in favour of a referendum, this is the biggest rebellion David Cameron has suffered since moving into Downing Street. 'Not fair' "I know one geezer (MP Adam Holloway) from here voted the other way and has resigned from his position," said Mark. "Everyone is entitled to an opinion at the end of the day and he was just voting the way he saw fit," added Mark. This rebellion is double that suffered by John Major in the 90s, when 41 MPs defied him. Some say the UK has lost its identity by being part of the EU and that it's a waste of money. Others argue there are positives, from cheaper roaming rates on your mobile phone to more job opportunities. Those MPs who defied the prime minister may have harmed their chances of a top job in the future and may now be forced to resign from their position. Twenty-five-year-old Lana Bance thinks that is unfair. "We should definitely have the right to make a decision," she said. "I think it's really bad they were told which way to vote, it's not fair to be dictated to," she added. "There's too many people in this country who don't stand up to what they believe in, so it's good that they did it, hats off to them." Labour saw 19 MPs rebel, but leader Ed Miliband still called the opposition by so many of the prime minister's MPs a "humiliation".	Stay in the European Union, leave it or renegotiate its membership ?
+text: Jack Letts - dubbed Jihadi Jack - was 18 when he left his Oxfordshire school in 2014 to join IS fighters in Syria. Sally Lane said her son had not been contacted ahead of the move, which his father likened to a "kick in the gut". The Home Office said it would not comment on individual cases. The Canadian government said it was "disappointed" the UK had "off-loaded" its responsibilities. Mr Letts, who is a dual UK-Canadian national, was jailed after being captured by Kurdish YPG forces while trying to flee to Turkey in May 2017. His parents, John Letts, 58, and Sally Lane, 57, were convicted in June this year of funding terrorism after sending their son £223. They both told Channel 4 News they were "shocked" their son's citizenship had been revoked. "It's kind of like you're [being] kicked in the gut," Mr Letts said. He said it was a "really disappointing" move by the British government that was "just shirking responsibility and passing the buck off to the Canadians". The decision is thought to be one of the last made by Theresa May's government - when now-chancellor Sajid Javid was home secretary. "I think it's maybe Sajid that's a bit of a coward and in denial and naive, and obviously it's his last act [as home secretary] and he can move on and not have to even justify it," Mr Letts's father said. He added he would "love to have a debate" with Mr Javid about the decision. Mrs Lane said it was a "real shock" the government did it without "any form of redress or discussion" with her son. "He's being held incommunicado and has no access to a lawyer," she said. Canada have also expressed disappointment in the government's decision. A statement on behalf of Canada's public safety minister Ralph Goodale's office said: "Terrorism knows no borders, so countries need to work together to keep each other safe. "Canada is disappointed that the United Kingdom has taken this unilateral action to off-load their responsibilities." Canada added that it was aware some Canadian citizens were being detained in Syria, but there was "no legal obligation to facilitate their return". "We will not expose our consular officials to undue risk in this dangerous part of the world." Former defence minister Tobias Ellwood said removing the radicalised fighter's citizenship "shunts the responsibility elsewhere" when many fighters were "radicalised here in the UK". He added that Britain "should be leading calls" on how "foreign fighters face justice and who is ultimately responsible for bringing them to justice". While the Home Office would not comment on the issue, a spokesman said: "Decisions on depriving a dual national of citizenship are based on substantial advice from officials, lawyers and the intelligence agencies and all available information. "This power is one way we can counter the terrorist threat posed by some of the most dangerous individuals and keep our country safe." Mr Letts, who converted to Islam when he was 16, dropped out of studying for his A-levels at a school in Oxford in 2014 before moving to Syria to join the so-called Islamic State. The jihadist terror group became known worldwide for its brutal mass killings and beheadings. In an interview with the BBC's Quentin Sommerville, Mr Letts said: "I know I was definitely an enemy of Britain." After being pressed on why he left the UK to join the jihadist group, he said: "I thought I was leaving something behind and going to something better." He told ITV News earlier this year that he wanted to return to the UK as he felt British - but understood it was unlikely he would be able to. "I'm not going to say I'm innocent. I'm not innocent. I deserve what comes to me. But I just want it to be... appropriate... not just haphazard, freestyle punishment in Syria," he said, at the time. . Following an Old Bailey trial, his parents were sentenced to 15 months' imprisonment, suspended for 12 months, for funding terrorism. Under international law, a person can only be stripped of their citizenship by a government if it does not leave them stateless. Mr Javid stripped Shamima Begum of her UK citizenship earlier this year. She was one of three girls from east London who left the UK in February 2015 and travelled to Syria, where she married an Islamic State group fighter. Mr Javid said Ms Begum could claim Bangladeshi citizenship because of her family background. But Bangladesh has said she is not a citizen and would not be allowed into the country.	The parents of a UK-Canadian man who joined the Islamic State group have said former Home Secretary Sajid Javid is a "coward" for revoking his British citizenship.
+text: Elements of the Baltic Fleet started arriving 30 miles (48km) off the Moray Firth on Monday. The SNP's defence spokesman Angus Robertson said there had been reports of crew throwing waste overboard. Portsmouth-based Royal Navy destroyer HMS York has been shadowing the vessels. The warships, including aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, were still off the firth earlier, but moving slowly. It was understood the Royal Navy informed the National Maritime Information Centre about rubbish being dumped from the carrier. A Ministry of Defence (MoD) source said it was almost certainly food waste that was dumped. Under environmental rules, food can be disposed off at sea provided this is done more than 12 miles (19km) from land. Plastics can never be dumped. Mr Robertson accused the Admiral Kuznetsov's crew of "marine fly-tipping" and "bad manners". He said: "Given the bad weather conditions the Russian vessels are very welcome to shelter off the Scottish coast, but it is more than bad manners to dispose of waste by simply throwing it overboard. "This is in contravention of agreements and normal practice and I think we need answers from the Russian and UK governments. "Have the appropriate authorities been informed? What was disposed of?" Following Mr Robertson's comments, the MoD said: "There are strict regulations, which are internationally recognised and which Russia is signed up to under the International Maritime Organisation which govern pollution and dumping of waste at sea. "They are a responsible navy and will follow those international regulations." The Scottish government said it was investigating the matter and was asking UK authorities for information. A spokesperson said: "We would expect all mariners, especially naval, to show respect for our precious marine environment. "Whilst Scotland welcomes all nations to its seas, it is important they observe international conventions." The Admiral Kuznetsov was headed for Syria when it and other vessels sought shelter in "deteriorating weather", according Russian military news agency Interfax-AVN. The Royal Navy and Ministry of Defence (MoD) have released images of HMS York close to the carrier. In a statement, the MoD said: "The 65,000 ton carrier, with other warships and support vessels, is thought to be en route to the Mediterranean on exercise. "The aircraft carrier anchored outside British territorial waters some 30 miles off the Moray Firth where she was thought to have taken advantage of the relative shelter to avoid the worst of current bad weather in the North Sea." Other Russian ships that sought shelter in the Moray Firth included the anti-submarine warfare ship Admiral Chabanenko and escort ship Yaroslav Mudryy, according to Interfax-AVN. Foreign planes In May 2007, Tornado F3 jets from RAF Leuchars in Fife were sent to intercept two Russian aircraft spotted observing a Royal Navy exercise. The jets were scrambled after the foreign planes were detected by radar in the skies over the Western Isles. They were identified as Russian Bear Foxtrot planes, commonly seen by RAF pilots during the Cold War. The Russian aircraft were escorted from the area by the RAF who said no radio contact took place between the pilots.	The crew of a Russian aircraft carrier has been accused of dumping waste off Scotland's north coast after seeking shelter from winter storms.
+text: By Mark SavageBBC Music reporter "So sad to say that my mother passed away this morning," he said on his Facebook page, alongside a photo of them together. "I only saw her last Monday and I am in shock. Travel safe, mum. Thank you for everything." Sir Elton, who was born Reginald Dwight, was Ms Farebrother's only son. Although his father - a flight lieutenant in the RAF - was a trumpeter in his spare time, it was his mother who ignited his love of pop music. An avid record collector, she brought home music by artists such as Elvis Presley and Bill Haley and supported Sir Elton throughout his career. Petty argument But they fell out over a "petty" argument in 2008, when Sir Elton asked her to sever ties with two old friends, Bob Halley and John Reid. Mr Halley had worked for Sir Elton for three decades, first as a driver then later as a personal assistant, before he resigned as part of a series of changes Sir Elton was making to his team. Mr Reid, who had been Sir Elton's manager and briefly his lover, helped the musician become one of the world's most famous - and richest - performers, but they too fell out. "I told him: 'I'm not about to do that and drop them,'" Ms Farebrother told the Daily Mail. "Then to my utter amazement, he told me he hated me. And he then banged the phone down. Imagine! To me, his mother!" Ms Farebrother told the newspaper at the time that she had never met her grandsons Zachary and Elijah, who Sir Elton and his partner David Furnish fathered through IVF with an American surrogate mother. For her 90th birthday, Ms Farebrother hired an Elton John tribute act to perform. Her son got in touch soon after, sending her white orchids to celebrate the milestone. But their relationship was still strained. Sir Elton told Rolling Stone that his mother had not called him to say thank you after the bouquet arrived. "To be honest with you, I don't miss her," he said. "I look after her, but I don't want her in my life." However, the pair appear to have fully reconciled this year, after Sir Elton recovered from a potentially fatal bacterial infection. "Dear Mum, Happy Mother's Day!" he wrote on Instagram in February. "So happy we are back in touch. Love, Elton xo" Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	Sir Elton John says he is "in shock" after the death of his mother, Sheila Farebrother, just months after their reconciliation.
+text: The men - two of nine killed on Thursday evening - were fathers of young children and had been raising funds for a local hospice, it has emerged. Steve Barber, 47, and John Taylor, 48, lived in the same street in the village of Upper Poppleton, near York. Mr Taylor's daughters Emma, 10, and Louise, eight, and Mr Barber's daughter Francesca, 10, attend Poppleton Ousebank School. The men were killed as they traversed Mont Maudit, translated as Cursed Mountain, in the Mont Blanc range near Chamonix. Mr Taylor's wife Karine and Mr Barber's long-term partner Donna Rogers have led tributes to the men. Mrs Taylor said she was "truly devastated". Rescuers praised She said her husband, who moved to the Poppleton area from Manchester in 2003, took up mountaineering in 1998 and had climbed Mont Blanc twice before. She added: "This event represents a significant loss to the UK climbing community." Miss Rogers said her family were all "devastated" at the loss of Mr Barber. She said he loved the outdoors, was a keen walker and always wanted to climb Mont Blanc. Both women thanked members of the mountain rescue teams who tried to rescue their partners and family and friends who had been "so supportive". Roger Payne, from west London, one of the UK's most respected climbers, was also killed. Mr Barber and Mr Taylor were raising money for St Leonard's Hospice in York. Janet Morley, the hospice's director of fundraising, said of Mr Barber: "As far as we are aware he had no direct link with the hospice, so we were very pleased to hear that he recognised the important part the hospice plays in York and the surrounding area. "We were looking forward to the photographs he promised to bring back from this adventure to use on the hospice's website. "We are devastated to hear of Steve's death and the deaths of John Barber and Roger Payne, as well as of the other victims. Our thoughts and prayers are with their families and friends today." 'Caring shoulder' Parents of children at Poppleton Ousebank School were informed of the men's deaths in a letter from head teacher Estelle O'Hara. She wrote: "Our thoughts and prayers go out to both Donna Rogers and Karine Taylor who have both lost their life-long partners. "Children have been informed and school staff have been supporting them throughout the day, providing a caring shoulder and answering any questions that children may have. "We would ask that people respect the families' privacy at this sad time. We understand that the climb was to raise money for St Leonard's Hospice and so we will be collecting on their behalf." Councillor Ian Gillies, who represents Upper Poppleton on City of York Council, said: "Devastated doesn't cover it, really. "I'm sure the people in the village and the wider community will provide the support the families need, not only now but for weeks to come."	A village near York has been "devastated" by the deaths of two of its residents in an avalanche in the French Alps.
+text: By Justin RowlattChief environment correspondent The shipments were among 81,615 tonnes of banned "crop protection products" planned by British and other European companies that year. Under EU law, firms are still permitted to make and export chemicals whose use is restricted within the bloc itself. Greenpeace used freedom of information requests to unearth the data. This was contained in hundreds of documents. The group said almost 40% of planned exports by weight came from the UK. The next-highest exporter was Italy, with 11% of planned exports, or 9,350 tonnes. Greenpeace described the trade as "exploitative hypocrisy" and demanded the UK government put an end to it. The campaign group's chief scientist, Doug Parr, said the UK should stop the manufacture and export of all banned pesticides and "pressure the EU to do the same and close this loophole for good". 'Double standard' Some critics in importing nations claimed the practice was a "double standard" that placed a lower value on lives and ecosystems in poorer countries. "Even though the climate is different, our bodies are made from the same matter," said Alan Tygel, spokesperson for the Permanent Campaign Against Pesticides and for Life, a Brazilian umbrella group of social movements and NGOs. "Substances that are dangerous for Europeans, are also dangerous for Brazilians, Indians, Argentinians, and so on." 'Different' requirements The majority of the exports notified from the UK (28,185 tonnes) were mixtures containing paraquat, a weedkiller that has been banned in the EU since 2007. Paraquat is manufactured in Huddersfield by the biotech company Syngenta. It is a very effective weedkiller that is widely used around the world but in concentrated doses can be very toxic. It is often used in suicides, and scientists are investigating evidence of links between repeated exposure to the chemical and Parkinson's disease. Syngenta told the BBC it followed the law in every country in which it operates. It said different parts of the world grew different crops in different climates with different weeds and other pests, and therefore needed different chemicals. "It is very common that crop protection chemicals produced in countries where we have manufacturing plants are not necessarily registered or sold there," it said. Almost half of the UK's 2018 paraquat shipments (14,000 tonnes) were destined for the United States, where Syngenta faces lawsuits from farmers who allege the weedkiller gave them Parkinson's disease. But exports were also planned to low- and middle-income nations including Brazil, Mexico, India, Colombia, Ecuador, and South Africa, where protective equipment is less commonly used and government regulation on the use of dangerous chemicals is not so rigorous. 'Strict rules obeyed' The other significant exports of banned pesticides notified from the UK in 2018 included up to 4,000 tonnes of the soil fumigant 1,3-Dichloropropene, produced by a subsidiary of the chemicals giant Ineos, which is majority owned by billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe, one of the richest individuals in the UK. 1,3-Dichloropropene is classified as a probable carcinogen. It remains banned in the EU because of concerns related to consumer exposure, as well as risks of "groundwater contamination" and risks for "birds, mammals, aquatic organisms and other non-target organisms". Ineos told the BBC the only exports of 1,3 Dicholoropropene from the UK were to Japan. It said that all shipments of the product followed strict European rules on the export of dangerous chemicals. In addition, the company said 1,3 Dicholoropropene helped to protect important food crops from disease and was "still used in European Union countries but only under emergency procedures which are subject to national approvals". Follow Justin on Twitter.	The UK approved the export of more than 32,000 tonnes of banned pesticides in 2018, according to environmental campaign group Greenpeace.
+text: About 30 firefighters were called to the blaze in Tooley Street in Boston at about 12:15 BST on Monday. Police said the man who died was believed to be in his 30s, but he had not yet been formally identified. Neighbour Martin Tunstall said he "dragged" the stepfather away as it was too dangerous to go back in the house. More Lincolnshire stories Mr Tunstall said the "back room was engulfed with flames". "[The man] said 'I must go back into the house' and we held him back. "He's a very brave man to do this." A joint fire and police investigation has begun to find out the cause of the blaze. Six fire appliances attended from Boston, Spalding, Horncastle and Donington, according to the fire service. Follow BBC East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk. Related Internet Links Lincolnshire Police Lincolnshire Fire and Rescue	Neighbours have told how the stepfather of a man who died in a house fire tried in vain to go back into the property to save him.
+text: By Leila BattisonScience reporter DNA from the hair demonstrates that indigenous Aboriginal Australians were the first to separate from other modern humans, around 70,000 years ago. This challenges current theories of a single phase of dispersal from Africa. An international team of researchers published their findings in the journal Science. While the Aboriginal populations were trailblazing across Asia and into Australia, the remaining humans stayed around North Africa and the Middle East until 24,000 years ago. Only then did they spread out and colonise Europe and Asia, but the indigenous Aborigines had been established in Australia for 25,000 years. Australian Aborigines therefore have a longer claim to the land in which they now live than any other population known. The research also highlights the exciting future possibilities of comparing the genomes of multiple individuals to track migration of small indigenous groups. Tiny genetic differences Archaeological remains are known from Australia from around 50,000 years ago, putting a maximum age of the Aborigines' settlement there. But the history of their journey and their relationship with the indigenous people of Asia and Europe had not been solved. It was previously thought that modern humans dispersed in one pulse out of Africa and the Middle East, and because of the distances involved, the modern Europeans would have separated from the Asians and Australians first. Genetic information from a lock of Aboriginal hair has been used to show that the Australians set off a lot earlier. By looking at the tiny (fraction of one percent) differences between the DNA of Aborigines and other ancient humans, the scientists show that the indigenous Australians were first isolated 70,000 years ago. Dr Francois Balloux, of Imperial College London described how a "population expanded along the coastline because of the rich resources available there. They could walk almost the entire way because the sea level was much lower". Just one small sea crossing would be required to reach Australia. Any potential archaeological remains of this journey, which lasted 25,000 years, would be lost to the deep sea under rising sea levels. The remaining populations in the Middle East moved out to colonise Europe and Asia 24,000 years ago, and the aboriginal genome records some interbreeding between Asian populations and aboriginal ancestors at this time. Discovering the history of human migration with DNA has been made possible by improvements in the techniques used to study the genome. Traditionally, genetic divergence dates were arrived at by combining the number of unique mutations in the DNA with an assumed rate of acquiring those mutations. Now, computationally powerful models can simulate lots of different scenarios for migration timings and directions, and researchers can compare and choose the situation that most closely matches what is seen in the genome. By comparing the Aboriginal genome with the DNA of African, European and Han Chinese individuals it was possible to highlight the later interbreeding after initial colonisation. Comparison with Eurasian populations show that the Australian Aborigines have a similar percentage of Neanderthal genes within their DNA as their Eurasian counterparts, suggesting that any interbreeding occurred before the Aborigines embarked on their colonising journey. The findings of these researchers are supported by an independent study, published this week in the American Journal of Human Genetics, which looks at the characteristic DNA from an extinct, archaic form of human, the Denisovans. Denisovans lived over 30,000 years ago, and contributed genes mostly to present-day New Guineans. This independent study identifies a pattern of Denisovan DNA in Asian individuals that can only be explained by two separate waves of human migration: the first of Aboriginals colonising Australia, and the second involving the occupation of Asia itself. 'Jurassic Park science' The Aboriginal research was carried out on a single lock of hair, which was donated by a young Aboriginal man to the British anthropologist Dr A C Haddon in 1923. "At this time, it was fashionable to take human samples," said Dr Balloux. The collection of hair was one of the more innocuous efforts of anthropologists at the time. The researchers chose to examine the hair, as opposed to any other type of remains, for legal reasons. Hair is not classified as a human tissue. "More important to us was that the research would be acceptable from a social and moral point of view" said Dr Balloux.To the surprise of the scientists, the people they consulted were very supportive of the study and its results. Dr Balloux explained that in the past, indigenous people have been "extremely sensitive of the motivations of western scientists". The research has been published with "strong endorsement" from the Goldfields Land and Sea Council, the organisation that represents the Aboriginal traditional owners of parts of Western Australia, he said. Genomics techniques like those used in this study have the potential to be used more extensively in the study of human migrations and the evolution of health and disease. The international team next plans to look in more detail at the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa, as well as solving how and when the Americas were colonised. Dr Balloux said he was excited about the unexpected potential of the techniques, describing it as "borderline Jurassic Park science".	A lock of hair has helped scientists to piece together the genome of Australian Aborigines and rewrite the history of human dispersal around the world.
+text: The US Department of Justice wants to extradite Navinder Singh Sarao, 36, on charges of wire fraud, commodities fraud and market manipulation. The crash wiped billions of dollars off the value of US shares in minutes. At a Westminster Magistrates' Court hearing on Wednesday, Mr Sarao opposed his extradition to the US. Separately, US regulators filed civil claims against Mr Sarao, adding that he made $40m (£27m) over five years. It is claimed the trader, from Hounslow, west London, used automated computer programmes to manipulate share prices. Scotland Yard confirmed Mr Sarao was arrested by the Met's extradition unit. 'Amazing insight' "This is like something out of a thriller - it's a most remarkable story," the BBC's economics editor Robert Peston said. "The allegation is that he was sending what are known as spoof orders to sell futures contracts in the US stock market. He would drive the price of the stock down... then withdraw the sell orders, but the price would already have fallen. "He would then buy the orders back and guarantee a profit for himself. According the charge sheet, he did this thousands and thousands of times over many years. "This is an amazing insight into the way computers have completely transformed the stock market business." 'Significant profits' The infamous flash crash saw US markets plunge rapidly, only to then rebound just as quickly. Regulators blamed high-frequency traders placing multiple sell orders. High-speed trading is where share dealers create computer algorithms to buy and sell stocks in milliseconds. The Justice Department said in a statement that "Sarao's alleged manipulation earned him significant profits and contributed to a major drop in the US stock market on May 6, 2010". The statement continued: "By allegedly placing multiple, simultaneous, large-volume sell orders at different price points - a technique known as 'layering' - Sarao created the appearance of substantial supply in the market." Mr Sarao was then able to buy and sell futures contracts tied to the value of the share indexes, it is alleged. 'Integrity and stability' In a separate announcement, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) released details of civil charges against Mr Sarao and his company Nav Sarao Futures Limited. The statement alleges market manipulation over five years, and as recently as 6 April. CFTC director of enforcement Aitan Goelman said: "Protecting the integrity and stability of the US futures markets is critical to ensuring a properly functioning financial system. "Today's actions make clear that the CFTC, working with its partners on the criminal side, will find and prosecute manipulators of US futures markets wherever they may be."	A financial trader has been arrested in the UK after US authorities accused him of contributing to the 2010 Wall Street "flash crash".
+text: Hannah Cobley, 29, gave birth in an outside toilet before wrapping the baby in plastic bags and leaving her in an overgrown area, Leicester Crown Court was told. In a police interview while she was in hospital, she said she "didn't know what was going on". Ms Cobley denies murder. In the video interview, shown to jurors, Ms Cobley said she had last had sex in October and had experienced regular periods since. The trial had previously heard she gave birth to the girl on 26 April 2017 at a farm where she lived with her parents in Stoney Stanton, Leicestershire. In her police interview on 30 April 2017, Ms Cobley described how the baby was stillborn. She said a few days later, when on holiday in Skegness, she began bleeding heavily. She later collapsed and was taken to Leicester Royal Infirmary. Asked why she didn't tell her mother what had happened, she said: "I thought she'd be ashamed of me." Ms Cobley's father Peter, who owns a transport business and kept livestock on the farm, said a day after the birth he found drops of blood in the outside toilet but thought someone had suffered a nosebleed. In a police interview, he said when he asked his daughter what had happened, she told him "there was a baby" and she "put it in a bag". He said she told him it "wasn't alive or anything", and that he did his "fatherly bit" by consoling her. Her mother Lisa Cobley told the court she spoke to her daughter alone soon after she had been taken to hospital, but found her "in so much pain" and "so scared". "She didn't want to tell me anything," she said. The trial continues. Follow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.	A woman accused of leaving her newborn daughter to die said she did not know she was pregnant before she gave birth, a court heard.
+text: In Sweden, people have been told to prepare for possible travel restrictions during the holiday period. Meanwhile Irish and French authorities said it was too soon to say if people could make travel arrangements. With six weeks until the festive season, lockdowns and other measures are in force in several countries. Portugal has significantly expanded the number of places subject to a night curfew. From Monday, three-quarters of the country will be under the government's toughest restrictions. Sweden's top state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell told citizens to prepare for the possibility of restricted travel between different areas during the Christmas period so that regional healthcare services could avoid becoming overwhelmed. A provisional decision would likely be made in a week or two, he said, adding that Swedes needed to be prepared that things could still change "right before Christmas". Mr Tegnell also said "the large bulk" of new Covid-19 cases were currently coming from private parties. He said he hoped a ban on serving alcohol in pubs and bars after 22:00, due to start next weekend, would not lead to a rise in private social gatherings. On Thursday, authorities announced 40 new deaths, the country's highest daily toll for five months. Meanwhile, Irish Deputy Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said he would not yet advise Irish citizens living abroad to book flights home, adding that it was "too soon" to give such advice. A similar sentiment was shared by French Prime Minister Jean Castex, who said it was "too early" to say whether citizens could buy train tickets to travel at Christmas. He added that there would be no easing of lockdown restrictions for at least two weeks. "It would be irresponsible to soften the lockdown now," he told a news conference, "the gains are fragile." Under the lockdown restrictions, people in France can only leave their homes to go to work if they cannot work from home, to buy essential goods, seek medical help or to exercise for one hour a day. All non-essential shops, restaurants and bars are shut, but schools and creches remain open. Mr Castex added that some shops may be allowed to reopen from 1 December, depending on case numbers. But he said bars and restaurants must remain closed. France is grappling with a sharp rise in cases, with more than 1.9 million confirmed infections, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. On Thursday, French health authorities announced a record-high 32,638 hospitalisations - almost 350 higher than a peak reached in April. But the daily number of new infections was over 2,500 lower than Wednesday, and France's seven-day moving average was down for a fifth day in a row. In Italy, much of the country is in lockdown, but there are calls for stricter measures as the numbers of infections continues to grow. A further 636 deaths were reported on Thursday. Regional Affairs Minister Francesco Boccia said people should celebrate Christmas only with close family members. In the UK, discussions took place about the four nations taking a joint approach to Covid rules over Christmas.	A number of European countries have warned that it is too early to plan for Christmas travel, as coronavirus cases continue to rise across the continent.
+text: By Kathryn WestcottBBC News Magazine Worrall Thompson has apologised for his "stupid and irresponsible actions", after being cautioned by police for leaving a branch of Tesco without paying for small value items. He had reportedly done this on five separate occasions. The 60-year-old has spoken of the shame of letting his family and friends down. The big question, he says, is "why". Experts agree that in these cases, shoplifting is rarely about genuinely needing the item that is stolen. It is often about seizing the opportunity to momentarily exercise control when the perception is one of powerlessness. Research by retail consultants Global Retail Theft Barometer and Checkpoint Systems has suggested a new wave of middle-class shoplifter is targeting high-end delicacies from supermarkets in order to maintain a lifestyle they could no longer afford. These are people who appear to be reputable and often justify their actions by arguing that they have become victims to the economic recession. But in most cases of stealing by what psychologists describe as "non-professional shoplifters" - those who don't steal for profit or resale, or to feed a drug or alcohol addiction - there is much more going on. A devastated Worrall Thompson, in an interview with the Daily Express, said that he was unable to comprehend what compelled him to take items such as onions, a sandwich, cheese and wine. "I've been racking my brains to think why on earth did I do it and what was going through my mind at the time," he said. Experts say this is a typical response from a "non-professional shoplifter". Shoplifting is generally a reaction to some kind of loss and a need to fill a void - real or perceived, says Barbara Staib of the National Association For Shoplifting Prevention in the US. "Shoplifters are generally honest citizens," she says, adding that research has revealed a "direct correlation between depression and shoplifting". She explains that while other people might turn to alcohol, or binge eating, others turn to shoplifting. "Some people are trying to find solace in shoplifting," she says. "It gives them the 'rush', a 'high' - it can be a relief, if only a temporary one, as they suffer remorse afterward, when they get caught. "These are people who go into a store and the opportunity arises. For some reason they rationalise, they convince themselves that it's OK - for that moment. This is maladaptive behaviour - a way of coping with things that are going on in those people's lives." Worrall Thompson joins a list of people in the public eye who have been accused of shoplifting. A decade ago, American actress Winona Ryder was convicted of stealing thousands of dollars worth of clothes. In an interview with Vogue magazine a few years later, she blamed her actions on painkillers that she said she had got from a "quack" doctor after breaking her arm a few months earlier. The painkillers, she said, left her in a state of "confusion". Canadian psychologist Dr Will Cupchik has spent decades researching and working with what he describes as "atypical theft offenders" - the wealthy, celebrities or those in the public eye. The last thing these people need, he says, is to steal. "There are many reasons why people who have so much to lose risk so much for so little," he says. "These are people who are reasonably well off and are basically honest. "This is not typically about risk-taking - it's not done just for the thrill of it." He believes that the shoplifting episodes are a response to what those people perceive as an experienced or anticipated "unfair, personally meaningful loss". This might include anything from losing a TV show, to problems with an intimate relationship or a child with an illness, he says. "[The shoplifting] can be described as a hole that they want to fill - in the same way that people eat too much, drink too much or work too much." And in many cases, when caught, their behaviour doesn't make sense to them. "In most cases, timing is important," Cupchik says. "I say to people, 'Tell me what happened in your life either earlier that day or the day before', and it will often be something profound." He relates the story of a top lawyer who stole a tube of toothpaste from a chemist in the same building as his law firm. "'I don't know why I did it,' he told me, but that day his child was in hospital undergoing chemotherapy. These are intelligent people who virtually never understand why they did what they did." And, he says, there is usually a symbolic meaningfulness to the item being stolen. He describes one lady who stole items that she subsequently donated to a charity shop. One of those items was a wrench. He says the woman didn't understand why she took the wrench but when quizzed about what was going on in her life at the time, she said that her husband, a mechanic, had cancer. Recent research carried out by Cupchik in North America indicates that more doctors, nurses and police officers have been involved in shoplifting than any other profession. "These are professions that deal with loss - such as loss of life - on a daily basis. They don't process how to handle the experience of loss." Like many "non-professional" shoplifters, Worrall Thompson has expressed shame over his actions, describing the day he got caught as "the least proud day of my life". "People can be very ashamed," says Staib. "One woman told us that she wished she was an alcoholic instead of a shoplifter." The woman explained that if she had told friends that she was an alcoholic and seeking treatment they would commend her for dealing with her problem. But if she told friends that she was a shoplifter and dealing with it, it would be a very different response. "She said they would be afraid of her," says Staib. "People see shoplifting as more of a black-and-white issue - thou shalt not steal. In the US, someone who shoplifts is a "dirtbag" or a "loser". We can excuse alcoholics but a shoplifter may have the same issues - it is very complicated. It is an addiction and they need treatment. However, she stresses that none of this makes their behaviour acceptable. "There are some very poor, distraught people who don't shoplift," she says. The British TV chef has said that while there have been many things going on in his life, including stress and the funerals of a couple of friends, he was not trying to make excuses for his actions.	Chef Antony Worrall Thompson has apologised for shoplifting from a supermarket. But what makes people steal things when they have enough money to pay?
+text: Scottish Renewable said the research from the Adam Smith Institute was "flawed" and "one-sided". The pro-free market think tank produced its report jointly with the Scientific Alliance. A separate study by Reform Scotland said the country could earn £2bn a year exporting renewable electricity. The more pessimistic assessment of the potential for green energy came in Renewable Energy: Vision or Mirage?. Its key arguments were: Report co-author Martin Livermore said: "For too long, we have been told that heavy investment in uneconomic renewable energy was not only necessary but would provide a secure future electricity supply. "The facts actually show that current renewables technologies are incapable of making a major contribution to energy security and - despite claims to the contrary - have only limited potential to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. "Consumers have a right to expect government to place high priority on a secure, affordable energy supply." Scottish Renewables said the report was one-sided and completely overlooked the benefits of renewables. The industry body's chief executive Niall Stuart said: "The report is full of serious flaws and oversights, and not once does it mention the need to tackle climate change, or its massive economic, social and environmental costs. "The authors completely overlook the latest evidence on cost showing that large-scale onshore wind is already cheaper than nuclear, with large reductions in the costs of all renewables in the future. "They also fail to mention the huge increases in bills this winter as a result of the UK's reliance on imported gas." World leader In another report just published by Reform Scotland, called Powering Scotland, a very different picture of the renewables sector was painted. It said Scotland could become a world leader in renewable technology and could potentially earn £2bn a year by exporting green energy. Graeme Blackett, a trustee with the think tank, said: "We would support the aim of a substantial increase in energy exports with a target of around half of electricity generated in Scotland being exported. "Even using conservative assumptions on prices, this would increase Scottish exports by £2bn per annum, equivalent to around 17% of manufacturing exports to the rest of the UK. "Given that some of the current fossil fuel and nuclear capacity will still be available in 2020, this is feasible if the 100% renewables target set by the Scottish government is met." The group called for all of Scotland's nuclear power stations to be phased out and for energy powers to be devolved formally to Holyrood. The environmental group WWF Scotland claimed the assessment by the Adam Smith Institute was not backed up by research. WWF Scotland director Dr Richard Dixon said: "This report comprises a selection of tired and unconvincing myths about renewables and is a distraction from our fight to reduce carbon emissions. "The report's attacks on renewables just don't stack up. More renewables really do mean less fossil fuels burnt."	The renewables industry in Scotland has hit back at a report which claims wind and solar power cannot meet the UK energy's needs.
+text: British male solo artist Winner: Ed Sheeran Damon Albarn George Ezra Paolo Nutini Sam Smith Winner: Paloma Faith Ella Henderson FKA Twigs Jessie Ware Lily Allen Winner: Royal Blood Alt-J Clean Bandit Coldplay One Direction Winner: Sam Smith Chvrches FKA Twigs George Ezra Royal Blood Winner: James Bay George the Poet Years & Years Winner: Mark Ronson ft Bruno Mars - Uptown Funk Calvin Harris - Summer Clean Bandit ft Jess Glynne - Rather Be Duke Dumont ft Jax Jones - I Got U Ed Sheeran - Thinking Out Loud Ella Henderson - Ghost George Ezra - Budapest Route 94 ft Jess Glynne - My Love Sam Smith - Stay With Me Sigma - Nobody to Love Winner: Ed Sheeran - X Alt-J - This Is All Yours George Ezra - Wanted On Voyage Royal Blood - Royal Blood Sam Smith - In The Lonely Hour Winner: One Direction - You and I Calvin Harris - Summer Ed Sheeran - Thinking Out Loud Mark Ronson ft Bruno Mars - Uptown Funk Sam Smith - Stay With Me Winner: Sam Smith Winner: Pharrell Williams Beck Hozier Jack White John Legend Winner: Taylor Swift Beyonce Lana Del Rey Sia St Vincent Winner: Foo Fighters 5 Seconds of Summer The Black Keys First Aid Kit The War On Drugs Winner: Paul Epworth Alison Goldfrapp & Will Gregory Flood Jake Gosling	A full list of winners at this year's Brit Awards, held at London's O2 Arena.
+text: Visitor officer Karen Adams told the BBC that summer season visitor numbers were not decreasing. The comments followed claims made by the President of Sark's Chamber of Commerce that the island was heading towards "economic oblivion", after one of three general stores closed. Mrs Adams said the other stores appeared "to be doing very well". While most visitors came to the island between March and October, Sark's status as the world's first Dark Island Sky attracted stargazers in the winter, Sark Tourism Committee said. Records kept by the Visitor Centre show that there were 55,359 journeys made to Sark from Guernsey and Jersey between March and October 2015. The committee said these were comparable to the 55,610 journeys made in 2014.	There is "no slump" in Sark tourism and visitor numbers are "stable", the island's tourism committee has said.
+text: Milorad Dodik told EU foreign affairs chief Baroness Ashton that he was satisfied with her assurances that Bosnia's judiciary would be reviewed. Mr Dodik accuses Bosnia's war crimes court of bias against Serbs and he has criticised the UN envoy, who has the power to dismiss Bosnian officials. Bosnia remains ethnically divided. The Dayton Accords which ended the 1993-95 war created two semi-autonomous entities: the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska and the Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia-Hercegovina. "I think that a referendum for the time being is not necessary", Mr Dodik told reporters after meeting Baroness Ashton in Banja Luka, the Bosnian Serb capital. The referendum in Republika Srpska would have gauged support for the presence of the UN high representative, Valentin Inzko. He warned recently that it could jeopardise the Dayton agreement. It would also have asked Bosnian Serbs if they supported Bosnia's central institutions, which tackle war crimes cases, corruption and organised crime. Review of judiciary While the Serbs want to maintain as much autonomy as possible, the international community and the Bosniaks have been pushing for more centralised institutions and the country to fulfil conditions to join the EU. Speaking after his talks with Baroness Ashton, Mr Dodik said "we understand this as the beginning of a dialogue on the judiciary, where the shortcomings in the work of the judicial institutions at Bosnia-Hercegovina level will be reviewed". Baroness Ashton said the European Commission would open "a structured dialogue" on the work of the Bosnian judiciary, as a necessary part of Bosnia's moves towards joining the EU. She pledged a "comprehensive overview of the whole judiciary". She also told Mr Dodik that she expected him to stick to his commitment "to remove the threat of the referendum". Last week an influential think-tank, the International Crisis Group (ICG), urged the separate communities in Bosnia to compromise, warning that their political conflict was "starting to tear apart state institutions and it can threaten the state itself".	The Bosnian Serb leader has cancelled a referendum that would have challenged Bosnia's courts and the UN envoy overseeing the country's institutions.
+text: Mantas Cepas, 33, a Lithuanian national, admitted supplying the drug and the manslaughter of his friend. Stephen Millington, 50, from Dublin Road, Newry, died early on 17 January after he was injected with about £4 worth of heroin. Newry Court sitting in Belfast heard that he had given his friend, Cepas, £40 to buy the drug. Mr Millington was an alcohol and drug user, but the court heard this was the first time he had chosen to inject the drug. Multiple drugs In court on Monday, the judge said Cepas would spend two years in prison, following by two years on licence. She said that heroin was an unpredictable and "very dangerous" drug. The court also heard that Mr Millington's death was as a result of the alcohol, heroin and benzodiazepine found in his system. Cepas had an address at Cowan Street, Newry, at the time of his friend's death. The prosecution told the court that Mr Millington and Cepas had been drinking with their girlfriends at Mr Millington's flat and they had had "two to three litre bottles of vodka." At one point, Mr Millington left the flat to get more drink. Police officers saw him wearing flip-flops in January and brought him back home. 'That's too much' Mr Millington gave Cepas £40 for a bag of heroin. Cepas left and returned "visibly affected by drugs ... with his eyes rolling in his head". Cepas went to the bathroom where he prepared the drug. Mr Millington then tapped his own arm looking for a vein before asking his friend to inject him. The lawyer said Mr Millington's girlfriend saw the amount in the syringe and told Cepas: "That's too much." A few seconds after the drug was administered, Mr Millington's eyes rolled back and he slumped over. 'In shock' Both Mr Millington's girlfriend and Cepas tried to rouse him, but when this was unsuccessful, an ambulance was called. When arrested, Cepas admitted buying the heroin for Mr Millington and told police his friend asked him to administer it. He told police he tried to help Mr Millington after he collapsed and that he did not think the amount of heroin was too much. His friend's death had left him "in shock" and he was sorry, he said. His defence barrister said his client's remorse was genuine and that Cepas had tried to revive his friend: "But unfortunately it was too late." The judge ordered that while on licence, Cepas should take up a place on programmes designed to tackle drug addiction. 'Measure of comfort' Police have welcomed the sentence handed down to Cepas. "Drugs are a scourge on society and those who supply and sell them are quite often selling a death sentence. In this case, Mantas Cepas both supplied and administered the lethal drug that cost Stephen Millington his life and he will rightly serve time behind bars for his crime," said PSNI Detective Superintendent Rachel Shields. She said that she hoped the sentence would "bring some small measure of comfort to the Millington family."	A man who gave his friend a lethal injection of heroin has been jailed for four years.
+text: Sol Hemy, 20, was found in the River Itchen in Southampton in September 2019 after he and four others broke into a house to steal drugs. The four men were jailed over the raid on Tuesday. Mr Hemy's mother, Elaine, said she hoped her son's death would illustrate the dangers facing drug criminals. Police were called when gunfire was heard in River Walk, Southampton, at about 01:00 BST on 5 September 2019. The body of Mr Hemy, a father of two, was found in the water at Riverside Park at 06:30. The four other men were jailed at Southampton Crown Court for conspiracy to commit burglary and possession of a firearm with intent. Elaine Hemy said she hoped her son's death would "change people's lives and get them on a positive path". She told the BBC: "I just wish that youngsters could just understand that what they're doing is dangerous and they can actually gain more from going out and putting all of that energy into something positive. "I wouldn't want another family to go through what we're going through because it's killed us, it's torn us apart and it's broken us." An inquest into Mr Hemy's death is expected to be held next year. His mother said: "Nothing's going to change our devastated loss. "But the only thing that could help us as a family to move on, would be to know how my son got in that water." Passing sentence on Tuesday, Judge Peter Henry said: "The sad death of this young man is evidence of the level of violence of high stakes gang warfare being played out that night on a residential street in Southampton."	The mother of a man who drowned in a river after he took part in a cannabis factory break-in said his death should deter others from drugs crime.
+text: By Leo KelionTechnology desk editor The amount is the regulator's largest penalty to date against a company accused of distorting the market. The ruling also orders Google to end its anti-competitive practices within 90 days or face a further penalty. The US firm said it may appeal. However, if it fails to change the way it operates the Shopping service within the three-month deadline, it could be forced to make payments of 5% of its parent company Alphabet's average daily worldwide earnings. Based on the company's most recent financial report, that amounts to about $14m a day. The commission said it was leaving it to Google to determine what alterations should be made to its Shopping service rather than specifying a remedy. "What Google has done is illegal under EU antitrust rules," declared Margrethe Vestager, the European Union's Competition Commissioner. "It has denied other companies the chance to compete on their merits and to innovate, and most importantly it has denied European consumers the benefits of competition, genuine choice and innovation." Ms Vestager added that the decision could now set a precedent that determines how she handles related complaints about the prominence Google gives to its own maps, flight price results and local business listings within its search tools. Google had previously suggested that Amazon and eBay have more influence over the public's spending habits and has again said it does not accept the claims made against it. "When you shop online, you want to find the products you're looking for quickly and easily," a spokesman said in response to the ruling. "And advertisers want to promote those same products. That's why Google shows shopping ads, connecting our users with thousands of advertisers, large and small, in ways that are useful for both. "We respectfully disagree with the conclusions announced today. We will review the Commission's decision in detail as we consider an appeal, and we look forward to continuing to make our case." Fast growth Google Shopping displays relevant products' images and prices alongside the names of shops they are available from and review scores, if available. The details are labelled as being "sponsored", reflecting the fact that, unlike normal search results, they only include items that sellers have paid to appear. On smartphones, the facility typically dominates "above-the-fold" content, meaning users might not see any traditional links unless they scroll down. Google also benefits from the fact the Shopping service adverts are more visual than its text-based ads. One recent study suggested Shopping accounts for 74% of all retail-related ads clicked on within Google Search results. However, the BBC understands Google's own data indicates the true figure is smaller. Seven-year probe The European Commission has been investigating Google Shopping since late 2010. The probe was spurred on by complaints from Microsoft, among others. The rival tech giant has opted not to comment on the ruling, after the two struck a deal last year to try to avoid such legal battles in the future. However, one of the other original complainants - the British price comparison service Foundem - welcomed the announcement. "Although the record-breaking 2.42bn euro fine is likely to dominate the headlines, the prohibition of Google's immensely harmful search manipulation practices is far more important," said its chief executive Shivaun Raff. "For well over a decade, Google's search engine has played a decisive role in determining what most of us read, use and purchase online. Left unchecked, there are few limits to this gatekeeper power." Analysis: Rory Cellan-Jones, Technology correspondent This is a big moment in a clash between the EU and the US's tech giants, which has been going on for more than a decade. The commission believes it has struck a blow for consumers and for little firms at a time when online advertising - particularly on mobile phones - is dominated by Google and Facebook. Google believes the regulator has a weak case and has failed to provide evidence that either consumers or rivals have been harmed. In essence, it sees this as a political move rather than one based on competition law. You can be pretty confident that the Trump administration will share that view. There's mounting anxiety in European capitals about something called Gafa - Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon - the four American giants that play such a huge role in all of our lives. That means we can expect further action to try to limit their powers, with the potential for growing political tension between Brussels and Washington. Although the penalty is record-sized, it could have been bigger. The commission has the power to fine Alphabet up to 10% of its annual revenue, which was more than $90bn (£70.8bn) in its last financial year. Alphabet can afford the fine - it currently has more than $172bn of assets. But one expert said the company would be more concerned about the impact on its future operations. "If it has to change the appearance of it results and rankings, that's going to have an impact on how it can monetise search," said Chris Green, from the tech consultancy Lewis. "Right now, the way that Google prioritises some of its retail and commercial services generates quite a lot of ad income. "When you consider the sheer number of search queries that Google handles on a daily basis, that's a lot of ad inventory going in front of a lot of eyeballs. "Dent that by even a few percentage points, and there's quite a big financial drop." Europe v US tech: At her press conference, Margrethe Vestager insisted her action was "based on facts" rather than any prejudice the European Commission might have against US tech companies. "We have heard allegations of being biased against US companies," she said. "I have been going through the statistics... I can find no facts to support any kind of bias." But this is far from the first time the European Commission has penalised US tech giants for what it views to be bad behaviour. Others to have been targeted include: The commission is also investigating Amazon over concerns that a tax deal struck with Luxembourg gave it an unfair advantage. The European Commission continues to pursue two separate cases against Google. The first involves allegations that the technology company has made it difficult for others to have their apps and search engines preinstalled on Android devices. The second covers claims Google took steps to restrict rivals' ads from appearing on third-party websites that had installed a Google-powered search box.	Google has been fined 2.42bn euros ($2.7bn; £2.1bn) by the European Commission after it ruled the company had abused its power by promoting its own shopping comparison service at the top of search results.
+text: Campaigners raised £58,182 for the 29ft-long 'baby Khan', which will fly over Parliament Square on 1 September. A crowdfunding anti-Khan campaign was launched following the giant Donald Trump baby balloon flown by protesters during the president's visit in July. Mr Khan said: "If people want to spend their Saturday looking at me in a yellow bikini they're welcome to do so. "I don't really think yellow's my colour though." The giant inflatable - a nod to the controversial 'Beach Body Ready' advert Mr Khan voiced his disapproval for in 2016 - has been approved by City Hall, the police and air traffic controllers NATS. The fundraising page for the balloon said: "In light of the Donald Trump 'Baby Trump' balloon being allowed to fly over London during his visit to the UK, let's get a 'baby Khan' one and see if free speech applies to all." It adds: "Under Sadiq Khan, we have seen crime skyrocket to unprecedented levels. People in London don't feel safe and they aren't safe. [...] Khan out." The site also says that if the campaign raises any extra money it will be "used for a continuing campaign to remove Sadiq Khan from office" and "defending free speech". The Greater London Authority (GLA) city operations team gave permission for the blimp to fly over Parliament Square between 09:30 and 11:30 BST. "As always, City Hall has been working in very close coordination with the Metropolitan Police and other key agencies to ensure this protest is able to be carried out in a safe and secure way," a spokesman for the mayor said. A NATS spokesperson said: "Following a thorough evaluation, we are satisfied that the balloon will have no impact on normal air traffic operations. The Met Police has also approved the flight and accordingly air traffic control permission has been granted."	Protesters have been given permission to fly a bikini-clad blimp of London mayor Sadiq Khan over Westminster.
+text: Anthony Stansfeld, Thames Valley police and crime commissioner, said he did not approve of raising the police precept, but added it was necessary to prevent "damaging" cuts. The force revealed its officer levels were "under strength" due to high numbers of retirements and transfers. The changes will mean Band D householders will pay £12 more a year. At its annual budget meeting, Thames Valley Police (TVP) said no decisions over the future of its mounted and dog sections had been made after suggestions surfaced they could be cut or scrapped. A budget of £405m was approved amid further cuts of £14.3m until 2020/21. Mr Stansfeld said the increased funding from council tax should have been raised by the Government as he argued TVP did not get as much cash compared to other forces. "If I got the same amount of money per head of population, I would have 2,000 extra police officers and our burglary rate would be a third of what it is at the moment," he added. The budget meeting heard how the force was 98 officers below the required level, but is forecasted to fall of 101 by the end of 2018. Mr Stansfeld admitted it was "slightly ironic" officer levels were struggling amid funding cuts, but said it was a "demographic issue". "Tough decisions" TVP Chief Constable Francis Habgood said the budget had been the "most challenging" the force had ever gone through. He added it would take "two to three years" to solve recruitment issues. He told the BBC: "I'm not going to pretend it's easy. The demand is still going up. There are still some tough decisions, but this is in a much better position than what I thought we were going to be in." By 2020/21 the force will have cut £113m in 10 years. The budget plans will be put forward to Thames Valley's police and crime panel for final approval next week.	A council tax rise will prevent a police force from making "unacceptable" cuts to frontline services.
+text: Work starting next year will see a £42m upgrade to a 10-mile (19km) stretch of the north Humber bank. It follows the 2013 tidal surge when the city's defences were overtopped after water levels in the estuary peaked to the highest ever seen. Environment consultants working on the project said Hull was the "largest at-risk urban area outside of London". Protected areas will include hundreds of water front homes on Hull's Victoria Dock. Gordon Rason, chairman of Victoria Dock Residents' Association, said it was important to better protect the area given the work done around the city of culture. As part of the project, which is being funded by the Environment Agency, there will also be new and raised tidal defences on either side of the city in the East Riding, at Hessle and Paull. Rachel Glosson, from Hull City Council, said the authority had been pushing for extra investment to ensure it was "one step ahead" in considering the impact of climate change. She said: "It shows a real commitment to the city to enable it to grow."	New defences are to be built to protect more than 100,000 properties at risk of flooding around the Humber Estuary.
+text: It follows Nicola Sturgeon's announcement last week that restrictions applying to those most at risk from Covid-19 would be eased. People in the shielding category have been able to visit indoor shops and meet others inside since 24 July. From Saturday, the group will be able to follow the same advice as the general population. The pause means the children of those shielding will be able to go back to school from 11 August and adults can return to work. But Ms Sturgeon told MSPs that Scottish government advice for everyone remained to work from home wherever possible. 'Huge relief' She also said those who had been shielding should be "especially careful" about using face masks, hand hygiene and physical distancing. The shielding group in Scotland are those who are considered to be at greatest risk of becoming seriously ill or dying if they become infected with Covid-19. It includes those who have had solid organ transplants, certain cancers and people with severe respiratory conditions. Ms Sturgeon said: "I know that the pause in shielding will be a huge relief to many, but I suspect it will also make you feel anxious. "So please be assured that we are pausing shielding now because we believe it is safe to do so. "However, if circumstances change, our advice will also change. We will continue to put your safety first." The first minister added that she was "deeply grateful" to people in the shielding group for their "patience and sacrifice" over the last few months.	Coronavirus shielding in Scotland will be paused from 1 August, the first minister has confirmed.
+text: By Claire Gilbody-DickersonBBC News Leah Flanaghan, 25, from Cornwall, cares for 21-year-old Ione Buzzard - who has cerebral palsy and must self-isolate to avoid contracting Covid-19. To avoid exposing Ione to any risk, Ms Flanaghan's partner Aleksandar Atanasov decided to stop working. "It's someone's life, it was a no-brainer," Ms Flanaghan said. "We had to think: 'If that was my child how would I feel?' "She's had a really rough life with her disability and she survived so many illnesses and then for this to come about and put her at risk... if she were my daughter I just wouldn't want that." Abattoir worker Mr Atanasov, 24, also known as Alek, had asked to be furloughed but his boss refused, meaning the couple had to dip into their wedding savings and buy things on credit to make ends meet. "With my wage I can cover the rent on my property and food and stuff like that, so we're ok," said Ms Flanaghan, from Launceston. "We can get by and pay our bills. "But we had planned to get married and we were always thinking ahead to save and buy our property but that has just stopped. "Now it's just 'let's try and get by'." Ms Flanaghan started self-isolating a month before lockdown to avoid putting Ione in any danger. She has travelled the 30-minute commute to Crackington Haven every day for shifts lasting up to 13 hours while Mr Atanasov has stayed at home waiting for her. She admitted she would "go crazy" if she was in the same position as her boyfriend - who she met in Cyprus three years ago. "Mentally for both of us it's quite draining and quite a lot on our relationship but we thought we had to make it work so everyone can be safe and stay healthy," Ms Flanaghan said. Ms Flanaghan's employer - Ione's mother Jenny - hailed the carer's "outstanding" dedication to her daughter. "'Thank you' may be only two words but we are beyond grateful for their choice," she said. Mr Atanasov's boss said he would still have his job if he returned within a few weeks, so the couple have been hoping the lockdown would soon be lifted. "Because he is a good worker there I'm hoping they will still want him back," Ms Flanaghan added.	A carer and her boyfriend have said they are "just getting by" after he gave up his job so she could protect a severely disabled woman she cares for.
+text: Officers were contacted at 10:30 local time (18:30 GMT) on Saturday about the alleged incident at the Palms Casino resort, according to Lt Jeff Goodwin. A police statement said an altercation took place in a room when a woman went to take a picture of Brown and was struck by him before he took her phone. His publicist Nicole Perna called the woman's charges "unequivocally untrue". Police officers were unable to speak to Brown at his hotel room as he had left before they arrived. They said a crime report has been taken, listing Brown for for misdemeanour theft and misdemeanour battery. Ms Perna said the woman's allegations were "a complete fabrication". Grammy winner Brown, whose hits include Run It! and Kiss Kiss, had performed on Friday at a Las Vegas nightclub where he appears regularly.	US singer Chris Brown is being investigated by Las Vegas police over an allegation of battery.
+text: These areas, currently in tier three, will be in tier four from 00:01 GMT on Sunday, the government has announced. The further restrictions include a ban on travelling in or out of tier four. People can meet one-to-one outside. The infection rate in Broxbourne almost doubled week-on week up to 14 December, the 15th-highest in England. The Hertfordshire district, which includes Hoddesdon and Cheshunt, had 652.8 cases per 100,000 people, up from 330 in the previous week. All non-essential shops must close, along with hair salons and leisure centres. Pubs and restaurants can only operate as a takeaway. Hertfordshire County Council leader David Williams said the announcement was "very disappointing" but was in response to a new, faster spreading variant of the virus creating a significant increase in case numbers across London and the south-east. "It is essential we follow the new rules to prevent it spreading," he said. "We recognise the concerns that this escalation will prompt with both residents and businesses, and the additional restrictions and tougher rules that this involves. "We also recognise the sacrifices they will be making yet again for the health, wellbeing and safety of the county." Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk	Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire will move into England's new tier four of coronavirus restrictions .
+text: By Emma AilesBBC Victoria Derbyshire programme Those with an unspent criminal conviction or victims deemed to have "consented" to abuse despite being a child, are among those denied payouts. Victims also have to claim within two years of reporting abuse, described by MPs as an "unrealistic timeframe". The Ministry of Justice has launched a review into the compensation system. The guidance contains a number of exemptions. These include victims who may have been groomed into performing sex acts online but not physically assaulted. It also states that victims of child sexual abuse can be disqualified from the scheme on the basis that "consent 'in fact' is different from consent 'in law'." Even in cases involving under-16s, it says "where the sexual activity is truly of the applicant's free will no crime of violence will have occurred". The report from the cross-party group of MPs for adult survivors of sexual abuse, said many of the 400 survivors it consulted found applying to the Criminal Injuries and Compensation Authority (Cica) "traumatising and complicated". "Too often, Cica acts as a second trial for the survivor, placing the onus on them to prove their case once more," it said. "This compounds a complicated, onerous process." 'We'll never forget what he did to us' "David" and his younger brother were both sexually abused by their older half-sibling when they were children. His younger brother was awarded £11,000 in compensation, but David was refused because of a decades-old conviction for conspiracy to commit robbery. "He was like a bogeyman in your childish, nightmarish dreams. "As I got older the abuse made me feel quite worthless and dirty. I didn't feel like normal kids did and in a way I tried to destroy myself as well. By getting in trouble with the police I felt a bit like vermin really, like people see rats. "A lot of nights I would drift off to sleep thinking about my childhood and how it had basically led to where I was in that prison cell. I turned my life around when I came out. "When I found out he had been abusing my younger brother, it destroyed me. We'll never forget what he did to us, we'll be living with that for the rest of our lives. "Money, no matter how much they give me, would never take the thoughts and nightmares out of my head during the day and the night. "It would help, but in a way, more than the money, it would signify that the actual government are accepting that the way you've turned out - you'll end up getting in trouble with the police, you'll end up how a lot of people do, who've been abused." Ministry of Justice figures, released in response to a written Parliamentary question earlier this month, revealed how many victims have had an award withheld. In 2018-19, of 4,972 resolved child sexual abuse cases, 111 victims were denied due to unspent convictions, while 52 people were denied because the time limit had been exceeded. In 2017-18, of 5,619 cases, 140 were denied due to unspent convictions while it was withheld in 411 cases due to the time limit. The average payment to victims in January this year was £13,130 for male victims and £12,758 for female victims. The MPs say the government should publish a revised compensation scheme "without delay" including measures to: An unspent criminal conviction is one that remains on someone's record, as they are considered still in the "rehabilitation period". For sentences of over four years, a conviction is never "spent". Sarah Champion MP said it was a "scandal" the scheme had not yet been reformed. "The whole scheme needs comprehensive reform so that victims and survivors are put at the centre of the process because, right now, it is all about saving the government money not supporting people to rebuild their lives shattered by crime." The report also found seven in 10 survivors said they had not been given appropriate support when attending court as a witness, and two out of five had not been given the opportunity to give evidence remotely or behind a screen. Three out of four said they were not informed about their abuser's parole or the process involved. A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said it was "vital" that victims of child sexual abuse received every support possible to recover from their ordeal. "We have increased funding for emotional and practical support twice this year, and the total amount for victims has nearly doubled since 2013," the statement said. Follow the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme on Facebook and Twitter - and see more of our stories here.	Rules that mean some victims of childhood sex abuse are denied compensation must be changed, MPs have told the Victoria Derbyshire programme.
+text: Mr Nicholson made his remarks at the Balmoral Show where he was accompanied by his party leader Mike Nesbitt, minister Danny Kennedy and MLA Robin Swann. Mr Nicholson complained publicly, last month, that members of his party were briefing against him. A newspaper had reported he would face a challenge for the nomination. Mr Nicholson was quoted at the time as saying these were "faceless, gutless" people and he would take them on. Mr Nicholson must still secure the party nomination in two years time. There has been speculation that a deal would be agreed in which Mr Nicholson would stand down mid-term but he insisted he intended to remain for the full five year term if re-elected in 2014. He was elected an MEP in 1989 and is one of three Northern Ireland MEPs. Sinn Fein's Bairbre de Brun was elected in 2004. She announced earlier this month that she would be stepping down as an MEP. The Foyle MLA Martina Anderson has been put forward by the party as her replacement. The DUP's Diane Dodds was elected in the 2009 election.	Jim Nicholson, UUP MEP, has said he will stand again for Europe and that he intends to sit the full term.
+text: He made more than 40 feature films in a career spanning 60 years. Many of his films - including Kanal, Man of Marble, Man of Iron and Katyn - were inspired by Poland's turbulent wartime and communist history. In 2000, Wajda was awarded an honorary Oscar for his contribution to world cinema. 'Be alert to everything' Wajda had been recently taken to hospital. Unconfirmed reports say he died of lung failure. Poland's former prime minister and the current head of the European Council, Donald Tusk, tweeted: "We all stem from Wajda. We looked at Poland and at ourselves through him. And we understood better. Now it will be more difficult." Film director and head of the Polish Filmmakers' Association Jacek Bromski told Polish broadcaster TVN24: "He was one of the greatest Polish artists, one of the best-known in the world. Poland was his passion. "For us, for the community he was a pillar of strength, everybody gathered around him. He was always present in the life of the film-making community, he was a mentor, a paragon." Wajda's last film Powidoki (Afterimage) tells the life story of the avant-garde painter Wladyslaw Strzeminski, who suffered under the post-war Stalinist government in Poland. The director said he wanted to "warn against state intervention in art". 'Feel the love' The film was recently chosen as Poland's official entry for the best foreign language film at the 2017 Oscars. Four of Wajda's earlier works had been nominated for that category. Man of Iron won the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival in 1981. Wajda once said that "the good Lord gave the director two eyes - one to look into the camera, the other to be alert to everything that is going on around him." Other tributes included one from film critic Tomasz Raczek, who wrote on Twitter: "Polish cinema will be in mourning for a long time." Actor Daniel Olbrychski, who starred in 13 of Wajda's movies, including The Promised Land' and The Maids of Wilko, said he had never met another director who worked with actors so well. "We could feel the love of our audience through him. But when he frowned just a little, I knew I had to try and do it better," Olbrychski told TVN24. Wajda was born in 1926 in the north-eastern Polish town of Suwalki. His father was among the victims of the Katyn massacre of Polish army officers by the Soviet Union in 1940. Wajda tried to follow in his father's footsteps, but was rejected by a military academy, and joined the Polish resistance in World War Two. During the war, Wajda joined the Polish resistance. He later studied to be a painter, before entering the Lodz Film School. In 1955, he made his feature film debut with Generation, set during the German occupation of Warsaw in World War Two. It was followed by Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds, which form a trilogy about life in wartime Poland. 'I lived to see freedom' Some of his films found disfavour with the communist rulers of Poland because of their trenchant portraits of the wartime Warsaw Uprising and the suppression of the Solidarity movement in the 1980s. It was only after the fall of communism in 1989 that he was able to make his film about Katyn. "I never thought I would live to see the moment when Poland would be a free country," Wajda said in a 2007 interview with the Associated Press. "I thought I would die in that system. It was so surprising and so extraordinary that I lived to see freedom." Following Poland's first free elections in 1990, he served for two years as a senator in the upper house of parliament. Wajda is survived by his fourth wife, actress and stage designer Krystyna Zachwatowicz, and his daughter, Karolina. Follow us on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, on Instagram, or if you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	Oscar-winning Polish film director Andrzej Wajda has died aged 90, the Polish Filmmakers' Association has confirmed.
+text: The motorway was affected between junction 12 for the A603 and junction 14 for Girton, after the problem began at about 04:45 BST. Lane one remained closed northbound, but other lanes reopened at about 09:15, police said. A Cambridge Water spokeswoman said it was "working to fix the burst as quickly as possible". "[The company] would like to thank motorists for their patience while we get it fixed," she said. Cambridgeshire Police said it was unlikely the motorway would be fully open until midnight. Police advised motorists to avoid the area if possible.	A burst water main closed part of the M11 near Cambridge after flooding during the morning rush hour.
+text: The codes could have been used to seek payouts had the scam not been detected. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said no personal taxpayer data had been compromised or disclosed by its systems. It added it was monitoring use of its web application for any further signs of fraudulent activity. The agency said the attackers had used personal data stolen from elsewhere to compromise its systems. The information had then been processed by a software bot - meaning an automated program - to make one application after another for a Pin. "Based on our review, we identified unauthorised attempts involving approximately 464,000 unique social security numbers, of which 101,000 SSNs were used to successfully access an e-file Pin," it said in a statement. Affected taxpayers should receive a letter to alert them to the fact their social security number had been misused in this way, the IRS said. Furthermore, it said, it had marked the affected accounts to protect them against any further attempt of tax-related fraud.	The US government's tax collection agency has said attackers fooled its computers into generating more than 100,000 tax return Pin codes.
+text: The futuristic flight suits worn by Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken during Saturday's successful launch look a world away from the bulky orange shuttle flight suits worn when astronauts last launched from Florida's Kennedy Space Center. The helmets are 3D-printed and the gloves are touchscreen-sensitive. But their primary purpose remains the same - to protect crew members from depressurisation, where air is lost from the capsule. The suits also ensure astronauts have sufficient oxygen and regulate their temperature. A communications link and breathable air are provided via a single "umbilical" cable in the seat that plugs in to the suit. The Starman suits, as they've been called, are all in one piece and customised for the astronaut. Their look was conceived by Hollywood costume designer Jose Fernandez, who has worked on Captain America: Civil War and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. But they are just designed for use inside the SpaceX capsule, known as the Crew Dragon, and are not suitable for use on spacewalks. Aerospace giant Boeing also has a contract with Nasa to carry astronauts to the space station in its CST-100 Starliner spacecraft. It has developed a pressure suit to protect astronauts during the key phases of launch and re-entry. The Boeing Blue suits are about 40% lighter than earlier generations of spacesuits worn by American astronauts - and more flexible. They contain different internal layers to keep astronauts cool. The suit also has touchscreen-sensitive gloves - so astronauts can work with tablets in the spacecraft. The soft, hood-like helmet features a wide polycarbonate visor to give Starliner passengers better peripheral vision throughout their ride to and from space. Zips in the torso area will make it easier for astronauts to comfortably transition from sitting to standing. In October 2019, Nasa shared a close-up look at two next-generation suits for the agency's Artemis programme. Under this effort, Nasa will seek to return astronauts to the Moon by 2024, using the agency's Orion spacecraft. One of the suits is called the Orion Crew Survival System, and is comparable to the suits used by SpaceX and Boeing. It recalls the so-called Pumpkin suits used by space shuttle astronauts, but is more lightweight. The other suit, called the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) suit is designed to be worn on the surface of the Moon. It is much bulkier than the pressure suits designed to be worn inside spacecraft. This is because it needs to protect the wearer from temperature extremes outside the walls of the spacecraft. It is also designed to provide some shielding against micrometeorites and other small particles of space debris. In these respects, it is similar to suits previously used for spacewalking at the International Space Station (ISS). There are two suits used for spacewalking at the ISS. One is the Russian Orlan type, which was first used in December 1977. The Orlan is a one-piece spacesuit. The "backpack" opens like a fridge door, allowing the spacewalker to climb inside. Nasa's Extravehicular Mobility Suit (EMU) was introduced in 1981 and is the other suit used at the space station. Unlike the Orlan, the EMU comes in separate pieces, with a bottom and top half. The semi-rigid suit provides around 8.5 hours of life support for its wearer outside in the vacuum of space. Astronauts travelling to the ISS train with both suits. The suit worn by Apollo astronauts on the Moon was also called the EMU - though it's different from the modern design. It was the result of years of development. Spacesuits have come a long way since the first spacewalk by the late cosmonaut Alexei Leonov in March 1965. Leonov's suit inflated after he stepped out into the vacuum, so that his hands came out of his gloves. Only by bleeding air out of the suit, which put the cosmonaut at risk of the bends, was he able to get back inside the spacecraft. .	The spacesuits worn by astronauts for the Crew Dragon mission have been getting a lot of attention. How do they differ from other astronaut attire down the years?
+text: By Leo KelionTechnology reporter The Wikipedia encyclopedia and blogging service WordPress are among the highest profile pages to remove material. Google is showing solidarity by placing a black box over its logo when US-based users visit its site. The Motion Picture Association of America has branded the action as "irresponsible" and a "stunt". Visitors to Wikipedia's English-language site are greeted by a dark page with white text that says: "Imagine a world without free knowledge... The US Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia." It provides a link to more details about the House of Representatives' Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and the Senate's Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa). If users try to access its other pages via search sites, the text briefly flashes up before being replaced by the protest page. However, people have been sharing workarounds to disable the redirect. Global protest WordPress's homepage displays a video which claims that Sopa "breaks the internet" and asks users to add their name to a petition asking Congress to stop the bill. "The authors of the legislation don't seem to really understand how the internet works," the site's co-founder, Matt Mullenweg told the BBC. Across the globe, several Pirate Party sites have been taken offline. The political parties - which advocate reform of copyright laws - took the action in the UK, Spain, Sweden, Argentina, Canada and elsewhere. The news recommendation site Reddit, the online magazine Boing Boing, the software download service Tucows and the German hackers' group the Chaos Computer Congress also removed access to their content. The tech news site Wired covered its headlines and pictures with black boxes which were only removed when covered with the cursor. The US news website Politico estimated that 7,000 sites were involved by early Wednesday morning. 'Gimmick' The moves were described as an "abuse of power" by one of the highest profile supporters of the anti-piracy bills. "Some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns, rather than coming to the table to find solutions to a problem that all now seem to agree is very real and damaging," said former Senator Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America. "It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information... A so-called 'blackout' is yet another gimmick, albeit a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals." The US Chamber of Commerce said that the claims against the legislation had been overstated. "[The sponsors] announced they would roll back the provisions of these bills designed to block foreign criminal websites, striking a major conciliatory note with those who raised legitimate concerns," said Steve Tepp, chief intellectual property counsel at the chamber's Global Intellectual Property Center. "That was on top of the changes that guarantee the bill applies only to foreign sites. What remains are two pieces of legislation that are narrowly tailored and commercially reasonable for taking an effective swipe at the business models of rogue sites." The proposed legislation would allow the Department of Justice and content owners to seek court orders against any site accused of "enabling or facilitating" piracy. Sopa also calls for search engines to remove infringing sites from their results. Pipa does not include this provision. 'Threat to innovation' Google posted a blog on the subject claiming that thebills would not stop piracy. "Pirate sites would just change their addresses in order to continue their criminal activities," it said. "There are better ways to address piracy than to ask US companies to censor the internet. The foreign rogue sites are in it for the money, and we believe the best way to shut them down is to cut off their sources of funding." Other net firms that have criticised the legislation decided not to take part in the blackout. Twitter's founder, Dick Costolo, tweeted that it would be"foolish" to take the service offline. Facebook declined to comment on the page blackouts but referred users to anew page posted by its Washington DC divisionwhich said: "The bills contain overly broad definitions and create a new private cause of action against companies on the basis of those expansive definitions, which could seriously hamper the innovation, growth, and investment in new companies that have been the hallmarks of the internet." Debate The events coincided with news that the US House of Representatives plans to resume work on Sopa next month. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Lamar Smith, said: "I am committed to continuing to work with my colleagues in the House and Senate to send a bipartisan bill to the White House." The Senate is expected to start voting on 24 January on how to proceed on Pipa. Even if Congress approves the bills, President Barack Obama may decide to veto them. The White Houseissued a statementat the weekend saying that "we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet".	Thousands of internet sites are taking part in a "blackout" protest against anti-piracy laws being discussed by US lawmakers.
+text: The training is being delivered by the Midlands Air Ambulance, which said it has seen a "huge increase" in this type of crime. The kits were introduced through a campaign by Lynne Baird after her son, Daniel Baird, 26, was stabbed to death in 2017. The charity said there had been a "lot of interest" from schools. In 2019, Midlands Air Ambulance attended an average of two stabbings per week. Jim Hancox, assistant air operations manager, said 60 schools had booked to undertake the bleed kit training before the end of April. "We know the care people get in the early minutes and seconds after being injured is crucial to their chances of having a good outcome," he said. "Unfortunately the people we see involved in these kinds of injuries are the young people. "Whilst I am sure with the greatest will in the world we wish these cases weren't happening, what we want to be able to do is be able to give them the best chance of having the best outcome and the best chance of survival." The bleed control kits contain items such as a tourniquet, bandages and a foil blanket. One student at Worcester Sixth Form College, who had the training, said: "Any day you can see someone collapse or get hurt, and it is important we know what to do to save their lives or help save their lives." Their teacher, Kim Martin said they want to see all students at the college undergoing the training: "Because they are, unfortunately, more likely to be around these sorts of incidents, to give them those skills so they can go off into the community and help." Mrs Baird has spent years campaigning for the roll-out of the kits that she believes could have prevented her son from dying. "This is something that could possibly save so many lives," she said. Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, on Twitter, and sign up for local news updates direct to your phone.	School pupils are being trained to use potentially life-saving bleed control kits in the event of a stabbing.
+text: PC Ian Dibell, 41, was killed in Clacton-on-Sea on Monday after he intervened in a dispute near his home. Peter Reeve, 64, the suspected gunman, was found dead the following morning with a handgun in a churchyard at Writtle, near Chelmsford. His inquest in Chelmsford, which also opened earlier, was told Mr Reeve was seen to shoot himself in the head. The inquest, held in the Marconi Room of the town's Civic Centre, was told how PC Dibell was shot as he approached a car. Post-mortem tests carried out by Dr Benjamin Swift found PC Dibell died from a bullet to the chest and Mr Reeve from a gunshot to the head. Essex and Thurrock Coroner Caroline Beasley-Murray said: "As the tragic events of this week have unfolded in Essex, many people's lives have been affected. "Much has been required of Essex Police to meet the challenges of a complex investigation. 'Exceptional officer' "The families can now return to their funeral arrangements and hopefully be left in peace to grieve for their loved ones." Mrs Beasley-Murray asked coroner's officer Philip Sitch to pass on her "sympathies" to the families of both men. Both inquests were adjourned until a later date. PC Dibell was shot after intervening in a dispute between 48-year-old Trevor Marshall, his girlfriend and Mr Reeve in Redbridge Road. Mr Marshall suffered leg injuries and his girlfriend was unhurt. Essex Police is continuing with its murder investigation into the case. PC Dibell was described as "an extraordinary man and an exceptional police officer" by Essex Police Authority. In a statement, the authority said: "He is the finest example of the deep sense of loyalty and bravery in our officers, even when not on duty, to serve and protect the public. "PC Dibell, you have become a beacon for us all. We shall not forget you."	An off-duty police officer shot dead in Essex died from a single bullet wound to the chest, an inquest has heard.
+text: The US signed a deal with the Taliban on Saturday aimed at bringing peace to Afghanistan after years of war. But a US forces spokesman said it launched an air strike on Wednesday in response to Taliban fighters attacking Afghan forces in Helmand province. The Taliban called for de-escalation. In a post on Twitter, spokesman Suhail Shaheen said the group "plans to implement all parts of the agreement one after another to prevent conflict escalation". "The opposite side should also remove the obstacles in implementing all parts of the agreement so the way is paved for comprehensive peace and for the Afghans to have their basic rights," he added. It was not clear if there were any casualties. What did the US say? Wednesday's strike was the first by the US against the Taliban in 11 days, when a reduction in violence agreement began between the two sides in the lead-up to Saturday's pact. In a statement on Twitter, Colonel Sonny Leggett, a spokesman for the US forces in Afghanistan, said it was a "defensive strike" to disrupt an attack on an Afghan National Security Forces checkpoint. The spokesman added that the US was still "committed to peace" but had a responsibility to defend its Afghan partners. He said Afghans and the US had complied with their side of the agreement, while the Taliban appeared intent on "squandering" the opportunity. On Tuesday alone, he said, the Taliban had launched 43 attacks on checkpoints belonging to Afghan forces in Helmand. "We call on the Taliban to stop needless attacks and uphold their commitments. As we have demonstrated, we will defend our partners when required," he wrote. The Taliban has so far declined to confirm or deny responsibility for any of the attacks. Ambiguity brings confusion Secunder Kermani, Pakistan/Afghanistan correspondent US and Afghan officials had both said they expected the partial truce or "reduction in violence" that led up to the agreement in Doha would continue afterwards. But the text of the agreement makes no mention of this. That ambiguity seems partly responsible for the confusing situation developing on the ground. The current spate of attacks by the Taliban could be seen as an attempt by the insurgents to pressurise the Afghan government into releasing thousands of their prisoners. They're demanding that before beginning "intra-Afghan" talks with the government and other Afghan political leaders. But so far President Ashraf Ghani has refused to agree to this. However, it's also possible that the Taliban plan to continue fighting throughout the "intra-Afghan talks" in order to improve their negotiating position, and to keep their fighters mobilised. What's the background? On Saturday the US and the Taliban signed an "agreement for bringing peace" to Afghanistan after more than 18 years of conflict. The US and its Nato allies agreed to withdraw all troops within 14 months if the militants upheld the deal. But violence surged in Afghanistan just days after the agreement was signed, with the Taliban ending a partial truce and resuming fighting with Afghan government troops. Central to the obstacles facing the deal is the disagreement over prisoner swaps. Under the accord, some 5,000 Taliban prisoners and 1,000 Afghan security force prisoners are meant to be exchanged by 10 March, when talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government are due to start. But Afghanistan's President Ashraf Ghani said on Sunday that his government had agreed to no such release. And on Monday the militants said talks would not take place if their prisoners were not released first. Although the US-Taliban deal provides for the prisoner swap, a separate US-Afghan declaration commits the government in Kabul only to participating in talks on the "feasibility" of such a release. Following reports of numerous Taliban attacks on Tuesday, Mr Trump shared a phone call with a leader of the group, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, about keeping peace efforts on track. The US president said it was a "very good talk", while the Taliban said Mr Trump had pledged to ask his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to talk with Mr Ghani to make sure negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban went ahead as planned. The Taliban have previously refused to negotiate with the Afghan government, so Saturday's deal was just with the US. The US attacked Afghanistan in October 2001 to oust the Taliban, whom they said were harbouring Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda figures linked to the 9/11 attacks. The Taliban were removed from power but became an insurgent force that by 2018 was active in more than two-thirds of the country.	The US military has conducted an air strike against Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, just hours after President Donald Trump said he had had a "very good talk" with a leader of the group.
+text: Nicola Sturgeon said NHS Scotland was facing "exceptional" pressures but coping despite difficult circumstances. Latest figures showed the number of people suffering from flu has more than doubled compared with last year. Health Secretary Shona Robison said she would examine if more could be done to encourage the uptake of the vaccine. Opposition parties criticised the Scottish government saying these challenging pressure were not unforeseen. Speaking during a visit to Perth Royal Infirmary's A&E department, Ms Robison told BBC Scotland: "Where there is a concern is for those who are under 65 with an underlying health condition. "We want more of those people to go and get vaccinated because we know the impact of flu on them can be very, very severe indeed." About half of NHS boards across Scotland have reported significant ward pressure as a result of dealing with people suffering from flu. Speaking on the BBC's Good Morning Scotland radio programme, Ms Sturgeon said: "I would apologise unreservedly not just during the winter but at any time of the year to any patient who is not seen as quickly as we would want them to be seen in the NHS or who doesn't get the treatment that they have a right to expect. "We have seen exceptional pressures this winter largely due to the increase in flu cases but also, particularly in the period immediately before Christmas, weather-related pressures, but the hard work, the incredible hard work, the incredible teamwork, of the staff of the NHS - and I want to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of them - means that our NHS is coping in very, very difficult circumstances." 'Exceptional circumstances' Provisional figures suggested uptake of the flu vaccine was similar to last winter. Ms Sturgeon said early information suggested rates had increased slightly among NHS staff, with less than 50% vaccinated last year. The Scottish Conservatives have argued ministers should have done more to boost uptake. During her visit to Perth Royal Infirmary, the health secretary praised the efforts of NHS staff over the festive period and apologised to patients who had to wait for treatment. "Any patient waiting longer than they should to be seen and treated within the NHS, I would apologise for that," Ms Robison told the Press Association. "But I think the public understand that we are in exceptional circumstances here and I have had lots of messages from the public saying staff, in the face of huge pressures and challenges, have done a tremendous job." 'Very challenging' Responding to concerns over flu vaccine uptake, she said: "There was a really robust, big campaign to promote vaccination, in the same way as we have done in previous years, not just for the public but health and social care staff as well. "We can't force people to get the vaccination, all we can do is promote and encourage, and we used every communication channel possible to get that message across." The health minister added that winter pressures were expected to be reflected again in A&E waiting-time figures. The number of patients seen within the target four-hour waiting time was well below the 95% target in the weeks before Christmas. Weekly statistics, due to be published on Tuesday, will cover the period between Christmas and New Year. Ms Robison said: "The A&E figures will remain very challenging indeed and people are working very, very hard to keep patients safe and, of course, people within A&E will be seen and treated and discharged as quickly as possible. "The week was one of the most challenging weeks. "Of course our A&E performance prior to that has been the best in the UK for over two years, so A&E performance was very, very strong, but it has been impacted by these winter pressures and that will remain the case for the short-term while they get into recovery mode." 'Devastating impact' Conservative health spokesman Miles Briggs said Scotland was failing to meet the target of having half of all NHS workers vaccinated against the flu while in England almost two-thirds (63%) were vaccinated. He added: "The impact of this is devastating - it means doctors and nurses unable to come into work and patients suffering further delays as a result." Labour health spokesman Anas Sarwar said an apology from the First Minister "just isn't good enough for patients and NHS staff failed by the SNP government this winter". He said: "These were not unforeseen circumstances. Our NHS faced a similar crisis last winter yet the SNP overtly failed to make the preparations necessary to avoid another winter meltdown." The Scottish Greens highlighted what they described as the "constant stress" being put on NHS professionals. Health spokeswoman Alison Johnstone added: "While emphasis on vaccination programmes is of course important, we have to remember that too many NHS staff are underpaid and under-resourced on an ongoing basis." Alex Cole-Hamilton, the Scottish Liberal Democrats' health spokesman, said the Nicola Sturgeon and Shona Robison's comments were "not nearly enough". He added: "We need to see the first minister and the health secretary deliver a clear plan of action for addressing these winter woes."	The first minister and health secretary have apologised to patients who have faced delays for treatment as a result of winter strain on the health service.
+text: Deng Shiping had refused to approve a new sports facility because he felt it had been poorly constructed. A man reportedly involved in building the site has now confessed to killing and burying Mr Deng in January 2003, police say. Six men also believed to be builders were arrested along with him. Mr Deng's remains were discovered beneath the running track of Xinhuang Middle School on Thursday, officials in the central city of Huaihua said. Footage posted on social media showed investigators cordoning off and examining the area. Mr Deng's son told local media his father had been tasked with overseeing the construction of the sports facility. But he later filed a complaint alleging that Du Shaoping, the man who has since confessed to the killing, had embezzled funds and skimped on building materials. "The field and track were being built by the principal's relatives," he told Hongxing News. "He believed there to be serious build quality concerns, and that they were cutting corners. "He refused to sign off on the work and reported it to the county government. Then he disappeared." Mr Deng's brother also told local media: "We had long suspected that his disappearance was linked to him being a whistleblower." The remains have been sent for further testing and a special task force has been set up to further investigate the crime.	The remains of a teacher who disappeared more than 16 years ago in China have been found buried beneath the school he worked at, officials say.
+text: By Tara McKelveyWhite House reporter Wearing a blue-grey jacket and gold cufflinks, Gerard Araud, the French ambassador to the US, was sitting in an armchair at the Brookings Institution during a panel discussion in early June. He coolly dismissed concerns that a co-panellist, Brookings' Thomas Wright, expressed about "the Trump Crisis in transatlantic relations", as Wright described it. Araud said he wasn't worried. "I trust the American system," he explained, adding that in "the coming months" he hoped to see "a normalisation of the American foreign policy". People in the audience laughed. Many of them saw the president's approach to foreign policy as anything but "normal", at least in the way it was understood at Brookings, and they didn't expect him to change soon (if ever). Still they knew where Araud was coming from - and understood why he was expressing hope about US foreign policy. He's a diplomat, after all. As another panellist, the historian Robert Kagan, said: "If I were ambassador, I would be saying exactly the same thing." That's what diplomats do. When conflicts arise, they try to make things seem OK in public while working behind the scenes to resolve differences. But over the past several weeks the city of Washington, the place where foreign ambassadors live and work, has become a diplomatic minefield. European leaders are trying to show their strength - during a recent meeting in Belgium, for example, French President Emmanuel Macron gave Trump a handshake so firm that his knuckles turned white. Then Trump announced that the US would withdraw from the Paris agreement - both a climate change accord and a diplomatic achievement. On the day of the announcement, he talked about a "reassertion of America's sovereignty" and said: "I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris." Trump's words were not subtle. Instead they captured the spirit of his "America First" foreign policy. As he explained on that day, he wanted Americans out of the agreement because he thought that it was not good for the country. For some aides at the White House, a "secondary benefit" of the decision to withdraw from the accord, as a senior official told the Washington Post, was that it annoyed the Europeans. Then the president went further. He slammed the London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, with an insulting tweet after a terrorist attack in his city left eight people dead. The conflict between the US president and European leaders at the local and national level has unfolded against the backdrop of a depleted, demoralised US foreign service. At the US embassy in Beijing, the senior most US official, David Rank, resigned as a protest against Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris accord. "I couldn't in good conscience be party to the US withdrawal," Rank said on PBS NewsHour. "We have a disciplined service. You either agree to implement the president's policy or you step aside." Meanwhile, appointments at the State Department have slowed down and dozens of positions are unfilled. Trump administration officials still have not submitted names to the Senate for the ambassadorships to the Belgium, Germany, Austria and other European countries. Besides that, many of the president's senior aides aren't even sure of Trump's views about political and economic issues: his senior aides, for example, seemed to think that he would decide to keep the US in the accord - and then he decided that the US should withdraw. He likes to mull things over, and sometimes he changes his mind at the last minute. For that reason the US officials are not always able to convey the president's ideas during meetings with foreign diplomats. Trump's tweets are mixed, contradictory and often hostile, and his aides don't always know what's going to come next - the sweet-tempered Trump who smiles at European leaders in person, or the wintry one who attacks them on social media. Many Republicans support the president's decision to pull the US out of the accord, and they like the way he keeps his options open in the realm of foreign policy. Matt Mackowiak, a Republican consultant who splits his time between Austin, Texas, and Washington DC, said: "This is a president who likes to preserve flexibility." Many Democrats, though, have been dismayed by the president's approach to foreign policy. "If you box yourself in, that can limit your possibilities," said Mackowiak, adding that he approves of the president's style. "He really doesn't like to be in a situation where his options are limited." "It's a double whammy," says Charles Kupchan, who served as a senior director for European affairs in the Obama White House. "It's both the lack of warm bodies and the confusion that exists within the White House." In the meantime, foreign ambassadors doing the best they can, trying to talk to senior people in the White House, while also struggling to sort out who's important and who's not. On some afternoons, diplomats hang out in cafes and analyse photos of the president and his White House team, trying to determine the power structure of the administration. "There's pictures of the Oval Office, and you're like: 'Who is that?'" said one European diplomat recently in a cafe in Washington DC's upmarket Dupont Circle, overheard while speaking with a colleague. "There's all these people behind him," the diplomat continued. "And you're trying to work out who's important." There's another, darker thread to the story. Some of the diplomats have been deeply troubled by conversations they've had with the people in those photos. Diplomats told me, for example, that a senior administration official quotes neo-fascist French and Italian authors in their interactions. This has left the diplomats speechless. Tom Malinowski, who served as an assistant secretary of state under Obama, says he understood why the diplomats were troubled by what they've heard. "There is a populist and nationalist strain to the Trump administration that has not been present in the White House since - well, probably ever," Malinowski says. "Americans and foreigners alike are trying to figure out what this new ideological strain consists of and where it's headed." Still, he said that some things are clear. "Here's the thing we all know - Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris accord," Malinowski says. "And he's accusing our closest allies in the world of being malicious. "How are you supposed to react to that if you're the French ambassador? You have to make adjustments. And you just batten down the hatches and hope things change sooner rather than later." That's pretty much what Araud did at Brookings. He smiled diplomatically - and left in a hurry.	Since the election things have been rocky for European diplomats. The president's decision to pull the US out of the Paris climate accord has made the situation even harder.
+text: Black Ops 2 is the sequel to a 2010 title which holds the record for the world's bestselling console game. Microsoft has already revealed its rival first-person shooter, Halo 4, made more than $220m (£138m) in global sales on its launch day last week. Game disk sales in the US were 25% down on the year in October, according to a study by NPD. It reported that sales had fallen to $756m in what is the sector's biggest market, noting that several other new sequels had not performed as well as previous iterations. Hack attacks The latest CoD game marks a change for the series, basing part of its action in the future. The scenario - in which hackers take control of part of the US's drone aircraft army - was dreamt up in conjunction with the Washington-based Brookings Institution think tank in an effort to prevent gamers feeling the series had become overfamiliar. Its multiplayer mode also puts new emphasis on e-sports in which players are ranked into leagues, and one user can act as a commentator for other spectators. The innovation is part of efforts to convince consumers to hold onto their disks rather than selling them onto the second-hand market from which publishers do not take a cut of sales. "We have to give a reason to keep the game," Activision's UK managing director Peter Hepworth, told the BBC. "There's the multiplayer options to keep people engaged - but even in the single player mode this year there are branching storylines, so your decisions change the ending. "We think we are giving several reasons to keep playing." The firm said 16,000 retailers have staged midnight openings around the world to help drum up excitement for the release. Battle for cash The series' last entry, Modern Warfare 3 was a bestseller, but did not perform as well as the original Black Ops title - and sales statistics will now be monitored to see if that trend continues. "Activision has already said that pre-orders for this title were stronger than for its previous releases which is a good sign," said Ed Barton, director of digital media at Strategy Analytics. "And there are more consoles out there than ever before which should also help. However, the Call of Duty experience has not evolved hugely from its formula, so there may be a sense of audience fatigue - but by the looks of things the positive factors will probably outweigh the negative ones." Activision's decision to release the game as a launch title for Nintendo's Wii U console - which is due to be released in the US next week - may also boost its fortunes. But Black Ops 2 faces competition for both cash and gamers' time from other big name action titles. Microsoft has described last week's release of Halo 4 as the "biggest US entertainment launch of the year", highlighting that the franchise had already generated more than $3.38bn in revenue since 2001. The title has had strong reviews, but is only available on the Xbox. Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed 3, set in the US's War of Independence, has also attracted positive reviews. The firm estimated that 3.5 million copies of the title had been sold in its first week of release - more than double the figure for its previous title. Capcom's Resident Evil 6; 2K Games' Borderlands 2; EA's Medal of Honor: Warfighter; and Bethesda's Dishonored have also been released in recent weeks.	The release of Activision's latest Call of Duty will be closely watched for its effect on lagging video games sales.
+text: The scrum-half believes the condition is a consequence of being a smaller player who had to do a lot of tackling in his career. In recent years there has been growing evidence that repeated head injury in contact sports might lead to long-term brain damage. But despite his challenges Laidlaw said he had "no regrets". He first realised something was wrong a few years ago when he was working for the Scottish Borders Housing Association and was informed where his next appointment was. Laidlaw told BBC Scotland's John Beattie: "I immediately turned round and I forgot where I was going. I thought 'There is something wrong here'." As time passed his condition worsened and he had to give up his job. Laidlaw, who spent his club career with Jed-Forest RFC, admitted: "I forget lots of things. I am not that old. I am only 67." He believes his condition is connected to a playing career that saw him capped 47 times for Scotland, the highlight of which was the 1984 Grand Slam. Laidlaw, who is 5ft 6in, was famously concussed in the penultimate match and spent a night in hospital before playing in the final game a week later against France. He said: "If you look at my history, I go back to primary school when I was introduced to rugby, I have played hundreds of games, something like 500 games. "I am one of the smallest players that ever played rugby for Scotland, so you have to get down low and tackle. "It is just inevitable that things like that are going to happen but I have no regrets whatsoever about my Alzheimer's because I have had a great life and I have enjoyed everything I have done." As well as representing and captaining his country Laidlaw made four Test appearances for the British and Irish Lions during the 1983 tour to New Zealand. Increased risk Laidlaw, who has three sons and seven grandchildren, recently lost his wife Joy. As well as the support of his family, he said he has been helped by his "great friends" and enjoys spending time at Jedburgh Golf Club. Rugby is not the only sport which is coming under scrutiny for possible links to brain injury. Last year, a study by Glasgow University found former professional footballers are three-and-a-half times more likely to die of dementia than people of the same age range in the general population. High profile cases include Celtic legend Billy McNeill and England striker Jeff Astle. And in the US the suicide of jailed former NFL star Aaron Hernandez renewed debate about the safety of sports where high impacts are common.	Roy Laidlaw, the former Scottish and British & Irish Lions rugby player, has revealed he has dementia.
+text: By Marianne TaylorBBC Scotland news Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which affects about 200 children and young people in Scotland, is incurable and causes severe disability. A shortage of experts makes it difficult for potential new treatments to reach those with the condition. Parents said the funding would help their children lead more fulfilling lives. Duchenne, which mostly affects boys, causes muscles to weaken and waste over time, leading to increasing and severe disability. Few born with the condition - which affects about one in 3,600 boys - currently live to the age of 30 due to damage to heart and breathing muscles. A new funding partnership between the Chief Scientist Office and charities Muscular Dystrophy Campaign and Action Duchenne, will provide £75,000 a year for three years for a medical training fellow to research potential treatments and work directly with children. It is hoped the new expert will be in post by autumn 2014. 'Real hope' Dr Chris Govender, whose four-year-old son Brandon has the condition, believes the new post will make a difference to the care of Duchenne sufferers. Dr Govender, from Kilmarnock, said: "Brandon was diagnosed with Duchenne in November 2011, and as healthcare professionals we are under no illusions of the progression of this severe condition. "The fulfilment of watching our happy boy grow is tarnished by knowing what the future holds for him. However, the search for a treatment is progressing well. We now have real hope that soon our children will receive treatment to slow down this devastating condition and allow them to live fuller lives. "There is a shortage of clinical neuromuscular specialists working in the UK, especially here in Scotland. This new research fellow will serve as an effective bridge between scientific research and clinical drug trials, and the clinicians treating our boys in the community." Clinical experience Robert Meadowcroft, chief executive of the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, said it is a critical time for research into the condition. He added: "There are several promising potential treatments for the condition in clinical trials. "This partnership approach and the Scottish government's commitment to funding research is good news for families living with the condition in Scotland and beyond. This new training fellowship will create and develop researchers who have experience both in the clinic and the lab. "We need people like this to make sure that any treatments developed by scientists tackling Duchenne make it from the laboratory to the people who desperately need them." Public Health Minister Michael Matheson said: "At any one time, around 200 boys and young men in Scotland are living with Duchenne. Many more people are affected indirectly as family, friends and carers. "This agreement paves the way to jointly fund a clinical research fellowship which will help drive Scotland to the forefront of clinical research."	Families of children with a devastating muscle-wasting condition have welcomed funding for a new medical expert.
+text: Members of the House of Keys voted seven in favour and 17 against an amendment to the Climate Change Bill. Environment Minister Geoffrey Boot said speeding up the change would be setting the island up for "failure". Lawrie Hooper MHK, who tabled the amendment, said the government needed to be more "ambitious" with its goal. Under the proposed bill, the 2050 date would be set in law, fossil fuel boilers would be banned by 2025 and restrictions on single-use plastics would be allowed. It also ties the government to reaching the net zero goal entirely through domestic efforts. 'No faith' The target date for emissions could still be moved forward through updated regulations, if the Council of Ministers deems it necessary, but it cannot be pushed further back. Mr Hooper said he had "no faith that an action plan that is not tied to something ambitious is going to be delivered". The island had an opportunity to become a "world leading green economy" and should be "grabbing the opportunities that present themselves", he added. Mr Boot said imposing a target of 2035 could require a "significant ever increasing spending on international off-setting" that could damage the island's reputation. He added that it could also "impact on those least able to afford and adapt to the change". Several other amendments, including one which would implement some aspects of it earlier than previously planned, were backed. The bill has now completed the clauses stage of the legislative process in the House of Keys and will return for its third reading before being passed to the Legislative Council for approval. Why not follow BBC Isle of Man on Facebook and Twitter? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk Related Internet Links Isle of Man Government	An attempt to bring forward the Isle of Man government's target of achieving net zero carbon emissions from 2050 to 2035 has been rejected by politicians.
+text: The US carmaker is expected to make an announcement about the factory, which makes Transit vans, on Thursday after a management and union meeting. The company, which is restructuring its European operations, would not confirm or deny the reports. Labour MP John Denham, for Southampton Itchen, said it would be "devastating" if the factory shuts. 'Falling sales' He said: "Huge numbers of families would be affected. It would also be very bad for the UK motor industry. "Obviously, we hope it's not true but it would be devastating if it closed, there are hundreds of jobs that depend directly on the plant and many others in the local economy. "Southampton is the only place that still makes complete Ford vehicles of any type in the UK." Conservative MP Caroline Nokes, for Romsey and Southampton North, said: "I've always had concerns for the future of the factory and it now looks like there will be an announcement tomorrow indicating that it's going to close. "Most of the UK motor manufacturing sector is doing well but unfortunately there's a history of falling sales of Transit vans, I think we've got to do all we can to get these 500 people other jobs within the city." Southampton City Council's Labour leader, Richard Williams, says the suggestion comes completely out of the blue. 'Help employees' He is backing plans for extra support and said "we want to help those workers affected as much as possible". "As a council we will work with Job Centre Plus and other local agencies to form a task force to help employees find alternative work," Mr Williams said. "A similar approach was taken earlier this year when British Gas made 500 call centre workers redundant, and the vast majority have since been found new roles." Earlier Ford said it was starting consultations on closing its Factory in Genk, Belgium, with the loss of 4,300 jobs.	Ford's Southampton factory, which employs about 500 people, could close, the BBC understands.
+text: This is 33 more than the previous week and accounts for 26.3% of all deaths, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). There were 65 deaths across the Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board area - 44 in hospital - in the week to 20 November. There were 58 deaths in care homes involving Covid-19 - the highest weekly number since mid May. Eleven of the deaths were in care homes in Rhondda Cynon Taf (RCT), nine in Neath Port Talbot and six in the Vale of Glamorgan. There were 47 deaths in the Aneurin Bevan health board area, across all settings, 38 deaths in Swansea Bay, 21 in Betsi Cadwaladr and 23 in Cardiff and Vale. There were 21 deaths in Hywel Dda - more than double the figure last week - and eight deaths involving Powys residents, five of them in hospital. The total weekly deaths is the highest since the start of May. Deaths reported up to 30 November 74Royal Glamorgan Hospital, Llantrisant 46Prince Charles Hospital, Merthyr Tydfil 78Princess of Wales Hospital, Bridgend 6Maesteg Hospital Meanwhile, Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board have reported another 27 deaths related to hospital infections in the last week. There were eight more deaths in both Royal Glamorgan and Prince Charles hospitals, and nine at the Princess of Wales hospital in Bridgend. It takes the total number of deaths to 204. There have been more than 700 cases linked to the outbreaks, although the rise in cases has slowed down. So-called excess deaths, which compare all registered deaths with previous years, are above the five-year average. Looking at the number of deaths we would normally expect to see at this point in the year is seen as a reliable measure of the impact of the pandemic. In Wales, the number of deaths increased from 742 to 848 in the latest week, which was 195 deaths (29.9%) higher than the five-year average for that week. Altogether, there have now been a total of 851 Covid-19 deaths in care homes up to 20 November, making up 24.6% of all coronavirus deaths in Wales. There have been 20 care home deaths in recent weeks in Llangollen but only two deaths in Denbighshire were registered in time for the latest figures. The total number of Covid deaths in Wales up to and registered by 13 November was 3,464 deaths. When deaths registered over the following few days are counted, there is a total of 3,536 deaths up to 20 November. RCT, with 503 deaths, has the largest number of Covid-19 deaths in Wales so far in the pandemic. Cardiff has had 442 including the latest week. Ceredigion has the lowest number of deaths but the total rose by eight in a week to 23. Neither Anglesey or Gwynedd had a death registered involving Covid in the most recent week. The deaths involving Covid include both suspected and confirmed cases and where Covid is a factor - although it is estimated in 90% of cases the virus is the underlying cause of death. Unlike Public Health Wales' daily reporting of deaths, this also includes deaths in people's homes, all care homes and hospices.	There were 223 deaths involving Covid-19 in Wales registered in the latest week.
+text: Shezad Khan, 44, paid £3,200 to order the weapons from a company based in the Czech Republic. But police raided his home in Glasgow's Broomhill after a parcel firm spotted a gun in a package addressed to him. Khan now faces a lengthy jail term after he admitted importing prohibited weapons as well as three charges under the Firearms Act. He was remanded in custody at the High Court in Glasgow pending sentencing next month. The hearing was told the pistols were capable of discharging harmful gases, blank cartridges or flares. Buying in bulk The crime came to light when a delivery company spotted a damaged parcel with a gun inside. Three similar packages were then found - all to be sent to Khan. Prosecutor Michael Meehan said a total of 43 pistols, which were either Turkish or Italian made, were eventually seized. Mr Meehan told the court Khan had paid for them from his own bank account. Asked why Khan had the weapons, his advocate Lili Prais replied: "He was buying these items in bulk with a view to selling them on an auction site. Of course, he did not actually receive the items." Lord Burns deferred sentencing for reports.	A man imported more than 40 firearms from abroad in a bid to make a profit by selling them online.
+text: Nigel Abbott, 65, suffered head injuries when he was the victim of a random attack in Walmley, Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham. His wife told the Birmingham Mail the funeral overran due to mourners wishing to pay respects at the coffin. Birmingham City Council said the charge was due to staff working extra time. The funeral directors have since said they would pay the charge. Gail Abbott said the service at Sutton Coldfield Crematorium in August finished within the 30 minute time slot they had paid for. But, due to mourners wishing to pay their respects at her husband's coffin, people were up to 15 minutes late leaving the chapel. Ms Abbott claims the undertakers were then told about the late fee 15 minutes after the service ended. Speaking to BBC WM she said: "It made me feel devastated for a second time. How can they put a price on paying respect? "It is just unthinkable. We have to get the time slot for funerals up to 45 minutes, not 30." Daniel Ross of Daniel Ross Funerals said he would pay the charge and had asked bereavement services "to show some humanity". He said: "The reason they applied the fee was due to the management of people leaving the chapel. "More than 200 people wanted to pay their respects at the coffin. " A city council spokesman said they had suggested to the funeral director that the family should book a double service, lasting for an hour. He added: "On this occasion that suggestion was not taken up. The fact this was the last service of the day required staff to work beyond their normal hours of work." Related Internet Links Birmingham City Council	The widow of a man killed in a street attack has said she was devastated when she was charged £374 because his funeral overran.
+text: Stormont's political institutions are under threat of a meltdown in a row over a botched heating scheme. Members of the assembly walked out of the chamber twice on Monday morning. However, Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness said Sinn Féin - partners in government with the DUP - would not be pulling the plug on Stormont. In an interview with the BBC, he said: "We are dealing with a shambles and there is an urgent need to restore credibility in the institutions. "It's very, very important that the executive office finds a way forward through the quite clear difficulties," he said. He said his party will put forward a motion in the assembly calling for an investigation into the "debacle" and urge the first minister to step aside during an investigation into the scheme. Earlier, Mrs Foster said she would resist her opponents' "fevered quest" to build her "political gallows". She exclaimed "trial by television" as she faced a no-confidence vote over the botched Renewable Heat Incentive Scheme (RHI) that could cost taxpayers £400m. In an interview with the BBC's Stephen Nolan on Thursday, Jonathan Bell, a former enterprise minister, broke ranks with his DUP colleagues and made a number of sensational claims about how the controversial scheme was handled. The RHI was set up by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (Deti) under the stewardship of Mrs Foster in 2012 to encourage businesses and other non-domestic users to move from using fossil fuels to renewable heating systems. But flaws in setting the scheme's subsidy rate left it open to abuse as claimants could earn more cash the more fuel they burned. The scheme was finally halted early this year, by which time its overall cost had reached £1.18bn. About £20m a year for the next two decades could be taken from the Northern Ireland budget to cover the overspend. "They can't gang up and kick out the elected leader of unionism," Mrs Foster told the Northern Ireland Assembly. "I am here and I will be staying here," she said. "I have acted with the highest level of integrity." She also treated her political opponents in the SDLP, Ulster Unionists, Alliance and TUV, to a razor-sharp tongue lashing. The gloves were off. She said she was "glad" that Colum Eastwood, SDLP, and Mike Nesbitt, UUP, "aren't very good" at opposition. The Alliance Party had, in the past, acted in a more "considered and responsible way", she said, "but that was under a different leader". "No doubt, at some point, we will hear today this decision is related to the flags protest," she said. Mrs Foster said the motion to bring her down was "doomed" and that this was a "coup d'état more worthy of a Carry On Film". While 39 assembly members voted for the no-confidence motion and 36 against, it was still defeated because Assembly votes require a majority of unionists and nationalists to back any motion. Sinn Fein members were not present in the chamber for the vote. Earlier, a series of stormy arguments and walk-outs threatened to lurch Northern Ireland into a fresh constitutional crisis. The row that erupted in the assembly on Monday was over Mrs Foster's decision to "fly solo" . She prepared to make a ministerial statement without the support of the Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, Sinn Féin, with whom she shares the joint office. Analysis - BBC News NI political correspondent Enda McClafferty When it works, it shows politics in Northern Ireland is moving in the right direction but when it goes wrong it reopens old wounds and leaves the institutions hanging by a thread. Joint ministerial authority means Arlene Foster and Martin McGuinness have equal power and cannot work in isolation. They have no choice. That's why Arlene Foster's decision to make a statement without the support of her partner in office today has plunged Stormont into a fresh crisis. Joint office is the bond which holds Stormont together, it now appears to be melting fast in this heating scandal. The other parties walked out of the chamber and stormed to the press microphones to voice their anger. Mr McGuinness made it clear that Mrs Foster did not speak for him or with him. He said she would be acting without his approval or authority. Earlier, he had warned that a DUP-established inquiry into the so-called "cash for ash" affair would have no credibility. He also said that there would be grave consequences if the DUP took a unilateral approach and Mrs Foster made a ministerial statement without his support. Speaker Robin Newton, DUP, found himself at the eye of the storm, facing a barrage from politicians over the right of Mrs Foster to make the statement without the support of her deputy first minister. But he went ahead and called on Mrs Foster to speak. She ended up preaching to the converted as nearly all of the MLAs from the other parties left the chamber again. Her DUP colleagues heard her say that not introducing cost-control measures in a botched heating scheme was the "greatest political regret of my life". It was not clear whether she was speaking in her capacity as first minister or whether it was personal. The DUP accused the other parties of "running away" when they left the chamber and Mrs Foster asked: "Where are they? The people of Northern Ireland deserve better than this." The other parties rolled their eyes. Eamonn McCann, People Before Profit, said there was "no shortage of clowns but no ring master" at Stormont. "We are now in La La land and limbo land," he said. TUV leader Jim Allister said: "I know it's pantomime season but what has happened today is beyond farce."	A vote of no confidence in Northern Ireland's First Minister, Arlene Foster, has been defeated in the assembly.
+text: By Pallab GhoshScience correspondent, BBC News His comments were in response to suggestions that the International Space Station (ISS) served little purpose. Commander Hadfield has been a Twitter sensation with his feed of comments, photos and videos showing what life is like in space. He is due to return to Earth on Tuesday. "We will go to the Moon and we will go to Mars; we will go and see what asteroids and comets are made of," he told BBC News. "But we're not going to do it tomorrow and we're not going to do it because it titillates the nerve endings. We're going to do it because it's a natural human progression." I met Chris Hadfield in his native Canada last year before he went into space. At the time, morale was running low within Nasa following the scrapping of the shuttle programme, the cancellation of the previous administration's plans to go back to the Moon and Mars and mounting criticism of the quality and quantity of research on the ISS. But every inch the archetypal, twinkly-eyed, optimistic astronaut, he was having none of it. "It's a process - we're not trying to make a front page every day and we're not planning on planting a flag every time we launch. That's just a false expectation of low-attention-span consumerism". Those growing up in the 1960s were inspired by views of the Earth from space and the Moon landing. A new generation has become enthralled by commander Hadfield's frequent tweets on what it is like to live in space. He has shown his nearly 750,000 followers how astronauts brush their teeth and how to eat a tortilla in zero gravity. Commander Hadfield has also sung along with schoolchildren from space and chatted with William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk in the original series of Star Trek. Cosmic superstar He has probably become the most famous astronaut since the days of Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin. And so many now want to know more about their new superstar. What, for example, does he think of the future of space travel? When I spoke to him in February 2012, I asked him whether he thought that astronauts would ever again leave low Earth orbit and go back to the Moon, or perhaps one day on to Mars, rather than simply ferrying back and forth to the space station. It was an honest enough question, but I realised as soon as he began to answer that it was a tactless one, because it implied what he and his fellow astronauts were doing was pointless. "That's a really self-defeating way of posing the question because you say 'get back to' and 'ferrying back and forth'," he said, clearly irked. I felt bad that I had irritated such a nice man, but my question had spurred him to deliver a passionate and articulate case for the ISS. "We are leaving Earth permanently," he said with zeal. "It is a huge historic step and we are trying to do it right and it takes time, it takes patience and it takes tenacity - and we're going to do it." His argument is that the construction and utilisation of the ISS will lead to the development of technologies that will eventually enable humanity to leave Earth and settle on other worlds. But that process will be a slow and incremental one. And he has this to say to those who want things to move much faster: "It's just an uninformed lack of patience and lack of understanding of complexity and a desire to be amused and entertained that builds a false set of expectations." One of the key technologies that is needed is a means to recycle water from astronauts back into a drinkable form, along with radiation shielding and developing ways of working and living in space for prolonged periods. Commander Hadfield believes that the ISS provides the perfect test bed for developing deep space travel capabilities. Selling points "We are slowly leaving our planet and it happens in little, [difficult-to-execute] and hard-earned steps and it makes huge sense to understand how to do it when we are only 400km (250 miles) away. "Because we can at any moment, when we have made a stupid mistake with a design, or an emergency that we hadn't recognised or because of human health, get in our spaceship and come home." That is a view backed by Dr Simon Evetts of the UK Space Biomedical Association. "The operational experience is significantly important because we are learning how to live in space and so I think that the ISS probably will be a stepping stone to Mars." But what about the science? One of the space station's key selling points was that it would be an orbiting laboratory where scientists from across the world would work in space to roll back the frontiers of knowledge. Critics such as the UK's Astronomer Royal, Prof Lord Rees, have questioned whether the hefty £65bn ($100bn) it cost to build the ISS would be value for money. "No one would regard the science on the space station as being able to justify more than a fraction of its overall cost," he said. 'Not justified' "I recall in the early days there were some proposals for experiments and the [UK] research councils would not even pay for the modest, marginal cost for them so we have to ask whether people would be prepared to pay for [the experiments on the ISS] had they to be financed in competition with other work on the ground". Lord Rees cites a $1.5bn cosmic ray experiment bolted on to the ISS as an example of money which could be better spent. "The results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) are still rather ambiguous and the general opinion is that the experiment has not justified its cost and would not have been flown had there not been lobbying which put it ahead of competing projects." One of the main areas of research on the ISS is to see how materials and biological systems behave in the microgravity of space. But project proposals have been slow to emerge. A report by the US National Research Council in 2011 highlighted that Nasa's efforts to maintain its human spaceflight programme had led to a decline in life and physical science research - "leaving it in a poor position to take advantage of the fully equipped ISS". Faced with the embarrassing prospect of an underused multi-billion dollar space station, Congress created an independent, non-profit organisation, the Centre for the Advancement of Science in Space (Casis), later that year. It was tasked with bringing in research projects from the US research community while Nasa concentrated its research efforts on developing technologies for long term space travel of the sort that Cmdr Hadfield describes. But projects were slow to emerge and within a few months the organisation's director resigned abruptly citing "unrealistic expectations" by Nasa and congressional officials. Evidence matters A large part of the problem is that there is currently no evidence that studies on topics such as bone thinning, growing stem cells or proteins in microgravity will lead to any useful new treatments. Without this, many in the research community can't see the virtue in such research. But Casis's upbeat new chief executive, Duane Ratliff, told BBC News that he believed that once there was evidence that these research areas might be fruitful, scientists would be falling over themselves to book a research slot on the ISS. "You then have a compelling research pathway, [so] if we can demonstrate the significance of the ISS as an R&D platform, there will be specific industries that will want to take advantage of that." In Europe, by contrast, there is no shortage of research ideas, many of which will be discussed at a space environments conference at the UK's National Space Centre in Leicester in November. Dr Evetts says that researchers putting proposals to the European Space Agency are aware that microgravity research is a long haul. "We can't really assess the importance of what we are getting out of the ISS now. We'll probably understand that in the decades ahead so we should not be too quick to judge," he said. Lord Rees, however, believes that the ISS is not a cost-effective way to do science. "Its main [purpose] was to keep the manned space programme alive and to learn how humans can live and work in space. And here again the most positive development in this area has been the advent of private companies which can develop technology and rockets more cheaply than Nasa and its traditional contractors have done". So the ISS's value for science and even as a staging post for deep space travel is not clear-cut. But as Chris Hadfield has shown, its ability to inspire is undisputed and perhaps deserves the patience that he has called for to inspire a generation to learn about science and space travel. Follow Pallab on Twitter @bbcpallab	Space station commander Chris Hadfield has told BBC News that those calling for a quick return of manned missions to the Moon are seeking "titillation".
+text: Sir Paul McCartney, Robbie Williams, former Spice Girl Mel C and Gerry Marsden are among the line-up on the single for the Justice Collective. The single is currently favourite to become the Christmas number one. Proceeds will go towards legal costs in the families' continued fight to quash the accidental death inquest verdicts. Ninety-six Liverpool supporters died after the crush at Sheffield Wednesday's Hillsborough stadium on 15 April 1989, when their team met Nottingham Forest in an FA Cup semi-final. Among those at the launch of the charity single at Liverpool's HMV store were former Liverpool player and manager Kenny Dalglish and comedian John Bishop. 'Suffered enough' Dalglish, Bishop and Liverpool Walton MP Steve Rotheram called on chancellor George Osbourne to waive the VAT on the single. This has already been done for the X Factor winner James Arthur's single, the proceeds of which are also going to charity. Dalglish said: "We are trying to get the same for the Hillsborough families. I think it's important that the government does that for us. "Every penny that comes in is going to go towards helping with legal costs, and I think that will be substantial. "I just hope it's getting near the end for the families because they have suffered long enough." Mr Rotheram said he has written to the chancellor about the VAT issue but has yet to receive a formal response from him. An application to overturn the inquest verdict was made by Attorney General Dominic Grieve and is due before the High Court on Wednesday. Mr Grieve said the main basis for the move was new medical evidence made public in the Hillsborough Independent Panel report published in September.	A cover version of the Hollies' hit He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother has been released to support families of the victims of the Hillsborough disaster.
+text: In a joint agreement, DMG - a Chinese entertainment and marketing group - will invest in Iron Man 3 and manage the co-production process in China. Along with Disney's China unit, DMG it will also distribute the film in the country. The move is Hollywood's latest effort to forge closer ties with China's fast-growing film industry. "We know Chinese audiences love Iron Man. So we are going to add Chinese elements and a Chinese story into Iron Man 3," Disney's general manager for Greater China, Stanley Cheung, said. Iron Man 3, starring Robert Downey Jr, Gwyneth Paltrow and Don Cheadle, will begin filming this year, with a US release date penned in for 3 May 2013. The announcement comes after China agreed in February to allow in more foreign films. For the past decade, China's state-run film distributors have allowed in only 20 foreign films per year for national distribution. But the government wants Chinese film studios to learn from Hollywood and so has been trying to attract foreign studios to form ventures by promising more market access and a bigger share of ticket sales. Last month, Disney rival DreamWorks unveiled plans to build a studio in Shanghai and make animated and live action material in conjunction with three Chinese companies. And last year, Legendary Entertainment and Relativity Media both announced partnerships with Chinese companies to produce movies for global audiences and distribute movies in China.	The third instalment of the Iron Man franchise is to be co-produced in China, Disney has announced.
+text: The approval is seen as proof of US visa policies quickly adapting to last week's historic Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage. Traian Popov, who wed Julian Marsh in New York, may now apply for immigration benefits and a permanent resident visa. But their union is still not legal in the state of Florida, where they live. Last week the Supreme Court threw out a law banning gay couples from receiving benefits available to other couples. The justices ruled that the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act discriminated against same-sex couples. 'Second-class citizen' Mr Marsh and Mr Popov were informed on Friday by Citizenship and Immigration Services that their green card petition had been approved, two days after the landmark ruling. Mr Popov is currently able to stay in the US on a student visa, as he is enrolled in college. But he would have had to leave the country once he graduated. The Department of Homeland Security could not confirm that their case was the first of its kind to be approved. Mr Marsh said it is still troubling that their union is not recognised in Florida. "They make you feel more and more like a second-class citizen, and they don't want you," he told the Associated Press news agency. "And that's how I feel about Florida." Mr Marsh explained that before last week's Supreme Court ruling, he and his husband had started to consider other options that would allow them to remain together, but they wanted to keep living in Fort Lauderdale. "We would like our marriage to be recognised even in a state where it wasn't performed," Mr Marsh added. There are about 36,000 same-sex couples in the US in which one partner is not a citizen, according to the non-profit immigration group Immigration Equality. Before last week's rulings, under the Defense of Marriage Act legally married same-sex couples were denied federal benefits available to opposite-sex couples. These include tax, health and pension benefits and family hospital visits.	A Bulgarian student who is married to an American has become the first gay man to have his application for a green card granted, says their lawyer.
+text: By Caroline WyattReligious affairs correspondent, BBC News In rational, post-Enlightenment Europe, religion has long since been relegated to a safe space, with Judaism and Christianity the safe targets of satire in secular western societies. Not so Islam. The battle within Islam itself between Sunni and Shia, so evident in the wars of the Middle East, and the fight between extremist interpretations of Islam such as those of Islamic State and Muslims who wish to practice their religion in peace, is now being played out on the streets of Europe with potentially devastating consequences for social cohesion. These latest shootings may be the work of "lone wolves" but their consequences will ripple across Europe and provoke much soul-searching about the failure of integration over the past decades. Immigrant communities are already being viewed with increasing suspicion in both France and Germany, with their significant Muslim populations, and even in the UK. France has the largest Muslim population in Europe, some five million or 7.5% of the population, compared with Germany's four million or 5% of the population, and the UK's three million, also 5% of the population. In all three, mainstream political parties are being forced to confront popular discontent over levels of immigration and the apparent desire of some younger, often disaffected children or grandchildren of immigrant families not to conform to western, liberal lifestyles - including traditions of religious tolerance and free speech. In the UK, that unease has largely played out on the public stage in a more peaceable manner, in the debate over "British values" and the recent Trojan horse schools affair. The fatwa against the writer Salman Rushdie over 20 years ago following the publication of The Satanic Verses, forcing him into hiding for several years, was perhaps the first time the issue impinged on British consciousness, though the attacks of 7/7 were a reminder that extremist violence could also hit the heart of the UK. However, France has already seen much more violence on its streets carried out in the name of religion over the past decades, although it has tried to write off most of its recent "lone wolf" attacks as the acts of mentally-unhinged individuals. But some in its Jewish community have responded to increasing anti-Semitism and the killing of Jews in France and Belgium by Islamist extremists by emigrating to Israel and elsewhere. Recent physical attacks on synagogues and Jews in the suburbs of Paris, where Jews and Muslims often live side by side in poorer areas such as Sarcelles, only exacerbated fears that the violence in the name of religion that grips parts of Africa and the Middle East, and which so many flee to Europe to escape, has followed them here. Germany, too, has seen a rising surge of anti-Islam sentiment in its cities, with worries about young radicalised Muslims moving from a concern confined to far right and neo-Nazi parties into the mainstream, as seen in the recent popularity of the Pegida movement, which campaigns against the "Islamisation" of Europe. Both political and religious leaders in Germany have spoken out against the movement, and counter-marches have been held, but Pegida's fears have brought thousands onto the streets. The killings at Charlie Hebdo are a deeply unwelcome reminder to the west that for some, mainly young radicalised men, their fundamentalist interpretation of their religion matters enough to kill those who offend it. As a result, across western Europe, liberally-minded societies are beginning to divide over how best to deal with radical Islamism and its impact on their countries, while governments agonise over the potential for a backlash against Muslims living in Europe. Today, mainstream Muslim organisations in the UK and France have unequivocally condemned the killings, saying that terrorism is an affront to Islam. But the potential backlash, including support for far right parties and groups, may well hurt ordinary Muslims more than anyone else, leaving the authorities and religious leaders in western Europe wondering how to confront violence in the name of religion without victimizing minorities or being accused of 'Islamophobia'.	In the heart of Europe in 2015, the killing of cartoonists and journalists for allegedly insulting God still comes as a shock, despite the rising number of such attacks in recent years.
+text: The plans for the 130-bedroom hotel were submitted by Andras House in 2009. The firm, which is controlled by Lord Rana, owns a number of other hotels in the city. The site for the new hotel is at St Andrews Square, off Great Victoria Street, and is currently used as a car park. It is almost opposite the Days Hotel, which is also owned by Andras House. The granting of planning permission does not mean that building work needs to begin imminently. Planning permission lasts for five years and if at that stage work has not begun, a fresh application would need to be made. A significant number of new hotels have opened in Belfast in the last decade but new developments have almost ground to a halt as a result of the recession. Nonetheless, plans have also been submitted to develop a further two hotels on Great Victoria Street on the site of the Fanum House office block. The site owner Seamus Gillan has signed up the French hospitality firm, Accor to operate the hotels.	Planners have given the go-ahead for a new hotel in Belfast city centre.
+text: By Grace LivingstoneBBC News Horacio Brignone lives in the village of María Juana in the Argentine flatlands, or pampas. From his window he can see fields of soya. His 20-year old son has suffered from asthma since he was three years old, he says, but when he recently moved to a city the condition disappeared. "He hasn't had an attack for two years since he went to study in Córdoba," says Horacio. "But when he came home for two months recently, he began to cough again." He blames the weedkiller sprayed on the soya fields. "We are 50m from the fields," Mr Brignone says. "We can't be certain, but respiratory problems and skin complaints are very common round here among those who live very close to the fields." Mr Brignone's wife, Rosalía Ramonda, has suffered from rashes on her skin for years. She tells me: "It goes red and is itchy. For years this happened and I just used to say: 'It's something I ate.'" Growing industry In recent decades, soybean production has increased sharply in Argentina. GM crops were supposed to need less herbicide, but, as weeds have grown resistant, higher quantities of herbicide have been used. While the area of cultivated land grew by 45% between 1994 and 2010, figures from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation show that the amount of herbicide used in Argentina increased from 19,376 tonnes of active ingredients to 227,185 tonnes - a rise of more than 1,000%. Stronger concentrations are also being sold more frequently, according to data from the Argentine agro-chemical industry body CASAFE. The most commonly used weedkiller in Argentina is glyphosate. The Argentine Federation of Medical Professionals has called for glyphosate to be banned, but the suggestion that it could be harmful is strongly contested. The European Union recently decided it was safe enough to relicense the herbicide in Europe for 18 months, while it continues to assess the evidence. Dr Damián Verzeñassi and his team at the faculty of medical sciences in the University of Rosario have been studying the health of more than 80,000 people in 25 communities in the Argentine pampas since 2010. It's an epidemiological study based on surveys rather than medical examinations. It measures the incidence of illnesses in the local population and it is not possible to draw from it a conclusive link between pesticides and human health. No hard proof The study found that in these rural areas, 40% of people suffer from respiratory problems - a higher rate than in the rest of Argentina. "We have more respiratory problems in the countryside than in the city," he says. "And we used to think that if you lived in the countryside you breathed and lived more healthily." The study also found a high incidence of children with skin rashes, particularly after the spraying of herbicides had taken place nearby. The cancer rate in these areas appears to be significantly higher than the national average too. "Between 75% and 95% of the communities in these areas live within 1,000 metres of the fields where they spray herbicides," says Dr Verzeñassi. "And all of these communities, except for one, for 20 years have been in areas where transgenic crops are produced, which rely on agro-toxic chemicals, fundamentally glyphosate.... so we cannot rule out that the possibility that the problems we are finding are related to these chemicals." Last year, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer said glyphosate was "probably carcinogenic". Monsanto, one of the world's leading manufacturers of glyphosate, disputes the findings of the WHO's cancer agency, which it says hasn't considered all the evidence and has "mis-characterised the hazard". It says that other independent regulators have concluded that glycophosate "can be safely used" and "at realistic exposure levels there is not a cancer risk". Mark Buckingham of Monsanto said: "Glyphosate has a lower toxicity than most other pesticides. "In terms of acute toxicity [exposure during one day] glyphosate is less toxic than vinegar, table salt, paracetamol and caffeine." Marcelo García, of the Argentine soya industry association ACSOJA, said that many other countries, including the US, are debating the health implications of herbicides, but so far there is no proof that glyphosate causes cancer. More than 30,000 people in the Argentinean province of Santa Fe have signed a petition calling for herbicide spraying to be banned within 800 metres of homes and 1,000 metres of schools. Sonia Lobos lives in Maria Juana. She is a mother of a 13-year-old boy who was diagnosed with leukaemia on Christmas Eve last year. "One day he said: 'Mummy, look I've got a bruise and I don't remember being hit.' I touched it and felt a hard lump," she says. Mrs Lobos lives closes to the fields and says lorries carrying chemicals to spray the crops pass her house regularly. "I don't know if this is really what caused my son's illness, but it is the most likely thing I can think of," she said. The Argentine ministry of agro-industry did not want to comment. But the pro-government congressman Eduardo Amadeo dismissed any suggestion that glyphosate or herbicides can be linked to illnesses. He said: "There is not one single case that can be scientifically proven to be related to glyphosate. Thanks to herbicides like glyphosate, agricultural productivity in the world has tripled. "Without them the world would suffer hunger."	Argentina is one of the world's largest exporters of genetically-modified soya. It's big business, but some local residents fear herbicides used by the industry could be making them sick.
+text: The world's 10 best-paid actors earned a total of $488.5m (£380.5m) in the past year, Forbes magazine calculated. That's almost three times more than their female counterparts, who took home $172.5m (£134m) between them. Transformers star Mark Wahlberg tops the male list with $68m (£53m) - compared with $26m (£20m) for the best-paid woman, La La Land's Emma Stone. Another 13 men earned more than Stone between June 2016 and June 2017, according to Forbes - including Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Jackie Chan and her La La Land co-star Ryan Gosling. Stone recently said some of her male co-stars have taken pay cuts so she can "have parity with them". Natalie Portman and Jennifer Lawrence are among the other stars who have spoken out about the issue. Best-paid male stars Best-paid female stars Forbes writer Natalie Robehmed said the pay disparity was down to the types of roles on offer. She wrote: "In release schedules dominated by superhero movies and brawny blockbusters, there are simply fewer parts for women that pay the sizeable backend profits that result in leading men's large paydays, or the franchise sequels that permit aggressive negotiation for favourable deals." Robehmed added: "Until there are an equal number of high-paying roles, there will continue to be an inequality in the paychecks of Tinseltown's very richest." Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	The size of the gender pay gap in the movie industry has been laid bare in new estimates of stars' pay packets.
+text: It has signed a deal with Gaikai to use the California-based firm's streaming technology to let its customers play titles written for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 without having to own one of the consoles. The tie-up was announced at the E3 games trade show in Los Angeles. It appears to confound rumours that Gaikai was on the verge of being taken over by Sony. Samsung said the service would be made available on its Smart Hub environment on high-end televisions released this year. It will initially be restricted to the US where users will shortly be invited to sign up to a trial. Console competitor "Samsung is excited to deliver this revolutionary gaming experience that takes advantage of all the benefits of cloud-computing, all on the central screen of the home," said Kyung-shik Lee, vice president of Samsung Electronics' visual display business. Gaikai's chief executive David Perry added: "Together, we will turn Samsung Smart TVs into a console-like experience capable of delivering the best-selling video games and other content instantly to consumers - no downloads, no extra hardware, no trips to the store." The cloud gaming company was founded in 2008 and to date has focused on offering users the chance to play demonstrations of console-designed games via web browsers. Samsung will pay the company a fee to use its cloud technology and then strike separate deals with games publishers to allow owners of its televisions to buy access to full titles. The South Korean firm was not able to discuss which titles would be available at launch. Quality concerns OnLive, another California-headquartered company, already offers users the chance to stream games to TVs via its Microconsole device. However, both it and Gaikai's service have been criticised for offering an inferior experience to owning a dedicated games console. Graphics are either shown at a lower resolution or with fewer frames per second. Players have also complained that it can take longer for their control pad commands to be registered. The delayed response time is only a mater of milliseconds, but this can still put users at a disadvantage in fast-paced action games. However, the recent announcement of new technology from Nvidia and the roll-out of faster broadband should address such issues going forward. Reaction times One industry watcher at E3 said cloud gaming had huge potential, but might disappoint serious gamers in its present state. "Streaming technology is very attractive in theory to publishers as it's a piracy buster," said Giancarlo Varanini, senior editor at the news site Gamespot. "It makes it so much more difficult to copy titles when the files are located on a remote server. "But broadband penetration isn't where it needs to be and the service isn't up to snuff for games which require a huge amount of precision. Gamers need quick reflex responses to compete with other players especially in multiplayer environments." Gaikai had previously been linked to a potential takeover by Sony, and trade magazine MCV suggested the two companies might still announce a tie-up of some sorts . A spokesman for Gaikai would not confirm or deny the report, saying only that: "We don't comment on rumours".	Samsung is to introduce a cloud-based video games service to its premium TVs.
+text: Reading Borough Council agreed to sell its land in Crescent Road to the government's Education Funding Agency (EFA) for a 900-capacity school. The school, to be run by nearby Maiden Erlegh School, will be open to year seven students in September 2015. The council predicted secondary schools in the town would be full by 2017, with latest census figures showing a big rise in children aged up to four. 'Huge change' Conservative Reading East MP Rob Wilson, who had the initial idea for the free school, said he was "delighted" the site had been approved. "Within a few years we have moved from very limited choice and opportunities for young people to real choice and opportunity for all," he said. Peter Thomas, Maiden Erlegh's headmaster, said he was "absolutely thrilled". "There is now clarity and certainty for the families of east Reading who will have the choice of a brand new school," he said. Reading Borough Council bought the site last year for educational purposes after it was initially earmarked by a developer for housing. At a policy committee meeting on Monday, councillors approved the sale of the site to EFA, which will also fund the construction of the building. The location means children will have access to playing fields and the chance to share resources with the nearby Alfred Sutton Primary School, as well as the new University Technical College. Reading Borough Council leader John Ennis said: "We are very pleased. "In 2017 we're going to have increased numbers of children in secondary schools, so we're getting ahead of the game."	A site for a new secondary free school in Reading has been approved.
+text: The council plans to secure £130m of investment and there will also be a drive to bring empty homes back to use. Councillors also hope to introduce a mortgage scheme to help first time buyers, and the creation of a "£20m housing fund". The council plans to finance the proposal through borrowing and using capital receipts. It has also bid for £10m from the Housing Market Renewal Transition Fund and could receive money from the New Homes Bonus. 'Recoup cash' Council-owned brownfield sites will be made available at no cost. Providers would then have to enter an agreement with the council in case the sites were not developed. The council said 18,000 people were on a waiting list for housing. City council leader Councillor Joe Anderson said: "This is the biggest investment of this type we have seen for decades. "Not only will our housing stock be improved through this and other building schemes which are taking place in the city, but it will create much-needed jobs and help build sustainable communities." Councillor Ann O'Byrne, cabinet member for housing said: "Over time we can recoup a good part of our investment by the increased income from council tax and through the government's new homes bonus." The "Housing Delivery Plan", from 2012 to 2015, is due to be considered by the council's cabinet on Friday.	Two thousand new homes will be built in Liverpool over the nest three years, the city council has announced.
+text: Tests identified the small amount of tar found on the Bolivar Peninsula, north-east of Galveston, as coming from BP's blown-out well off Louisiana. But officials said it was unclear if it had drifted hundreds of kilometres from the leak site or had fallen from ships taking part in the clean-up operation. Up to 60,000 barrels of oil a day have leaked into the Gulf since 22 April. BP has said its oil-capture systems collected or burnt off 24,980 barrels of oil on Monday, according to the Reuters news agency. Over the past week, efforts to clean up the spill have been hampered by the first hurricane of the Atlantic season, Hurricane Alex. Separately, BP said it could cover the costs of the clean-up and compensation claims without selling new shares, amid rumours that a Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund was about to buy a stake. Relief wells The commander of the US Coast Guard in the Galveston region, Capt Marcus Woodring, said about five gallons (19 litres) of tar balls from the Deepwater Horizon leak had been found on Saturday. But he said it was impossible to confirm whether they had drifted from the site of the leak, about 550 miles (885km) away, or had dropped off one of the ships carrying collected oil to Texas to be processed. The joint BP-US government response team said there were doubts that the oil had drifted all the way from the spill. "The testing found that the oil was lightly weathered, raising doubts that the oil traversed the Gulf from the spill source," a statement said. Galveston's mayor, Joe Jaworski, said he was hopeful the analysis was correct and that the tar balls were not a sign of more oil to come. "This is good news. The water looks good. We're cautiously optimistic this is an anomaly," he said. Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson meanwhile promised in a statement that any of the state's coastline affected by the spill "will be cleaned up quickly and BP will be picking up the tab". The coasts of four other US Gulf states - Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida - have so far been more seriously affected by the spill. Tar balls and oily water were spotted on Monday near the mouth of Lake Pontchartrain, a large lake to the north of New Orleans, in Louisiana. Rough weather since Hurricane Alex passed through the Gulf, to the south of the spill, has hampered clean-up operations for the last week. Tests of a giant tanker refitted to scoop up oil have been inconclusive because of high seas, the ship's operators said. The first of two relief wells being drilled to permanently cap the well is seven days ahead of schedule, but officials said on Tuesday that it was still likely to be mid-August before the operation could be completed. In the meantime, some of the leaking oil is being piped to the surface from a cap over part of the well. BP spokesman Mark Proegler has said the company hopes to connect "by the end of the week" a third tanker, Helix Producer, to its collection system to increase capacity to 53,000 barrels a day from the current limit of 28,000. The Helix Producer will form part of a new collection system involving a so-called floating riser and four vessels which will be able to disconnect and reconnect quickly, reducing the time lost when collection is halted because of rough seas. The new system should be able to handle up to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. The Deepwater Horizon rig - operated by Transocean on behalf of BP and its partners - exploded on 20 April and later sank with the loss of 11 lives, leading to the worst oil spill in US history. US scientists estimate 35-60,000 barrels per day are leaking from the well, about one mile (1.6km) below the surface of the water.	Tar balls have landed on a Texas beach, meaning oil from the Gulf of Mexico spill has hit all five US Gulf states.
+text: It gave the warning on the day it asked shareholders to back a rescue plan, which includes closing 81 stores. Investors backed the plan, a Company Voluntary Arrangement (CVA), which was struck with creditors last week. The CVA will allow it to close some stores and lower rents on others. It could also see 300 jobs lost throughout the chain. Carpetright is also asking shareholders to buy £60m in new shares through a rights issue. The retailer said that there had been "inevitable disruption to trade" because of the publicity around its restructuring activities, and this, along with continued weak consumer confidence had depressed sales. However, it added there were signs of better trading in its refurbished stores and that this was giving it the confidence to carry on with the store improvement programme. Chief executive Wilf Walsh said: "The CVA proposal will enable us to take the tough but necessary actions needed to restore our profitability. "Having now received approval from both shareholders and creditors, we will press ahead with our plans for the proposed equity financing to recapitalise the business and enable Carpetright to address the competitive threat from a position of strength."	Struggling floor covering chain Carpetright has warned it expects to make losses this year of between £7m-£9m, compared with a profit of £14.4m last year.
+text: Nick Clegg said the cost of upgrading school kitchens could be partly met by unspent maintenance funds. But email extracts revealed by the BBC Radio 4's World at One programme warned school places might have to be cut. Mr Clegg's deputy, Sir Malcolm Bruce, said he had been "telling the truth". The Lib Dem leader announced the policy, which aims to provide all pupils in the first years of primary education in England with free school meals, at his party's annual conference in September 2013. On the World at One in March, Lib Dem Schools Minister David Laws said: "There was a serious amount of policy work that went into this, and it was costed by officials before the announcements were made at the Liberal Democrat party conference." But the programme has been told that Education Secretary Michael Gove still did not know how the cost of the school meals was to be funded on 29 November 2013. 'Wholly unacceptable' Mr Gove wrote to the Treasury: "Now that my officials have had time to fully analyse this policy, it is clear that it cannot be delivered for less than £449m in 2014-15 and £635m in 2015-16. "I am sure that you will agree with me that we must not risk forcing schools to subsidise meals by reducing their spending on teaching and learning. "I would be grateful for your assurance that my budget will be increased to fully cover the cost of this new commitment, as I am unable to fill any shortfall from within my existing budget." In addition, the BBC has been informed that an email dated 4 December 2013 from a senior official at the Department for Education to the private offices of Mr Clegg, Mr Laws and Chancellor George Osborne raised concerns that the money set aside for upgrading kitchens was insufficient. "The £150m is less than the £200m we believe will actually be required to deliver this policy," it said. "Second, more importantly, the gap between the deputy prime minister's figure and the Treasury's funding will require our secretary of state to divert money from providing school places to meet basic need or from meeting urgent maintenance needs in schools. "Both these scenarios are wholly unacceptable to this department and our secretary of state." 'Not true' Another email was sent from a Department for Education official to other civil servants, including in the Treasury. "I am concerned that there is a risk that the deputy prime minister and others are about to make public statements that suggest that the additional £80m for free school meals capital can be found from within the department's budget without an impact on other education capital budgets," it said. "This is not true, and... it will be relatively easy for people outside the department to see that it is not true." Later that day, Mr Clegg said: "We're putting new money for instance forward to help schools expand their kitchens or buy new equipment for their kitchens." Part of the £150m allocated to this "comes from maintenance funds that the Department for Education haven't managed to spend elsewhere", he said. The government's website added: "£70m of this will be new money from the Treasury and around £80m will be from unspent Department for Education maintenance budgets." The World at One has also been told that the Department for Education's permanent secretary was opposed to the way Mr Clegg's announcement had been made at the Lib Dem Conference and advised Mr Gove and Mr Laws to go slower and think through the implementation details first. The deputy prime minister's office declined to comment. In a statement, Mr Laws told the BBC: "We do not comment on leaked documents and on budget negotiations with the Treasury. "The funding package announced… in December was agreed across government, does not involve any reductions in capital maintenance or basic need budgets, and is judged by us to be adequate to help ensure the successful delivery of this policy - £70m of the £150m extra capital is new money from the treasury and £80m is from existing unallocated resources in the department." 'Disgruntled' Lib Dem Sir Malcolm said: "Let's be clear, this information is being leaked, it seems to me, by Conservative sources who don't like the policy. "But the policy has been agreed at the highest level of government. The funding has been provided, it is being rolled out, and all the children who are eligible will get their free school meals this autumn. "It is agreed by the prime minister, the deputy prime minister, the chancellor of the exchequer, and actually the secretary of state, Michael Gove, has agreed this policy. "And I think it would do him some good if he put a bit of constraint on some of the ideologues who are trying to undermine it and acknowledge that he has signed off on this policy and fully supports it. He should call his dogs off." He acknowledged there had been a debate within the Department for Education on how to allocate resources. "Michael Gove wanted that money for free schools - David Laws wanted it for free school meals," he said. "The government agreed it should go to free school meals, and certain Conservatives are disgruntled and dissatisfied with that and are trying to undermine an agreed policy." But the Conservative chairman of the Commons Education Committee, Graham Stuart, said the revelations broadcast on the programme show that "there are more questions to ask" over the development of the policy. He added: "We know that Department for Education officials warned that the free school meals plan, which effectively extends free school meals to children whose parents can already afford them, risked diverting money away from badly needed extra schools places or maintenance."	Senior Department for Education officials raised concerns the deputy prime minister misled the public about the government's free school meals policy, leaked emails show.
+text: They will set off on 8 April next year from Southampton to retrace RMS Titanic's route across the Atlantic. A special memorial ceremony will be held on board the cruise ship Balmoral at the time the ship went down. Titanic hit an iceberg at 23:40 on 14 April and sank two hours and 40 minutes later, with the loss of 1,517 lives. The wreck still rests on the seabed where it sank, 375 miles south east of Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada. Jane Allen, from Devon, said: "We wish to commemorate our relative, Thomas Pears, who died on the Titanic. "His story has been a big part of our lives. His widow Edith survived in Lifeboat 8." Helped in evacuation Philip Littlejohn, grandson of Titanic survivor Alexander James Littlejohn and the only Titanic relative to have made the dive to the wreck site, will also make the trip. He said: "I'm sure my grandfather, a First Class steward on Titanic, would be proud to know his story will be shared. "It will be an emotional moment when we are over the wreck site, where I dived in 2001, and where my grandfather left Titanic rowing Lifeboat 13." Another relative taking part will be author Arthur Cropley, the great-nephew of Charles Lightoller, the second officer of the Titanic. Mr Lightoller survived the sinking, helping with the evacuation of passengers. He was portrayed by actor Kenneth More in the 1958 film A Night To Remember, with the character also featuring in the Oscar-winning 1997 film, Titanic. Mr Lightoller helped in the evacuation of British troops at Dunkirk in 1940. He died, aged 78, in 1952. The Balmoral will be joined by another cruise ship, Azamara Journey, which will sail from New York to take part in the ceremony. Azamara Journey will call at Halifax, where guests will visit Fairview Lawn Cemetery where 121 of Titanic's unclaimed victims were buried.	Relatives of passengers and crew on Titanic are planning to mark the 100th anniversary of the disaster by sailing to the spot where the liner sank.
+text: It forms part of the announcement that the island will enter level one of it's safe exit framework from coronavirus lockdown from midnight on Friday. Funerals can be attended by up to 80 people under the new rules, but private gatherings will remain limited to 20. "Close personal contact services", such as beauty treatments, will also be allowed to resume. Deputy Chief Minister Senator Lyndon Farnham said working from home was "no longer the recommended default option" during the coronavirus pandemic, but said physical distancing must be adhered to in the workplace. Random checks that businesses are complying with health guidelines are being introduced. Islanders who do not obey self-isolation rules will be at risk of arrest and face a fine of up to £1,000, the Health Minister Richard Renouf added. The penalty for those who refuse to take a test "without a reasonable excuse" is increased to £10,000. 'Risk not gone' The island has been in level two of it's coronavirus exit strategy since 12 June, with some elements of level one gradually introduced, including a drinks-only service in pubs and restaurants. Deputy Renouf said: "The risk has not gone, it is not diminished and we should not think that level one will allow us to return to life as normal." He added the government would only be able to lift the public health pandemic measures when a vaccine became available. "Until that time it's critical that islanders and businesses need to continue to comply with all health guidelines," Deputy Renouf said. The island currently has eight active cases of the virus.	People in Jersey will no longer be encouraged to work from home from Saturday, the government has said.
+text: One woman was seen sitting on a protruding section of the National Trust chalk cliff between Birling Gap and the Belle Tout lighthouse. Walkers have been warned to stay away from the edge since a major cliff fall further along the coast in May. The National Trust the signs included visual instructions as well as written. Bob Battersby, who took the picture on Sunday, said he thought the tourist sitting on the cliff may be Japanese. "There are some National Trust signs in English warning about the risk of cliff falls but hardly anyone up there was English." he said. "The signs need to be bigger and in Japanese, Chinese, German, French, Italian and Spanish to warn the language students and other tourists who visit this unique piece of coastline." 'Cliffs are crumbling' Geologist Rory Mortiemore said putting up signs in other languages would be a good idea. "I can understand people who are not local not fully understanding that these cliffs are crumbling," he said. "When you look at them they stand pretty vertical and look stable. "Along from Birling Gap and around Belle Toute and up to the top of Beachy Head the chalk tends to fall in big slabs." A group of students were described as "mad" after they were spotted posing for pictures on the cliff edge days after the collapse in May. The National Trust said it recommended that visitors stay at least 16ft (5m) from the cliff edge. "The warning signs are standardised Health and Safety Executive cliff edge signs and so include visuals as well as language," it said. "They are the same as those displayed around the country."	Calls are being made for improved warning signs at a crumbling cliff top in East Sussex after tourists were pictured close to the edge.
+text: From 8 October, the company will impose a 5.5% increase in all natural gas tariffs and the cost of liquid petroleum gas (LPG) will rise by 7.6%. OFT Chairman Bill Henderson said: "It is disappointing that when people are suffering wage freezes the company feels it must increase its prices." The price increase will see a typical household pay an extra £61.40 a year. LPG consumers will pay an additional £115.60 per year. Mr Henderson added: "The office is not condoning or supporting Manx Gas price increases. "We can't stop anyone from increasing prices but we try to ensure that the public are provided with all the information and the reasons behind it." Manx Gas said wholesale gas purchase prices incurred by the company have increased by over 20% in the past 12 months.	The Isle of Man's Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has called the latest Manx Gas prices "disappointing".
+text: By Jessica LussenhopBBC News Magazine On a late fall day in 2014, Craig Futterman, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, received a phone call. He won't say who was on the other line or even where he was when he got the call. "I want to be very careful not to give anything away that could identify them," he says now. The mystery informant - someone "within Chicago law enforcement" according to Futterman - wanted to talk about an incident that had happened weeks earlier on 20 October, 2014, when a 17-year-old named Laquan McDonald was shot and killed by a Chicago police officer. At the time a spokesman for the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police said that McDonald had punctured a police cruiser's tire with a knife, damaged its windshield, then lunged at officers before he was felled with a single shot to the chest. "The officers are responding to somebody with a knife in a crazed condition, who stabs out tires on a vehicle and tires on a squad car," the spokesman told a local TV station. "He is a very serious threat to the officers, and he leaves them no choice at that point but to defend themselves." It was a common story in Chicago. According to the Better Government Association, Chicago police shot 240 people over a four-year span, or about one per week. Seventy of those people died and of those, two-thirds were African American. The city's Independent Police Review Authority has investigated 400 police shootings since 2007 and found only one incident to be unjustified. It seemed as though McDonald's case would be chalked up as another justified use of deadly force. But the person on the phone told Futterman a very different story. He said the shooting was captured on a police vehicle's dash camera. "They told me that it looked like an execution and they were deeply afraid it was going to be buried," recalls Futterman. "The video would be buried and nothing would happen." Futterman soon called Jamie Kalven, founder of the Invisible Institute, a nonprofit journalism outfit on the south side of Chicago. The two have worked together for years on claims of misconduct and brutality against the Chicago police department. It was that reputation that led the whistleblower to them. "It took a lot of courage to even seek me out confidentially," says Futterman. "It's something that could put their job and their life in serious jeopardy." Using information provided by the whistleblower and his own inquiries, Kalven was able to track down two witnesses to the shooting - a passing motorist and a truck driver who was parked nearby. Both gave an account of the shooting that matched up with the description given by the whistleblower. Seven weeks after McDonald's death, Kalven and Futterman released a joint statement calling for the release of the dash camera footage. "With no apparent provocation - the boy was shying away rather than lunging toward them - a white male officer shot Laquan, who fell to the ground," they wrote. "After a pause, as the boy writhed on the ground, the officer fired repeatedly into his body." "That got a flurry of attention locally," recalls Kalven. "Columnists wrote about it." Two months after that, Kalven obtained a copy of McDonald's autopsy report. The document that called into serious question the police description of what happened. "The most salient aspect was 16 independent gunshot wounds front and back," says Kalven. "There was no way to square that information with the official narrative." Kalven published his findings in Slate. By then, many Chicagoans were following Kalven's work, including Jeff Neslund, a lawyer for the McDonald family. As he prepared to file a lawsuit against the city on the family's behalf, Neslund subpoenaed and successfully obtained a copy of the tape, along with a cache of records from the investigation that followed. "There were a couple ways to go here. We could hold a press conference, the circus could come to town and we could let it fly," says Neslund. "Or, call the city, see if they want to meet and settle the case." Neslund says McDonald's mother did not want the tape released, and opted to go to the city. In April 2015 - just days after a contentious campaign season ended in the re-election of Mayor Rahm Emanuel - the city agreed to pay the family a $5m (£3.3m) structured settlement, which included an agreement not to release their copy of the footage. But just because both the family and the police wanted a tape suppressed doesn't make it law. Journalists and activists were demanding the tape's release under Illinois' Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which says that citizens have a right to view government records. Brandon Smith, an independent freelance journalist, was one of more than a dozen reporters to to request the tape. But - as a local reporter who had repeatedly gone to battle with the city over its withholding of records - he was the only one to file a lawsuit against the police department after it denied the request. "I made the request because all kinds of stuff seemed fishy," he says. "I think the city has a real transparency problem." Three months later, on 19 November, a judge ruled that the Chicago police department failed to show that releasing the video would significantly impede any ongoing investigation. He ordered the tape be released within the week The city moved quickly. The day before the 25 November deadline, the officer Jason Van Dyke was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. At a press conference, Mayor Emanuel and police superintendent Garry McCarthy emphasised that the shooting was the act of a single officer who "needs to be held accountable". Hours later, the tape was released. It showed exactly what the whistleblower described to Futterman 13 months earlier. McDonald walks down the middle of the street holding a 3-inch blade in one hand. He encounters police officers, but is moving away from them when Van Dyke opens fire, shooting McDonald 16 times. The release has led to protests and demands to know who in city government and in the police department tried to keep the tape from the public. There have been allegations that other officers on the scene purposely stymied the investigation. The New York Times called what happened a "cover-up" and a "scandal". In response to the demand for further accountability, Emanuel asked for McCarthy's resignation on Tuesday this week. He also introduced a new task force that will aim to improve police misconduct investigations and establish "best practices for release of videos of police-involved incidents". Some Chicagoans are asking for Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez to resign for not charging Van Dyke sooner. Her office then cast blame on Mayor Emanuel, saying the decision to withhold the tape came from his office. "That makes this whole episode look like an attempt by the city, the police and prosecutors to keep the video under wraps, knowing the political problems it would most likely create," writes the editorial board of The New York Times. Both Alvarez and Emanuel have said they will not resign. Meanwhile, Smith has filed another FOIA request. The request asks for the names of the other officers on the scene, emails about the case between the police and the mayor's office, and "all internal police department communication regarding the case". Attorney Neslund says there could be additional revelations from a federal investigation by the FBI and the US Attorney's office, which is still "active and ongoing". "We had access to a lot of things that were not made public," he says. As the fallout continues, Kalven says he is in a "state of amazement" that the work that began with a single phone call has resulted in the firing of one of the top cops in the US. As for the whistleblower, neither Kalven nor Futterman know if his identity will ever be revealed. "He's still in the government, I'm sure relishing these developments," says Kalven. "I hope the day will come when his role can be fully acknowledged and his story be told." Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox.	Laquan McDonald's death seemed like another case of a justified police shooting until a whistleblower picked up the phone. One year later, the city is reeling.
+text: By Soutik BiswasBBC News, Delhi In the Indian capital, Delhi, people simply build without permission on public and private land and bribe officials to turn a blind eye. Then they sit tight and wait for politicians to legalise the housing colonies in exchange for votes come election time. Delhi's population has grown from a little over two million in 1954 to nearly 18 million today. The authorities only managed to build a little more than one million homes during this period. The lack of adequately developed land at affordable rates has led to the messy growth of various unplanned settlements - from slum clusters and colonies to rural and urban villages, all within what is known as Delhi city. So a third of the capital's residents have ended up living in several colonies - more than half of which are illegal; many of them have no legal electricity or water supply. Vote bait Many officials are not enthusiastic about taking action because illegal colonies can be rubber stamped in exchange for votes and money. Chetan Dutt, a lawyer who launched a petition in 2006 that spurred Delhi High Court to order the demolition of over 18,000 illegal constructions in the city, says the illegal colonies first began cropping up in the 1960s. In 1972, the then Congress government legalised 800 such colonies. Five years later, it did the same for another 567 colonies. Between 1989 and 2002, illegal colonies were regularised by the government of the day at least five times. "It is the pressure of the mob and politicians which has led to the regularisation of colonies," says Mr Dutt. "This emboldens investors and builders to keep on encroaching and building because they are sure they will be legalised some day." Delhi-based writer Jug Suraiya once wrote that "100% of Delhi is unauthorised". Politicians and builders take money from the poor and the middle-class and encroach on public land to build grotty unplastered red-brick homes that dot much of the city. The rich buy farmland to build plush farmhouses that they also rent out for parties and marriages or set up entirely illegal colonies like the 161-acre Sainik Farms where some of the city's most influential people - including army men and senior journalists - live. Others sell their apartments or convert them into offices by bribing the police and municipal officials. Business booms, and traffic clogs up residential roads even more. 'Mammoth problem' Home and shop owners encroach upon the city's pavements, parking their cars or hawking their wares alongside openly menacing private warnings like - "Keep off the road" or "Tyres will be deflated if you park your car here". Today, Delhi's pavements have either been encroached on or have shrunk as the authorities widen roads in a bizarre policy that is heavily loaded in favour of car owners. Pedestrians simply don't count. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi, one of the world's largest city authorities, with a reputation for corruption and sloth, applied to the courts to fix the problem of unauthorised constructions. Its officials said the reasons behind illegal buildings in Delhi were "the increasing needs of families, extension of existing houses, disappearance of the joint family system (extended families living under one roof), requirement of extra space for children etc". The new master plan for the city - called Vision-2021 - aims to make Delhi a "global metropolis and a world-class city, where all the people are engaged in productive work with a decent standard of living and quality of life in a sustainable environment". But critics say none of this will be possible unless there is a huge crackdown on corruption and a reform of the tainted institutions - the municipality and the Delhi Development Authority, which hold the key to the city's future. In a sense, Delhi mirrors much of urban India's failure to meet the demands of a rapidly urbanising country as jobs dry up in the countryside. The country has a shortage of over 20 million homes, 70% in the middle- and the low-income category. It is a monumental failure which analysts say could easily snowball into a civil war of sorts over housing, water and electricity in the future.	What is an urban dweller to do when the city authorities won't provide adequate living space for a rapidly growing population?
+text: The 400-berth marina at the Prince of Wales dock was proposed to be the centrepiece of the SA1 waterfront regeneration. But the Welsh government said money ring-fenced for the project had been redistributed elsewhere in Wales. South Wales Chamber of Commerce said the marina might not be the "right priority" for public money. However, Councillor Chris Holley, leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Swansea council and former leader of the authority, said the city had been "snubbed". He claimed that business space and apartments at SA1 - a major redevelopment of the city's former docklands - had been sold with the proposed marina as the centrepiece. 'Shocked' The SA1 development overlooks the Prince of Wales Dock, near Swansea's current marina, and is being developed for commercial, residential and leisure use. A second marina and a sea lock were also planned for the waterfront but work stalled in 2008 with the credit crunch. Mr Holley said he was "shocked" to discover the Welsh government had spent the money ring-fenced for it from the sale of land in the area. He said after he and Lib Dem AM Peter Black inquired about the project, they received a letter from business minister Edwina Hart which confirmed that the ring-fencing was stopped in 2008. The money had instead being redistributed elsewhere in Wales. "There's uncertainty about the marina future," said Mr Holley. "I don't think it will be going ahead in the near future." Peter Black AM told BBC Radio Wales he felt Swansea was "becoming the poor relation" to Cardiff. "In terms of the amount of money being spent in Cardiff Bay - which must amount to £100m or more - compare that to what's being spent down in Swansea Marina and SA1, it is a pittance, and quite frankly Swansea is being second best here," he said. 'Wider picture' Graham Morgan, director of the South Wales Chamber of Commerce, said he could understand if the Welsh government had re-prioritised the use of the money in the current financial climate. "When you step back from it, for a marina to work you have to be convinced that someone will buy a boat and will moor it there," he said. "That's the biggest thing at the moment - boats are luxury items. "So it's perfectly feasible that right now that isn't the right development." He said he did not believe the Welsh government was "snubbing" Swansea, pointing to a number of developments that were currently boosting the city. "There's a lot going on, such as the new university campus being built, the electrification of the rail line to Swansea, the possibility of Swansea becoming a city region, the high performance computer system that's being installed in the Dylan Thomas Centre which will link together technology and academia," he added. 'Significant support' The Welsh government said that since 2008, only £2.9m has been raised from income by sales of land at SA1 and in the same period, £9.3m has been spent on the development. "The business, enterprise, technology and science department has a clear process in place to allocate funding to projects as they are brought forward and has already provided significant support to Swansea including £2m in March of this year to acquire Oldway House to facilitate the city centre regeneration," a statement read. "In addition Welsh government investment in SA1 over the last four years has been £9.3m, which exceeded sales income in the same period by almost £6.4m."	Uncertainty surrounds the future of a planned £19m marina in Swansea after the development stalled.
+text: He overcame his shyness to impress judges and viewers with his spirit and soulful voice, beating bluesy musician and judges' favourite Crystal Bowersox. "I have never been happier in my life," he said after scooping the title and a recording contract which will launch with his version of U2's Beautiful Day. The finale also made the most of Simon Cowell's last appearance as a judge. DeWyze's victory was based on votes cast after Tuesday's performance show, which drew more judges' compliments for Ohio's Bowersox. Cowell was treated to a film package recounting highlights from his career. "You have the honesty of Abe Lincoln and the charm of the guy who shot him," comedian Dane Cook told the smiling British judge. "I didn't think I was going to be this emotional and I genuinely am," Cowell said on stage, turning to the audience. "Everybody asks who's going to replace me, who going to be the next judge. The truth is, you guys are the judge of this show and you've done an incredible job over the years."	Illinois paint shop assistant Lee DeWyze has won the ninth season of the American Idol talent contest.
+text: By Leo KelionTechnology reporter The News Digest app claims to present readers with "all the stories you need to know about" and brings up a graphic saying "Done" when they have been read. It is based on Summly, an app created by British teenager Nick D'Aloisio, who now works for Yahoo. Media analysts are split over the need for such a product. Mark Mulligan, editor of the Media Industry Blog said the facility could address the needs of busy consumers. "There's a huge amount of information of varying quality being created, and people require a way to steer through all the news - it's a tyranny of choice," he told the BBC. "The idea of cutting through the clutter and being a trusted curator that can offer quality bite-sized chunks of information definitely addresses a need." But consultant Bob Eggington, who helped launch BBC News Online, was more sceptical. "If people are being told they have read enough news they are being misled," he said. "What Yahoo is saying is: 'We will try to tell you the things we know about that we think are of interest to you' - and both of those statements are highly imperfect." News of the app's release was revealed by Mr D'Aloisio during a presentation hosted by Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Atomised news Yahoo News Digest uses software algorithms to scour a variety of online publications including Reuters, Associated Press, Business Insider and Sky News. It then assembles the information gathered into what it terms "atoms", which are selected chunks of text, infographics, maps and Wikipedia extracts about each topic alongside photos, videos and links to the news sources. "We found that people were willing to consume more content when it was boiled down to the most important bits," said Mr D'Aloisio on the company's blog. At present the app is only available on the US iPhone App Store and does not allow users to customise the type of stories most likely to interest them. Android app acquired Yahoo's news ambitions extend beyond the app. Ms Mayer's Keynote Address revealed that Yahoo Tech, a advertising-supported technology news site overseen by ex-New York Times writer David Pogue, was now online. The chief executive also introduced a new digital magazine called Yahoo Food. In addition, Ms Mayer revealed her firm had taken over Aviate. The Android app analyses a phone's wi-fi signal, GPS location data and accelerometer sensor to study a user's habits in order to anticipate their needs. For instance it can then bring up a selection of installed workout apps when it believes the handset owner is at the gym or display bus arrival information when it thinks they are waiting for transport. Advertising overhaul Investors will probably be more interested in news that Yahoo has unified its suite of digital advertising products. Facebook recently overtook Yahoo to become the US' second biggest digital ad seller, according to research firm eMarketer. Google remains the market leader. It adds that the Yahoo's share of worldwide digital ad revenues dropped from 3.4% in 2012 to 2.9% in 2013. To help address this the web portal has launched three new products and platforms: In addition the firm announced that sponsored posts on Tumblr - the blogging platform it acquired in May - would now be powered by the firm's Yahoo Advertising products.	Yahoo has launched a news summary app that aims to deliver two daily briefings of eight to nine stories most likely to interest its users.
+text: Speaking at a press conference, General Secretary Tilvin silva made public his disappointment on a press release issued by the Director of Information stating that the government intends to go ahead with talks. “We have nothing to do with this statement” said Tilvin Silva He added that the JVP does not oppose talks with the tigers but any talks should be linked to a final solution In a statement made in Parliament Wimal Werawansa, leader of the JVP Parliament group said “We will not hesitate to walk out” There was no immediate reaction from any members from the other Government coalition parliamentarians. Werawansa said it is not proper the Director of Information who is a government official to make political statements, without proper consultation of all the relevant parties. A few days ago speaking at a public meeting president Chandrika Kumarathunga made it clear that she was not that pleased with the JVP stand on the national question. Resignation Meanwhile, two members of the Ceylon workers congress (CWC) holding ministerial and deputy ministerial portfolios have handed over there resignations to Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksha. R.Yogarajan Deputy President of the CWC confirmed that Mutthusivalingam, Minister of Estate infrastructure and deputy minister S.Sellasamy handed over there resignations to the prime minister to be forwarded to the President. Asked why the letters of resignation were not handed over directly to the President, Yogarajan said “It is difficult to get an appointment with the president .We decided to handover the letters of resignation to the prime minister as we met him in the parliament today” "The CWC has decided to withdraw its support from the Government as it feels that we have not been able deliver to the people as promised", said Yogarajan.	The JVP said that it may pull out from the governing Coalition if its counterpart would decide to hold talks with the Tamil Tigers based on Interim Self Governing Authority proposals .
+text: Official results showed the measure had passed by 51.2% to 48.8% in Sunday's referendum. The proposal was put forward by the right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP) which campaigned with slogans such as "Stop extremism". A leading Swiss Islamic group said it was "a dark day" for Muslims. "Today's decision opens old wounds, further expands the principle of legal inequality, and sends a clear signal of exclusion to the Muslim minority," the Central Council of Muslims said in a statement, adding that it would challenge the decision in court. The Swiss government had argued against the ban saying it was not up to the state to dictate what women wear. According to research by the University of Lucerne (in German), almost no-one in Switzerland wears a burka and only around 30 women wear the niqab. About 5% of Switzerland's population of 8.6 million people are Muslim, most originating from Turkey, Bosnia and Kosovo. Swiss people are given a direct say in their own affairs under the country's system of direct democracy. They are regularly invited to vote on various issues in national or regional referendums. It is not the first time Islam has figured in a Swiss referendum. In 2009 citizens went against government advice and voted to ban the building of minarets - a proposal also put forward by the SVP which said minarets were a sign of Islamisation. The proposal in Sunday's referendum did not mention Islam directly and was also aimed at stopping violent street protesters from wearing masks. However, the vote was widely referred to as "the burka ban". The latest proposal predated the coronavirus pandemic, which has meant all Swiss adults having to wear masks in many settings. Swiss voters give face covering ban a 'jein' Analysis by Imogen Foulkes, BBC News, Geneva Was today's vote about all face coverings, from niqabs and burkas to the scarves rioters sometimes pull over their faces? That's what the Yes campaigners from the Swiss People's Party insisted - but their posters and literature said otherwise, showing threatening looking women in black niqabs, and warning of Islamic extremism. So does the result mean the Swiss are becoming more extreme? Are they Islamophobic? Perhaps not. In the end, the ban only just squeaked through. In the past the Swiss People's Party has had much bigger majorities for its populist initiatives, often aimed at restricting asylum and immigration. It successfully pushed through a ban on minarets in 2009 with a similar campaign to this one. But the debate around face coverings touched all sorts of different nerves. Many Swiss feminists view the burka and niqab as oppressive to women but they also oppose laws telling women what they can and cannot wear. When it came to voting they were torn. A regular answer from women asked whether they would support the ban was "Jein", a cross between "Ja" (yes) and "Nein" (no). Today's close vote in Switzerland was probably very much a "Jein" as well. Sanija Ameti, a member of Switzerland's Muslim community, told the BBC that the campaign - and the depiction of Muslim women in the posters - had been upsetting. "So many Muslims in Switzerland will feel insulted and not part of this society, and pushed into a corner where they don't belong. We don't look like these women in the pictures, we just don't," she said. However, others in the Muslim community supported the ban. Imam Mustafa Memeti, from the city of Bern, told the BBC he thought the motivation behind the campaign was "probably Islamophobic". But he said he supported the ban anyway because it could help to emancipate Muslim women in Switzerland. Ahead of the vote, Walter Wobmann, chairman of the referendum committee and an SVP lawmaker, described Muslim face coverings as "a symbol for this extreme, political Islam which has become increasingly prominent in Europe and which has no place in Switzerland". "In Switzerland our tradition is that you show your face. That is a sign of our basic freedoms," he said. Amnesty International spoke out against the proposed ban, calling it "a dangerous policy that violates women's rights, including to freedom of expression and religion". The wearing of Islamic veils in public has been a controversial topic in other European countries. France banned wearing a full face veil in public in 2011 while the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria and Bulgaria have put in place full or partial bans on wearing face coverings in public.	Switzerland has narrowly voted in favour of banning face coverings in public, including the burka or niqab worn by Muslim women.
+text: A group of MPs had tried to exclude VAT from freshly baked products where no attempt was made to keep them hot. Attempts to exempt static caravans from VAT and to undo a cut in the top rate of income tax were among others to fail during debate on the Finance Bill. But Labour says it will vote against a freeze on age-related allowances - the so-called "granny tax" - later. The party said the freeze would cost some pensioners up to £323 a year. The "pasty tax" is one of a host of tax measures in last month's Budget that have caused controversy. The closest vote on Wednesday was over the imposition of VAT on static caravans. Seventeen Conservatives rebelled and the government's majority was cut by more than two-thirds to just 25. Ministers saw off opponents of the "pasty tax" by a margin of 35 votes. The government has faced protests over the Budget proposal - which it says is designed to end longstanding anomalies over VAT on hot food. Those calling for a rethink include bakers Greggs, Labour and some Conservative and Lib Dem MPs, who argue that tax increases will threaten jobs in the industry and increase prices for consumers by up to 20%. 'Level playing field' Hundreds of bakers have said they will march on Downing Street next week in protest over the tax changes. A group of MPs - representing constituencies in the South West of England - sought to amend the section of the Finance Bill relating to VAT on hot takeaway food. But Treasury minister David Gauke told the Commons that current tax rules on hot food were "complex and unfair" because, while a fish and chip shop would have to charge VAT on a sausage roll, a bakery next door would be tax-exempt for selling the same snack. He added: "The current rules mean customers simply do not know whether they are being charged VAT on hot food because it currently depends on the particular suppliers purpose for heating the hot food. "The new rules will ensure a level playing field and we are removing the subjective element." Most takeaway food served hot, such as fish and chips and curries, has been liable for VAT at 20% since the mid-1980s. Ministers have argued that zero-rated products such as pasties - which are put on display warm and subsequently cool down - should be brought into line and VAT of 20% should be paid on all products sold "above ambient temperature". The baking industry has argued that pasties, pies and other savouries are kept warm to improve their appearance or to comply with health and safety regulations and not for consumption and should therefore not be taxed. Asked about its stance on VAT on hot food, Downing Street said the Budget was "a fair Budget and the government sticks by it".	The government has defeated an attempt to overturn changes to VAT charged on takeaway food, dubbed "the pasty tax".
+text: Sadiq Kahn said budget constraints had left him "no choice". Scotland Yard estimates it will need to make £400m of savings by 2020 under current funding. Under proposals each of the Met's 32 boroughs will be left with one 24-hour counter. There are currently 73 working counters, down from 136 since 2013. Conservatives said the mayor was using government funding as a "scapegoat". London Assembly member Gareth Bacon said: ""The fact is the Met has found three quarters of the savings it requires and no announcement has yet been made about future funding." Mr Khan set out the new plans in a consultation document on public access and engagement published on Friday. City Hall says that closing "poorly used" front counters will save £10m each year - equivalent to the cost of 170 police constables. Since 2010, the Met has had to find £600m of savings. Some 8% of crimes were reported at police front counters in 2016, down from 22% in 2006, according to official figures. About 70% of crimes are reported by phone. Under the plans, remaining police buildings will get upgraded IT services while frontline officers will be provided with tablet computers - in an an effort to boost the reporting of crime online. Mr Khan said: "The huge government cuts to the Metropolitan Police Service have left us with no choice but to take drastic action to protect the frontline of policing. "My top priority is keeping Londoners safe, and every pound saved by closing a front counter is a pound of savings that we do not have to find by reducing the frontline." When former mayor Boris Johnson cut police station front counters in 2013, Mr Khan criticised the move, suggesting Londoners could be forced to report crime at police "contact points" in McDonald's restaurants. The Home Office said Scotland Yard has had a "broadly flat" budget since 2015. A spokesman said: "There is more money and more officers for each Londoner than anywhere else in the country. "This government will continue to ensure that the Metropolitan Police have the resources they need to cut crime and keep our communities safe." The public consultation is open until 6 October.	Half of London's police station front counters will close under new plans announced by the Mayor of London.
+text: My visit to the Norwegian city of Lillehammer a few weeks ago reaffirmed my conviction that the Scandinavians really are a class act. Those who follow these things would remember that Lillehammer was the host city for the 1994 Winter Olympics. I remember the images of a pretty town on television but then I know that the camera can portray my home city Accra as a pretty town when I know the reality to be somewhat different. You can take it from me that Lillehammer is as picturesque and pretty as anything you have seen on television. It is a small town of about 26,000 people and the first thing I wondered when I arrived at the train station was how they had managed to host the Winter Olympics. But I was soon to discover that organising big numbers in small places comes to them easily. Indeed, as I looked on in amazement at the smooth running of the conference I was attending, I wondered about what lessons to take back with me. And the more I looked on, it occurred to me, it was the might-have-been that was the most important. Touchy subject I have written on other occasions about the unmanaged population growth of Ghana. I have drawn attention to the fact that at Ghana's independence in 1957, we had a population about the same as Norway. However, 58 years later, Norway still has a population of just over five million people and Ghana has almost 28 million people, according to the latest figures from the statistics department. I know this is not a popular subject in Ghana and every time I have tried to raise it, I have been met with hostility from many quarters. But I still think that there must be a lesson somewhere we can learn in having a manageable-sized population. Elizabeth Ohene: "It seems to me we are looking to the Norwegians for the wrong lessons" If Norway had been growing at the same rate of population as we have been doing and they were also now about 28 million people, the country would not be as wealthy as it is today. Even if they were increasing at half our rate of population growth, they would still not have the disposable income that they have today. I acknowledge that it is not only in the rate of population growth that the Norwegians are different from us; but the orderliness and cleanliness that one finds in Norway must have something to do with there not being too much pressure on facilities. More on Africa's population: And then there is the critical problem of the proper and judicious use of public funds, for which the Norwegians are famous. This is the country that has shamed the rest of the world by investing huge portions of its oil revenue for what it terms, "generations yet unborn", in acknowledgement of the fact that the oil will be finished one day. Indeed, when we discovered oil in Ghana, Norway was the country we turned to for advice on the management of the revenue and our members of parliament have made endless journeys to learn how to use our oil revenue properly. It seems to me we are looking to the Norwegians for the wrong lessons. Before Norway discovered oil, they had already finished with their basic infrastructure of roads, railways, ports, schools, hospitals and homes, etc. Here we are in 2015 and we are nowhere near even agreeing on where to start. What is more, we think we should be increasing our numbers. If there is any lesson to learn, it should be in managing the size of our population. Now that Ghana's own Cardinal Peter Turkson has recently spoken out about population growth and the impacts of climate change, and mentioned "birth control", maybe there will now be a conversation on population in Ghana. But the chances of there being a small-sized, well-managed, pretty little town like Lillehammer in Ghana does not seem likely in my lifetime. More from Elizabeth Ohene: Why do presidential jets cause a storm? Ghana's fondness for creative language African presidents are addicted to titles Should Ghanaians be given a three-day-weekend for funerals?	In our series of letters from African journalists, Ghanaian writer Elizabeth Ohene considers what her country can learn from Norway.
+text: By Roger HarrabinBBC environment analyst Research from Cambridge and Aberdeen universities estimates greenhouse gases from food production will go up 80% if meat and dairy consumption continues to rise at its current rate. That will make it harder to meet global targets on limiting emissions. The study urges eating two portions of red meat and seven of poultry per week. However that call comes as the world's cities are seeing a boom in burger restaurants. The research highlights that more and more people from around the world are adopting American-style diets, leading to a sizeable increase in meat and dairy consumption. It says if this continues, more and more forest land or fields currently used for arable crops will be converted for use by livestock as the world's farmers battle to keep up with demand. Deforestation will increase carbon emissions, and increased livestock production will raise methane levels and wider fertiliser use will further accelerate climate change. The lead researcher, Bojana Bajzelj from the University of Cambridge, said: "There are basic laws of biophysics that we cannot evade." "The average efficiency of livestock converting plant feed to meat is less than 3%, and as we eat more meat, more arable cultivation is turned over to producing feedstock for animals that provide meat for humans. "The losses at each stage are large, and as humans globally eat more and more meat, conversion from plants to food becomes less and less efficient, driving agricultural expansion and releasing more greenhouse gases. Agricultural practices are not necessarily at fault here - but our choice of food is." Yield gaps The report says the situation can be radically improved if farmers in developing countries are helped to achieve the best possible yields from their land. Another big improvement will come if the world's population learns to stop wasting food. The researchers say if people could also be persuaded to eat healthier diets, those three measures alone could halve agricultural greenhouse gas levels from their 2009 level. The study is the latest to warn of the planetary risks of eating intensively-produced meat and dairy produce. Scientists worried about climate change are increasingly making common cause with health experts concerned about the obesity pandemic. But many people are voting with their wallets and their bellies - as burger bars expand, mushroom burgers are not yet top-selling items. Follow Roger on Twitter: @rharrabin	Global consumption of meat needs to fall - to ensure future demand for food can be met and to help protect the environment - a study says.
+text: A dedicated team of BBC journalists supply Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and Google Assistant with news updates, drawing on our local, national, specialist and global journalism. If you say "Play BBC News" to an Alexa device, you'll get our ground-breaking interactive bulletin. That allows you to listen to the news as normal, or move through the stories using your voice. For example, you can skip a story by saying "Alexa, next". You can also get an in-depth take on selected stories by saying "Alexa, more from the BBC". This will get you to the richest audio the BBC newsroom has on each topic, telling the human stories behind current events, and explaining and analysing what's going on. The BBC is also providing a 24/7 Coronavirus Update service for smart speakers, with all the latest details about the pandemic and how it is affecting life in the UK and around the world. Just say "Coronavirus, BBC" to your smart speaker or go to the programme page. Limitations imposed by other platforms currently prevent us from offering our interactive bulletin more widely. The BBC does not charge you to access smart speaker content and offers its services without cost to all UK smart speaker platforms.	Say "Play BBC News" to any smart speaker, to get the latest bulletin on the stories that matter.
+text: It said this would "not significantly alter" the spread of the virus, which is linked to serious birth defects. In an open letter to the WHO, more than 100 leading scientists had said new findings about Zika made it "unethical" for the Games to go ahead. They also said the global health body should revisit its Zika guidance. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has said it sees no reason to delay or move the Games because of the mosquito-borne disease. The outbreak began in Brazil a year ago, but now more than 60 countries and territories have continuing transmission. Between February and April 2016, Brazil's health ministry registered 91,387 likely cases of the Zika virus. The number of babies born with Zika-linked defects stood at 4,908 in April. While Zika's symptoms are mild, in the letter the experts say it causes babies to be born with abnormally small heads and may also cause a rare and sometimes fatal neurological syndrome in adults. The letter is signed by 150 international scientists, doctors and medical ethicists from such institutions as Oxford University and Harvard and Yale universities in the United States. They cite the failure of a mosquito-eradication programme in Brazil, and the country's "weakened" health system as reasons to postpone or move the Olympics in "the name of public health". More on the Zika crisis: Microcephaly: Why it is not the end of the world What you need to know Key questions answered about the virus and its spread Travel advice Countries affected and what you should do The mosquito behind Zika What we know about the insect Abortion dilemma Laws and practices in Catholic Latin America "An unnecessary risk is posed when 500,000 foreign tourists from all countries attend the Games, potentially acquire that strain, and return home to places where it can become endemic," the letter says. The biggest risk, it adds, is if athletes contract the virus and returned home to poor countries that have not yet suffered a Zika outbreak. They also express concern the WHO has a conflict of interest because of its partnership with the IOC. The Rio Olympics are due to take place between 5 and 21 August. In a statement, the WHO, which has declared the Zika virus a global public health emergency, said: "Brazil is one of almost 60 countries and territories which to date report continuing transmission of Zika by mosquitoes. "People continue to travel between these countries and territories for a variety of reasons. The best way to reduce risk of disease is to follow public health travel advice." Several public health experts had previously warned that hundreds of thousands of people arriving in Rio would speed up Zika's spread and lead to the births of brain-damaged babies. But on Thursday, the head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), whose advice is quoted approvingly in the letter, said the threat did not warrant halting the Games. "There is no public health reason to cancel or delay the Olympics," Dr Tom Frieden said. However, he urged the US to act more quickly to prevent pregnant women contracting Zika, amid congressional deadlock over the release of $1.9bn (£1.3bn) in funding. And virology researcher Oliver Brady, from Oxford University, said the risk was comparatively low because the Olympics would take place during Brazil's winter. "We really think August is about 20 to 40 times lower risk than we see around now or in January where we see these large numbers of cases reported from Rio," he told the BBC. The Olympics have never been moved for public health reasons but Fifa relocated its 2003 Women's World Cup from China to the US because of the Sars epidemic.	The World Health Organization (WHO) has rejected a call to move or postpone this summer's Rio Olympic Games over the Zika outbreak.
+text: By Sarah DickinsBBC Wales economics correspondent Unemployment in Wales between November and January was 73,000 - which is 3,000 more than between October and December and represents 4.8% of people over 16. In the UK, the rate of unemployment was lower at 4.3%. In Wales, 72.6% of 16 to 64-years-olds were working between November and January, which is 8,000 fewer than a year earlier. The Welsh jobless rate, published by the Office for National Statistics, has fallen from 5% in the previous month. Although Wales is still above the UK average, unemployment is higher in North East England, Yorkshire/Humberside and the West Midlands.	The latest unemployment rate shows that there has been little change since the figures published a month ago.
+text: Green energy firm Ecotricity has launched the world's first national motorway charging network for electric vehicles. It has installed free power points at 12 Welcome Break service stations, with 17 more promised later in the year. Until now, a lack of charging points between towns and cities has made longer journeys impractical. "There's a bit of the chicken and egg situation going on," said Ecotricity founder Dale Vince. "People are not buying electric cars because they're not sure about charging, and people aren't putting charging points up because [not many are] buying electric cars." Faster charging The national network also addresses another common complaint about electric vehicles - charging time. Welcome Break's power outlets offer two types of sockets - a three-pin one for 13A current supply and a seven-pin one for a higher 32A supply. Using the 13A supply can mean waiting around 12 hours and probably spending the night in one of the service area hotels. Opting for the higher current option will top-up a car in just 20 minutes - and fully charge it in one hour, said Mr Vince. "So in the time it takes you to get a cup of coffee and a sandwich, you can charge your car," he added. However, not all electric vehicles are compatible with the newer 32A system. Costly option Despite the promise of charging points dotting Britain's landscape, there are still relatively few people chosing electricity over petrol or diesel. One of the reasons is price - electric vehicles are still a lot more expensive than gas-powered models. But Mr Vince thinks that, just like mobile phones and computers, electric cars prices are bound to come down over time. Transport minister Mike Penning, who was present at the scheme's launch cited the role of subsidies in boosting electric car sales. Drivers can receive up to £5,000 to put towards the cost of an electric or plug-in hybrid vehicle. "At the moment we have 2,000 electric cars on the road and five car manufacturers [making them], but there's a huge waiting list already, and the government is going to be there to support the buyers," said Mr Penning. Some environmentalists question the green credientials of electric cars, once the overall lifespan of the vehicle has been taken into account. The manufacture and disposal of battery units, in particular, raises issues about the use of toxic chemicals and metals such as lithium.	Electric car drivers in the UK are being offered the chance to break free of the city and hit the open road.
+text: The fire at Marsden Moor started on Sunday and was "likely" to have been caused by a barbecue at Easter Gate, the National Trust said. It has now spread to Denshaw in Saddleworth, Greater Manchester, the fire service said. Firefighters also remain on Ilkley Moor damping down a blaze which spread over 25,000 sq metres on Saturday. The National Trust said the Marsden fire, which started at about 19:00 BST on Sunday, was the sixth on its moorland this year and covers about 3 sq km of land. The last significant fire was on 27 February, with four separate smaller fires reported since. The trust's Marsden branch said the moor was a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest, a Special Protection Area and a Special Area of Conservation due to the ground-nesting bird population and blanket bog habitat. It said a helicopter had been deployed since 09:00 to take water from nearby reservoirs to the fire. "At present it is estimated that an investment of more than £200,000 in restoring this special habitat has been lost," the trust said. "The deployment of the helicopter itself costs the trust, a conservation charity, £2,000 per hour. "We're devastated to see the destruction caused. Please help us protect the moors and wildlife by calling the fire brigade immediately if you spot any signs of fire." Three men were arrested on Sunday over the Ilkley Moor fire but two were later released pending further investigation. One man has been since charged with arson. West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service tweeted that people were still being seen lighting barbecues on Ilkley Moor, despite the fire continuing to burn. It said it was working with police and Bradford Council to deal with the issue. Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service is assisting West Yorkshire firefighters at Marsden and also helping Derbyshire crews tackle a fire near Arnfield Reservoir in Glossop. It said on its Facebook page: "If you live around Stalybridge, Oldham or Rochdale and can smell the smoke please keep windows and doors shut as a precaution." Bradford Council has warned people to stay away from Marsden Moor while the fire is being dealt with. Follow BBC Yorkshire on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk.	A second blaze has broken out on moorland in West Yorkshire on one of the hottest days of the year.
+text: Unite said its members had unanimously agreed Birmingham City Council's latest offer, suspending the strike action on Tuesday and Wednesday. Workers started a series of walkouts over "secret payments" made to non-striking GMB staff after a dispute in 2017. As part of the offer, which goes before cabinet on Friday, workers would receive payments of £3,500. Council leader Ian Ward said on Friday when details of the new offer emerged that a sum of £3,000 was previously in a cabinet report and there was a figure of £500 "to end all litigation and all disputes that are currently under way" between Unite and the authority. Latest news in the West Midlands Mr Ward said there was "a determination on all sides that we'll move forward" to deliver a service that people "deserve". Temporary arrangements, including fortnightly collections, remain in place. Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, on Twitter, and sign up for local news updates direct to your phone.	Planned strike action by bin workers in Birmingham has been called off.
+text: Lawmakers approved the bill, amending the 1955 marriage act, despite opposition from Christian lobby groups. The bill was passed with a wide majority, with 77 votes in favour and 44 against. Hundreds of jubilant gay-rights advocates celebrated outside parliament after the bill was passed, calling it a milestone for equality. People watching from the public gallery and some lawmakers immediately broke into song, singing the New Zealand love song "Pokarekare Ana", AP news agency reported. Some opinion polls have suggested that about two-thirds of New Zealanders support the reform, although others polls suggest the public are more divided. Parliamentarians were allowed a conscience vote, and, crucially, the reform had the backing of both the Prime Minister John Key and leader of the opposition David Shearer, the BBC's Phil Mercer in Sydney reports. Celebrations have been held in pubs and clubs in the capital Wellington, our correspondent adds. Same-sex civil unions have been legal in New Zealand since 2005. 'Human rights' "In our society, the meaning of marriage is universal - it's a declaration of love and commitment to a special person," Labour MP Louisa Wall, who introduced the legislation, said. "Nothing could make me more proud to be a New Zealander than passing this bill," she added. Drag artist Jake Andrew said he learned of the news at a club in Hamilton. "We cheered, yelled, cried and sang - it was just amazing," he told the BBC. "I am so happy, not only because I can now marry the person I love, but because New Zealand has moved a step further towards gay and lesbian people becoming completely equal with the rest of our society." Tania Bermudez and Sonja Fry, a same-sex couple, said the bill was about human rights. "It means that we can actually call each other wife," Ms Fry said. However, Conservative Party leader Colin Craig said there were many people who disagreed with the bill. "We're seeing the politicians make a decision tonight that the people of this country wouldn't make," he said. Bob McCoskrie, founder of the lobby group Family First, said the bill undermined the traditional concept of marriage. "Historically and culturally, marriage is about man and a woman, and it shouldn't be touched," he said. New Zealand becomes the 13th country to legalise same-sex marriage. Other countries include the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa, Argentina and Uruguay. French and British lawmakers have also voted in favour of legislation allowing gay marriage, although the bills have not yet been passed into law. No other country in the Asia-Pacific region allows gay marriage. Australian members of parliament overwhelmingly voted against a bill that would have legalised same-sex marriages in September. However, some states allow civil unions for same-sex couples. China does not allow gay marriage. However, transsexuals who have undergone surgery are able to marry someone of the opposite sex, provided their new gender is verified by the local public security authorities.	New Zealand's parliament has legalised same-sex marriage, the first country in the Asia-Pacific region to do so.
+text: In his new year message, the prime minister said he hoped the country would "move forward united" after it leaves the EU on 31 January. He vowed to govern "for everyone", not just those who backed him at the polls. And he said he wanted more prosperity and fairer opportunity to be the hallmarks of a "remarkable" new decade. Boosting resources for the NHS, improving the UK's infrastructure, tackling violent crime and protecting the environment were among his government's other main priorities for the year ahead, he said. Mr Johnson, who is currently on holiday in the Caribbean, said the "first item on his agenda" when he returned was delivering on the mandate of the people and taking the UK out of the EU. He said: "We can start a new chapter in the history of our country, in which we come together and move forward united, unleashing the enormous potential of the British people." The Conservatives' resounding election victory on 12 December had "driven an electoral bulldozer" through the deadlock in Parliament, he said, and offered a way out of the "division, rancour and uncertainty" surrounding the Brexit debate since the 2016 referendum vote. Legislation to ratify the withdrawal agreement with the EU easily cleared its first hurdle before Christmas, when MPs backed it by a majority of 124. Deal 'in the microwave' With an 80-seat Conservative majority in the Commons, the remaining stages of the bill are expected to be completed quickly in January in time, the PM said, to "get Brexit done before the end of this month". "That oven-ready deal I talked about so much during the election campaign has already had its plastic covering pierced and been placed in the microwave," he said. While the UK is set to leave the EU's institutions at 23.00 GMT on 31 January, negotiations over its future economic relationship with the 27-member bloc have yet to begin, with experts saying they will be far tougher than those over the terms of the UK's exit. Mr Johnson has set himself a deadline of completing an ambitious trade deal by the end of 2020, when the 11-month transition period agreed by the two sides ends. Many leading EU figures have cast doubt upon the tight timetable and questioned the PM's ruling out of any extension. Mr Johnson has pledged to put public services at the heart of a One Nation agenda, promising billions of extra investment for the NHS in the next four years and levelling up schools funding across England. Ahead of what is traditionally the most difficult time of the year for the health service, Mr Johnson insisted it was his "top priority" and his ambition was to provide "state of the art" healthcare which remained free at the point of use. "The loudest message I heard during the election campaign is that people expect us - expect me - to protect and improve the NHS." 'Prime minister for everyone' He said he aimed to deliver a "people's government". "I am acutely aware that there are millions of people who did not vote for me and were disappointed by the result," he said. "If you are one of them, I want to reassure you that I will be a prime minister for everyone, not just those who voted for me. I know that you love this country no less, simply because you voted for another party or wanted to Remain." Mr Johnson, who a year ago was languishing on the backbenches after quitting Theresa May's government, is said to be planning a major cabinet reshuffle and departmental reorganisation after the UK leaves the EU. He has also signalled that infrastructure and science will be at the heart of a Budget in March, with the aim of making the UK "an engine for the ideas of the future". He said he wanted to "make the 2020s a decade of prosperity and opportunity" with a "fantastically exciting agenda". 'Mitigate the worst' In his new year message, Jeremy Corbyn has insisted Labour will remain the "resistance" to Boris Johnson's government despite their heavy defeat while the SNP's Nicola Sturgeon said leaving the EU was a source of "deep regret" for many Scots and her government would do all it could to "mitigate the worst impacts". Elsewhere, Nigel Farage has said he is in no rush to make any decision about the Brexit Party's future. He told supporters that the party had "changed politics for good", despite failing to elect any MPs after it decided not to field candidates in more than 300 Conservative-held seats. "Don't let anyone tell you that we have not succeeded in our main goals," he wrote in an email. "We are now assessing thoughts and ideas as to what our next steps might be."	The UK is on the verge of a "new chapter" in its history, Boris Johnson has said, as he promised to "finish the job" by delivering Brexit within weeks.
+text: Just under 20,000 people took part in the Cardiff Half Marathon but runners and spectators faced disruption, with no trains running between Newport and Cardiff before 13:00 BST. Residents were also advised that many roads around Cardiff city centre will be shut for large parts of Sunday. Security was heightened after the London and Manchester terror attacks. The route started outside Cardiff Castle at 10:00 and took runners past Cardiff City Stadium to Penarth, and across the Cardiff Bay barrage before looping Roath Park Lake and finishing in Cathays Park. Kenya's John Lotiang broke the course record to win the men's race, in which Wales' Dewi Griffiths finished fourth with a personal-best finish. In the women's race, Edith Chelimo won with another course record, while Melissa Nicholls and Richie Powell took the women's and men's wheelchair titles. Cardiff council said the city was "expected to be exceptionally busy" and organisers acknowledged attacks at Westminster, Manchester, London Bridge and Parsons Green this year had "raised the potential" of an incident during the city's half marathon. But Run4Wales, which organises the Cardiff Half, moved to "reassure" the public of the "seriousness we place on security" at the event. "We've had a close working relationship with South Wales Police and the security agencies to make sure we are doing everything we possibly can to make sure the event goes off safely," said chief executive Matt Newman. He said contingencies had been put in place, adding: "The view from the security experts is we go ahead and it is business as usual." Cardiff has a history of hosting major sporting events, like June's Champions League final, and South Wales Police has promised a "visible and reassuring presence" to "provide the response the public would expect". Since its inception in 2003, the Cardiff Half Marathon has become the UK's third biggest annual mass participation event behind the London Marathon and the Great North Run, and last year participants raised £2.5m for charity.	Up to 100,000 people were expected in Cardiff on Sunday for Wales' largest annual mass participation event.
+text: A pre-inquest review heard Surrey coroner Richard Travers had written to the Home Office to access hundreds of closed files on the 1974 IRA blasts. The hearing was told records may also be held by two other police forces and the Ministry of Defence (MoD). Lawyers for a survivor and victim said searches should widen further. Soldiers Ann Hamilton, 19, Caroline Slater, 18, William Forsyth, 18, and John Hunter, 17, died following the first blast at the Horse and Groom on 5 October, along with 21-year-old plasterer Paul Craig. A further 65 people were injured. Eleven people - the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven - were wrongly jailed in what became known as one of Britain's biggest miscarriages of justice. The pre-inquest hearing was told archives could extend beyond 700 files from a five-year inquiry by retired judge Sir John May into the wrongful convictions, to records created by other government departments including the MoD, and also papers held by the Met Police and Avon and Somerset Police. Brenda Campbell QC, instructed by KRW Law for the family of victim Ann Hamilton and survivor Yvonne Tagg, said Surrey Police had already logged some 6,000 documents, but added: "It may be in the region of 10,000." She told the coroner: "We would ask you to direct the MoD to communicate with you...so we know what if anything the MoD may have and the same goes for Avon and Somerset Police and for the Metropolitan Police." Lawyers for the Met Police and the MoD said work was ongoing to discover what archives existed. James Berry, for the Met, said the London bomb squad had responded to the explosions and seconded officers to the Surrey investigation, but added: "It may well be since they were working for Surrey, their documents may be held by Surrey." Edward Pleeth, for the MoD, said the department was making inquiries, however "we simply don't know what exists". Since 2016, the BBC has accessed several files from the May inquiry at The National Archives (TNA). However, it was refused access to TNA's copy of the report by Avon and Somerset Police, which investigated Surrey Police's handling of the investigation, and when the BBC approached Avon and Somerset directly, it was told: "No information is held."	Some 700 classified files and 10,000 Surrey Police documents could be put before a coroner as part of the resumed Guildford pub bombings inquest.
+text: The state news agency, BNA, said the group plotted to attack "policemen... vital sites and security locations, including an embassy". Bahrain human rights groups condemned the "unfair trial" and sentences. The Gulf state has seen sporadic unrest since putting down mass Shia-led protests in 2011. In the latest case the defendants were given sentences ranging from three years to life in prison. Activists said minors were among those jailed. Four people were acquitted. Among the group's targets, the Gulf Daily News reported, were the Saudi embassy in Manama and the King Fahd Causeway connecting Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. The court alleged that those on trial were funded by the main Shia opposition group, al-Wefaq, and a banned association, al-Wafa (Fidelity). In a statement, two Bahrain advocacy groups said that nine of those found guilty were under the age of 18. "Bahrain's politicised courts are disenfranchising an entire generation of Bahrainis with unfair imprisonment," said Husain Abdulla, of Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain. Bahrain was hit by an uprising in 2011 in which the Shia majority demanded democratic reforms from the Sunni-led government. Since then, protests have been more intermittent, following a crackdown. In January, Bahrain stripped citizenship from 72 people on the grounds of damaging national security.	Bahrain has jailed 57 Shia citizens, and stripped all but one of them of their nationality, for an alleged plot to bomb sites across the kingdom.
+text: Dave LeeNorth America technology reporter The social network has signed an exclusive deal to show every La Liga game, for the next three seasons, to viewers in India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, The Maldives, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. The rights were previously held by Sony Pictures Network. The terms of the new deal have not been disclosed. The last time they were for sale, in 2014, they were bought for $32m, according to Reuters. There are 348m Facebook users in the region, 270m of them are in India. It is the latest move from Facebook, and the tech industry in general, to invest in highly lucrative sports rights for emerging streaming services. The social network already shows Major League Baseball to US audiences at a reported cost of $1m per game. As with the rest of Facebook, the content is free but supported by targeted advertising. Speaking to Reuters, Facebook’s director of global live sports said the La Liga streams would at first be advertising-free, but it was considering how best to implement them in future. “This is one deal,” Peter Hutton told the news agency. “It’s not something that is a big threat to broadcast world.” It’s unlikely broadcasters will see it that way - and they’re wise not to. Live sport is the major driver of subscriptions to premium cable or satellite services, and the slow creep of technology companies buying up sports rights will have traditional broadcasters concerned. Since the rise of Netflix and others, live sport has been just about the only thing holding many potential cord-cutters back from making the chop. The Facebook-La Liga deal is part of a global trend. In the UK, the current Premier League season will be the last time every live match will be shown on a TV channel. Next season, 20 games will be online-only - viewable only through Amazon. The company will bundle the games in with its Prime subscription service. Similarly, in the US, the National Football League (NFL) has renewed last season’s deal with Amazon to bring 11 “Thursday Night Football” matches to Prime. To get them, Amazon had to win a bidding war involving Twitter, YouTube and Verizon. Outside the US, the National Basketball Association (NBA) is being streamed in China - by online giant Tencent. An average of 2m people watch each game. We should also consider a major sport of the future - eSports. Watching professional gamers is an industry predicted by some to soon be worth over $1bn a year. Tech giants got there first: the top platforms for eSports viewing are Amazon-owned Twitch and Google's YouTube. In something of a role reversal, traditional broadcasters are making deals to bring eSports offline and onto regular TV. Most notably, Disney recently announced a multi-year deal to broadcast live action from Overwatch League, one of the biggest eSports competitions. Disney’s channels, which include ESPN and ABC, will share the action - and it will be streamed online too, of course. ‘We don’t do live sports' So what does all this platform-shifting mean for world sport? We’re at the beginning of a financial shift, maybe the biggest since the early 1990s, when the major football leagues in Europe commericialised their competitions to new heights. Transfer fees and wages soared thanks, in a big way, to the phenomenal TV deals these new sporting megabrands could attract. Is that changing? Perhaps. This year's deal for UK rights for the Premier League came in at £496m less than in 2017 - the first time in the Premier League’s history that TV revenue has dropped year-on-year. The tech giants have money to burn. With its yearly content budget of $8bn, Netflix could buy the next three seasons of Premier League UK rights twice over. But it doesn’t plan to, saying it won’t follow its competitors. "We don't do [live] news, we don't do [live] sports,” chief executive Reed Hastings told a room of journalists in Hollywood earlier this year. "But what we do do, we try to do really well.” With subscriber growth slowing this year, the industry is watching to see how long it can hold on to that stance, especially as its rivals seem eager to open their wallets. ________ Follow Dave Lee on Twitter @DaveLeeBBC Do you have more information about this or any other technology story? You can reach Dave directly and securely through encrypted messaging app Signal on: +1 (628) 400-7370	People in the Indian subcontinent will, from Friday, have only one way to watch top flight Spanish football: on Facebook.
+text: The 33cm by 24cm (13in x 9.5in) oil painting went under the hammer in Towcester on Thursday. Auctioneer JP Humbert said it had attracted a moderate amount of interest after a previous sale of another painting. The auction house sold that portrait of the reclusive writer for £23,836 in December. This latest painting, which is annotated 'Emily Jane Bronte', was estimated to fetch between £5,000 and £8,000. Auctioneer Jonathan Humbert said: "We have another Bronte painting which we will put up for auction in April and we are hoping to make it three out of three." The Bronte family moved to Haworth, West Yorkshire, in 1820 where the Reverend Patrick Bronte was appointed Curate of Haworth. They lived at the Haworth Parsonage from 1820 to 1861, which is now the Bronte Parsonage Museum.	A portrait believed to be of the author Emily Bronte was sold for £4,600 at a Northamptonshire auctioneers.
+text: By Brian WheelerPolitical reporter Mr Jenkin, who trained as an opera singer before entering politics, warned the music world was facing "paralysis" over the issue. He said the UK did not have to wait for a deal with the EU to set up a visa system for visiting musicians. He was quizzing minister Matt Hancock at a Tory conference fringe meeting. Mr Hancock hinted a new regime could be put in place soon, after listening to pleas from Mr Jenkin and John McLeod, a board member of Manchester's world-renowned Halle Orchestra. Mr McLeod said it was not just visiting soloists - who sometimes had to be flown in at the last moment to cover for sickness - that needed to know they would not be stopped at the border. "We employ lots on international musicians on full employment contracts on a continuous basis and we are bit worried. "We will listen to 100 musicians just to employ one musician and if we appointed them on the basis that they are, maybe, British passport holders, as opposed to Spanish passport holders, that's a concern, because there's a quality issue." Mr Jenkin, a leading campaigner for Britain's exit from the EU, said the government should act to end the uncertainty now, because top orchestras had very long "lead times" and sometimes booked musicians "two years hence". "They need to know where they stand. This is something we can decide for ourselves. "We don't need to wait for an agreement but there is a sense, the same applies to seasonal workers in agriculture, that there is paralysis because everyone has been told not to announce anything, or decide anything, until further agreement has been made. "There are things we need to get on with and decide and implement for ourselves, whatever the outcome of the negotiations." Digital Minister Matt Hancock, who is also responsible for the UK's creative industries, told the meeting: "I entirely agree that we don't need to wait for a deal before we set out the direction of future immigration policy and I take your pleadings to get on with it." He added: "I hope we can come to a good and reasonable resolution on this." The meeting was chaired by former Labour MP Michael Dugher, the chief executive of trade body UK Music, who has called for the introduction of an EU-wide live music 'passport' for British artists to ensure freedom of movement after Brexit.	Eurosceptic Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin has urged the UK government to guarantee free movement for top EU musicians after Brexit.
+text: Alphabet earned $32.7bn in revenue in the three months to the end of June, up 26% from the same period last year. But the record €4.34bn EU fine over over Google's Android mobile operating system knocked $5bn off its profits. Alphabet reported net income of $3.2bn. Without the fine, it would have been almost $8.3bn, the firm said. The EU said Google had used the mobile operating system to illegally "cement its dominant position" in search. Alphabet is appealing the decision, which drove a 36% increase in costs in the quarter. On a call with financial analysts, chief executive Sundar Pichai said it was too early to say how the changes requested by regulators would affect the firm's business over the long term. "There is more work to be done and I think it will become clearer as we go along," he said. Mr Pichai also said it was too early to say what effect Europe's new privacy law - the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) - is having. Analysis Dave Lee, BBC North America technology reporter, San Francisco On the face of it, the European Commission's massive fine hasn't really hurt Alphabet - at least not in the eyes of investors. But it's important to remember that simply paying the fine - if Google loses its appeal - doesn't make the problem go away. The European Commission has demanded big changes to the Android platform, changes that once implemented could impact Google's huge gains in search revenues. The strong performance in this part of the business is what's keeping investors happy despite the fine - but those smiles might crack once the full extent of Europe's ruling is understood. The fine is just the beginning - it's the changes to Google's vast mobile empire that could cause real harm to the business model. "I'm confident that we can find a way to make sure Android is available at scale to users everywhere," Google's chief executive, Sundar Pichai, told investors. It may be his biggest challenge yet. Digital ad market Alphabet, which relies on advertising for the bulk of its business, is facing an increasingly competitive market, as firms such as Amazon make inroads. In March, the research firm eMarketer estimated that Google would capture about 37% of digital ad spending in the US this year, down from almost 39% in 2017. Despite the competition, Alphabet said pressure from traffic acquisition costs, which reflect what it pays other companies to drive users to its sites, had lessened. As a share of ad revenue, those costs fell from 23% to 22%. Alphabet has also branched out into a range of other areas, including cloud computing, YouTube and driverless cars. The firm said cloud computing and YouTube are enjoying growth. Its Other Bets segment, which includes companies like the driverless car firm Waymo, reported a quarterly operating loss of $732m, up from $633m last year.	Shares in Alphabet, Google's parent company, jumped as much as 5% in after-hours trading after the firm reported stronger ad sales than expected.
+text: The listed 19th Century structure on Alfreton Road, Derby, was damaged by a burst water main in August. Derby City Council said it hoped the cost of repairs, which it described as a "burden for the taxpayer", would be shared with Severn Trent Water. Severn Trent said it would "work with the council". "It will be a negotiation between ourselves and Severn Trent to establish what the level of payment is. I don't expect Severn Trent will pay the full amount," a council spokesman said. 'Negotiation' The bridge, which was designed by pioneering engineers George and Robert Stephenson, has been closed to traffic for three months. The council hopes it will open to one-way traffic, travelling into Derby, on 19 November. "Our assessment shows the bridge can only support one lane of traffic until it is fully repaired," said the spokesman. The authority will seek to approve the £700,000 cost of repairs at a cabinet meeting later but added those could take "months" because it needs to access the bridge from the railway line. "Our opportunities to... carry out repairs are greatly restricted," the council said in a statement. It said the work would be scheduled over a series of Saturday evenings and was talking to Network Rail to secure access. Cabinet member Mick Barker said the repairs were "another burden for the taxpayer". "The main is a big one that goes into the city so it carries a lot of pressure," he said. "It has failed on a couple of occasions recently so hopefully this is the last time." Follow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, on Twitter, or on Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk. Related Internet Links Derbyshire Constabulary Severn Trent Water	A council is seeking an "admission of liability" from a utility company over the £700,000 cost of repairing a flood-damaged railway bridge.
+text: By Sudha G Tilak Delhi Gale was covering Jaipur Pink Panthers, a professional kabaddi team owned by Bollywood star Abhishek Bachchan. His series, Sons of the Soil: Jaipur Panthers, which premiered on Amazon Prime Video last week, is a fascinating peek into the transformation of a traditional game into a highly competitive and popular spectator sport. "We were trying to show the new glamour that has been brought to the sport but also celebrates the heritage and roots of the sport that make it so desi [indigenous.]. We have really tried to capture what makes kabaddi unique and attractive to more and more people in and outside India," Gale told the BBC. The "new glamour" has helped. The six-year-old made-for-TV professional league had transformed the game and made kabaddi the second-most watched sport in India after cricket. It has transformed the lives of many of its players, who come from humble backgrounds in villages and small towns. Players for 12 teams - the league began with eight teams in 2014 - are picked up at auctions and managed professionally. They are togged out in colourful jerseys and play 40-minute games on rubber mats in packed arenas under bright lights and accompanied by music and pyrotechnics. Boisterous fans in attendance often include Bollywood and cricket stars. More than 400 million people watched the game on TV during the inaugural season. "A working class game has been successfully transformed into a TV sport," says Joy Bhattacharjya, a sports producer. What is kabaddi? "I get to live vicariously through my team," Bachchan says in the film. Jaipur Pink Panthers were the inaugural champions in 2014 and remain one of the league's most popular teams, despite not winning another title. Gale's camera follows the actor and his team in hotels, tour buses and at heated practice sessions and frenzied games, with Bachchan himself, his father superstar Amitabh Bachchan and actor wife Aishwarya Rai Bachchan in the stands. Popular sports and Bollywood feed off each other in India. Gale says the series was a personal journey into the roots and the makeover of the game in India. In rural Haryana, he filmed a big kabaddi tournament at a rural fair. At team member Deepak Narwal's house, they were fed home-made ghee (a type of clarified butter that originated in India) with his parents, a family "living and breathing the sport" in kabaddi's heartland. He filmed several hundred army cadets watching a game on TV on a jumbo screen, a "special experience" when he was also trying to follow Ben Stokes and England chase down a stiff target against Australia back home in a cricket Test match. Gale films a prominent player of Bachchan's team who's recuperating after injury at home in his village in Haryana in north India. His mother is giving her son a head massage. "Is Abhishek taking care of you," she asks his son. "Why would he do that?" he says, smilingly. "He should take care of his players," she replies, deadpan. The series shows how the game has now become a passport to upward mobility for thousands of players in villages and small towns. Players have bought homes, cars and appliances with earnings from kabaddi. And with foreign players participating in the league, "the melting pot of languages and cultures are so great to see". A Korean player in the Jaipur team often becomes the subject of curiosity. Kabaddi has come a long way in India since it played a role in India's independence struggle. Mahatma Gandhi supported the game and wrote articles on its benefits. In his book Kabaddi By Nature, Vivek Chaudhary, a sports journalist, tells the story of a group of Indian kabaddi players-cum-freedom fighters from a club in Maharashtra who travelled to the 1936 Berlin Olympics to demonstrate the sport at an exhibition game and ended up meeting Adolf Hitler. "The invitation came about because of a friendship that was formed by one of the kabaddi players who was sent to Berlin in the early 1920s to study sports as part of attempts to make Indian youth fitter and stronger so they could drive out the British. He ended up becoming close friends with Dr Carl Diem, organiser of the Nazi Olympics," Mr Chaudhary writes. The professional league has now made kabaddi a commercially viable and intensely competitive game with the highs and lows that come with it. "I ask myself why do I put myself through this. The agony, the ecstasy, the highs and the lows, and the heartbreak," Bachchan says in the film.	For more than six months in 2019, award-winning British director Alex Gale followed a team of players of kabaddi, a traditional fast-paced contact sport played by millions of Indians.
+text: Staff and older residents will be next to receive the Pfizer/ BioNTech vaccine after more than 5,000 NHS staff and vaccinators got the jab last week. There had been fears that homes would not be able to receive the first batch of doses due to logistical challenges. It comes as the Conservatives called for vaccination plans to be published for each health board in Scotland. Health Secretary Jeane Freeman said older care home residents had been prioritised to receive the vaccine along with care staff. However she also warned that the pace of the vaccination programme remained dependent on the supply of the vaccine, which is manufactured in Belgium. The first consignment of the vaccine arrived in the UK last week and was distributed to vaccination centres across the four nations. They were initially stored in packs of 997 doses in specialist freezers because the Pfizer vaccine must be kept at a temperature of at least -70C. 'Minimal wastage' The Scottish government said it had received confirmation the vaccine could be "packed down" by health boards into smaller sizes, which meant the programme could be rolled out to care homes. The go-ahead was given by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. The vaccine will be taken directly to care homes or to nearby vaccination centres in 195 five-dose vials, which Ms Freeman said would result in "minimal wastage". These vials will need to be diluted before use. They can also be transported in an unfrozen state for up to 12 hours and can be stored undiluted for up to five days, the Scottish health secretary said. Ms Freeman said: "We are providing the vaccine to people in care homes according to the order of priority set out by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation and we will work through that order of priority as quickly as vaccine supply allows." She said that ministers were hopeful that "subject to further stringent approvals", other vaccines, such as those being developed by AstraZeneca and Moderna, would be available soon. It follows comments to BBC radio's Good Morning Scotland programme by Westminster Health Secretary Matt Hancock earlier this week that the speed of the vaccination programme over the coming weeks would be determined by how quickly the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine could be manufactured in Belgium. He said: "We've got a broad schedule and there'll be several millions for the UK as a whole and so several hundred thousand for Scotland over the remainder of this month. "We've got that as a broad delivery schedule, but obviously the manufacturing process itself is complicated so we've got to get the stuff in the country." 'Sluggish and incomplete' The Scottish Conservatives have called for each individual health board in Scotland to publish its vaccination plans to prevent what they described as a "postcode lottery" from developing. The party's health spokesman Donald Cameron, said: "Opposition MSPs seeking to scrutinise plans and get answers for their constituents are struggling to get information from the SNP and health boards. "The answers we do get are frequently sluggish and incomplete. "The public needs to know every detail has been covered. Secrecy will not benefit anyone." The Scottish government said talk of a lottery was "irresponsible" and said Jeane Freeman had offered to meet with opposition parties to discuss details of how the vaccine was being delivered.	Covid-19 vaccinations will begin in care homes on Monday, the Scottish government has said.
+text: By Tom BatemanTokyo, Japan Red pins mark the countries where every arm of the Pokémon empire - games, trading cards, Pokemon GO, the animated TV series - is available. There's a lot of red. Pokémon started life as an 8-bit video game in Japan - where players capture creatures and store them in pocket-sized capsules (Pokémon is short for "pocket monsters") - but has grown into a cultural megahit. By some estimates, Pokémon is now the biggest media franchise in history, worth more than Harry Potter and Star Wars combined. Over its 25-year journey, it has spawned several global crazes, involving celebrities paying millions for trading cards and people walking tens of thousands of kilometres in pursuit of rare monsters. These are the moments when Pokémania swept the globe. Your very own Pokémon legend is about to unfold! Pokémon started small. The game's developer, Game Freak, was a Tokyo-based company that had started life as a self-published video gaming magazine. "It took about seven years to develop the games. We thought they would sell well in Japan, perhaps a million copies of each," says Mr Ishihara, who was part of the original games' development team. He turned out to be right. The series' first instalments, Pokémon Red and Green, were released in Japan on 27 February 1996. They proved popular, with players using cables to link their Game Boys and trade for certain Pokémon that were exclusive to each version. "But we never considered selling Pokémon abroad," Mr Ishihara says. "People said there was no chance it would work because American children wouldn't play a game where you had to read a lot of text, where there was no action and where you took turns to fight battles." Pokémon Red and Blue - based on an updated version of the Japanese originals - were released in North America in 1998 and in Europe in 1999. They were followed by Pokémon Yellow, Gold, Silver and Crystal. "All told, they sold 76 million copies worldwide. I was absolutely shocked," Mr Ishihara says. Pokémania strikes Mr Ishihara believes that the tortuous process of translating the games into English was part of the success, with the North American release of the anime building hype for the delayed Game Boy games, which in turn fed demand for a newly-launched trading card game. "As we launched more and more products and expanded the business, it became a social phenomenon," he says. At its height in the early 2000s that phenomenon - branded "Pokémania" - led religious leaders in Saudi Arabia to ban Pokémon entirely, saying the game promoted Zionism and gambling, while western media published lurid stories of "Pokémon card crime". There was some truth to the stories: in one incident, an eight-year-old boy in southern England caused an outcry after he phoned in to a local radio station and attempted to swap his infant sister for a holographic Vaporeon card. I want to be the very best Although this wave of Pokémania died down in the years that followed, Pokémon never went away. 2008 saw the launch of a new generation of WiFi-enabled Pokémon games. Suddenly, players could trade and battle with anyone, anywhere. "As a kid, I watched a lot of people battle on WiFi battles in 2008, that's when that really blew up on YouTube," says Aaron Zheng, who started a YouTube channel focused on competitive Pokémon after coaching his younger brother to victory in the games' world championships in 2013. The channel led to work commentating at official Pokémon tournaments, taking Zheng from his home in New York to Australia, Brazil and the UK. "The cool thing about Pokémon is it's a really global game. I think if I went to a big city, there'd probably be someone that I know from Pokémon that I could probably crash with. I think that's so cool," he says. 16 days, 7 hours, 45 minutes and 30 seconds On 12 February 2014, a channel on the streaming service Twitch began an experiment. The channel, "Twitch Plays Pokémon", broadcast a stream of Pokémon Red. What was different was that viewers could play the game, interacting with it live by typing commands into Twitch's built-in chat. "I think Twitch served as sort of that perfect platform. You've got the video, you've got the chat, it was right for something like that," says Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham, a long-time esports expert and head of creator development at Twitch. "The streamer's original system fit perfectly, like, yeah, throw me the commands, I'll begin parsing them into the game and we'll see what chaos this creates," he says. The chaos was compelling. More players joined in, thousands of people telling the game to do different things all at the same time. Twitch Plays Pokémon went viral, gaining widespread media attention within days. According to Twitch, the stream's peak saw over 120,000 simultaneous players trying to control the action. The sheer number of players sometimes made the game almost impossible to play. At one point progress was held up for almost 10 hours as players repeatedly fell down a ledge, while stray button presses in an in-game menu caused some of the stream's most beloved Pokémon to be "released", meaning they were lost forever. But after 16 days, seven hours, 45 minutes and 30 seconds of play, the stream completed the game. In all, 1.16 million people had played, and more than nine million had watched. Marcus Graham believes the "Pokémon" part of Twitch Plays Pokémon was the key to success, as the stream combined the simple goals of catching monsters and collecting gym badges with players' nostalgia for the classic game and its cast of familiar characters. "I really do think that because the game was Pokémon that played a massive part in the explosive virality of it all. It was kind of that perfect storm." Gotta catch 'em all While the world watched millions play Pokémon Red on Twitch, a Japanese software engineer was working on an April Fool's joke. Tatsuo Nomura (who declined to be interviewed for this article) worked for Google's maps division. A Pokémon fan since childhood, Nomura decided to blend the two, hiding Pokémon on a map of the world for users to find. "Mr Nomura used to find exploits in Pokémon Red and Green when he was a kid, that's how he became interested in computer programming," explains the Pokémon Company's Tsunekazu Ishihara, who greenlit the project after receiving a pitch from Google-owned game developer Niantic. "That passion led him to join Google, then Google Maps, and consequently he created Pokémon GO." The mobile game was an instant success, introducing millions of players to a world of "augmented reality" gaming. To play, users must walk around in the real world in order to find and catch Pokémon on their phone screens. One Japanese player, playing under the name Kyarorina, got hooked after his workplace organised a walking competition for its staff. "The goal of simply walking turned into an obsession with chasing after rare Pokémon and catching them all," he says. The stats tell the full story: since first downloading Pokémon GO in July 2016, he has walked over 31,000km (19,200 miles) and visited more than a million Pokéstops - real-life locations where players can collect in-game items. In 2019, Kyarorina became the first person to catch one million Pokémon in-game. "Recently I've been spending about eight to 10 hours a day catching Pokémon, about 2,000 a day. I think I'll hit two million by the end of this month and announce it on Twitter," he tells the BBC. Pokémon GO's initial popularity was matched by its profitability. In 2020, five years after the game was first released, it saw record revenues of over $1bn (£718m). The free-to-play game makes money both by charging players for items and by charging businesses for the privilege of appearing on the in-game map. For Neriko Doerr and Debra Occhi, cultural anthropologists who co-authored a book on Pokémon GO, the game is evidence of Pokémon's broad appeal - something that can help explain the franchise's success. "Pokemon GO attracted people who are into going outside, walking around and people who are happy with just collecting Pokemon into the game world, some of whom became very enthusiastic," Ms Doerr says. The red pins As Pokémon's 25th birthday approached, the franchise once again hit headlines as YouTuber Logan Paul paid $2m for six boxes of vintage Pokémon cards. "This is a newfound obsession of mine and I am so excited to share it with other enthusiasts around the world," the controversial entertainer wrote on social media. "Pokemon cards have always been highly prized," says Tracy Martin, an expert in valuing post-war collectables. "This is down to nostalgia and obviously the rarity of a card, but also Pokemon is still very current. It's a phenomenon that seems to grip both children and adults, and that's the main reason why it's still going strong," she says. "That was not what we expected," says Pokémon's Tsunekazu Ishihara, who was himself featured on a Pokémon card that last year sold for $50,000. So what does Ishihara expect the next 25 years will bring for Pokémon? "World domination" he says, eyes fixed on the red pins that dot his map. Additional reporting by the BBC's Sakiko Shiraishi.	In Tokyo's ritzy Roppongi neighbourhood, Tsunekazu Ishihara, president of The Pokémon Company, sits opposite a giant map of the world.
+text: Twelve paintings from some of the world's most famous galleries will go on show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Among the works being loaned is a self-portrait by Van Gogh, currently on show at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The Prado in Madrid and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC have also agreed to lend paintings to the year-long exhibition. The Tate collection in London will also donate David Hockney's Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy. The Dulwich Picture Gallery was the first purpose-built public art gallery in England when it opened its doors in the south London suburb in 1811. Director Ian Dejardin said: "We are proud and delighted to be able to announce our plans for this landmark birthday with the extraordinary support of the world's great museums and collections, our dedicated patrons and benefactors, and the community that we serve."	A south London gallery is celebrating its 200th anniversary next year by showing a masterpiece every month.
+text: The Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation that runs the site, voted on new measures that will be finalised by the end of the year. Wikipedia is written and updated by volunteers. Many, particularly women and members of the LGBTQ community, have complained of abuse and harassment from other editors. Wikimedia's board of trustees said maintaining civility was a core value. "We must work together to create a safe, inclusive culture, where everyone feels welcome, that their contributions are valued, and that their perspective matters," said Katherine Maher, the chief executive officer of the Wikimedia Foundation. "Our goal is all the world's knowledge, and this is an essential step on our journey." What will the new rules involve? The foundation's binding code of conduct for members will include banning or limiting access if volunteers violate the terms. There will be a review process for the decisions if volunteers feel more context is needed. Wikipedia has become one of the internet's most trusted sources for information, but complaints about gender imbalances and harassment have plagued the platform for close to a decade. A study from the University of Washington on the gender gap in Wikipedia editors found many female and LGBTQ editors feared for their safety. Several female editors told the researchers their work had contested by male editors or that they received negative feedback from a male editor. A New York Times article from 2019 also highlighted the concerns some transgender editors have about volunteering for the site. One editor told the paper they received death threats. How does the harassment work? Wikipedia is not a formal social media platform like Facebook or Twitter. But its editors can interact with one another and can change the content on a page after it has been written. This has led to a form of harassment where, after one volunteer adds to a page, another volunteer will remove or change that work moments later, forcing the first editor to redo their work and leading to editing battles. The development of a new code of conduct will take place in two phases. The first will include setting policies for in-person and virtual events as well as policies for technical spaces including chat rooms and other Wikimedia projects. It is set to be ratified by the board by 30 August. A second phase outlining enforcement when the rules are broken will be approved by the end of the year, according to the board's plan.	Wikipedia is to institute a new code of conduct to battle what the firm called "toxic behaviour" by some volunteers.
+text: The consumer group found "dubious" deals that were worse than they first appeared at most major UK chains. These included multi-buys that cost more despite the alleged offer, and special offers in which goods are sold at the special price most of the year. Supermarkets were trying to cut costs for shoppers, a retailers' group said. Which? looked at pricing data from May 2018 to June 2019 for 459 products. These spanned seven of the UK's biggest supermarkets: Asda, Iceland, Morrisons, Ocado, Sainsbury's, Tesco and Waitrose. Among the "dodgy" deals it came across was an Iceland multi-buy, where customers were offered two packets of Kellogg's Crunchy Nut cornflakes for £4, or £2 each. While this appeared to offer a saving, Which? found that the price was just £1.49 per packet a week earlier - 51p less per item. It also found a promotion at Asda for Wall's Carte D'Or Strawberry Ice Cream (1L) that read, "was £3.50 now £2". However, Which? said the product retailed at £2 for around eight months of the year, with the special offer only lasting about a third of that time. 'Stop tricking shoppers' A previous Which? investigation into misleading pricing in 2015 led the government to roll out new guidance to ensure retailers' pricing practices complied with consumer law. The rules state that retailers must ensure the information they present to consumers is fair and does not waste time or cause annoyance, disappointment or regret. Neither should it cause a consumer to overspend or buy a product that is inappropriate for them. But Natalie Hitchins, head of home products and services at Which?, said: "Four years on... many of the big supermarkets are clearly still in the wrong, with numerous examples of dodgy discounts and never-ending offers. "These retailers must stop tricking shoppers with deceptive deals... if not, the CMA must intervene to ensure that pricing guidelines are followed." She said that the magazine would report its latest findings to the Consumer and Markets Authority (CMA). Iceland said it would review its promotional calendar following Which?'s findings, but Asda rejected claims its offers were misleading. The other supermarkets did not respond to requests for comment. Meanwhile, industry body the British Retail Consortium said: "Supermarkets seek to provide the best value for consumers on the hundreds of thousands of product lines they sell. "This is often through promotions and discounts, which can change week to week, even on the same product lines, as retailers seek to cut the cost for shoppers."	Supermarkets are still offering misleading special offers and discounts despite rules designed to stop this, according to Which?
+text: The associates of the Lyons criminal family were found guilty of plotting attempts to kill five men linked to their rivals, the Daniel family. Police said it was a "miracle" that no-one died in the violent attacks. The judge, Lord Mulholland, said the "sophisticated plot" was foiled by "good, old-fashioned detective work". Brian Ferguson, 37, Andrew Gallacher, 40, Robert Pickett, 53, Andrew Sinclair, 32, John Hardie, 35, and Peter Bain, 45, were found guilty of conspiracy to murder last month. Ferguson, Gallacher and Hardie were each jailed for 20 years; Picket was jailed for 16 years; Bain was jailed for 15 years; and Sinclair was jailed for 13 years and three months. Lord Mulholland told them: "You sought to turn Glasgow into a war zone for your feud. "This is a civilised city, which is based on the rule of law. There is no place for this type of conduct, retribution or the law of the jungle." The men had targeted Robert Daniel, Thomas Bilsland, Gary Petty, Ryan Fitzsimmons and Steven Daniel between June 2016 and September 2017 at locations in Glasgow, North Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire and Manchester. Shot dead Their attackers were tracked down during Operation Engagement, the latest investigation linked to the feud - which has been connected to dozens of tit-for-tat attacks, including a murder. The trial heard that victim Steven Daniel knew Kevin "Gerbil" Carroll, who was shot dead in the car park of Asda, Robroyston, in January 2010. The first murder trial, which later collapsed, heard that Carroll's killer, William Paterson, visited a member of the Lyons family in prison, two days after the supermarket murder. The latest 14-week trial at the High Court in Glasgow, which was held amid tight security, focused on five attempted murders in five months. The murder bids included an attack on Steven Daniel on 18 May 2017. After a high-speed car chase which ended with a crash on an off-ramp of the M8, he was attacked with a cleaver and a hammer. His nose was almost severed from his face, and his injuries were so severe that police initially thought he had been shot at close range. The Audi S3 used in the attack was set on fire, but a bloodied machete was discovered in the back seat. The first attack was on Robert Daniel, whose car was rammed by another vehicle before he was chased into a house in Robroyston on 8 December 2016. Once inside the house he was struck twice on the back of the head with what he later told police was a hatchet or a machete. A month later, Thomas Bilsland suffered a fractured skull after he was set upon in Glasgow's Cranhill. Gary Petty was targeted after he visited an Italian takeaway in Maryhill on 7 March 2017. Former soldier Ryan Fitzsimmons was left unconscious and brain-damaged after being ambushed in the street by a masked gang on 28 April 2017. The 34-year-old was attacked with a sword and a hammer outside the home he shared with his mother in Clydebank, West Dunbartonshire. He told jurors: "It felt like death was coming." His mum Geraldine, 61, was so affected by what happened that she suffered a heart attack in the street. Crime cash Mr Fitzsimmons told jurors he had "no enemies" but jurors heard his older brother Martyn had once been charged with shooting Ross Monaghan, the man cleared of murdering Carroll outside Asda. Last year soldier turned gun-runner Martyn was jailed for 10-and-a-half years after admitting having a Glock and ammunition, and hiding £36,000 of crime cash. He was part of a nine-man crime gang - described as Scotland's most dangerous - jailed for 87 years after Operation Escalade, a massive probe into violence, drugs and firearms offences. Lord Mullholland described Ryan Fitzsimmons as "a hard-working man living peacefully with his mother". He said: "As a result of the extensive injuries sustained during the attack upon him he has had to give up work and is dependent on his mother for his care and support. The need for care and support will persist for the rest of his life." Lord Mulholland said Steven Daniel had told the trial that he was not aware of a feud between the Lyons and Daniel families. "I did not believe a word and, more importantly, neither did the jury," he said. The judge said the "sophisticated" murder plot had involved high-tech tracker devices and encrypted mobile phones. But he told the six men: "You were caught by good, old-fashioned detective work, identifying DNA on a tracker - and everything followed from there." Det Inp Jim Bradley said it was a "miracle" that no one died. "It's been documented in the trial that if it hadn't been for medical intervention and the expertise of medical staff that a couple of our victims would have died," he said. "The level of violence in such a planned and premeditated manner was horrific. "There's no other word for it - just totally horrific." He added that there had been repeated attempts to "calm things down" and stop the violence. "Hopefully this will be a deterrent to anybody that's going to involve themselves in this kind of activity," he said. "There's no winners in this type of crime."	Six men who tried to turn Glasgow into a "war zone" during a feud with a rival gang have been jailed for a total of 104 years.
+text: A 20-year-old man was taken to hospital from Cineworld at 20:15 GMT on Sunday, after a fight at the entertainment complex. Police said his injuries were not life-threatening and he has since been discharged from hospital. A 16-year-old boy and a 23-year-old man are in custody on suspicion of the possession of a bladed article. The teenager was also arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm. Passer-by Amy Fearnside described the moment eight police officers arrived wearing stab vests and went into The Cornerhouse complex. "We only knew what happened as my boyfriend heard a teenager on his phone asking to be picked up as someone had been stabbed," said the 38-year-old from Strelley, Nottinghamshire. "There was no panic, people were just carrying on as normal. A few people were coming out of the building, but not running or anything." Supt Ross Cooke, of Nottinghamshire Police, said: "Our officers have acted quickly to establish the circumstances around this incident leading to two arrests and the recovery of a knife. "Isolated incidents such as this are incredibly serious and as a force we are committed to ensuring that appropriate action is taken to keep people safe and bring to justice those responsible." A spokesman for Cineworld said: "The safety and security of our customers is our absolute priority and we take incidents of this nature extremely seriously. "We are doing all we can to support the police's investigation." Anyone who witnessed what happened has been urged to contact Nottinghamshire Police. Follow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.	Two people have been arrested over a stabbing at a cinema in Nottingham city centre.
+text: University of Nottingham researchers found that pregnant women exposed to smoke at work or home increased their risk of stillbirth by 23% and of having a baby with defects by 13%. They looked at 19 previous studies from around the world. A UK expert said it was "vital" women knew the risks of second-hand smoke. The studies used to pull this research together were carried out in North America, South America, Asia and Europe. All the studies focused on pregnant women who did not smoke themselves but were passive smokers due to their proximity to a partner who smoked or work colleagues who smoked. The combined data from the studies suggests that being exposed to more than 10 cigarettes a day is enough for the risks to be increased. However, the University of Nottingham study did not find an increased risk of miscarriage or newborn death from second-hand smoke - only an increased risk of still birth and birth defects. The results did not point to a link with any specific congenital birth defect. Impact on sperm development The researchers say fathers who smoke should be more aware of the danger they pose to their unborn child. Previous research has shown that women who smoke during their pregnancy create serious health risks for their unborn baby, including low birth weight, premature birth and a range of serious birth defects such as cleft palate, club foot and heart problems. Dr Jo Leonardi-Bee, lead researcher of the study and associate professor in medical statistics at the University of Nottingham, said they still did not know when the effects of the second-hand smoke begin. "What we still don't know is whether it is the effect of sidestream smoke that the woman inhales that increases these particular risks or whether it is the direct effect of mainstream smoke that the father inhales during smoking that affects sperm development, or possibly both. "More research is needed into this issue although we already know that smoking does have an impact on sperm development, so it is very important that men quit smoking before trying for a baby." Dr Leonardi-Bee added: "The risks are related to the amount of cigarettes that are smoked so it is therefore very important for men to cut down. "Ultimately though, in the interests of their partner and their unborn child, the best option would be to give up completely." Andrew Shennan, professor of obstetrics at St. Thomas' Hospital in London and spokesperson for baby charity Tommy's, said: "It is vital that women are made aware of the possible risks associated with second-hand smoke and alert those around them of the impact it could potentially have on the health of their unborn baby. "The chemicals in cigarettes are known to significantly increase the risk of serious pregnancy complications."	Fathers-to-be should stop smoking to protect their unborn child from the risk of stillbirth or birth defects, scientists say.
+text: Campaigners say the sweet's branding is a "real step backwards" on reducing the stigma around mental health. The packaging on the chocolate-covered nuts features the name Nutters along with cross-eyed characters. Poundland said it listens to feedback and will "assess this line". In a statement the company said: "These chocolate-covered nuts have been a customer favourite over the last 12 months and that popularity suggests it hasn't caused offence to them." Mental health campaigners had criticised Poundland for the packaging which they said was "offensive and distressing". Lib Dem MP Norman Lamb, whose 29-year-old son Archie has suffered from mental health issues, said the word nutter is "pejorative" and "not the sort of expression we should be using these days". "If you just say nothing and just allow these products to be normal practice, it perpetuates a negative view of mental health - that there's something weird and odd about you. "Just think about being a teenager and thinking 'do I want to be defined as a nutter?' "We need to be doing much more to recognise that it's nothing to be ashamed of and embarrassed about and encourage young people to get help." Dr Sophie Dix, Director of Research at mental health research charity MQ, added: "While we have seen a positive change in perception of mental health, promotion of products with offensive language and distressing imagery is a real step backwards for progress." Poundland said it listens to feedback and has promised to assess the line of sweets at its next formal review.	Poundland has responded to claims its Nutters sweets are "offensive" to those with mental health problems - saying their popularity suggests customers do not have an issue with the product.
+text: The author made the apology on the anniversary of the fictional Battle of Hogwarts, which saw many popular characters die. She's previously said sorry for killing Fred Weasley and Remus Lupin. "This year I'd like to apologise for killing (whispers)... Snape. *runs for cover*," she tweeted. Aware of the controversy she was about to start, she asked fans not to argue over her choice of character given Professor Snape's long-running hatred of Harry. However her apology still sparked a lively debate on Twitter. "He bullied Harry and tried to make his school life hell just because he was petty and bitter," Kim Carlton wrote. Rune Johansson said: "I can't forgive Snape for what he did to Neville. They were both bullied, underestimated, mocked. He could have been kind. He wasn't." While Emma tweeted: "You really didn't need to apologise for that one." But some fans were more forgiving. In the early days, Snape was on Voldermort's side until he changed allegiance because of his love for Harry's mother, Lily Potter. He then became a spy for Dumbledore and was killed by Voldermort's snake at the Battle of Hogwarts. Another Twitter user, Blake Leyer, wrote: "It gutted me. I sobbed. SOBBED. Sirius was the next worst loss for me. The worst for my daughter it was Lupin." And Dean tweeted: "He didn't think they SHOULD be together he never wanted to force her into anything, he just loved her." Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	In a tweet that is dividing Harry Potter fans, JK Rowling has said sorry for killing off Professor Snape in the final book of the Harry Potter series.
+text: It included a skyscraper-sized version of Scott teleporting across the landscape as he performed his songs. Fortnite is one the world's most popular games, attracting millions of young players from across the globe. Scott used the opportunity to reveal a new song, while players celebrated the event with themed in-game items. The award-winning artist has sold tens of millions of records in his career, and was due to perform at the world-famous Coachella music festival this summer before it was postponed. Those who missed the digital debut, however, can catch "encore" performances at the weekend. A digital version of Scott performed a fully-animated, scripted 10-minute set - shorter than a concert performance. As Scott moved from song to song, his virtual avatar changed - first into a cyborg, then a fluorescent spaceman. The landscape shifted and crumbled around players on an enormous scale. After it was over, Scott tweeted: "Honestly today was one of the most inspiring days. Love every single one of you guys." In December, Tim Sweeney, the billionaire chief executive of Epic Games was asked on Twitter: "Do you view Fortnite as a game or as a platform?" His answer was telling, and possibly a hint at what was in the pipeline. "Fortnite is a game. But please ask that question again in 12 months." The Travis Scott concert was probably in development back then, and can now go down as the most successful live event the game has ever staged. You can easily imagine larger and more immersive events in the future and some crystal ball gazers are now seeing Fortnite as a lot more than a game and possibly a major player in virtual reality if they can get the technology right. It all sounds like the prologue to the book Ready Player One about a metaverse where people play, socialise and live their lives online. However, there could be another reason that Epic is pushing in this direction. It's still one of the most popular video games in the world but competition is fiercer than ever with the likes of Warzone and Valorant on the rise. It's been a year since the company announced it had 250 million registered players, which is roughly the same size as Snapchat's userbase. Could these events be a sign of the company diversifying in an effort to keep people interested and entertained? It is not the first time Fortnite has staged a virtual concert, having hosted Marshmello early last year, as well as a Star Wars tie-in and other live events. Technology site the Verge wrote that while the Marshmello experiment "was an exciting, dynamic example of what a virtual concert could look like", Scott's show "blew it out of the water". Forbes labelled the show a "stunning spectacle" that offered a glimpse at Epic Games' "metaverse" concept for the game. Epic said that more than 12.3 million players participated in the event at the same time, which it said was an all-time record.	More than 12 million players logged in for Fortnite's concert featuring Travis Scott, with reviewers calling it "stunning" and "spectacular".
+text: Margo MacDonald's plea came ahead of a Scottish Parliament vote on the End of Life Assistance Bill on 1 December. The independent MSP, who has Parkinson's disease, published the results of a poll which indicated most Scots adults supported the proposals. MSPs have been allowed a free vote on the bill, rather than on party lines. It is not illegal to attempt suicide in Scotland but helping someone take their own life could lead to prosecution. According to the poll, conducted by Angus Reid, 77% of adult Scots back the legislation, while 12% opposed it and the remainder were unsure. The survey, carried out from 14-16 April, asked 1,001 people: "The Scottish Parliament is considering the End of Life Assistance (Scotland) Bill, which would allow people with intolerable terminal illnesses to be assisted if they wish to end their own life. Do you agree this option should be available to people in Scotland?" The "Care not Killing" alliance of 50 groups, including faith-based organisations, has campaigned against the bill by promoting better palliative care. Ahead of this week's vote, Ms MacDonald said: "MSPs should be influenced by the strength of public support as much as by the church campaign." Ms MacDonald's bill would allow people whose lives become intolerable through a progressive degenerative condition, a trauma or terminal illness to seek a doctor's help in dying. It also proposes a series of safeguards which would prevent abuse of the legislation. The fate of the bill at the first vote is uncertain, and the majority of MSPs on a special Holyrood committee set up to scrutinise the legislation said it was "not persuaded that the case had been made to decriminalise the law of homicide as it applies to assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia". If the general principles of the bill were to be approved this week, the legislation would still face a further two parliamentary votes before becoming law, during which time it could be amended. In England, the director of public prosecutions has indicated he was unlikely to take legal action against those who assist the suicide of friends or relatives who have a settled and informed wish to die. However, no such guidance has been given in Scotland. The bill vote had been due to take place on Thursday, but has been moved to accommodate a debate on the row over the Scottish variable rate of income tax.	The politician behind plans to give terminally ill people the right choose when to die has urged MSPs to recognise strong public support for the move.
+text: By Paul MartinReporter, BBC Wales Live The idea is being considered by the Welsh Government as part of its curriculum changes. New Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) is being introduced in primary and secondary schools. Education Minister Kirsty Williams said she was considering whether allowing parents to remove pupils from the lessons was "still appropriate". The consultation paper said arrangements had been unchanged for decades and it was "keen to explore potential approaches to modernise". Ms Williams told Wales Live: "We don't give parents the right to withdraw from specific parts of the curriculum - maths or maybe science if somebody is concerned they don't believe the science around climate change - we don't give parents the right to withdraw children from those lessons. "So it's about checking in to see if these rights are still appropriate as we move forward with our curriculum reform. "We will do this sensitively and we will be listening to views and we're not charging ahead in a gung-ho fashion because we realise these are complex but highly important issues and that's why we're listening seriously to people's views." Currently, Sex and Relationships Education must be taught in secondary schools, but is optional in primary schools - under the new curriculum RSE will also be taught in primary schools. Government guidance said it should be "developmentally appropriate" and recognise the importance of "diversity and difference across a range of identities related to relationships, sex, gender, sexuality". There have been protests by parents at a school in Birmingham as they feel classes about LGBT rights were age-inappropriate and incompatible with Islam. Under the new curriculum, schools would be legally obliged to teach RSE, but the guidance on which areas schools should focus on would be advisory. However, the Welsh Government said it "fully expects schools to be teaching RSE that is inclusive of LGBTQI+ learners". Some religious groups, including the Christian Institute, Muslim Council of Wales and the Catholic Education Service, are opposed to the right of withdrawal being removed. The National Association of Head Teachers said the decision "must continue to sit with parents and carers" although key elements relating to safeguarding must continue for all children. But the Church in Wales, National Secular Society and Children's Commissioner have backed the idea. The Church in Wales said RSE helped young people "develop an understanding of tolerance and diversity" making it "fundamental to the core purposes of the new curriculum". The consultation closed on Monday and the government will analyse responses before making a decision.	Parents' right to remove children from sex and relationships education could be scrapped under reform plans.
+text: PM Ahmed bin Daghar and members of his cabinet are believed to be holed up inside the presidential palace in Aden. There are reports of talks between the southern separatists and government forces, who were previously allies. The fighting opens up a new front in Yemen, splitting the alliance against Houthi rebels in the north. It has already led to the deaths of 40 people since Sunday, the Red Cross says. The separatists are also reported to have also seized Aden's military bases. Yemen's internationally-recognised government relocated to Aden in 2015, when President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi and his cabinet were forced to flee the capital, Sanaa, following an offensive by the Houthis. A assault on Sanaa prompted a Saudi-led multinational coalition to launch a military campaign to defeat the rebels. Since then, more than 9,245 people have been killed and 3 million displaced, according to the UN. Why are the separatists and government fighting? Supporters of two sides have fought alongside each other over the past three years but it has always seemed an uneasy alliance. Before the conflict, separatist sentiment had been running high in the south, which was an independent state before unification with the North in 1990. Although the separatists were suspicious of Mr Hadi - who is a southerner but supports continued unity with the north - they joined forces to prevent the Houthis capturing Aden and drive them out of most of the south. However, tensions between the two sides remained. The situation was made more complex by divisions within the Saudi-led coalition. Saudi Arabia backs Mr Hadi, who is based in Riyadh, while the United Arab Emirates - a key partner in the coalition - is closely aligned with the separatists. How did the clashes in Aden start? They erupted on Sunday after the expiry of a deadline set by the separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC) for a cabinet reshuffle, including the removal of Mr Bin Daghar. The council accused the government of "rampant corruption" resulting in a "deteriorating economic, security and social situation never before witnessed in the history of the south". The fighting, which has involved tanks and heavy artillery, began in the eastern Khor Maksar district, where the airport located. It quickly spread to the southern Crater district, near presidential palace, and the hills overlooking the sea port. As the separatists took control of official facilities and military bases, the prime minister denounced what he called a "coup". President Hadi, who is based in Riyadh, ordered his forces to secure Aden. What's the latest? By Tuesday morning, the separatists were said to have seized the last stronghold of the Presidential Guards force in the northern Dar Saad district and reached the presidential palace, where Mr bin Daghar is based. Sources close to the southern separatists told Reuters that negotiations were under way to allow Mr bin Daghar's government to leave the city safely, but a government source said the prime minister had no intention of leaving. Meanwhile, Save the Children has announced it is suspending all humanitarian work, citing security reasons. "Our staff are forced to shelter at home and in bunkers while gun battles rage outside," the charity's director in Yemen Temer Kirolos said. What's being done to end the fighting? The Saudi-led coalition urged both sides to cease hostilities on Tuesday. "The coalition will take all the measures it deems necessary to restore stability and security in Aden," a statement said. The US, which is supporting the coalition's campaign against the Houthis, expressed concern and called "for dialogue among all parties in Aden to reach a political solution". "The Yemeni people are already facing a dire humanitarian crisis. Additional divisions and violence within Yemen will only increase their suffering," it added. The UN's interim humanitarian co-ordinator in Yemen, Stephen Anderson, said the violence was having a negative impact on its operations across the south of the country. "Humanitarian movements within the city have been suspended and aid workers remain in lockdown in their residences, unable to continue critical life-saving activities," he warned.	Yemeni separatists have taken almost full control of the southern port city of Aden after days of fighting with government forces, residents say.
+text: The ring is regarded as sacred and women, traditionally seen as "impure", are forbidden from entering. They ran into the ring when Maizuru city mayor Ryozo Tatami collapsed while giving a speech. The head of Japan's sumo association later apologised to the women. "The announcement [to get off the stage] was made by a referee who was upset, but it was an inappropriate act in a situation that involves one's life," Nobuyoshi Hakkaku, the sumo association's chief said in a statement. "We deeply apologise." Local reports later emerged that spectators saw salt being thrown into the ring after the women had left. In Japanese culture, salt is thrown into the sumo ring before a match to purify it. Some on social media said the gesture implied that the women had "dirtied" the ring. "How rude is it that they threw salt to cleanse the ring after the women went in?" one Japanese Twitter user said. "This is the response to someone who tried to save a life? I think we'd better sprinkle salt on the head of the sumo association," another added. Mr Tatami was taken to hospital and is in a stable condition. It is not the first time women entering the sumo ring has sparked controversy. In 2000, the then governor of Osaka Fusae Ota asked the sumo association to allow her to enter the ring so she could present a trophy to the champion wrestler, but her request was rejected.	Women who rushed to perform first aid on a man who collapsed in a sumo ring in Japan were ordered by a referee to leave the ring, because females are banned from the space.
+text: The Grade II listed Ribblehead Viaduct, which is 104 ft (32m) high, opened in 1875 and carries the Settle to Carlisle railway line. Network Rail said it needed to re-point eroded mortar joints and replace broken stones on all 24 arches which span the 1,318 ft (402m) long structure. The repair work is expected to finish by the end of February. Owned by Network Rail, bosses said it had taken "months of painstaking work to refine the plans" which included analysing ten samples of mortar from the viaduct "to ensure that the mix used in the repair will be as close to the original as possible". Phil James, North West route director at Network Rail, said: "It's a privilege to look after so many significant buildings and structures across the rail network, but Ribblehead Viaduct has got to be one of the crown jewels of Victorian civil engineering. "We know the structure is incredibly important both locally and internationally and we want to give it the care and attention that it deserves so it can be enjoyed by future generations of passengers and sightseers." The Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority said it was "the first major repairs since the 1990s". Jim Munday, from the authority, said: "If you asked anyone in England to picture a train on a viaduct, they'd probably think of Ribblehead Viaduct. It is a star attraction for our area, although it is but one of many superb Victorian viaducts in the Yorkshire Dales National Park." More than 100 workers died during its construction, which took about five years to complete. The 2,000 workers lived in a shantytown built in the valley below, which was the inspiration for the ITV television series Jericho. Follow BBC Yorkshire on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk.	Scaffolding is being erected on one of Yorkshire's most historic landmarks as a £2.1m restoration project begins.
+text: Dounreay, an experimental nuclear power complex built in the 1950s, is in the process of being shutdown and the site cleaned up. However, companies set up because of the site such as JGC have been finding work on the MeyGen tidal energy scheme. The Beatrice Offshore Windfarm off Wick is also expected to create new jobs. Thurso engineering firm JGC works on contracts related to Dounreay, but has also been constructing large ballast blocks for tidal turbines for the MeyGen project. The tidal energy scheme in the Inner Sound of the Pentland Firth, an area of the sea that separates the Scottish mainland and Orkney, will initially involve four turbines. Cables to bring ashore the electricity generated by the devices have already been laid. Atlantis Resources, the developer, hopes to later expand the project to up to 269 turbines. 'Different techniques' JGC has been working on making 24 ballast blocks, each weighing 206 tonnes. The firm's Steven Sutherland told BBC Scotland: "The skills transitions are relatively simple going into the renewable sector. "The items are a lot larger, so we have different techniques to learn, but we are managing that transition well." Adam Bremner, an employee at the firm, said the renewable sector was offering local people the chance to stay in the area where they were brought up. He said: "There has been a shortage of work around here for a while, so this is all good. If the work is here then you are going to stay here." 'Fantastic news' Trudy Morris, of Caithness Chamber of Commerce, said the construction of the £2.6bn Beatrice Offshore Windfarm Ltd (Bowl) project should bring further opportunities. More than 80 turbines could be installed in the Outer Moray Firth with construction work expected to start next year. The harbour at Wick, once a busy fishing port, will be used for the shipping in and out of equipment, turbines and construction workers. Ms Morris said: "It is going to be operational in 2019, but there is going to be a lot of work prior to that which businesses will be able to get involved in. "There will be a need to upgrade the port and a need for technicians." Willie Watt, chairman of Wick Harbour Authority, said such an opportunity as the offshore wind farm had been hoped for for years. He said: "It is fantastic news for Wick. We have been working for the last 10 years to try and regenerate the harbour and secure a new future following the demise of fishing. "This is going to give us stability, a future, opportunities and most importantly it is a new industry coming to town for the youngsters to come on to."	Firms in Caithness are making a transition from a reliance on work from Dounreay to new opportunities in renewable energy, say business leaders.
+text: By Sean CoughlanEducation correspondent Inspectors criticised Darul Uloom school when they saw a "female governor sat out of sight of the male governors in an adjacent room". But a statement from the school says the school did not segregate, but was respecting the governor's choice. A wave of Ofsted inspections found nine private faith schools "inadequate". Ofsted chief Sir Michael Wilshaw had written on Tuesday to Education Secretary Nicky Morgan with the findings of inspections of 22 private faith schools, in cities including Manchester, Coventry, Birmingham and Leicester. These had formerly been inspected by an independent group - the Bridge Schools Inspectorate - but from this autumn Ofsted has taken over responsibility for carrying out checks. Religious studies GCSE 'error of law' 'Mutual respect' Inspectors raised concerns including that some of these private faith schools were not "promoting fundamental British values" and were not encouraging "mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs". They highlighted particular concern about Darul Uloom Islamic High School in Birmingham, where inspectors observed that "the only female governor sat out of sight of the male governors in an adjacent room to the main meeting. "As a result, she could only contribute to the meeting through a doorway. Governors told inspectors this was their usual arrangement. "A senior HMI has pointed out to the school that this practice is unacceptable as it fails to show proper respect for women." In response, a statement from the school says that visitors, parents and governors can "sit where and how they wish as they feel comfortable, and we never assert any restrictions on this". The private boys' schools says it has an "open door policy" and has hosted meetings including for a local faith forum and for the West Midlands police. The school issued a statement from the unnamed governor saying that "my request to sit as I please" was a way of "demonstrating the school's strong promotion of both Islamic and British values". "The right for a person to choose is a universal value," she said. But she claimed that the "British values" requirement was opposed to this. Darul Uloom, now rated as inadequate, had been inspected by Ofsted inspectors since 2011. In October 2013, Ofsted rated it as good and described the head teacher as "forward thinking". Ofsted says that although its own inspectors carried out a number of inspections in recent years, the school was considered to have been part of the BSI inspection system. Among the 22 schools inspected 15 were Muslim and seven Christian. They had been part of a group of about 50 private schools which had been assessed by the Bridge Schools Inspectorate, which now is no longer approved to inspect schools. Among the 22 schools inspected by Ofsted, one was "outstanding", four were rated "good", eight were rated as "requires improvement" and nine were "inadequate". Sir Michael's letter to the education secretary says it should be a priority to inspect other former Bridge Schools Inspectorate schools.	The female governor at a private Muslim school in Birmingham - at the centre of criticism from Ofsted - chose to sit separately from men, says the school.
+text: By Ross HawkinsPolitical correspondent, BBC News GCSE results data could be used to target schools that fail to send high-achieving pupils to top universities. Universities Minister David Willetts said he would "love it" it if the best universities could write to young people with the best GCSE grades. Data protection rules mean that is unlikely to happen. But ministers believe GCSE results could be used to identify schools in which students get good results at 16 but fail to go on to the top-rated institutions. Mr Willetts said data could be used to "track" schools with weak records in getting their pupils into leading universities. Universities could then work with those schools, encouraging students to apply and potentially making them "less onerous" conditional A-level offers. 'Merit-based' In an interview for BBC Radio Four's World at One, Mr Willetts said universities were "entitled to look behind" A level grades to decide who to admit. Information from student loan repayments may also be used to provide more accurate information about what people can expect to earn once they graduate from courses. The ideas follow a push, announced by the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg earlier this year, to make information about social mobility more transparent. Students from "tougher backgrounds and less academic schools" appear to out perform when they get to university, Mr Willetts said. He added: "Universities are entitled to look behind the A level grades to assess who are the people who are going to be the best performers at university. That's why I say my criteria is actually merit, it isn't social engineering." University admissions have long been central to the debate about social mobility. Research from the access regulator Offa indicates the richest 20% of young people are seven times more likely to enter the most selective institutions than the poorest 40%. 'Well-intentioned' Professor Les Ebdon, the new head of the Office for Fair Access (Offa), has urged universities to set themselves "challenging" admissions targets. MPs on the Commons Business, Innovation and Skills select committee voted against accepting the appointment of Prof Ebdon and called for the recruitment process to begin again but he was later confirmed in his post. Offa can fine universities up to £500,000 for breaching access agreements. Some MPs fear that Offa could compromise universities' independence in running their own admissions. The Conservative backbencher Rob Wilson said he supported Mr Willetts' ideas but warned: "My concern really is with the Office for Fair Access and with Les Ebdon is that we have an apparatus which has been put in place that however well intentioned David Willetts is and this government is, that apparatus is there for future governments."	High achieving pupils at schools with poor GCSE results could be offered a less demanding route into higher education, under government plans.
+text: The University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust (UHMBT) met seven of 40 suggestions from the Care Quality Commission for Furness General Hospital and Royal Lancaster Infirmary. A CQC investigation was launched into the trust last year. UHMBT said it had made "good progress" in meeting most of the CQC's concerns. During a follow-up review in April, the CQC found 30 of its recommendations had been partially met by the trust. Inspectors said three had not been achieved and to meet these, the UHMBT must: 'Made good progress' Malcolm Bower-Brown, CQC regional director for the North, said the commission was "pleased to report evidence of improvement" but said there was "still a great deal of work to be done". He said inspectors would "continue to monitor the trust closely until we are assured required service improvements are fully embedded and patients are receiving safe and effective services on a sustainable basis". A CQC spokesman added the publication of the follow-up report marked the end of the commission's formal investigation into the trust. Since the investigation was launched, UHMBT has invested £5.5m in patient services and another £1m has been spent on more doctors, nurses and clinical support workers in its emergency departments. UHMBT chief executive Jackie Daniel said: "Staff across the organisation have really come together to improve things for the benefit of our patients. "We accept that we still have work to do in the areas highlighted in the report where we were found to be partly meeting, or not meeting, the standards." She added that "positive steps" had been made after the inspection and added the trust aimed "to not only meet all the recommendations but exceed them".	An under-review NHS trust has still not met recommendations to improve emergency care at two hospitals, according to health inspectors .
+text: Artist's impressions of the redesign of Hillington Square in King's Lynn went on display at the town hall on Tuesday. A month-long period of further consultation on the revamp of the 1960s complex will now go ahead before plans are submitted for approval. "When I first arrived, we looked at it and it looks like it has landed from outer space," said Mr Hemingway. "It looked like a fortress had been put up. "And from the community themselves, you start to find out that actually it's almost like Hillington Square has got a negative brand." The designer, who launched the Red or Dead fashion label with his wife Geraldine, started his affordable social design firm in 1999 after selling his clothing brand. He said he was keen to introduce the concept of community living to the "unloved" town centre estate, which is owned by Freebridge Community Housing. "The main thing that we want to do is knit it back into King's Lynn," said Mr Hemingway at the design launch in the town. "It doesn't feel like you want to linger about at all whether you're passing through or a resident." The former council-owned estate, which comprises 320 properties, is to have a former road, Union Street, reinstated and spaces for community enterprises and businesses will be created. The plans will be on view at King's Lynn Town Hall for the next month. Related Internet Links Freebridge Community Housing Hemingway Design Hillington Square	Designer Wayne Hemingway has unveiled his plans for the regeneration of a rundown Norfolk housing estate.
+text: The Ruabon-based firm went into administration on Wednesday with the loss of 320 jobs. The company ran public and school services across Wrexham, Flintshire, Denbighshire and into Cheshire. One leading Denbighshire councillor, David Smith, said it was well known that the bus operator was struggling. "I think people were aware that there were financial problems with GHA for a while," said Mr Smith, who is responsible for public services on Denbighshire council. "But nobody had an idea as to how high or how much that was, or when it was going to tip over." Administrators confirmed on Thursday the firm's principal directors Gareth and Arwyn Lloyd Davies had received a winding-up petition over unpaid taxes. "The directors attempted to secure an emergency funding package but were unsuccessful," said the administrators. In Denbighshire, Mr Smith told BBC Radio Wales' Good Morning Wales show the priority had been to secure school transport services until the end of the summer term, which is next Wednesday. "As soon as we heard on Wednesday we set our contingency plans into place," he said, adding 95% of the school transport ran on Thursday and 100% on Friday. Delays and cancelations The two other north Wales councils hit by the company's collapse said they were also focusing on school transport. "The council has given priority to school transport services in the first instance and is working with a number of different bus operators to put temporary arrangements in place; however some services may operate later than usual," said officials in Flintshire. Wrexham has seen as many as 22 public route services cancelled, and said officers were continuing to "to engage with local bus operators to understand and assist them where possible to reintroduce a local bus route". "We are pleased to say that pupils got to school this morning with minimum disruption and a big thanks must go to staff who worked into the night to sort this out," added officials.	The scale of the collapse of north Wales bus company GHA Coaches was unexpected, a senior council figure has said.
+text: The Belfast Coroners' Court inquest into the murders more than 40 years ago was hearing from a barrister for some of the victims' families on Wednesday. The 10 men were ordered out of a bus and shot in January 1976 in what became known as the Kingsmills massacre. No-one has ever been convicted in connection with the killings. Speaking in court, the families' barrister referred to a Police Service of Northern Ireland review of the case that was conducted after a report by its Historical Enquiries Team in 2011. The barrister said the police review linked a "prime individual" to 46 murders that happened between 1974 to 1976. The killings included 22 civilians, one of whom was a seven-year-old boy. The other murders involved 21 soldiers, two police officers, and a paramilitary activist. 'An open mind' The inquiry into the massacre is also seeking clarity on the status of so-called 'on-the-run' letters after it was claimed that a number of suspects in the massacre received the controversial correspondence. The controversial letters were issued by the government and assured the recipients that they were not being sought by police. During the cross-examination of a police intelligence officer on Wednesday, the barrister asked if forensic evidence that is not new "dies a death" because of the letters. The police witness said he did not know and therefore could not answer the question. The coroner said he was also not clear on the status of the letters and the hearing would keep "an open mind" on the question. He said it may be that some other witness will be required to provide an answer. The inquest into the killings has resumed this week after being adjourned last year due to a police investigation. It also heard on Wednesday about a secret intelligence document that recorded details of a self-confessed member of the IRA providing a list of 11 suspects. The hearing was also informed of police intelligence that linked a "crack unit" of the IRA in Whitecross in County Armagh with the massacre.	An inquest into the IRA killing of 10 Protestant workmen in County Armagh has been told that a key suspect has been linked to almost 50 murders.
+text: Addison Lee's John Griffin wrote: "[Cyclists] leap onto a vehicle which offers them no protection except a padded plastic hat." London Cycling Campaign (LCC) said this was "likely to put the safety... of cyclists at even greater risk." Mr Griffin later responded by saying: "I accept that the tone of the article was perhaps a little too inflammatory." In his initial comments, which appeared in the firm's thee magazine Add Lib, Mr Griffin's said cyclists were "throwing themselves onto some of the most congested spaces in the world". "The influx of beginner cyclists is going to lead to an overall increase in accidents involving cyclists," he said. "The rest of us occupying this road space have had to undergo extensive training. We are sitting inside a protected space with impact bars and air bags and paying extortionate amounts of taxes on our vehicle purchase, parking, servicing, insurance and road tax. "It is time for us to say to cyclists: 'You want to join our gang, get trained and pay up.'" However, LCC spokesman Mike Cavenett said: "Mr Griffin's article is only likely to incite his 3,500 drivers to behave even more irresponsibly, putting the safety of the hundreds of thousands of Londoners who cycle daily at even greater risk." "It's hard to see how the government departments and corporate clients that currently use Addison Lee services can continue to do so without appearing to condone the chairman's complete disregard for cyclist safety." Following the outcry, Mr Griffin issued a statement saying the article "was meant to entertain and generate debate, but the online reaction has obscured the main message that there are many inexperienced cyclists who need better training to be safe on London's busy roads". "Contrary to what has been reported, at no point did I suggest that motorists are never to blame," he said. "Both cyclists and motorists have a responsibility to use the roads safely."	The boss of a minicab firm has been criticised for comments cyclists claim could "put their lives at risk".
+text: Michael Cohen's help is detailed in the memo from Robert Mueller, who is heading the probe into alleged Russian collusion with the Trump team. The memo is mainly to guide sentencing for crimes Cohen has admitted. A second Mueller memo sets out the case against ex-campaign chief Paul Manafort for breaching a plea bargain deal. Cohen and Manafort are among a number of Trump aides being investigated in Special Counsel Mueller's probe. Both have been co-operating with his team but Mr Mueller now accuses Manafort of lying. In a separate court filing on Friday, prosecutors in New York made their case for the length of Cohen's sentence when it is delivered on Wednesday. They say he should serve a "substantial" jail term after admitting violating campaign finance laws, committing tax evasion and lying to Congress. President Trump has repeatedly denied there was any collusion with Russian officials, calling the investigation a "witch hunt". The White House said Friday's memos offered nothing new or damaging about the president. Mr Trump tweeted: "Totally clears the President. Thank you!" although it was unclear to what he was referring. What was in the Mueller memo on Cohen? It is a government sentencing memorandum on the one charge of lying to Congress. Cohen had admitted making false statements about a Trump property deal, out of loyalty to the president. The memo says that although this crime was serious, any sentencing should be served concurrently with the New York prosecutors' recommendations on other crimes. The memo says Cohen has taken "significant steps to mitigate his criminal conduct". The key elements of the memo are about the Russian links. They are that Cohen: What was in the New York prosecutors' memo? The New York prosecutors' submission said Cohen had committed four federal crimes over several years. "He was motivated to do so by personal greed, and repeatedly used his power and influence for deceptive ends," the filing said. One of the crimes Cohen admitted was paying hush money to two women who alleged they had affairs with Mr Trump. This could amount to a violation of US campaign finance laws. While the prosecutors accepted Cohen's help with the Mueller investigation should be taken into account in sentencing, they said it should only bring a "modest" reduction on the guidelines of four to five years. What do the Cohen memos all mean? Analysis by BBC North America reporter Anthony Zurcher In a one-two punch of court filings, the memos say that Cohen should get credit for providing useful information to investigators. But not too much credit. Some of the information in the special counsel's document is already known. The negotiations for a Trump Tower in Moscow, which lasted well into the 2016 presidential campaign, were once again outlined. But the document drives home the point that Donald Trump was kept informed about the possible deal, which could have netted "hundreds of millions of dollars" and that the negotiations took place "at a time of sustained efforts by the Russian government to interfere with the US election". Other details Cohen supplied are largely left to the imagination. The president is also once again implicated in the campaign finance charges against Cohen. The New York prosecutors state that Mr Trump's lawyer acted to silence two women who claim they had affairs with Mr Trump in order to "influence the 2016 presidential election". What's more, Cohen "acted in co-ordination with and at the direction of Individual 1". What all this means is that prosecutors in New York and Washington are claiming the president had implicit knowledge and involvement in a campaign finance crime. He also had knowledge of a massive property deal that involved contacts with Russian government officials while he was running for president in an election that was being targeted for influence by the Russian government. The picture they paint is a dark one. The Manafort memo Paul Manafort served for five months with the Trump campaign team, three of them as campaign manager, before being sacked. This latest memo, from Mr Mueller's office, tries to spell out how the special counsel believes Manafort breached a plea bargain deal by lying to investigators. Manafort was convicted of financial fraud in August relating to his work as a political consultant in Ukraine. He then accepted a plea bargain deal under which he would help with the Russia inquiry. The deal had meant Manafort would face up to 10 years in prison, with certain charges dismissed. His lawyers deny he has lied. The memo lists five allegations of breaching the deal by lying: The memo calls these "multiple discernible lies - these were not instances of mere memory lapse". Our correspondent, Anthony Zurcher, says that given the central focus of Mr Mueller's investigation is Russia-Trump links, the Kilimnik connection could prove to be of particular interest. More on Trump and Russia	President Donald Trump's ex-lawyer has given substantial help on how Russian nationals tried to affect the 2016 election, a legal memo has revealed.
+text: GTR, which runs Thameslink, Southern and Great Northern, was forced to cancel hundreds of trains following the introduction of new timetables in May. About 230 daily services have now been removed from GTR's routes to make for a "more consistent [revised] timetable". Charles Horton said: "I have been caught up in delays - I travel on our trains every single day." The GTR chief executive said: "Like most people who travel on Thameslink and Great Northern there have been occasional delays in the past few weeks. "Some trains have run on time and others haven't. I'm sorry about that." Mr Horton said planning for the new timetables, which should have taken several months, had been "squeezed into a couple of weeks". Transport Secretary Chris Grayling has announced compensation for commuters and an inquiry into what went wrong, saying there had been "major failures". Mr Horton said: "We have to get to the root of the problem and make sure lessons are learned." 'Better timetables' He rejected claims the company did not have enough drivers to work the new timetable. "We have sufficient drivers, but where drivers are available to run these services is mismatched," Mr Horton said. "Better timetables delivering progressive improvements would be introduced from the summer onwards." Britain's rail timetable is updated twice a year but May's update included more changes than normal in an attempt to improve punctuality and account for extra services and capacity. The timing of all GTR and most Northern trains was changed, but all new journeys had to be individually approved by Network Rail. Northern also brought in a temporary revised timetable removing 165 daily train services until 29 July.	The boss of beleaguered rail firm Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) has admitted being delayed by his own trains.
+text: By Mark DevenportBBC News NI Political Editor Some of the negotiators have said they believe Thursday's discussions could be the last before Christmas. Previously, the government had warned that if there was no deal before Christmas, there would be little chance of making progress in the new year. Discussions between the parties lasted until nearly 22:00 GMT on Wednesday. However, there appeared to be little evidence of progress on the key financial issues. 'Major problems' The Ulster Unionists submitted a 24-point paper looking for some more welfare reform flexibilities. But Sinn Féin apparently stuck rigidly to its own 11-point paper that essentially rejects all the proposed Westminster welfare changes. In an interview on BBC NI's Good Morning Ulster on Thursday, Sinn Féin's John O'Dowd said "a significant amount of work" had yet to be done and the government needed to play its part. "The only resolution on welfare would be a change of attitude from the British government," he said. "The catalyst to what they are calling welfare reform has been billions of pounds of cuts. "We are dealing with the cuts to welfare. These are attacking the most vulnerable in our society. If a peace process boils down to taking money from the sick, disabled and unemployed. Then I ask myself what has the past 20 years been about." 'Special circumstances' DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson said the parties had to be realistic about the amount of money available to the Northern Ireland Executive. "We recognise there are special circumstances that apply in Northern Ireland and we're trying to take account of that, but we also have to be realistic," he said. "We have to be realistic about what we're likely to get from Westminster and then, we've got to make our budget so that we're able to manage our finances, cover our public services and ensure that the most vulnerable are protected." Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt called for a "seismic shift in realistic thinking" from some of the parties around the table. "Everybody wants to protect the most vulnerable, but some people won't get real and acknowledge we won't get it from London, we have to take it out of the block grant," he said. "If we don't balance the budget there is no point in anything else - you have to get the budget right first." The SDLP's Alex Attwood said there were "two keys" that could unlock the negotiations and produce a positive outcome. "The first is the parties have a big responsibility to once and for all deal with the past, parades, the Irish language, the bill of rights and many other matters," he said. Seize the moment "The other key is that I think David Cameron now needs some time to think, not to fly in and fly out, but to reflect upon these negotiations and how he needs to measure up in terms of recognising that the transition from where we were as a society in Northern Ireland to where we need to go is going to take longer than we had hoped and that that requires financial underpinning, both in budget and welfare terms." The Alliance Party's employment minister Stephen Farry said the parties had to "seize this moment". "The parties have been focusing intensively in meetings over the past number of weeks and that has intensified over the past number of days, but this does need to be brought to a close and, indeed, a productive close," he said. "We do have to appreciate what is at stake here and it is the future of devolution itself. If things are not got right, things are in real jeopardy." The parties are expected to resume discussions at about 10:00 GMT on Thursday. But some negotiators told the BBC that they privately believe the talks could be winding to a close. They added that no deal could spell major problems for Stormont's future budgetary process and the stability of Northern Ireland's power-sharing executive.	Cross-party talks have resumed at Stormont, with few signs of the parties resolving their differences over budget and welfare reform.
+text: It has been increasingly enforced ever since the Thai military took power in 2014 in a coup, and many people have been punished with harsh jail sentences. Critics say the military-backed government uses the law to clamp down on free speech, and the United Nations has repeatedly called on Thailand to amend it. But the government says the law is necessary to protect the monarchy, which is widely revered in Thailand. What exactly is this law? Article 112 of Thailand's criminal code says anyone who "defames, insults or threatens the king, the queen, the heir-apparent or the regent" will be punished with a jail term between three and 15 years. This law has remained virtually unchanged since the creation of the country's first criminal code in 1908, although the penalty was toughened in 1976. The ruling has also been enshrined in all of Thailand's recent constitutions, which state: "The King shall be enthroned in a position of revered worship and shall not be violated. No person shall expose the King to any sort of accusation or action." However, there is no definition of what constitutes an insult to the monarchy, and critics say this gives the authorities leeway to interpret the law in a very broad way. Lese-majeste complaints can be filed by anyone, against anyone, and they must always be formally investigated by the police. Those arrested can be denied bail and some are held for long periods in pre-trial detention, the UN has said. Correspondents say trials are routinely held in closed session, often in military courts where defendants' rights are limited. The jail penalty also applies to each charge of lese-majeste, which means that those charged with multiple offences can face extremely long jail terms. In June 2017, a man was sentenced to 70 years in jail in the heaviest sentence ever handed down, though it was later halved when he confessed. Why does Thailand have this law? The monarch plays a central in Thai society. King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who died in October 2016 after seven decades on the throne, was widely revered and sometimes treated as a god-like figure. He has been succeeded by his son, Maha Vajiralongkorn, who does not enjoy the same level of popularity but is still accorded a sacrosanct status in Thailand. The military, which overthrew the civilian government in May 2014, is staunchly royalist. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha has stressed that the lese-majeste law is needed to protect the royals. One of the justifications for a previous military coup in 2006 was that the prime minister then, Thaksin Shinawatra, was undermining the institution of the monarchy - an allegation he vehemently denies. How has it been used? Though the law has been around for a long while, the number of prosecutions has risen and penalties have grown more severe since the military took power. The UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights says the number of people investigated for lese-majeste has risen to more than double the number investigated in the previous 12 years. Only 4% of those charged in 2016 were acquitted. There has been a wide range of offenders, from a grandfather who sent text messages deemed insulting to the queen, to a Swiss national who drunkenly spray-painted posters of the late king. People have also been arrested for lese-majeste over online activity, such as posting images on Facebook of the late King Bhumibol's favourite dog, and clicking the "like" button on Facebook on posts deemed offensive. The social network in fact faced a ban in Thailand in May 2017 for failing to block illegal content including alleged lese-majeste posts, although authorities later backed off. Human rights groups say the government wields the law as a political tool to stifle critical speech, particularly online. The legislation, says Amnesty International, has been used to "silence peaceful dissent and jail prisoners of conscience". In February 2017, the UN's special rapporteur on the promotion of opinion and expression, David Kaye, said "the fact that some forms of expression are considered to be insulting to a public figure is not sufficient to justify restrictions or penalties". He called for a repeal of the law, saying that "lese-majeste provisions have no place in a democratic country".	Thailand's lese-majeste law, which forbids the insult of the monarchy, is among the strictest in the world.
+text: Sears Holdings - which also owns Kmart - filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday. The company has suffered, along with many other traditional retailers, from rising online competition from firms such as Amazon. Sears has been closing stores and selling properties as it grapples with debts of more than $5bn. The company employs nearly 90,000 people in the US, although that is down from 246,000 five years ago, and in its heyday it had more than 3,000 stores. It became America's largest retailer before being overtaken by Walmart in the 1980s. The firm filed for bankruptcy petition after it reportedly could not meet a $134m repayment due on Monday. Chapter 11 protection postpones a US company's obligations to its creditors, giving it time to reorganise its debts or sell parts of the business. Eddie Lampert - who is the company's chief executive, biggest investor and landlord - had attempted to restructure its debts to avoid bankruptcy. In a statement, he said: "Over the last several years, we have worked hard to transform our business and unlock the value of our assets. "While we have made progress, the plan has yet to deliver the results we have desired." Announcing its bankruptcy filing, Sears also said it would close 142 unprofitable stores by the end of the year, on top of the previously announced closure of 46 stores by November. Analysis: by Kim Gittleson, New York business correspondent Entering a Sears in 2018 was like travelling back in time - and not in a good way. Chronic underinvestment in the company's physical stores meant that shelves were often empty and signs for products were handwritten. That's assuming you found a reason to walk into a Sears in the first place. By the mid-1990s most of what Sears sold was available elsewhere, often at a discount. Ironically for a company who rose to prominence with its catalogues and its use of the US Postal Service to deliver nearly everything, everywhere (sound familiar?), the modern-day Sears seemed averse to investing significantly in any e-commerce presence. With some of its best-located stores sold off in a push to raise capital, it eventually became even more difficult to find a Sears - Walmart has over 5,000 locations in the US; Target has over 1,800; even Macy's has over 800 stores. While Sears' closure of another 142 locations certainly marks an end of an era in US retailing, the reality is that Americans still love to shop, even in physical stores, if you give them a reason. They just didn't want to shop at Sears. 'Tarnished' brand Some analysts say Sears' problems were exacerbated by a lack of investment in stores. Neil Saunders of GlobalData Retail said Sears' troubles began in the 1980s when it became "too diversified and lost the deftness that had once made it the world's largest and most innovative retailer". "That a storied retailer, once at the pinnacle of the industry, should collapse in such a shabby state of disarray is both terrible and scandalous," he said. "The brand is now tarnished just as the economics of its model are firmly stacked against its future success." Sears was founded by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck in 1886 as a mail order catalogue company. It opened its first retail locations in 1925 and eventually became a fixture in shopping malls across the US. It was America's largest retailer by revenue until 1989, when Walmart overtook it, Mr Lampert's hedge fund, ESL Investments, took a stake in Sears in 2004, later combining it with Kmart with the aim of restoring its profitability. He and his affiliates now own about 49% of Sears. Despite the investment, Sears never regained its footing. It racked up more than $6bn in losses between 2013 and 2017, while annual revenues fell to $16.7bn in 2017, almost half the $31.2bn posted in 2014. As of August, the retailer had more than 860 stores in the US, down from 1,700 at the end of 2014. Sears Canada, which was spun-off from the main company in 2012, filed for bankruptcy last year, with the loss of thousands of jobs.	Sears, the US department store chain that once dominated America's shopping malls, has filed for bankruptcy.
+text: A letter to First Minister Nicola Sturgeon says the Inchgreen dry dock in Greenock and Govan Graving Docks have needlessly been allowed to decay. Campaigners want an action plan to stop marine industry sites being lost to housing or retail development. The owners of both sites have insisted they have plans for their future. The STUC along with 23 MPs and MSPs from the SNP, Labour and the Greens have endorsed a joint letter to the first minister from the Campaign to Save Inchgreen Dry Dock and the Clyde Docks Preservation Initiative. The Inchgreen dock, one of the largest in the UK, is where the QE2 was fitted out in the 1960s after its launch from the John Brown shipyard. But it has been largely unused for 16 years and its cranes were demolished last summer. Campaigner and former shipyard worker Robert Buirds has accused its owner Peel Ports of starving the facility of investment, while at the same time investing heavily in the Peel group's main ship repair interests at Cammell Laird in Merseyside. He said: "We've had at least two companies that have asked to lease Inchgreen - but the price they were looking for the lease made it completely uneconomical. "That's two companies who have a vision for Inchgreen - who think they can expand Inchgreen and use it for shipbuilding or marine engineering." Peel has robustly defended its investment record, saying it has created more than 5,000 jobs in Scotland in recent years. Cammell Laird, which manages Inchgreen on behalf of Peel, says it is currently bidding for refit contracts for the Navy's new aircraft carriers which could give the Inchgreen dock a new lease of life. The A-listed Govan Graving Docks, derelict for 31 years, are owned by property developer New City Vision, which was recently refused planning permission for 700 flats, shops and office space on the site. Port Glasgow-based Ferguson Marine, owned by billionaire Jim McColl, is understood to have expressed an interest in using both Inchgreen and the Govan site for shipbuilding or repair. The letter to Ms Sturgeon warns that cash-strapped local authorities could be tempted to accept short-term offers of investment that fail to provide skilled employment, with industrial land disappearing "never to return". Robert Buirds added: "I'm not complaining that they're not investing. I don't believe they're investing in the right places that brings the amount of work and skilled jobs that I believe the River Clyde requires." The campaigners have asked the Scottish government to produce a strategy to promote and co-ordinate investment in marine industry on the Clyde. The Peel group acquired numerous industrial sites and tracts of waterfront land on the Clyde though its acquisition of Clydeport in 2003. Elsewhere, it has recently announced plans for a major retail and leisure development near Glasgow's Riverside Museum, and an upgrade to its cruise liner terminal in Greenock. No-one from New City Vision or Peel was immediately available for comment. The letter is endorsed by MPs Ronnie Cowan, Paul Sweeney, Mhairi Black, Gavin Newlands, Brendan O'Hara, Carol Monaghan, Patricia Gibson, Alison Thewliss and MSPs Richard Leonard, Patrick Harvie, Gil Paterson, Ross Greer, Jackie Balllie, Stuart McMillan, Claudia Beamish, Neil Biddy, John Finnie, Ruth Maguire, Jonan McAlpine, Emma Harper, Kenneth Gibson, David Stewart and Rhoda Grant.	Senior politicians from three parties have backed calls for a new industrial strategy to help "save" former ship repair sites on the Clyde.
+text: By Tomos LewisBBC News Over a quarter of adults in Wales who drink have increased their consumption since the coronavirus restrictions were brought in, according to research by Alcohol Change UK. Sales of alcohol jumped 31% in March, ahead of overall supermarket sales. The charity urged people to think about how much they were drinking during the lockdown. In March, pubs, restaurants, bars and clubs were closed as part of strict measures to curb the spread of coronavirus, and people have been unable to socialise with those outside their own homes. Research from the charity suggests many people are now drinking in their homes. But it said about a third of those who drink have cut down, or stopped drinking all together during lockdown. 'I realised that wasn't something that I wanted to happen' Meg Payne has never been a heavy or frequent drinker, but said she noticed she was drinking more regularly out of "boredom" during the restrictions. The 23-year-old, who lives with her parents in Cardiff, has been furloughed through the UK government job retention scheme. She said she found herself drinking on evenings she normally would not. To combat this, she developed a routine and said that exercise and online workouts helped. "I did find that looking forward to a drink at the end of the day was something that I was doing a lot more often," she said. "At the start of this quarantine and lockdown period, I was drinking more," she said. "It probably got to two weeks in, when I sort of realised and took a look at it and I realised that wasn't something that I wanted to happen." Andrew Misell, director for Wales at Alcohol Change UK, said there were concerns that more people may get into habits of heavy drinking which could last for the long term. The charity said the number of people visiting their website for help was up nearly 400% in the past month, compared to the same period last year. "Even those of us who perhaps aren't in such immediate danger are feeling the strain. I think an awful lot of us realised how much we really liked getting out of the house," he said. Alcohol sales in UK retailers surged 31% in March, ahead of overall supermarket sales, which rose 10.3% in the same period, according to Office for National Statistics figures. Cardiff-based personal trainer Emily Tucker said a rise in online drinking challenges could lead to heavier and more regular drinking. She said a perception that people needed to be productive with their time during isolation could make people feel pressurised. The 28-year-old is offering live workouts on Instagram and said exercises and learning new skills could help stem boredom. "If you feel [alcohol is] starting to become your go-to source of entertainment, I would definitely look into the online content that's available," she said. "I know people are offering language lessons online for free. There are people doing yoga and mobility fitness, cooking - there's so much available." "What's really important is that you are keeping in touch with people and making sure that you're okay, it doesn't have to revolve around alcohol," she said.	People could develop long-term heavy drinking habits as a result of self-isolating at home, a charity fears.
+text: The dispute, which could be worth up to £500,000, centres on who pays for keeping order on roads by the Championship club's main turnstiles. In October, the High Court ruled that the club was not responsible. The Supreme Court has now said the force has no basis to appeal. In the original High Court case in 2016, it was ruled that Suffolk Constabulary was entitled to recover costs for officers patrolling Portman Road and Sir Alf Ramsey Way. But in October, the Court of Appeal upheld the club's view that the High Court judge had misdirected himself on the law. Michael Beloff QC, representing the club, said during that hearing that about £500,000 was at stake, covering policing bills issued between 2008 and 2013. 'Disappointed' The police force applied to the Supreme Court to see if it could appeal, but it has been informed by judges that it has no grounds because "the case doesn't raise an arguable point of law". An Ipswich Town spokesman said: "We are pleased that the matter is closed and that we continue to have a good working relationship with Suffolk Police." Suffolk Police and Crime Commissioner Tim Passmore said: "We are disappointed with the outcome of this decision from the Supreme Court. "We will now take some time to consider the implications for the force and once they have been fully assessed in due course we will be in a position to comment further." Neither side was able to confirm whether any repayment from the police to the club would require another court hearing or not.	Suffolk Police has been told it cannot appeal against a court decision which ruled it has to pay for policing streets around Ipswich Town's stadium on match days.
+text: Mobile phone footage shows passengers walking through Manchester Airport's seemingly unstaffed passport control. The incident happened early on Saturday morning after the delayed arrival of a Ryanair flight from Madrid. Manchester Airport and the Home Office said they were examining the details of the alleged security breach. Flight FR3186 had been due to arrive at 23:35 BST on Friday, but did not do so until 02:05 BST on Saturday morning. One of those on board, Clinton Laykin from Stoke-on-Trent, provided BBC News with footage shot on his mobile phone. He estimated there had been 130 to 140 passengers on board. In the footage, Mr Laykin says: "This is the UK border and there's nobody at Passport Control at Manchester Airport. "A planeload of people have just arrived and come straight through and we are going to baggage reclaim. "Nobody has checked our passports." A spokesman for the airport told BBC North West Tonight: "It is the responsibility of an airline's handling agent to notify UK Border Force (UKBF) about arrivals from outside of the UK. "By them doing this in advance of a flight's arrival, ensures the relevant UKBF staff [are] in place to handle the immigration process. "As an airport we will work closely with our third party partners to investigate what occurred in this instance." A Home Office spokesman said: "We are currently carrying out an investigation into this incident." A Ryanair spokesman said: "There appears to have been a malfunction in the airport's system, which caused incorrect flight information to be published, and subsequently resulted in this issue at border control. We have asked Manchester Airport to look into this matter and ensure it does not recur."	An investigation is under way into how a plane-load of passengers was apparently able to enter the UK without having passports checked.
+text: Seasonally adjusted exports fell by 1.1% in July from June. Economists were expecting a 0.7% rise. Exports to eurozone nations, which buy approximately a third of Germany's exports, fell by 0.7% compared with the same month last year. Germany's exporters helped the nation avoid recession and are behind the acceleration of economic growth. "It's a disappointment, but the data has fluctuated a lot in recent months," said Stefan Schilbe, from HSBC Trinkaus. "But we can be hopeful that the picture will change for the better in coming months. "Leading indicators in industrial states - from the United States to Britain and the eurozone states - are pointing upwards," he said. Spain's pain Underlying the weakness in Europe, Spanish factories reported another month of falling production. Figures for July show that factories and utilities cut production at an annual rate of 1.4%. It is the 23rd month of falling industrial production.	German exports unexpectedly fell in July as the nation delivered less to its eurozone neighbours.
+text: By Lora JonesBBC News The soy-based version of its Whopper burger is cooked on the same grill as meat burgers. The fast food chain says the Rebel Whopper is aimed at those who want to cut meat consumption. But a spokesperson for the Vegan Society called the launch a "missed opportunity". Burger King says that the burger "patty" itself is plant-based, but because of how it is cooked it will not be labelled as suitable for vegans or vegetarians. It will also be served with mayonnaise, unless the customer asks otherwise. Katie Evans, marketing director for the chain, said the burger was aimed at "flexitarians". She added it wanted the burger to replicate the "flame-grilled taste" as closely as possible. Burger King did confirm, though, that its vegetarian bean burger and its vegetarian option on the children's menu are cooked separately. Sam Calvert, head of communications at the Vegan Society, said that not making the new burger fully vegan "seems a missed opportunity". She added that vegan mayonnaise was "readily available" and used by other well-known chains, which would also make the burger suitable for some religious groups that avoid eating certain animals and eggs. 'Jumping on the bandwagon' The Rebel Whopper launch on Monday also saw a backlash on social media. One Twitter user called it "a case of big corporations jumping on the bandwagon of a trend". Lifestyle blogger Donna Wishart criticised Burger King for failing to deliver "actual vegan products", when other fast food companies do so. However, Toni Vernelli, international head of communications and marketing at Veganuary, dismissed claims that Burger King was trying to "capitalise on the vegan pound". She said that "increasing the availability of plant-based options" was the best way to encourage the reduction of meat consumption. "Don't let perfection be the enemy of good," she said. The Vegan Society describes veganism as a "lifestyle" that avoids all animal foods such as meat, dairy, eggs and honey, as well as animal-based products like leather. 600,000According to a Vegan Society survey of 2,000 people in 2018 £740mEstimated sales of meat-free foods in 2018 87%Most Veganuary participants in 2019 were female According to the latest research by the Vegan Society, conducted in 2018, there are about 600,000 vegans in Great Britain. Flexitarianism, part-time vegetarianism or veganism, is becoming more popular. In 2020, at least 300,000 people pledged to go vegan for the first month of the year, under the Veganuary campaign, the organisation said. Interest in vegan and vegetarian products shows no sign of slowing down. This January, other well-known food chains have launched meat substitutions for popular products. Bakery Greggs announced a vegan "steak bake" after the success of its vegan sausage roll last year, while coffee chain Costa said it would offer a "vegan ham and cheese" toastie.	Burger King has launched its first plant-based burger in the UK - but it is not suitable for vegans and vegetarians.
+text: Former education minister John O'Dowd had decided Scoil An Droichid and Bunscoil Bheann Mhadagáin could each run a 'nurture group' in 2016/2017. These groups provide extra help for young people with behavioural problems. The DE told the schools last Friday there was no money to open the units. The schools were told about Mr O'Dowd's decision in April and the units were to open in September. The two schools would have been the first Irish-medium schools funded to run them. In a statement, DE said that it was made clear to the schools "that the commencement of the pilot remained contingent upon securing funding". In the letter to Fionnguala McCotter, the principal of Scoil an Droichid, a DE official said: "Due to current pressures on the department's budget, we have been unable to secure the funding required to allow the project to proceed. "I appreciate that this will be extremely disappointing for the school and that you have already invested significant time and effort in staff training." Both schools had already spent thousands of pounds on equipment for the units, and trained and recruited teaching staff. Specialist teaching They were to receive around £69,000 each to allow them to open the units for a year. Nurture groups are small units within primary schools that provide additional targeted help for pupils with social, emotional or behavioural problems. The pupils, usually from Key Stage 1, that are educated in the unit receive specialist teaching and support. Currently, 30 primary schools across Northern Ireland are funded for nurture units, although none are Irish-medium schools. The Department of Education and the former Department of Social Development (DSD) provided an initial £3m of funding for the units from 2013. Further funding was then provided by DE to enable the classes to continue. A recent evaluation of the classes carried out by experts from Queen's University found that they were "highly successful". The evaluation noted "improvements in the social, emotional and behavioural skills of children from deprived areas exhibiting significant difficulties." In a statement, a DE spokesperson said that they were currently funding nurture groups in 30 Primary Schools across Northern Ireland at a cost of £2.26m. "In April 2016 the former Education Minister decided to bring forward a one year nurture group pilot for schools in the Irish Medium sector," they said. "Funding could not be secured at that time and although initial engagement took place to identify two potential participants, it was made clear that the commencement of the pilot remained contingent upon securing funding." DE also said that the costs the schools had paid for staff training would be reimbursed.	The Department of Education (DE) has overturned a decision made by the former education minister to introduce nurture units in two Irish-medium primary schools.
+text: Mr Davey will move to the station in January after seven years at the helm of the arts funding body. He described Radio 3 as "one of our most important cultural institutions and a beacon of excellence". He takes over from Roger Wright, who has left Radio 3 after 15 years to become chief executive of Aldeburgh Music. Mr Davey said: "It is an honour to be asked to lead this wonderful institution and to renew it for the digital age, helping new audiences to encounter the wonderful things serious music and culture can bring. "I stumbled upon Radio 3 when I was a teenager, and it opened a door to an endlessly fascinating world of sound and thought that has nourished me ever since. "I want everyone to have that chance and am proud to be able to make sure they will." 'Formidable track record' Radio 3 has around 1.9 million listeners per week in the UK, but was recently overtaken in the ratings by digital radio station BBC 6 Music for the first time. Mr Davey's predecessor was also director of the BBC Proms, but the jobs have now been split and another appointment will be made to run the Proms. Mr Davey will oversee the BBC's six performing groups, which include the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic and the BBC Singers. BBC director general Tony Hall said Radio 3 was "a true icon of classical music and cultural broadcasting in the UK". He continued: "Alan Davey has a formidable track record in the arts and a depth of understanding only matched by his passion for classical music. "His appointment marks a new chapter in the Radio 3 story - one that will extend and grow its rich history of excellence, innovation, and distinctiveness." Before joining Arts Council England, Mr Davey worked for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and Department of Health.	Arts Council England's chief executive Alan Davey has been named the new controller of BBC Radio 3.
+text: Ex-head of Sky News Nick Pollard found there was "chaos and confusion" at the BBC over a decision to axe Newsnight's report on Jimmy Savile in 2011. And BBC Scotland's Ken MacQuarrie found another Newsnight report - which led to Tory peer Lord McAlpine being wrongly accused of child abuse - had been the result of a "serious failure" of journalism. Many have been reacting to their reports. Politicians Culture Secretary Maria Miller "I am pleased that the BBC Trust have acted quickly to publish Nick Pollard's review. The report raises serious questions around editorial and management issues at the BBC and I look to the Trust to help tackle these. I also remind the Trust how vital it is to publish all relevant evidence, as soon as possible, in order to re-build public trust and confidence in the BBC. "It remains critical that we do not lose sight of the most important issue in this - the many victims of sexual abuse by Savile. I urge the BBC to now focus on the review into those abuses, and ensure it is swift and transparent." Ben Bradshaw, former Labour culture secretary and member of the culture, media and sport committee "I think the controversy over the next days is going to be the BBC's response to Pollard. This is a chance to clear the decks and to have a full assessment of what went wrong… and as a great friend of the BBC I hope they do that. "He [Nick Pollard] is absolutely lacerating about BBC News management's failure. As we understand it, the deputy head of news, Steve Mitchell, has resigned or retired - it's not quite clear which. "Apart from that there has been no change. I think people will be asking themselves whether the level of the response from the BBC to this report today has been adequate and commensurate with the seriousness of the criticisms in it." BBC reaction Lord Patten, BBC Trust chairman "The former director general is no longer in his post. The deputy director of news is gone. Other people have been replaced from their jobs. "I think that the issues of culture and leadership of the management problems that have been identified in that terrific, searingly honest report of Nick Pollard's are ones that have to be addressed. But I don't think you necessarily address them by just putting heads on spikes." George Entwistle, former BBC director general "Pollard's report underlines the fact that any managerial shortcomings relating to Newsnight's aborted Savile investigation were largely the result of unsatisfactory internal communications... "I am pleased that the Pollard Report makes it clear I played no part whatever in Newsnight's decision not to broadcast the original Savile investigation - just as I was not personally to blame in any way for the journalistic failures on Newsnight when it broadcast its erroneous report about the North Wales care home." Steve Mitchell, deputy director of BBC News "It is with great sadness that I have decided to retire from the BBC after more than 38 years' service of which I am very proud and which I have found greatly enjoyable. Given the strain over the past month since being told to stand aside from the job I loved, having endured the Pollard review process and now having read its criticisms, I have decided that it is in my interests and those of the BBC that I bring my career to a dignified end. "Whilst I feel vindicated that the review has found that I put no undue pressure on Peter Rippon, I disagree with the remainder of Mr Pollard's criticisms in relation to me." Andrew Marr, BBC presenter "He [Steven Mitchell] was always one of the most cautious, straight down the line, old-fashioned traditional voices in the BBC. "Clearly, there were lots of mistakes made, but any sense - and Pollard of course has pushed this to one side - that there would be improper pressure applied by Steve Mitchell on a programme about paedophilia or anything else - [is] utterly, utterly out of court - completely impossible and against his character." Adrian Van Klaveren, controller of BBC Radio 5 Live "I am writing to you following the BBC's announcement today that I am leaving 5 live and moving to a new job. It is a very sad day for me at the end of an incredibly difficult few weeks... "What is of course especially hard to take is that I am leaving 5 Live as a result of events which had nothing to do with how I carried out my job here. Rather, it happened after I had just begun a temporary role in the most challenging of circumstances." Liz McKean, Newsnight reporter who worked on the axed Savile investigation "The decision not to run the report was seriously flawed, but it was more than that. I think the decision to drop our story was a breach of our duty to the women who trusted us to reveal that Jimmy Savile was a paedophile. "Many found it difficult to share their experiences as vulnerable girls. Our editor didn't watch the main interview with our witness. Nick Pollard did and found her credible and compelling, as did we. As for what he called the chaos caused by the inaccurate blog of October, I welcome the recommendation that the BBC should trust its journalists." Meirion Jones, Newsnight producer involved in the axed Savile report "Last Christmas, Newsnight knew - the BBC knew - that Jimmy Savile was a paedophile. We knew there'd been a police investigation, they'd taken it seriously. We'd interviewed a victim - a very good victim - on camera. We had corroboration, we had footage of victims with abusers on BBC premises, and yet the BBC decided to pull the investigation and run tributes to Jimmy Savile instead. "I hope the BBC takes measures to make sure nothing like that will ever happen again. What I do feel confident about though is that the BBC has now taken measures to make sure that children are safe here." Commentators The National Union of Journalists "The NUJ notes with concern that the Pollard report identified fundamental failings of the management culture at the BBC, especially BBC News. "The NUJ believes that confirmation by the BBC Trust of 'long term failings' in the attitudes of senior management is a positive step forward to tackling what the union believes to be a deep-rooted problem. It welcomes the confirmation from the Trust that 'change must start with the people at the top behaving differently' including 'embracing criticism'." Neil Midgley, the Daily Telegraph Lord Patten was "very combative" towards some journalists in this morning's conference. He was "unnecessarily and inexplicably hostile this morning". Mr Midgley added it was "remarkable" that nobody has been fired over the Newsnight reports. Miriam O'Reilly, broadcaster and journalist tweets: The BBC deserves more than some of the people who've been failing to manage it #savile Liz Dux, solicitor for the some 40 alleged victims of Jimmy Savile "We're talking about 12 months in their suffering that has been prolonged by this. Twelve months is an awful long time. It could have led to absolutely disastrous consequences for the victims, because if Savile's estate had been distributed in that twelve months they would have been left with absolutely no access to justice at all." She added the victims did not want to see "months of BBC soul searching". Baroness Neville-Jones, former BBC governor and security minister for "What is really important is what the BBC now does by way of strengthening and clarifying the lines of responsibility for editorial control... "I think there are some institutional problems here. I think also there are just too many people at the BBC. This is an organisation that needs de-layering so that more people take more full responsibility and you can't evade responsibility by it being half somebody else's. "So I think it should be trimmed and there needs to be a certain amount of institutional reorganisation as well." George Carey, filmmaker and first BBC editor of Newsnight "The litany of criticism that Nick Pollard makes of the BBC management is pretty appalling, frankly. And I should think it's worse than the BBC expected... "It seems to me there has been another - if I may put it this way - BBC management failure, and that is judging how to respond to this. Tim Davie, the acting director general, was quite reasonable in saying he wanted to be fair and do this, that and the other. But the fact is, from the outside, it looks astonishing that there's just one deputy head rolling and a few people shifted to this side or that." Sir John Tusa, broadcaster, former head of the BBC's World Service and former Newsnight presenter The Pollard report painted "an awful picture of an organisation that is so mired in processes" it cannot make decisions. "Clearly there are steps, sidesteps, policy people, compliance people, and it was very clear from what Pollard says, people didn't know what they were doing and when it came to making decisions, they didn't. An organisation that allowed that sort of structure to grow up so that people can't make decisions has got something to do - it has got to be cleared out. "The over-management, over-bureaucratisation of the way BBC news and other bits of the BBC have been made to run was never necessary in the first place and what we are now seeing is all those bad habits coming home to roost in a very bad way."	Both BBC management and journalism have been criticised in two scathing reviews of Newsnight investigations.
+text: By Mark SavageBBC music reporter To be fair, the star is a headline act at home in the US, where she's one of the most successful female artists of all time. Her star was never quite as big in the UK, though, despite having 17 top 10 hits to her name, which made this festival set something of a gamble. Admirably, rather than play it safe, Janet delivered a whistle-stop tour of her career, playing a relentless, non-stop medley of 21 tracks in just 50 minutes. At times, the pace was dizzying. One of her biggest hits, The Best Things In Life Are Free, was jettisoned after the first chorus; and minor tracks Throb and Come On Get Up got a fuller airing. For die-hard fans, it was a dream setlist (and there were plenty of them singing their lungs out) but for a festival crowd unfamiliar with the corners of her back catalogue, some of the song choices were perplexing at best. But the blessing of the attention-deficit setlist was that every time an album track started up, a pop banger was just around the corner - whether it was the punchy 1980s funk of What Have You Done For Me Lately, or the breezy pop melodies of Escapade and Miss You Much. It was a physically-demanding performance, full of crisp, impressive dance moves - often directly lifted from videos Janet shot 30 years ago. But the 53-year-old easily fell in step with her troupe of eight dancers, despite wearing a heavy tail-coat in the 30C heat. She paused only once, to dab the sweat off her face with a towel, which she then threw aggressively to the floor so she could get on with the next routine. In fact, she seemed happiest when she was goofing off with the dancers, breaking into laughter when one blew her a kiss during Escapade, and tossing around her red tangle of curls as they vamped on some of The Jacksons' old routines. Janet's vocals were sometimes too quiet in the mix, but she seemed to have worked out a way to sing - mostly - live while galloping around the stage; and the rip-roaring Black Cat proved she could belt it out when she needed to, Never the most loquacious of stars, her stage banter was minimal, save for a few exhortations to sing along and, during Nasty, declaring: "I could learn to like this, Glastonbury". Meeting the press backstage after the show, though, she said the view from the stage had been "amazing". "So many people," she marvelled. "Everybody seems to really enjoy it every single year. I hear so much talk about it." It's easy to overlook what a trailblazer Janet was in the 1980s and 1990s, emancipating herself from her overbearing father, Joe, and singing about female empowerment and sexuality long before Beyonce and Rihanna. Meanwhile, her Rhythm Nation album was ripped from the headlines, with songs that tackled social injustice, racial prejudice, homelessness and illiteracy. Two of those songs, State Of The World and The Knowledge, formed a centrepiece of Saturday's set, and sadly proved as relevant now as they were in 1989. But it was the hits, not the deep cuts, that really connected. The lovestruck funk of Love Will Never Do (Without You) was a highlight, as was the military stomp of Rhythm Nation, which closed the set. A technical delay at the start of her show meant the planned encore of Together Again had to be dropped. In the final analysis, it might have been wiser to drop the jukebox approach and concentrate on 10 or 12 guaranteed bangers, but after what felt like a 50-minute tour of modern R&B history, you couldn't accuse Janet of slacking off. She's done a lot for us lately. Setlist Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	In the run-up to Glastonbury, Janet Jackson raised a few eyebrows when she tweeted a line-up poster that put her name above the headliners.
+text: A few years ago, the Nigerian police paraded a gang of male armed robbers headed by a woman in front of journalists, and photos of these seven alleged criminals who had terrorised a part of Lagos were published. I was shocked to identify the petite, light-skinned woman allegedly leading this deadly gang as a former secondary school classmate, with whom I had maintained sporadic contact over the years. The Federal Government Girls College, Owerri, has produced a number of outstanding Nigerian females, including World Bank Vice-President Arunma Oteh and outspoken MP Nnenna Elendu-Ukeje. But the leader of a dreaded gang of robbers was a first for us, and the news quickly spread to our alumni across the world. On a whim, I dialled the alleged gang leader's phone number a few weeks later. She was pleased to hear from me, but was driving and would call back later, she said. The din of the surrounding Lagos traffic was proof that she was indeed not locked up in a police cell. When she did call back, she dismissed the police's accusations, insisting that she was innocent and had simply been "set up". She has not been convicted of the alleged crimes and is still walking free, despite being paraded before the media and having her reputation irredeemably soiled. The proclivity to parade suspects by the Nigerian security services and declare them guilty before the media, without a lawyer present or trial by a competent court, came to the fore recently in a heartbreaking video that has been widely published. 'You will not do this to me!' Nigeria's spy agency, the DSS, said a woman who they identified as Amina Mohammed posed as the wife of a state governor to gain entry to the presidential villa in the capital, Abuja. The officers forced her to face the camera and confess her alleged crimes. But, she refused. Instead, she covered her face with her veil, screaming: "You will not do this to me!" In the effort to get her to cooperate, security officials yanked her veil away from her. The woman knelt on the floor, weeping. Clearly, the woman was dreadfully aware of how many Nigerian citizens have had their reputations irreparably ruined by this process. Typically, the suspect makes a full confession before the cameras, the bruises on their faces and the presence of stern security personnel leading you to wonder exactly what might have inspired the so-called admission of guilt. For years, Nigerians have been treated to one such show after another, but this is hardly ever followed up by news of actual convictions. The security agents appear more keen to be perceived as having done a good job, even when they may have little evidence to convict. Also by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani: Similar dramas have been the major characteristic of President Muhammadu Buhari's much touted anti-corruption war. Prominent Nigerians accused of incredible levels of corruption have been filmed in handcuffs, the case against them detailed in the media, with public opinion immediately declaring them guilty. Yet, almost four years after President Buhari took power, the majority of these alleged treasury looters still roam free. Only a few mostly insignificant convictions have been recorded. The same has been the case for high-profile Boko Haram members captured and paraded by the military. It is possible that these media parades are an attempt by the security personnel to squeeze water out of stone, to exact some punishment for offenders since the Nigerian judiciary is notoriously slow and riddled with corruption. The reasoning seems to be "let's ruin their reputation even if we can't get a conviction". 'Dictatorial tendencies' President Buhari has complained publicly about our country's judiciary, which he appears to view as a stumbling block to his dealing with offenders. In a keynote address at the annual conference of the Nigerian Bar Association in August, he said: "Rule of law must be subject to the supremacy of the nation's security and national interest. "Where national security and public interest are threatened or there is a likelihood of their being threatened, the individual rights of those allegedly responsible must take second place, in favour of the greater good of society." This comment and others like it led to outrage from Nigerians, many of whom are only too aware that our democratically elected president once presided over a military government characterised by a number of notorious decrees that violated human rights. More Letters from Africa The most telling evidence that President Buhari's conversion from dictator to democrat may not yet be complete is the continued incarceration of Sambo Dasuki, a former national security adviser who is accused of squandering billions of dollars meant for the prosecution of the war against Boko Haram. He pleaded not guilty and over and over again, the courts have granted Mr Dasuki bail. Yet, he remains behind bars three years after he was arrested, and has still not been convicted of the alleged crimes. Mr Dasuki played a role in President Buhari's arrest back in 1985 when he was removed as head of state during a military coup, and Nigerians cannot help wonder if that little fact may not be linked to this administration's continued defiance of court orders that the man be granted bail. Follow us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica	In our series of letters from Africa, Nigerian writer and novelist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani tackles the culture of naming, shaming and public parading of suspects in Nigeria before taking them to court.
+text: By Martin VennardBBC News "It's changed my life," says Andrea Sella, who is professor of chemistry at University College London. "I couldn't believe that I'd found myself at Latitude in front of about 1,000 people talking about carbon dioxide, dry ice and climate change," he says of his first involvement in scientific outreach at a music festival seven years ago. "I thought, 'Oh my God, they started laughing. Let me remember what I did to cause it.' "It's changed the way I teach and speak to students. I've been able to take more risks. I've learnt enormous amounts about the craft of speaking in public." Prof Sella, who won the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize in 2015 for his science communication, is one of an increasing number of scientists who are involved in public engagement at music festivals. Bluedot, Green Man, Chagstock and Glastonbury are among the growing number of festivals who have brought music and science together. Womad, the world music festival at Charlton Park in Wiltshire, recently hosted its physics pavilion for the third successive year and claims to be the first music festival to do "real" science. One of the people behind the pavilion is Prof Roger Jones, of Lancaster University who also works on the Atlas particle detector experiment at Cern. "There are at least two major music festivals in Europe that we're looking to work with," he says over a backstage cup of tea. "They realise there's an appetite for science, and music festivals are in a competitive market. They want things that make them more attractive to a broader audience. "We had 4,000 people come to the physics pavilion in 2016 and just under 6,000 last year and this year we're looking at a similar number again. The only thing stopping us from getting any bigger is space," Prof Jones says. The pavilion's main tent hosted talks and demonstrations, such as one on lasers called "From Death to Art", a science rap performance and a live link up with Nasa's Hubble telescope control room. The "Physics of Gin" workshop went down well in "The Lab" tent, while Institute of Physics volunteers and Badminton school students manned the "Give it a Go" gazebo. "Music and science are a good mix," says Meklit, an Ethiopian born, US-based singer, who performed in the main festival at Womad. She has incorporated star sounds - created from data by a Nasa engineer - in her song Supernova. "I'm a TED fellow and go to a lot of TED conferences. Scientists are some of the most creative people I know," she adds. "Science at music festivals is definitely growing, as is outreach in general," says Alice Roberts, the writer, broadcaster and professor of public engagement in science at Birmingham University. "The first time I talked at Glastonbury five years ago I thought, 'Who is going to come and listen to me in a tepee on a hill when there is all this music nearby?' But a couple of hundred people came," she says. "You engage with an audience that is going for the music and it works. We have a false and archaic division between science and the humanities." Prof Roberts admits that assessing the long-term impact of such outreach is difficult. "You have to combine quantitative data with case studies. "A student came up to me at Bluedot recently and said: 'The reason I started doing anthropology was because of you.' It was humbling and made it feel worthwhile," says Prof Roberts, who was talking about archaeology, history and genetics. Prof Jones says that outreach in general has in part led to an increase in students studying physics. "At Lancaster in 2011/12 we had about 80 students per year. In 2017/18 it was 143. We're doing particularly well, but there has been a rise across universities," he says. Prof Roberts says the secret of successful outreach is pitching things at the right level. "It is about being brave and not dumbing down, getting the right balance of being accessible but tackling some complex issues. Create a story line that brings in the concepts," she says. Robin Ince, the co-presenter, with the scientist and musician Brian Cox, of the Radio 4 comedy and science programme The Infinite Monkey Cage, says: "Dumbing down is a boring accusation from people who want to keep their subject to themselves. "The main formula that works is the speaker has to have passion," he adds. Jacky Jarrett, from Bristol, visited the physics pavilion with her seven and 10-year-old daughters, who learnt about electrical circuits, while making card faces with flashing LED lights for the noses and eyes. "I don't know if I would have gone to a science event in the past. I would have thought it was boring, but now I might go to more," she says. Emma Welton travelled to Womad from Exeter with her 10-year-old son, Harry. "I'm interested in music and he's interested in science," she says, after Harry investigated a cornflour mixture with a spoon. "It felt solid because the particles were squashed together," he says. Robin Ince has been mixing science and comedy for 15 years and is a regular on the festival scene. "At Glastonbury we did an Infinite Monkey Cage on quantum cosmology and had 3,000 people in the tent. They had been drinking cider - and other things - for a few days but they still engaged," he says. "Science at festivals is becoming more popular because people aren't getting science from other places. People go to festivals to hear a few bands, but not all of them on the bill, and to experience something new, maybe about black holes. "The main thing with a music festival is you have several stages and people wander about, but at a literary festival you buy an individual ticket for an author's talk," Robin Ince adds. Ana Godinho, head of education, communications and outreach at Cern, says it puts about £8,000 into the costs of the Womad physics pavilion and that it represents good value for money. "Womad is the only music festival we do. We are thinking of doing more. We're not here to recruit scientists. It's to raise awareness," she says. The rest of the pavilion's cost - which Prof Jones estimates at under £30,000 ¬- comes from Lancaster University, the Institute of Physics, the Science and Technology Facilities Council and Womad itself. So what does the future hold for science outreach and music? Prof Sella says: "I think it will continue to grow. It may become edgier and have more niches." "We're thinking about breaking out of the pavilion and doing installations around the Womad site and doing things on the main stages," Prof Jones says. He would like to get a well-known musician who is also a scientist to appear in the pavilion. "You don't have to be called Brian to apply," he says with a smile.	Music festivals are increasingly becoming a venue for science as well as bands. Are music and science a good mix?
+text: Under Samoa's laws, sodomy is illegal and punishable by up to seven years in prison. The country's principal censor told local media that the film did not "go well with cultural and Christian beliefs here". It comes after Sir Elton criticised a Russian distributor's decision to cut sex scenes from the film. The film tells the story of the musician's rise to fame and includes a male sex scene. It also includes images of Sir Elton, his husband and their children. Apollo Cinemas in the Samoa's capital Apia wrote on its Facebook page: "Unfortunately due to censoring issues we have had to cancel 'Rocketman'". Censor Leiataua Niuapu Faaui told the Samoa Observer that the film is "not good for public viewing and violates laws against same-sex marriage." Films that include explicit sexual activity, explicit sexual violence, promotion of drugs or offence to religions are subject to bans, according to ABC. Around 97% of Samoa's population is Christian. It is not the first time that the country has banned a film over "cultural and Christian beliefs". In 2009, censors banned Milk, a film based on the life of gay rights activist and politician Harvey Milk. Samoa also banned The Da Vinci Code in 2006, arguing that it conflicted with the country's religious beliefs.	Samoa has banned the Sir Elton John biopic Rocketman because of the film's depiction of gay sex.
+text: In the New York Times, he said the US president was "indulging in revisionist history", amid reports Mr Trump now questioned whether the tape was real. Mr Trump originally apologised for the remarks, which came to light a month before he won last year's election. Top Republicans condemned the tape, but most still backed Mr Trump's campaign. In his opinion piece, the former co-anchor of NBC's Access Hollywood show said he and seven others who had witnessed the remarks were convinced they were "listening to a stand-up act". "He said it. 'Grab 'em by the pussy,'" Bush wrote. "Of course he said it. And we laughed along, without a single doubt that this was hypothetical hot air from America's highest-rated bloviator." But Bush said that after reading accounts by 20 women who have come forward to accuse Mr Trump of unwanted sexual advances, he now knew better. "President Trump is currently indulging in some revisionist history, reportedly telling allies... that the voice on the tape is not his. This has hit a raw nerve in me," Bush added. He said the president was "wantonly poking the bear" as the US was trying to come to terms with years of sexual abuse and misconduct against leading figures in the media and entertainment industry. Mr Trump has denied any allegations against him of sexual misconduct and threatened to sue his accusers. But at the time the videotape was released he appeared to acknowledge that it was real, dismissing it as "locker room talk". According to US media reports, Mr Trump has been privately telling allies that the voice on the recording is not his. Bush, a nephew of former president George HW Bush, lost his job as co-host of NBC's Today show after the videotape was released.	Former NBC TV host Billy Bush has confirmed that he heard Donald Trump boasting about grabbing women by the genitals in a 2005 recording.
+text: By Brian WheelerPolitical reporter, BBC News He owes his political career to Mr Brown, who talent-spotted him when he was a young financial journalist in the early 1990s. By the time he was 30, he was effectively second in command at the Treasury, despite being an unelected official, helping to mastermind then chancellor Mr Brown's biggest policy coups such as the handing of the control of interest rates to the Bank of England and the five economic tests that kept Britain out of the euro. He was also on the frontline of the war between Mr Brown's supporters and Tony Blair's Downing Street. 'Insurgency' It was during this period that he gained a reputation - always dismissed as malicious gossip - for briefing against Labour colleagues seen as enemies of Mr Brown. He has rejected Lord Mandelson's claim he was part of a Brownite "insurgency" against Mr Blair's premiership, arguing that there was a "creative tension" rather than warfare between the two camps. But his combative, even abrasive, approach to politics has seen him labelled something of a bully in the past - something always denied by friends. When Gordon Brown finally entered Number 10 in 2007, Mr Balls, who had become the MP for Morley and Outwood two years earlier, was handed the key role of education secretary, although there seemed little doubt that it would be merely a stepping stone to the much bigger prize of the chancellorship. Policy battles Sadly for him, it turned out not to be, but it was a role he continued to covet. He did not see eye-to-eye with former chancellor Alistair Darling over the economy and sided with Gordon Brown in the party's policy battles in the run-up to the 2010 general election. But, according to Lord Mandelson, a weakened Mr Brown felt unable to install Mr Balls, his closest political ally, at the Treasury. No surprise, perhaps, that Mr Balls was the first of last summer's Labour leadership contenders to break ranks with the economic policy on which Labour fought the 2010 general election. He has said Mr Darling was wrong to commit the party to halving Britain's record budget deficit in four years, telling BBC News that although he had toed the party line in government privately he "didn't think it could have been done". 'Team player' When Labour lost power and Mr Brown was succeeded by Ed Miliband, Mr Balls was not his first choice for the shadow chancellorship. Instead the new Labour leader surprised many by picking Alan Johnson - a well-liked and experienced politician but someone who lacked Mr Balls's economic credentials. When he quit months later, citing personal reasons, Mr Balls got his chance in the role and has since headed up an aggressive line arguing against government cuts. The son of a zoology professor, Ed Balls was educated at a private all-boys school, Nottingham High, and Oxford University, where he gained a first class honours degree, before attending Harvard, in the US, as a Kennedy scholar. During the 2010 general election campaign he saw off a strong Conservative challenge in his own constituency by a whisker, later claiming, in a BBC interview, that this proved he was both a "winner" and a "team player". It was by no means certain that Mr Balls would enter the race to succeed Mr Brown at the head of the Labour Party after the party lost power - not least because his wife, shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, was considering her own leadership bid. In the end Ms Cooper, with whom he has three children, and who represents a neighbouring constituency in West Yorkshire, decided not to stand. Despite starting as an outsider, he mounted a disciplined and forceful leadership campaign, coming a creditable third behind the Miliband brothers. He will inevitably be dogged by press speculation that he still hankers after the party leadership - but with the political spotlight so firmly on the economy he should have enough in his in-tray to keep him from making too much mischief for Ed Miliband - or so the Labour leader must hope.	The biggest hurdle Ed Balls had to overcome in Labour's 2010 leadership election was establishing his own political identity, separate from that of Gordon Brown.
+text: Six temporary trays on the Tyne Bridge to catch waste from nesting birds were approved by Gateshead Council in 2020. By the River Brew Co on the Gateshead quayside is requesting a 12-month extension. About 250 breeding pairs of kittiwakes nest on and around the bridge, above the village's restaurants and bars. A council planning statement said "bird excrement and other waste from the nests directly above impacts on customers and useable space below". The application submitted to the council said the trays could "catch the majority of material ejected from the nest above before it falls or is blown onto people at quay level". If the scheme is extended, the trays would be coated with a polyester powder to match the colour of the bridge and deter birds from nesting on them, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said. The trays are about 5ft (1.5m) long and 10in (25.4cm) wide. Councillors will decide on the application by April. Follow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk. Related Internet Links Gateshead Borough Council By The River Brew Co	Metal trays installed under a bridge to protect customers at a shipping container village from falling bird poo could remain for another year.
+text: The teenager is accused of killing Steven McMyler, 34, who was found on 6 August outside Wigan Parish Church. The boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, appeared at Manchester Magistrates' Court and was remanded in custody until Monday when he will be brought before Bolton Crown Court. On Thursday a man, 19, was in court also charged with Mr McMyler's murder. Jordan Short, of Rushey Hey Road in Kirkby, Merseyside appeared before magistrates. A 17-year-old boy from Merseyside has also since been arrested on suspicion of murder and is in custody for questioning, Greater Manchester Police said. Three men aged 18, 19 and 30, were held on suspicion of murder and have been released pending further inquiries. Mr McMyler was found fatally injured outside the church on Bishopsgate shortly before 19:50 BST. Why not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk	A 13-year-old boy has been charged with murdering a man whose body was discovered in the grounds of a church.
+text: Presenter Sally Nugent stepped in after Fritz's husband was stuck on the motorway. Fritz later gave birth to a baby boy at St Mary's Hospital in Manchester. The baby had been due to arrive in early December but Fritz's waters broke after she came off air. Fritz tweeted her "heartfelt thanks" for the BBC Breakfast "team effort". A BBC spokeswoman said that Nugent had only intended to keep Fritz company while waiting for her husband, who was stuck in traffic on the M6. "When Sally heard that she'd gone into labour she offered to be there until Victoria's husband got there. But her husband never arrived so she found herself at the birth." Nugent tweeted: "You won't believe what happened after work yesterday. Huge congrats to our very clever @VFritzNews." "It's going to be a brilliant story for his 21st birthday! What an incredible day." A picture of mother and baby was put on BBC Breakfast's Facebook page with the headline "Breaking Breakfast Baby News!" "24 hours ago Victoria was presenting our business news - today she has some rather more important news to deliver! "He was in a bit of a rush to greet the world and arrived a few weeks early so he doesn't have a name yet but both mother and baby are doing well." Many viewers were surprised at the news because she did not look heavily pregnant when she was presenting the business segment. Follow us on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, on Instagram, or if you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	BBC Breakfast's business presenter Victoria Fritz went into labour after coming off air, with one of her fellow presenters acting as her birthing partner.
+text: Meliad Farah, a Lebanese-Australian, and Hassan El Hajj Hassan, a Lebanese-Canadian, were found guilty of helping a Lebanese-French man who prosecutors said died after planting the bomb. Their whereabouts are not known. Prosecutors linked the attack to militant group Hezbollah. It denied involvement. Hezbollah has been accused of carrying out a string of bombings and plots against Jewish and Israeli targets, and it is designated a terrorist organisation by several Western states and Israel. The EU put Hezbollah's military wing on its terrorism blacklist after the bombing. How did the attack happen? On 18 July 2012, a bus carrying Israeli tourists exploded outside the airport in the Bulgarian Black sea report of Burgas. The following year, Bulgarian authorities named Meliad Farah and Hassan El Hajj Hassan as suspects in the bombing. Prosecutors said the two men entered the country the month before the attack using fake ID documents, along with the bomber, who was later identified through DNA analysis as Lebanese-French dual national Mohamad Hassan El-Husseini. Farah and Hassan are thought to have left Bulgaria soon after the attack. In 2016, Farah and Hassan were charged with complicity in an act of terrorism. Prosecutors accused them of providing the explosive device and logistical support to El-Husseini, and said the evidence linked them to Hezbollah. On Monday, Sofia's Specialised Criminal Court found Farah and Hassan guilty and sentenced them to life in prison without parole. They were also ordered to pay compensation to the victims' families. "The court's sentence reflects the punishment we asked for and is adequate to the committed crimes. Whether it will be served or not will be a result of the search of the wanted persons, which is ongoing," Prosecutor Evgeniya Shtarkelova was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.	A Bulgarian court has sentenced two men to life in jail over a bus bombing in 2012 that killed five Israeli tourists and their Bulgarian driver.
+text: The G7 group of rich countries urged all parties "to immediately halt all military activity". The UN Security council issued a similar call. Khalifa Haftar, leader of the self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA), has ordered the advance on Tripoli. The unrest comes ahead of a planned UN conference on possible new elections. Tripoli is the home of Libya's internationally recognised government, which has the backing of the UN. Violence and division have riven Libya since long-time ruler Muammar Gaddafi was deposed and killed in 2011. What's happening on the ground? The LNA's leader Haftar ordered his forces to advance on Tripoli on Thursday, as UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres was in the city to discuss the ongoing crisis. Gen Haftar spoke to Mr Guterres in Benghazi on Friday, and reportedly told him that his operation would not stop until his troops had defeated "terrorism". On Thursday, LNA forces took the town of Gharyan 100km (62 miles) south of Tripoli. There are now reports troops have taken the capital's airport, which has been closed since 2014 - although these are disputed. Residents of Misrata east of Tripoli told Reuters news agency that militias from their city had been sent to defend the capital. Armed groups allied to the Tripoli government told the news agency on Friday that they had taken a number of LNA fighters prisoner. LNA troops seized the south of Libya and its oil fields earlier this year. What's been the reaction? In a tweet, Mr Guterres said he left Libya "with a heavy heart and deeply concerned", saying he still hoped there was a way to avoid a battle around the capital. The G7 later responded to the fighting with a statement urging an end to military operations. "We strongly oppose any military action in Libya," the statement read, reiterating their support for UN-led efforts to bring elections and calling on all countries to support the "sustainable stabilisation of Libya". The UN Security Council held a close-door meeting late on Friday. Afterwards the German UN ambassador Christoph Heusgen said members had "called on LNA forces to halt all military movements". "There can be no military solution to the conflict," he said. A Russian spokesman earlier told reporters the Kremlin does not support Gen Haftar's advance and said it wants a solution by "peaceful political means". UN envoy Ghassan Salame said on Saturday that the conference planned for 14-16 April would still be held in time, despite the escalation - "unless compelling circumstances force us not to". Hope dashed for a political resolution? By Sebastian Usher, BBC Arab affairs editor Khalifa Haftar's forces have met with mixed fortunes. To the south, they appear to have got close to the outskirts of the capital, at one point claiming to have taken the airport. But to the west, they appear to have been pushed back. It's still unclear how much this is a show of force to bolster Gen Haftar's position or a genuine effort to seize Tripoli. He returned during the revolution and he's subsequently become the most powerful military leader in a country rife with militias, allied to a rival government in the east. Despite the chorus of international concern over his actions, he has had support from powerful outside players, including the UAE and Egypt. Efforts towards a political resolution for Libya have foundered time after time. The most recent hopes may once again have been dashed. Who is Khalifa Haftar? Born in 1943, the former army officer helped Colonel Muammar Gaddafi seize power in 1969 before falling out with him and going into exile in the US. He returned in 2011 after the uprising against Gaddafi began and became a rebel commander. In December Haftar met Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj from the UN-backed government at a conference but refused to attend official talks. He visited Saudi Arabia last week, where he met King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for talks.	World powers and the United Nations have condemned fresh fighting in Libya as rebel forces from the east of the country march on the capital.
+text: There are currently 32 patients in critical care or on ventilators in hospitals, according to latest NHS Wales figures. In Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board area, two months ago there were 29 Covid-19 patients in critical care at the pandemic's peak. Along with Hywel Dda health board, both currently have three patients. "It's a good sign at this stage that we've seen critical care pressures reduced by probably about 80% from the peak," said NHS Wales chief executive Dr Andrew Goodall. "The majority of people being treated in critical care now do not have coronavirus, which importantly shows more NHS work is taking place." He said it was one of the factors he was keeping an eye on, but he said it was also "striking" that the number of patients still in hospital being treated with Covid-19 - 885 - was the equivalent of filling three large hospitals. The seven-day average in total daily admissions to hospitals of confirmed and suspected Covid-19 cases is currently 90 - 17 lower than last week. What is happening in different parts of Wales? The latest figures show how the virus is continuing to decline. Aneurin Bevan around Newport and the old Gwent valleys was an early hot-spot for coronavirus. Now there are twice as many patients in its critical care units with other medical issues rather than being treated for the virus. At the peak, the health board had 48 critically ill patients at any one time with Covid-19 but currently has six. But Dr Goodall told a media briefing he was still concerned about the possibility of a second peak of the coronavirus outbreak emerging. "Is it through the summer, linked to lock down restrictions? Is it ahead of the winter, when actually the virus may be more susceptible to transmission at that time?" he said. He added: "We're prepared because we've retained contingency arrangements that we put in place but also because we've learned a lot more about the virus." Dr Goodall said the 19 field hospitals that had been established in Wales remain "a contingency" but discussions were being held with health boards about whether there is "some other supportive role that could be played by those field hospitals as well".	The number of critically ill patients with coronavirus in Wales has fallen to its lowest number since 25 March.
+text: By Jonathan AmosBBC Science Correspondent The contamination was found in sediments pulled from the bottom of the Mediterranean, near Italy. The analysis, led by the University of Manchester, found up to 1.9 million plastic pieces per square metre. These items likely included fibres from clothing and other synthetic textiles, and tiny fragments from larger objects that had broken down over time. The researchers' investigations lead them to believe that microplastics (smaller than 1mm) are being concentrated in specific locations on the ocean floor by powerful bottom currents. "These currents build what are called drift deposits; think of underwater sand dunes," explained Dr Ian Kane, who fronted the international team. "They can be tens of kilometres long and hundreds of metres high. They are among the largest sediment accumulations on Earth. They're made predominantly of very fine silt, so it's intuitive to expect microplastics will be found within them," he told BBC News. It's been calculated that something in the order of four to 12 million tonnes of plastic waste enter the oceans every year, mostly through rivers. Media headlines have focussed on the great aggregations of debris that float in gyres or wash up with the tides on coastlines. But this visible trash is thought to represent just 1% of the marine plastic budget. The exact whereabouts of the other 99% is unknown. Some of it has almost certainly been consumed by sea creatures, but perhaps the much larger proportion has fragmented and simply sunk. Dr Kane's team has already shown that deep-sea trenches and ocean canyons can have high concentrations of microplastics in their sediments. Indeed, water tank simulations run by the group have demonstrated just how efficiently flows of mud, sand and silt of the type occurring in canyons will entrain and move fibres to even greater depths. "A single one of these underwater avalanches ('turbidity currents') can transport tremendous volumes of sediment for 100s of kilometres across the ocean floor," said Dr Florian Pohl from Durham University. "We're just starting to understand from recent laboratory experiments how these flows transport and bury microplastics." There is nothing atypical about the study area in the Tyrrhenian basin between Italy, Corsica and Sardinia. Many other parts of the globe have strong deep-water currents that are driven by temperature and salinity contrasts. The issue of concern will be that these currents also supply oxygen and nutrients to deep-sea creatures. And so by following the same route, the microplastics could be settling into biodiversity hotspots, increasing the chance of ingestion by marine life. Prof Elda Miramontes from the University of Bremen, Germany, is a co-author on the Science journal paper describing the Mediterranean discovery. She says the same effort shown in the battle against coronavirus must now take on the scourge of ocean plastic pollution. "We're all making an effort to improve our safety and we are all staying at home and changing our lives - changing our work life, or even stopping work," she told BBC News. "We're doing all this so that people are not affected by this sickness. We have to think in the same way when we protect our oceans." Roland Geyer is professor of industrial ecology at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California at Santa Barbara. He has been at the forefront of investigating and describing the waste streams through which plastic gets into the oceans. He commented: "We still have a very poor understanding of how much total plastic has accumulated in the oceans. There seems to be one emerging scientific consensus, which is that most of that plastic is not floating on the ocean surface. "Many scientists now think that most of the plastic is likely to be on the ocean floor, but the water column and the beaches are also likely to contain major quantities. "We really should all be completely focused on stopping plastic from entering the oceans in the first place." Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter:.	Scientists have identified the highest levels of microplastics ever recorded on the seafloor.
+text: The Seat Toledo was abandoned on a road near Muchelney on Christmas Eve. Now, with water levels receding, 21-year-old Hubert Zajaczkowski has been able to reclaim his car. He said: "It was shocking, seeing my car on telly and in the international news. Everyone was talking about it, including the Prince of Wales." Mr Zajaczkowski, an apprentice at AgustaWestland in Yeovil, said he escaped from his car on Christmas Eve as the water suddenly rose. "I was trying to get home to Shepton Mallet from work and this is the route I took and of course I got stuck in the water." For weeks, the car remained stranded under several feet of water, filmed and photographed by national and international media and press. But as the floods retreated, it finally resurfaced - allowing an old military amphibious vehicle to tow it out. Despite being unable to drive his car home, Mr Zajaczkowski said he was able to reclaim his lost keys and insurance documents. "It smells, it's unbelievably disgusting in there," he said. "My insurance documents are covered in grass and all sorts, and my sleeping bag literally weighs a ton and is full of water." Mr Zajaczkowski said he bought the car two years ago for £600 but was hoping to get rid of it in the spring. "As you can see, nature did it for me," he said. But as the car was towed from the water, with Mr Zajaczkowski behind the wheel, he said he felt "proud in a way to be driving it again".	A submerged car that became a familiar sight during coverage of flooding on the Somerset Levels has been reunited with its owner.
+text: The social media firm had initially told Jackie Charley, from Denholm, they could not be approved for sale. She said she could not stop laughing after her work - featuring a robin, stag and a squirrel - was blocked for its "shameful, sexual nature". Facebook said a glitch had led to the incorrect assessment but the block had now been lifted. Ms Charley highlighted the situation late last month. "Hilariously, Facebook has blocked my Christmas cards from becoming a product in my shop due to their shameful, sexual nature," she posted. "'It looks like we didn't approve your item because we don't allow the sale of adult items or services (eg sexual enhancement items or adult videos).'" She then asked the public to judge for themselves, posting the pictures of winter scenes. However, Facebook confirmed it had now addressed the situation. "Our team processes millions of images each week, and occasionally we incorrectly ban content, as happened here," a spokesperson said. "We approved Jackie's post as soon as we became aware of our mistake, and are very sorry for the inconvenience caused."	Facebook has lifted a block on a Borders' artist's Christmas cards after mistaking them for "adult items".
+text: Mohammed Haroon Zeb was found injured on Queen's Cross, Dudley, at about 00:35 GMT on Sunday and died in hospital that afternoon. His family remembered the taxi manager as "a beautiful son, brother, father" and "a real icon to this world". There have been no arrests so far over his death but police say their investigation is continuing "at pace". Mr Zeb died on the day he turned 39, his cousin said. "Today we mourn the loss of our hero who will be dearly missed," Mr Zeb's family said in a statement released via West Midlands Police. "He eased the burdens of everyone he knew and his beautiful smile lit up every room he walked in." His cousin, Shaz Saleem, said Mr Zeb had been returning to his home on Queens Cross after work when he was shot in the "cowardly" attack. He said: "He was just such a character, such a wonderful guy. It's so sad that everyone he knew is crying. "This shouldn't be happening in our town - it's absolutely scary and ridiculous that we have got gun crime in Dudley." Police said they were continuing to examine CCTV in the local area and were keen to speak to a man known to have flagged down officers in the area just after the shooting. "Haroon's death is simply tragic, my thoughts are with his family and friends and this very sad time," said Det Ch Insp Jim Munro, from West Midlands Police. "Our investigation is continuing at pace as we try and understand what happened." A post-mortem examination is due to take place on Friday. Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk Related Internet Links West Midlands Police	A father of four fatally wounded in a shooting died on his birthday, his family has revealed.
+text: The actor also starred in Ghostbusters, The Flintstones, Little Shop of Horrors and Parenthood in the 1980s and early 90s, but stepped away from on-screen roles in 1997. His wife had died six years earlier, and he struggled to continue his film career after becoming a single parent, and decided to concentrate on raising his children. Although he continued to do occasional voice-overs for films such as Disney's Brother Bear movies, his screen break turned into a 23-year hiatus. "I'm a single parent, and I just found that it was too difficult to manage raising my kids and doing the travelling involved in making movies," he told USA Today in 2005. "So I took a little bit of a break. And the little bit of a break turned into a longer break, and then I found that I really didn't miss it." Five years ago, Moranis declined to take part in the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters. "It didn't appeal to me," he told The Hollywood Reporter at the time. "I still get the occasional query about a film or television role, and as soon as one comes along that piques my interest, I'll probably do it." Fans are now excited to learn that Moranis will reprise his role of Wayne Szalinski for the new film, currently titled Shrunk. Josh Gad will star as Wayne's son, who as an adult is now an aspiring scientist like is father. Joe Johnston, who directed the 1989 original, will also direct the sequel, which is being produced by Disney. He is also due to appear in a forthcoming Martin Scorsese-directed Netflix documentary called An Afternoon With SCTV. SCTV is short for Second City Television, the sketch comedy show that gave Moranis and many other actors their big breaks during its run between 1976 and 1984. The new Netflix special was filmed in Toronto, with Moranis joining fellow SCTV veterans including Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy and Joe Flaherty. Other stars who quit acting Read more: The Hollywood stars who quit acting Follow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	Film favourite Rick Moranis is to return to our screens for a new sequel to 1980s family comedy Honey, I Shrunk The Kids.
+text: Each day more than 30 East Coast trains cross the Royal Border Bridge in Berwick, designed by famous Tyneside engineer Robert Stephenson. On 27 November, hundreds of school children will watch the switch-on of lights on the bridge's arches to mark its anniversary. There will also be street performers and a firework display. Northumberland County Council's tourism and cultural development manager Nigel Walsh said: "To illuminate such an impressive and significant piece of architecture has been a huge task. "We are very excited about the plans we have in place for the celebration on Saturday." The bridge was officially opened by Queen Victoria in 1850.	A railway bridge which links Scotland and England is to be lit up to celebrate its 160th birthday.
+text: The retailer said online sales had grown strongly in the second quarter of the year, but sales in stores had not kept up the pace of the first quarter. Full-year profits are now expected to be £5.5m, down from £8m last year. The Wakefield-based chain has more than 300 stores and a membership of 1.7 million for its loyalty scheme. Many retailers are struggling in the current trading environment, with several well-known chains closing stores and seeking a financial restructuring to survive. Department store group House of Fraser was bought by Sports Direct after running into difficulties, and earlier this month Debenhams rushed out a statement to try to reassure investors over its finances. Last week. menswear chain Moss Bros issued a profit warning, also citing the summer's hot weather as a factor for poor trading. However, not all retailers are in trouble. Earlier this week, fashion chain Next reported better-than-expected sales. 'Challenging times' In its latest trading statement, Bonmarché said: "The continuation of warm weather for an extended period may have delayed demand for early autumn stock, but we believe that the more dominant factor is that underlying consumer demand for the UK High Street is weaker which is impacting footfall." It had given an upbeat trading statement in July, in which it said trading had been "significantly better" than in the previous quarter, but trading since then has deteriorated. Helen Connolly, the company's chief executive, said: "These are undoubtedly challenging times in the retail industry and, in common with many other businesses, Bonmarché's store trading has been impacted by weaker consumer sentiment and footfall." However, she added that despite the "challenging market, the health of the business remains strong". Bonmarché, established in 1982, describes itself as "one of the UK's largest women's value retailers". Shares ended 19p lower at 84p, valuing the company at £43m.	Shares in womenswear chain Bonmarché fell 18% on Thursday after warning that profits would fall short due to weak consumer demand and warm weather.
+text: The motorway had been closed in both directions between junctions one and four since 0410 BST on Friday. The Highways Agency had hoped to open one lane by the end of the FA Cup semi-final at nearby Wembley Stadium. The southbound section will remain shut "until it is safe to be reopened", the agency added. Spokesman John Cauldwell said the aim was to get vehicles flowing in both directions by Monday morning when traffic is at its peak. FA Cup semi-final The motorway closure led to delays on Saturday on the A1, A40 and A406 as motorists took alternative routes, AA Roadwatch said. The closure coincided with one of the biggest weekends in the capital's sporting calendar, with Wembley hosting two FA Cup semi-finals and the London Marathon on Sunday. About 40 firefighters were called to tackle the blaze, which broke out at a scrapyard site close to Scratchwood Services and Ellesmere Avenue in Mill Hill on Friday. A number of gas cylinders were involved and a hazard zone was set up in case they exploded in the heat, London Fire Brigade said. About 50 people living in properties near the scrapyard were temporarily evacuated as a precaution while the cylinders, some of which were acetylene, were cooled and made safe. Train lines close to the scene were also shut down. Highways Agency engineers have been given access to the site of the fire underneath the motorway to assess the extent of the damage. Motorists have been advised to check the Highways Agency website for the latest traffic information.	One lane of the northbound M1 has reopened after being closed for more than 36 hours following a fire, the Highways Agency have said.
+text: Dozens of KKK members took part in an authorised march to protest at the planned removal of a statue of General Robert E Lee from Charlottesville. Lee commanded forces of the pro-slavery Confederacy in the US Civil War. The marchers, some carrying Confederate flags, were separated from rival groups by metal barricades and armed police. The KKK supporters were escorted to and from the rally on Saturday by police. They were greeted in the university town by large crowds chanting "shame" and "racists go home" shortly after they had gathered at Justice Park. "Police were deployed to secure access to the park and ensure the safety of all involved," a Virginia State Police spokeswoman said. Police declared the counter-protests "unlawful" and used tear gas to disperse the crowds. Several people were arrested, local media report. While some Americans regard the Confederate flag and associated Civil War monuments as part of their Southern heritage, the far right have adopted them as a rallying cause. Some observers argue that US President Donald Trump's election to the White House re-energised the far right across the US. In May, a torch-lit rally against the removal of Confederate monuments in Virginia was condemned by a local mayor. More than 100 people attended a counter-protest the following night. A rally in February 2016 ended with the arrests of 13 people after a violent brawl between members of the KKK and rival demonstrators resulted in a number of stabbings in Anaheim, California.	A march by supporters of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan (KKK) group in the US state of Virginia has been met by hundreds of rival demonstrators.
+text: By M Ilyas KhanBBC News, Islamabad But there has been an eerie silence in Pakistani quarters in the 24 hours since the Afghan government announced that Mullah Omar died in a Pakistani hospital in April 2013. This was despite reports that the top leadership council of the Taliban had been meeting in the Pakistani city of Quetta to choose the successor. Pakistan's state television has ignored the news for the most part since it first broke. The private media mostly followed the BBC line, and held debates in which the usual ex-military analysts, while refraining from confirming or denying the death, focused on the timing of the leak, saying it was meant to defame Pakistan and undermine Taliban-Kabul talks, which Pakistan had been set to host. Some even suggested the Indians might have forced the hand of the Afghan officials who leaked it to the BBC. A day after Kabul's announcement, a Pakistani foreign office spokesman said he wouldn't like to comment on "rumours" of Mullah Omar's death. Few are impressed at Pakistan's stance. Osama Bin Laden was found and killed in Pakistan even though for years Pakistan denied he was present on its soil. Now Afghan intelligence officials have gone ahead with the claim that Mullah Omar died in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi. While there may never be official Pakistani confirmation of this, few doubt claims that he lived most of his post-9/11 life in southern Pakistan. The reason lies in the origin of the Taliban movement, and its symbiotic relationship with Pakistan. The movement was originally confined to some parts of Kandahar province, and was mainly a localised reaction to extortion and moral crimes by local warlords. But it gained strength in the later part of 1994 when Pakistanis dressed as madrassah students descended on the border town of Spin Boldak, busted a huge arms cache of a former mujahideen group, and then rolled up the Kandahar highway to free a Pakistani trade convoy to central Asia which had been held hostage by local warlords. Subsequent years saw former mujahideen fighters joining the Taliban movement in their hundreds in a blitzkrieg in which the southern cities fell to the Taliban one after the other. Security analysts in Pakistan and the US have long held that Pakistan provided the Taliban with logistics and tactical leadership to capture such important regional centres as Herat in the west, Jalalabad in the east and finally Kabul in 1996. Post-9/11, when the US-led coalition dislodged the Taliban regime, Pakistan allowed the fleeing militants to carve a sanctuary on its soil in the border town of Wana in South Waziristan tribal district. This sanctuary later expanded to an entire north-western belt along the Afghan border, called the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata). This played a major role in the Taliban's ability to survive, and finally take the battle to the US-led coalition troops inside Afghanistan. All this while, and despite Pakistan's denials, it was common knowledge the entire Taliban leadership set up bases in Quetta and Peshawar, and later in Karachi, from where they guided operations inside Afghanistan. After the end of Nato's mission in Afghanistan last year, Pakistan moved to clear these sanctuaries of unwanted groups that the Taliban-al-Qaeda militant network had spawned over a decade. In recent months, it has also reverted to securing peace in Afghanistan, without which it cannot successfully implement a major economic corridor the Chinese are building across the length of the country to connect China with the Arabian Sea. But Pakistan's need to keep Indian influence out of Afghanistan continues to cause suspicions among some sections of Afghan ruling circles, who believe Pakistan will manipulate peace talks to achieve its own objectives at the cost of Afghan interests. Many believe the Pakistanis would have kept Mullah Omar's death a secret in order to prevent rifts within Taliban. Meanwhile, Pakistani officials believe that the Afghan intelligence service, the NDS, has been leaking news of the Taliban's engagement with Kabul to embarrass the Taliban leadership and to encourage defections from their ranks. They feel by confirming the news of Mullah Omar's death on Wednesday, the NDS pushed President Ashraf Ghani, who was opposed to making the news public, into a corner. Whether this move by the NDS will achieve peace in Afghanistan is a question only time will answer, but many believe that the Taliban movement will no longer be the monolithic force it remained until about three years ago. And the NDS will also now be able to sell their long-held view to domestic and international audiences that the Taliban leadership is but a lackey of Pakistan.	The Taliban have confirmed that their leader Mullah Omar is dead, and are thought to have appointed Mullah Akhtar Mansour as the movement's official head.
+text: During the same period, 17% of councils reduced free parking, according to UK-wide data sourced by LV car insurance. It comes as local authorities make significant budget and job cuts. Local Government Minister Bob Neill said there was "no excuse" for using motorists as "cash cows", but a body representing some UK councils said regulating parking was "essential". Data provided by more than 200 UK councils as part of a Freedom of Information request, suggested a 5.8% jump in the number of parking attendants, with numbers increasing from 3,630 to 3,841 between 2008 and 2012. Some 10% of councils have increased the number of on-duty parking attendants by at least 20%, it suggested. Average council areas now have some 16 parking attendants enforcing traffic, parking and other laws, while London boroughs have 51, the data also showed. And 10% of drivers have received parking fines over the last 12 months, with those hit paying out £340 - about £96 per offending driver. 'Cash cows' Of the councils that provided information, Westminster hired the most parking attendants with 242, while Islington in north London had 135, followed by Edinburgh with 121, and Lambeth in south London with 99. Meanwhile, 57% of drivers said parking in their nearest town was more difficult now than in 2008, with 7% thinking it was easier, according to another LV survey of 1,583 motorists. Some 18% of drivers revealed they had parked illegally in the last year. Local Government Minister Bob Neill said: "There are plenty of other ways for councils to raise extra income or make savings like better procurement and sharing back-office services. "We want to see councils use parking to support the High Street and help their local shops prosper. "That's why we have ended the last government's requirements to limit spaces, push up parking charges and encourage aggressive parking enforcement." But the Local Government Association (LGA), which represents councils in England and Wales, said good management of parking was vital. "Regulating parking is essential to keep traffic flowing, pedestrians and motorists safe, roads clear for emergency services and business deliveries, deterring drivers from blocking roads and pavements, and ensuring people can park near their homes or local shops," said Tony Ball, vice-chairman of the LGA's economy and transport board. "With the number of cars on our roads increasing, it's more crucial than ever that on-street parking is properly managed." 'Cash-strapped motorists' He also said that towns and city centres no longer had the space to "keep creating more parking spaces". "Councils have worked hard to improve public transport and cycling provision to encourage more people to leave their car at home unless driving is essential," said Mr Ball. "Any revenue raised from parking management must be spent on transport services such as filling potholes, bus passes for the elderly, park and ride schemes, street lights, parking services and road improvement projects, things which will benefit all road users at some point." John O'Roarke, managing director at LV, said the lack of free parking in council areas was "putting increasing pressure on cash-strapped motorists", with many "resorting to parking illegally". "This problem is being exacerbated as councils increase the number of paid parking zones in their areas and take on more parking attendants to police them," said Mr O'Roarke. He also advised drivers visiting busy areas to plan ahead and "consider parking slightly further away to avoid high parking charges". "Many cities now offer park-and-ride schemes, which are a fraction of the cost of inner city parking," he said.	The number of parking attendants hired by councils has risen by nearly 6% since 2008, figures have suggested.
+text: Israeli police have not confirmed the arrest or what alleged offence they are investigating. EU prosecutors suspect Moshe Harel of masterminding an illegal organ trade involving a clinic in the Kosovan capital, Pristina. His arrest was announced to a court in Kosovo on Thursday, an EU press officer in Pristina told the BBC News website. Israeli newspapers have recently reported the arrest of 10 people over an international organ-trafficking network, but it is unclear if Mr Harel is among them. But he is known to be among nine people indicted in the Kosovo case, which relates to organ transplants carried out in 2008. Prosecutor Jonathan Ratel, of the EU law and justice mission (Eulex), said Mr Harel "and several other suspects" had been arrested in Israel "in connection with an investigation in Israel". The Eulex prosecutor is now "in close co-operation with the authorities in Israel" with regard to an international arrest alert issued by Interpol for Mr Harel at the request of the Special Prosecution Office of Kosovo, Eulex press officer Bardha Azari told the BBC. The owner of the Kosovo clinic at the centre of the allegations, Lutfi Dervishi of Medicus, has denied any wrongdoing.	A key suspect in an organ-trafficking case in Kosovo has been arrested in Israel, European Union prosecutors say.
+text: The event was one of a series being organised by All Under One Banner across the country. Local police said about 10,000 people took part in the march. The participants gathered around the fountain in the town's High Street. They then made their way through town and along the Whitesands before finishing in the Dock Park. The march filled the streets as it snaked its way around the centre of Dumfries. Further events Groups from across the country joined locals to be part of the crowd. Despite oppressive heat and a weather warning for rain, it remained dry for the march. Police closed a number of roads and warned drivers to expect delays during the event. Public transport was also expected to be affected. The Dumfries event followed a similar march in Glasgow last month. Further ones are planned in the weeks to come.	Thousands of Scottish independence marchers have taken to the streets of Dumfries.
+text: It said it had discovered more than 70 bodies in six mass graves in Tillaberi in the north-west of the country, an area affected by jihadist violence. The killings allegedly happened earlier this year. One of the investigators said the civilians had been killed with bladed weapons and small arms. International rights groups have accused the armies of Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso of carrying out dozens of extrajudicial executions during campaigns against jihadists and other armed groups in the Sahel region. Niger's National Commission on Human Rights was investigating allegations that 102 civilians had gone missing in the troubled region between 27 March and 2 April after an army operation. "There have indeed been executions of unarmed civilians and the mission discovered at least 71 bodies in six mass graves," said Abdoulaye Seydou, the president of the Pan-African Network for Peace, Democracy and Development, which took part in the investigation. "It is elements of the Defence and Security Forces (FDS) which are responsible for these summary and extrajudicial executions," he added. But Mr Seydou said it was not possible to say whether top levels of the army were responsible. There has been no response to the claim from the Niger authorities.	Niger's national human rights commission has accused the army of executing dozens of civilians during counterinsurgency operations.
+text: British actress Gwendoline Christie, who currently stars in Game of Thrones as warrior Brienne of Tarth, has also been cast in the production. The news was announced on the Star Wars website, although it did not say what roles the actresses would play. Star Wars: Episode VII is due in cinemas on 18 December 2015. "I could not be more excited about Lupita and Gwendoline joining the cast of Episode VII," Lucasfilm president and producer Kathleen Kennedy said. "It's thrilling to see this extraordinarily talented ensemble taking shape." Nyong'o and Christie join the already announced cast of John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, and Max von Sydow. They will join original stars Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, and Kenny Baker in the new film. Meanwhile, gossip website TMZ has posted a series of leaked pictures from the set of Episode VII, which began filming in Abu Dhabi last month. The pictures appear to show a Tatooine-like marketplace and a new alien creature.	Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave actress Lupita Nyong'o has joined the cast of Star Wars: Episode VII, it has been announced.
+text: Ministers say use of plastic bags has dropped by 81% in supermarkets since the charge was introduced in 2011. But they say some customers are buying bags-for-life and throwing them away or forgetting to re-use them. The Welsh Retail Consortium (WRC) said it was wrong to penalise customers for buying and using reusable bags. In the Welsh government's proposals for the environment bill, ministers float the idea of extending the charge to cover bags-for-life, which are outside the scope of the charge. Supermarkets currently charge between 5p and 10p for the re-usable bags. The plans are out to consultation until January. Ministers are also considering extending their powers to force retailers to pass on money raised from bag charges to environmental causes. John Munro from the WRC told BBC Wales's Sunday Politics programme: "The Welsh Retail Consortium does not support extending the charges to reusable carrier bags or bags for life the simple reason is we're trying to encourage customers to reuse their carrier bags and we're doing that by placing a charge on single use carrier bags. "It seems slightly perverse to be telling customers that we want them to reuse their bags and then tax them, basically penalising them for using and buying reusable bags." 'Deep support' Natural Resources Minister Alun Davies said: "What we're doing in the white paper is saying we want to change the way we manage our natural resources in Wales...what we want to see is a more consistent, coherent way of doing this across the whole country and we want to manage our waste better. "And as a part of managing our waste we want to have the powers to enable us to make additional charge where they are necessary and if they are necessary in the future. "This isn't about picking a fight with anybody, retailers or otherwise. This is about managing our natural resources in Wales in a very positive way, in a very sustainable way. "That has broad support and wide support and deep support across the whole of Wales, and as a part of that we're looking at how we manage our waste. "We know that we've seen tremendous increase in recycling rates over the last few years...the way that people have changed their behaviour in Wales since we introduced a relatively small charge for a plastic bags is almost emblematic of the changes we want to see in the future as well. "So what we're saying about plastic bags is only one element of a much wider and perhaps more important story." 'Big mistake' Welsh Conservative leader Andrew RT Davies said: "As someone who believes in small government obviously I would like to see a very light touch when it comes to regulation or legislation. "But, as I say, it's about striking a balance between what is a sensible compromise between improving the environmental credentials of Wales and having this levy that people have accepted because it's a modest sum of money and it is making an impact and then being seen to (be) turning it into maybe more of a penalty and a heavier hand of government that actually people will start to resent. "I think that would be a big mistake." Northern Ireland has its own 5p bag charge, although plans to increase the charge to 10p were recently dropped. Scotland is introducing a 5p charge next year, with England due to follow after the 2015 General Election. Sunday Politics is on BBC One Wales at 11:00 GMT on Sunday, 24 November.	Retailers have warned Welsh ministers it would be "perverse" to extend the 5p charge on plastic bags to "bags-for-life" sold by major stores.
+text: More services were either late or cancelled in July and August than during the same months in 2018, says the Transport for the North report. The downturn in reliability was "a significant concern" going into autumn. TPE blamed much of its worsening performance on "weather events such as flooding and extreme heat". A spokesperson added: "Performance has improved this month and we are working hard to ensure that we continue to provide the best possible service for our customers." Northern said: "Our performance has been steadily improving over the past 12 months as we have worked hard to bring stability and reliability to our services. "We know there is more to do, and our customers were impacted over the summer by extreme weather causing flooding and damage to overhead lines and disruption to many rail services across the country." Northern introduced new timetables on 20 May 2018, leading to widespread disruption. A review led by Rail Minister Andrew Jones and Leeds council leader Judith Blake found it "led to severe hardship" for commuters across the north. However, the latest performance assessment from Transport for the North says: "Following a period of recovery from December 2018 onwards, performance has continued to deteriorate for both operators. "Levels of reliability are now lower than in the same period for 2018, with a number of severe weather events, train crew cancellations and fleet failures having a particularly significant impact." Its Strategic Rail Director, David Hoggarth, said: "The fact that rail passengers in the north are still faced with unreliable services is symptomatic of a transport network in need of strategic investment." He said the report was clear "that the performance of the operating companies is below what it should be". "Passengers' interests should come first - and we'll continue to press for the rail industry to adopt this focus." Failing this happening, he said, "we expect government to intervene... to ensure our communities have a rail network they can rely on". TPE saw its public performance measure - the percentage of trains running on time - drop to 70.9% between 21 July and 17 August from 75.7% in the same period last year. An average of 42 trains were cancelled each day, representing 12.9% of services. The figure for Northern fell to 79.4% from 82.2%. An average of 139 trains were cancelled each day, representing 5.3% of services. Follow BBC Yorkshire on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk.	Northern and TransPennine Express (TPE) rail services are worse than they were a year ago when they were disrupted by timetabling chaos, a new report says.
+text: By Tom EdgingtonBBC News It means that developers can now seek planning permission for the project, which faces opposition from environmentalists and local residents. What is the Heathrow expansion plan? Heathrow is already the UK's busiest airport, serving about 80 million passengers per year. The airport currently has four terminals and two runways. Supporters of a new runway say it would boost international trade and provide many new jobs. Building the new runway would involve diverting rivers, moving roads and rerouting the M25 through a tunnel under the new runway. The proposal also includes upgrades to existing terminals two and five and plans to build new car parks. Heathrow Airport has said the project would be funded privately. What are the arguments for a third runway? The expansion would benefit passengers, boost the wider economy by up to £61bn and create up to 77,000 local jobs by 2030, according to the Department for Transport. More than 40% of the UK's exports to non-EU countries now go through Heathrow, according to its chief executive John Holland-Kaye. He said a third runway was vital in order to strengthen international trade links. "If we don't expand our only hub airport, then we're going to be flying through Paris to get to global markets," he said. Heathrow Airport also says it would introduce legally-binding environmental targets - including on noise, air quality and carbon emissions. What are the arguments against? Local and environmental groups have dismissed Heathrow Airport's assurances and have argued that a new runway would mean unacceptable levels of noise and pollution, as well as adding to the UK's carbon emissions from the increased number of flights. The proposal also "makes a mockery" of the government's 2050 carbon neutral strategy, according to Green MP Caroline Lucas. Rupa Huq - the Labour MP for neighbouring Ealing Central and Acton - has labelled the plan "completely nuts", saying: "Heathrow is the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in Europe." Campaign groups have also voiced opposition. "The impact on local people could be severe for many years to come," said John Stewart, who chairs the Hacan group. "Disruption from construction, the demolition of homes, the reality of more than 700 extra planes a day." In all, 761 homes are expected to go, including the entire village of Longford. Heathrow has said it would pay the full market value plus 25% for properties in its compulsory purchase zone, as well as for some houses in the surrounding areas. When was a third runway first proposed? The third runway plan has been talked about for many years. The Labour government approved a third runway in 2009, with former Prime Minister Gordon Brown saying it was needed for economic reasons. But the plan was later scrapped by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2010. David Cameron, who became prime minister after Mr Brown, ruled out a Heathrow expansion "no ifs, no buts". In 2015 an Airports Commission, set up to look at London's airport capacity problems, recommended Heathrow as the preferred site for a new runway - a plan which was approved under Theresa May's leadership. The decision was opposed by several local MPs, including Boris Johnson, whose Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat is next to Heathrow. He offered to lie down in front of bulldozers to stop the runway's construction. However, when MPs voted in favour of the third runway in 2018, Mr Johnson - then foreign secretary - was away in Afghanistan. On 27 February 2020, the Court of Appeal ruled the decision to allow the expansion was unlawful because it did not take climate commitments into account. However, the Supreme Court's decision has ruled the strategy was legitimately based on previous, less stringent, climate targets at the time it was agreed. What happens next? The airport can now make a planning application, although this could take more than a year. It still has to persuade a public inquiry that there is a case for expansion, and the government will have the final say. Meanwhile environmentalists are expected to continue challenging the project at every stage in the courts - including the European Court of Human Rights.	The Supreme Court has reversed a decision to block plans for a controversial third runway at Heathrow Airport.
+text: Dr Lee, the MP for Bracknell, took his seat on the opposition benches as the PM addressed the Commons. His defection means Boris Johnson no longer has a working majority. MPs hoping to pass legislation to block no deal have cleared the first hurdle after Speaker John Bercow granted them an emergency debate. That debate could last up to three hours, followed by a vote. If the MPs win the vote - defeating the government - they will be able to take control of Commons business on Wednesday. That will give them the chance to introduce a cross-party bill which would force the prime minister to ask for Brexit to be delayed until 31 January, unless MPs approve a new deal, or vote in favour of a no-deal exit, by 19 October. It seems right now - although there is still some arm twisting going on behind the scenes - that the government is set to lose the vote. We are finding ourselves in the middle of a full-throttle confrontation between a Parliament that does not want to allow the country to leave the EU without a deal and a prime minister who secured his place in power promising he would always keep that as an option. Both of them cannot be the victors here. And they are both determined to win. Speaking in the Commons earlier, Mr Johnson told MPs he wanted a negotiated exit from the EU and insisted there was "real momentum" behind the talks with Brussels. He said he would travel to Dublin on Monday for discussions with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, focused on proposed alternative arrangements to the Irish border backstop - a key sticking point in the negotiations. Asked to provide evidence of progress by several Tory MPs, he said he would not negotiate in public but reassured them he would give details of the UK's proposals well before the end of September to meet a deadline set by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. But he said the moves by MPs, including Conservatives, to pass legislation effectively blocking a no-deal exit on 31 October would "destroy any chance of negotiating a new deal". If the rebels succeeded in their aims, Mr Johnson said it would force him to go to Brussels to "beg for another pointless delay" to Brexit and he would "never" do that. "It is Jeremy Corbyn's surrender bill. It means running up the white flag," he added. No 10 has said the prime minister will push for an election on 14 October if the MPs succeed in blocking no deal. But asked if he might simply ignore them and press ahead with a no-deal Brexit regardless, he said: "We will of course uphold the constitution and obey the law." Last-ditch efforts to get the Tory rebels on side have been taking place, but BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg said the first meeting on Tuesday morning between the prime minister and the group went "less than swimmingly" and was "less than cordial". Further discussions reportedly began shortly after the PM's Commons statement. There are thought to be about 15 confirmed rebels. The government had hoped the threat of an election - and of deselection and expulsion from the party - would be enough to bring them into line. Before Dr Lee's defection, Mr Johnson only had a working majority of one in the Commons. In a letter to the prime minister, Dr Lee said Brexit divisions had "sadly transformed this once great party into something more akin to a narrow faction in which one's Conservatism is measured by how recklessly one wants to leave the European Union". "Perhaps more disappointingly, it has become infected by the twin diseases of English nationalism and populism." He told BBC Radio 4's PM the "bullying" of MPs opposed to no deal showed the "tone and culture" of the Conservative Party had fundamentally changed, and he knew of other like-minded colleagues who were also considering their futures. Welcoming her latest recruit, Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson said they would work together to prevent a "disastrous Brexit" which would do untold damage to the NHS and other public services. Dr Lee's decision to cross the floor - following that of ex-Tory MP Sarah Wollaston last month - was greeted with cheers on the opposition benches. Amid angry exchanges during the PM's statement on last month's G7 summit, Jeremy Corbyn urged the PM to "reflect on his choice of language" to describe the rebels' bill. The Labour leader said the UK was "not at war with Europe" and it was a no-deal exit which would see the UK "surrender" jobs, employment standards and social protections. "His is a government with no mandate, no morals and, as of today, no majority," he added. The SNP's leader in Parliament, Ian Blackford, said Dr Lee's defection capped what he said was the "shortest-lived honeymoon period ever" for a new prime minister. He said his party was ready for a general election at any time. But veteran Tory Ken Clarke, one of those set to rebel later, said the PM's strategy was to "set conditions which make no deal inevitable, to make sure as much blame as possible is attached to the EU, and as quickly as he can fight a flag-waving election before the consequences of a no deal become too obvious to the public".	Conservative MP Phillip Lee has defected to the Liberal Democrats ahead of a showdown between Boris Johnson and Tory rebels over Brexit.
+text: Andrew RT Davies issued the challenge at the Welsh Conservative conference in Ffos Las, Carmarthenshire. He said the opposition's failure to cooperate so far stopped them "unlocking progress and prosperity". Later, Prime Minister Theresa May urged Labour to follow the Tories' example on school reforms in her keynote speech. Labour's initial attempt to re-nominate Carwyn Jones as first minister of a minority administration after the 2016 assembly poll election failed, when opposition parties united to back Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood instead. But Mr Jones was re-installed a week later, after a Labour-Plaid deal was struck. On Friday, Mr Davies told the conference: "Beyond our own Conservative benches, there are immensely talented individuals with whom, looking ahead to the next assembly elections, I stand ready to work with to deliver the change in government Wales needs." He said there were "only two roadblocks that I believe stop us unlocking this progress to prosperity that Wales needs". "One is removing the Labour Party itself, and the other is those who acknowledge that Labour are the problem - but just can't bring themselves to work with the Tories to do anything about it." Mr Davies added that it was "all well and good talking about what change in Wales you would want, but if you haven't got a route to get there, you're simply shouting from the sidelines". Analysis by David Cornock, BBC Wales Westminster correspondent If you talk to some MPs there's a recognition that if they want to get Labour out of power in Wales, then the only way is to join forces with other parties. The problem is the Conservatives are still seen as toxic among Plaid Cymru supporters, which makes it very difficult to see how any sort of deal that would put Andrew RT Davies in as first minister could be engaged. Mr Davies has floated this sort of deal before. So far, other parties have been slow to join in. By the time of the 2021 assembly poll, Labour will have led the Welsh Government for 22 years, either in its own right or with support from Plaid Cymru or Liberal Democrat AMs. The Conservatives lost three seats in Wales in the 2017 general election and three after the 2016 assembly campaign. Welsh Tory chairman Byron Davies has admitted the party has been behind the game, as he set out plans to recruit full-time campaign managers. Earlier in the speech, Mr Davies alleged that there "something very rotten" at the heart of the Welsh Government, saying it was "poisonous" and too-used to power. "After two decades in power the Labour party in Wales has become arrogant, complacent and out of touch. "A government that has abolished the right to own your own home, by scrapping the empowering right to buy scheme, and the bizarre decision to scrap the school uniform grant and the independent living grant." He accused the Welsh Government of using private information "to smear and damage" its opponents.	Opposition politicians should work with Conservatives to form a future non-Labour Welsh Government, the Tory leader in Wales has said.
+text: The CS Lewis Nature Reserve in Risinghurst, Oxford, was once part of the back garden of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe author. The Wychwood Foundation wanted to build a retreat with nine flats for vulnerable people of all ages. The charity withdrew its proposal after Oxford City Council planners recommended its refusal. It had planned to build apartments to sell, along with 22 parking spaces and an access road from nearby Lewis Close that would run alongside the reserve, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service. The development would also have offered residents a variety of arts-related activities. The Berks, Bucks & Oxon Wildlife Trust described the nearby three-hectare nature reserve as a "tranquil woodland" where the renowned Belfast-born author enjoyed wandering while writing his Narnia series. The development had been opposed by local residents who described it as "an honourable idea... just in the wrong place". A petition against the scheme received more than 4,000 signatures. Oxford City Council planners recommended the proposals were refused, describing them as "unacceptable" on the "rural fringes of Oxford". Related Internet Links CS Lewis Nature Reserve CS Lewis Oxford City Coucil	Plans for a development near a nature reserve that inspired The Chronicles of Narnia have been dropped.
+text: Capt Tom Moore originally aimed to raise just £1,000 for NHS Charities Together by completing 100 laps of his garden before his 100th birthday. The Duke of Cambridge hailed him as a "one-man fundraising machine". His daughter Hannah Ingram-Moore said: "There are no words left to say. We cannot believe people's generosity and he's just floored by it." 'A-list celebrity' Ms Ingram-Moore continued: "We're all speechless. It's not even two weeks since this started. We're just working our socks off supporting him and this phenomenon. "Yesterday we did 35 interviews and another 17 today but the Yorkshireman takes it all in his stride. "He's become an A-list celebrity. I'm just the sidekick." More than a million people have now made donations to his JustGiving page. And more than half a million people have called for Capt Tom to be knighted in a petition to the Honours Committee. The petition, which was set up earlier this week, has received more than 680,000 signatures after his efforts grabbed the nation's attention. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said he is looking at ways to recognise his "heroic efforts". As he finished the challenge on Thursday, having raised about £14m, Capt Tom said it was "an absolutely fantastic sum of money". In a tweet, he said he would be doing "less walking" on Friday but would be talking to TV channels in the United States, Argentina, Europe and the Middle East. Speaking to BBC Radio 2 he said the sum of money was "absolutely enormous" and "very difficult to imagine". He also thanked everyone who had donated for their support. "I say thank you very much indeed. I appreciate it because the object for which we're donating is so important and so necessary... I think you're all so kind and thoughtful contributing to this cause," he said. The total includes an undisclosed donation from the Duke of Cambridge, who, with the Duchess of Cambridge, recorded a special video message for the veteran. Prince William said: "It's amazing and what I love also is that he's a 99-year-old war vet. "He's been around a long time, he knows everything and it's wonderful that everyone has been inspired by his story and his determination. "He's a one-man fundraising machine and God knows what the final total will be. But good on him, and I hope it keeps going." In response, Capt Tom said: "It's absolutely amazing that my super prince can say something like that." He also said it was "a moment we will never forget". Capt Tom, who is originally from Keighley in West Yorkshire, has seemingly risen from nowhere to the status of near national treasure. Keighley Town Council has tweeted that it will "honour the fundraising hero" with the freedom of the town. Capt Tom began raising funds to thank NHS staff who helped him with treatment for cancer and a broken hip. With the aid of a walking frame, he completed 100 laps of the 25-metre (82ft) loop in his garden in Marston Moretaine, Bedfordshire, in 10-lap chunks well before his birthday on 30 April. NHS Charities Together said it was "truly inspired and humbled" by his efforts. Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk	A 99-year-old war veteran has been left "speechless" after raising more than £23m for the NHS.
+text: By Judith BurnsEducation reporter, BBC News The Department for Education has launched guidance to help schools in England spot mental health issues. Up a quarter of five- to 16-year olds may have, or be at risk of, mental health problems, says the DfE. "Teachers are not therapists but they play a vital role in the lives of their pupils," said Ms Truss. "A healthier happier classroom allows teachers to get on with what they do so well, teaching and inspiring the next generation." Ms Truss said the guidance would help teachers know exactly what to do and when to act to help a child with problems. The advice clarifies schools' responsibilities and outlines what they can do to support children or young people "whose behaviour - whether it is disruptive, withdrawn, anxious, depressed or otherwise - may be related to an unmet mental health need". The DfE says the guidance will also help teachers be more confident in identifying children who are simply behaving badly. The aim is to help identify families with risk factors and children showing early signs of problems and "intervene early and strengthen resilience before serious mental health problems occur". "Children exposed to multiple risks such as social disadvantage, family adversity and cognitive or attention problems are much more likely to develop behavioural problems," says the document. It suggests schools use pupil questionnaires, teacher training toolkits and mental health factsheets to pinpoint pupils who may need help. They could then be offered counselling in school or referred to child mental health experts in the local NHS. The document also identifies ways schools can promote positive mental health by developing pupils': 'Non-stigmatising' Clear bullying and behaviour policies, discussion of mental health issues in the wider curriculum, peer-mentoring systems and involving parents and carers, are ways of providing a more stable environment for pupils, it says. Prof Peter Fonagy, head of clinical educational and health psychology at University College London, said "schools are well placed to help troubled youngsters by understanding their individual needs" and offering them "support in a normal, non-stigmatizing environment". Philip Rush, head of St Peter's High School, Stroud, Gloucestershire, welcomed the guidance "as many pupils may be suffering, sometimes as the result of chronic conditions, sometimes as the result of trauma or tragedy or sometimes as part of wider health issues". Fran Congdon, head of personal, social and economic education at St Marylebone School, London, said the advice would help schools equip pupils "with strategies to manage their own emotional lives, social pressures and personal goals and obstacles".	Too many young people with unmet mental health needs are unfairly labelled as troublemakers, says the Education Minister, Elizabeth Truss.
+text: By Sean CoughlanBBC News family and education correspondent Graduate earnings figures show that up to the age of 30, postgraduates typically earn £9,000, or about 40%, more than those without degrees. This is double the £4,500 per year gap - about 21% - between those with an undergraduate degree and non-graduates. Universities Minister Chris Skidmore welcomed the "graduate premium" in pay. The graduate earnings figures for 2018, published by the Department for Education, show that for graduates aged between 21 and 30, the typical salary is £25,500, compared with £21,000 for non-graduates. Pay stagnation But with more students than ever getting undergraduate degrees, the biggest earnings premium is now for those who stay on for further studies, with postgraduates typically earning £30,000. This gap applies across the whole working population, between the ages of 16 and 64, with postgraduates averaging £40,000, compared with £34,000 for graduates and £24,000 for non-graduates. The government has commissioned a review of whether undergraduate fees of £9,250 per year in England represent value for money. These latest official figures show a narrowing advantage for young graduates - the annual pay gap closing from £6,000 between graduates and non-graduates in 2008 to £4,500 and a lower proportion of young graduates in "high skilled" jobs in 2018. The earnings figures show that pay levels for all levels of education have faced a decade of stagnation and real-terms decline. In 2008, the typical young graduate was earning £24,000 - and by 2018, if it had simply kept pace with inflation, that would have risen to about £31,500. But the typical young graduate in 2018 was only earning £25,500, representing a significant drop in real-terms earnings. Below these national figures for young graduates there are very wide differences - depending on gender, ethnicity and regional jobs markets. Mr Skidmore said: "There is clearly much further to go to improve the race and gender pay gap. "We have introduced a range of reforms in higher education which have a relentless focus on levelling the playing field, so that everyone with the talent and potential can not only go to university, but flourishes there and has the best possible chance of a successful career."	Young graduates in England need a postgraduate degree to get significantly ahead in earnings, official income data suggests.
+text: By Sean CoughlanBBC News education correspondent The study says that among seven-year-olds, August-born children are more than three times as likely to be "below average" as September-born children. August children are also 20% less likely to attend a top university. The IFS says the economic consequences facing summer babies will last "throughout their working lives". The report from the independent financial researchers shows the sharp difference in outcomes between the youngest children in a year group - those born in August - and the oldest, born in September. Less confidence Researchers say that August-born seven-year-olds are between 2.5 and 3.5 times "more likely to be regarded as below average by their teachers in reading, writing and maths". They are also 2.5 times more likely to be unhappy at school at the age of seven and at an increased risk of being bullied. This reflects that these August children can be almost a year younger than their September-born classmates. This achievement gap has not been closed by the time youngsters are ready to leave secondary schools - with August-born teenagers 20% more likely to be in vocational rather than academic study after school. They are also 20% less likely to be at a leading Russell Group university compared with a September-born teenager. These August children are likely to have lower confidence and less likely to feel they "control their own destiny". This accident of birth can have far-reaching economic significance, says the IFS, as underachievement in qualifications at school will be likely to reduce employment opportunities in adulthood. "This suggests that August-born children may end up doing worse than September-born children throughout their working lives, simply because of the month in which they were born," says IFS programme director Claire Crawford. This research, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, is intended as a step towards finding a way of tackling the disadvantages of being the youngest in a year group. The rules for beginning school mean that a child reaches compulsory school age at the beginning of the term following their fifth birthday. However it is usual to start school in the September after a child's fourth birthday, which means that August babies would only just have reached the age of four when they enter the reception class. But parents should have a choice about whether a child is full-time or part-time and there should be the option to defer entry until later in the school year. "Parents now have the choice of a place in reception classes from the September following a child's fourth birthday, so that their child is ready to start school," said a Department for Education spokesman. "If parents choose to defer entry, they can continue to access their entitlement to 15 hours of free early education in a setting of their choice."	Children born in the summer in England are at an academic disadvantage throughout school, says a report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
+text: Of those, four have so far been identified as members of the band Kombo Kolombia, which was reported missing after playing a gig last week. Twenty members of Kombo Kolombia were feared kidnapped when they disappeared after playing a gig on Thursday night. Police said one of the band members managed to escape from the kidnappers. He led officers to the well, where they found the bodies. Some of them were wearing the band's distinctive T-shirts. Forensic experts said there might be more bodies in the well than the twelve they had recovered so far. Relatives had reported the band's 12 musicians and eight crew missing on Friday because the men were not answering their mobile phones. When the relatives travelled to the concert venue, they found it abandoned and the band's cars empty. As drug violence is rife in the area, police worked on the assumption that the band had been kidnapped. Risky business Special operations officers began searching for them, but it was not until Sunday that information provided by the band member who escaped led them to the well, about 30km (19 miles) away. Nuevo Leon state security spokesman Jorge Domene said the surviving band member had been beaten but was in a stable condition. It is not yet clear how he managed to get away or if he was the only one to escape. Drug gangs have killed a number of Mexican musicians in recent years. In 2007, Sergio Gomez, the singer of band K-Paz de la Sierra was kidnapped after a concert in the western state of Michoacan. He was found strangled days later. Sergio Vega, known as El Shaka, was shot dead in 2010 in Sinaloa state, in western Mexico, just hours after he had denied reports of his own murder. However, most of those killed played "narcocorridos", songs celebrating the lives of drug barons. Kombo Kolombia specialise in Colombian popular music, not normally linked to Mexican drug gangs. However, local media reported that the band had played in bars which had in the past been targeted by drug cartels. More than 70,000 people are estimated to have died in drug-related violence in Mexico over the past six years. Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, who took office on 1 December 2012, has announced the creation of a new national police force to tackle organised crime and violence.	Officials in Mexico say they have found four more bodies in a well in the northern state of Nuevo Leon, bringing the total to 12.
+text: RNLI lifeguards acted after the third sewage alert so far this year at Godrevy, Cornwall. One of the organisers of the 10 Boards event described paddling through "10 metres of brown water". South West Water (SWW) blamed heavy rainfall overwhelming the sewage system and apologised "for the inconvenience". Thirty two women were competing in Saturday's event, which has been held on the beach for the past three years. The RNLI put up red flags on the beach after receiving a pollution alert from SWW via a Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) text message. Health risks Alexa Poppe, from 10 Boards, said: "The water turned brown in about half an hour, the flow was incredible." She said the event resumed on Sunday and no-one had become ill. Nick Holden, from the National Trust, said: "We were really disappointed that we had to postpone the competition. "The alert system kept the girls safe, but it is very frustrating that these incidents still occur." SAS said the text messaging system, run with SWW to alert beach users to sewage overflows, had been triggered once in May and twice in June. Campaigns director Andy Cummins said: "There was heavy rain, but this is weather you would expect. "If there are discharges they should be for extreme events and this was not an extreme event." Surfers and bathers risk a number of health problems from swimming in polluted water, including hepatitis and salmonella, according to SAS. SWW said in a statement that it had spent more than £2bn on cleaning Devon and Cornwall's bathing waters, with an extra £20m this year. "Unfortunately, during periods of intense rainfall, the system can sometimes become overloaded," it said. West Cornwall Liberal Democrat MP Andrew George said: "If there's a discharge of this sewage volume on this occasion with what appeared to me to be an unexceptional storm, then this has the potential to occur on a very regular basis. Mitigation measures will be necessary."	A surfing event was postponed and bathers ordered out of the sea after sewage flowed onto a National Trust beach.
+text: The incinerator near Connah's Quay on Deeside aims to create enough energy to power 30,000 homes. But before it is given a permit, Natural Resources Wales (NRW) wants to examine any potential impact and hear from residents and health bodies. A drop-in session will be held on Wednesday. US company Wheelabrator has said its Parc Adfer facility would process up to 200,000 tonnes of household waste a year. If all goes to plan, building work could begin on the site on the Deeside Industrial Park later this year and the incinerator could start operating in 2018. 'Satisfied' The drop-in session will be held at Deeside Leisure Centre from 13:00-20:00 GMT. The public will have a month to comment. Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board and Public Health Wales will also be asked to look at any impact on people's health. Sian Williams, NRW head of operations for North Wales, said: "We will only grant the permit if we are satisfied that the proposed facility can operate without harming the environment or the health of people nearby." Waste would arrive by lorry from Anglesey, Conwy, Denbighshire, Flintshire and Gwynedd. Any recyclable material would be weeded out. Combined heat and power technology would then incinerate the waste, while at the same time generating steam, which would produce electricity through a turbine and generator. Plans were submitted last October.	The public is getting a say on plans to burn hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste a year collected by five councils across north Wales.
+text: Peruvian officers detained Mr Fuentes in Lima, after a joint intelligence operation with Colombia, Peru's police chief, Gen Raul Salazar said. Mr Fuentes, known as Don Leo, entered Peru illegally last month, they added. The Urabenos gang controls much of the drug trade in northern Colombia, with many ex-paramilitaries in its ranks. According to the Colombian authorities, Mr Fuentes took over running part of the Urabenos after one of the most wanted drug dealers, Henry de Jesus Lopez, was arrested in December in Argentina. Mr Fuentes had been in prison in 2008 after being arrested with a group of armed men, but was subsequently released, Colombian media reported.	Peruvian police have arrested Jacinto Nicolas Fuentes German, who is suspected of being a leader of Colombia's Urabenos criminal gang.
+text: John Manning, 66, from Bedford and Mark Varney, 65, from Linslade near Leighton Buzzard, died outside The Bedford Sixth Form building at about 12:20 GMT on Saturday. A 32-year-old man arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving has been released under investigation. Bedfordshire Police have appealed for witnesses to the crash to come forward. The families of the victims have paid tribute to their loved ones in statements issued via the police force. Mr Manning's family said the father and grandfather was "a charitable and big-hearted man". "Thank you to those who attended the scene for your kindness - it has brought a great comfort to our family," they said. The family of Mr Varney said he was a "kind and loving family man" who was "so excited to meet his first grandchild in a few weeks' time". They said: "As a family, we are truly devastated to have him ripped from us like this, so suddenly and so tragically." Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk	Two pedestrians who died after being hit by a car at the weekend have been named by police.
+text: About 5,100 drivers caught during the hours of darkness in a two-month window will have their fines returned. Newcastle City Council said bus lane warning signs were erected before new regulations - which do not require lighting - came into force. The move will cost the authority £117,500 in refunds. Viral appeal The two cameras on John Dobson Street have raised a total of £1.3m in fines since they were introduced in February. Motorist David Crawford-Emery appealed to a tribunal on behalf of his girlfriend, after she received a fine for driving in the bus lane on John Dobson Street. He won the appeal on the grounds "no offence had been committed", and shared the adjudicator's decision online, where it was shared more than 4,000 times. "The adjudicator said the yellow and black advance warning sign that had been further down John Dobson Street was not sufficient on its own to give drivers advanced warning of this change. "It said it was set back from the road, which it was, on the far edge of the pavement, it contained quite detailed information which would be difficult for a driver to fully take in." Mr Crawford-Emery added: "I shared it for benefit of the fact I thought one or two of my friends may have been caught, and it went viral." In a statement, the city council apologised and said any drivers due to receive a refund would be contacted directly. "We are currently reviewing all adjudicators' decisions to see if we need to take any further action," it said. "During this review we found that we issued 5,100 penalty charge notices during hours of darkness between 23 February and 22 April when the bus gate signs were not lit up. "This happened because we were working to new Department for Transport regulations, which do not require lighting but which came into force later than we had anticipated." Barry Speker, a senior consultant at Sintons solicitors, said those fined during daylight hours may have grounds to appeal and could affect "many thousands" of motorists and "hundreds of thousands" of pounds.	Thousands of unwitting drivers fined for travelling down a bus lane with "inadequately lit" signage are to be refunded.
+text: The concert, by the Raise the Roof Orchestra, was to raise funds towards the £7m cost of the work. The Grade II listed cathedral was given £500,000 from the First World War Centenary Cathedral Repairs Fund and £4.6m from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Work on the fabric of the cathedral starts in October 2015. Renovation and improvements to the organ will also be undertaken. The Raise the Roof Orchestra, conducted by Patrick Dienes-Williams, comprises local professionals and music students including the Bishop of Guildford, the Right Reverend Andrew Watson, playing bassoon. Guildford High School pupil Laura MacDonald, 17, performed Elgar's Cello Concerto. The cathedral, which was begun before World War Two but not completed until 1961. The restoration will include the removal of deteriorating plaster on the ceiling, which contains asbestos. The cathedral will be open throughout the building work.	A final concert has taken place at Guildford Cathedral before the organ is dismantled during a project to repair and restore the building.
+text: Hatice Cengiz and the rights group Khashoggi formed before his death are pursuing Mohammed bin Salman and more than 20 others for unspecified damages. Khashoggi was killed by a team of Saudi agents during a visit to the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2018. The crown prince has denied ordering the killing. Khashoggi was a prominent critic of the Saudi government and had been living in self-imposed exile in the US, frequently writing for the Washington Post. In the civil lawsuit filed in Washington DC on Tuesday, Turkish citizen Ms Cengiz claims personal injury and financial losses over Khashoggi's death. Khashoggi's human rights group, Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn), says its operations were hampered. The lawsuit alleges that Khashoggi was murdered "pursuant to a directive of defendant Mohammed bin Salman". "The objective of the murder was clear - to halt Mr Khashoggi's advocacy in the United States... for democratic reform in the Arab world," the lawsuit says. In a video conference on Tuesday, lawyers for Ms Cengiz and Dawn said the focus of the lawsuit was to have a US court hold the crown prince liable for the killing and to obtain documents that reveal the truth, the Washington Post newspaper reports. "Jamal believed anything was possible in America and I place my trust in the American civil justice system to obtain a measure of justice and accountability," Ms Cengiz said in a statement. Who was Jamal Khashoggi? A prominent Saudi journalist, Khashoggi covered major stories, including the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the rise of the late al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, for various Saudi news organisations. For decades, the 59-year-old was close to the Saudi royal family and also served as an adviser to the government. But he fell out of favour and went into self-imposed exile in the US in 2017. From there, he wrote a monthly column in the Washington Post in which he criticised the policies of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the son of King Salman and Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler. In his first column for the Post in September 2017, Khashoggi said he had feared being arrested in an apparent crackdown on dissent overseen by the prince. How did Jamal Khashoggi die? He was last seen entering the Saudi consulate on 2 October 2018 to obtain papers he needed in order to marry Ms Cengiz. After listening to purported audio recordings of conversations inside the consulate made by Turkish intelligence, UN special rapporteur Agnes Callamard concluded that Khashoggi was "brutally slain" that day. The Saudi public prosecution concluded that the murder was not premeditated. It said the killing was ordered by the head of a "negotiations team" sent to Istanbul to bring Khashoggi back to the kingdom "by means of persuasion" or, if that failed, "by force". The journalist was forcibly restrained after a struggle and injected with a large amount of a drug, resulting in an overdose that led to his death, according to the Saudi prosecution. His body was then dismembered and handed over to a local "collaborator" outside the consulate. The remains were never found. Turkish prosecutors concluded that Khashoggi was suffocated almost as soon as he entered the consulate, and that his body was destroyed. In December 2019, the Riyadh Criminal Court sentenced five people to death for "committing and directly participating in the murder of the victim". Three others were handed prison sentences totalling 24 years for "covering up this crime and violating the law". Three people were found not guilty, including Saudi Arabia's former deputy intelligence chief, Ahmad Asiri. Saud al-Qahtani, a former senior adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed, was investigated by the Saudi public prosecution but not charged. Last month, state media reported that the five death sentences were commuted to 20-year jail terms.	The fiancee of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has filed a lawsuit against Saudi Arabia's crown prince, accusing him of ordering the killing.
+text: Andrew Riseley, the regulator's chief executive, said market studies in 2013 would be aimed at reviewing grocery, gas, heating oil and fuel prices. He said: "We want to provide more information about prices. "[Also] potentially if there are justifications for the prices that are being charged what they are." Mr Riseley said the focus of their work had shifted from keeping prices down to ensuring services were of high quality. He said: "There are many variables that customers experience and there are many variables across which competition happens. "You will pay more to shop at a premium grocery retailer than you do somewhere else. That's a perfectly valid choice that customers are making." The regulator also intends to use the market studies to advise the Commerce and Employment Department on whether or not further regulation may be needed in certain areas.	Guernsey consumers should be given more information about how the price of goods and services are set, according to the island's competition regulator.
+text: Drugs such as tamoxifen and bulsufan are now 10 times more expensive despite no longer being under patent. The British Generic Manufacturers Association said trusts often paid much less than the list price. The Department for Health said it has plans to cut generic drug costs. The UK researchers said NHS negotiations with drug companies were failing to contain costs, and getting access to cheaper drugs would allow more people to be treated with more modern medicines. They estimated that the cost of these price rises to the NHS in England was around £380m a year - which only included community-based prescribing, not hospital prescribing. Rationing Drugs start off being on-patent, and their high prices allow pharmaceutical companies to profit from their investments in research and development. After patents have expired and generic versions are sold, the theory is that drug prices should fall close to the cost of production. However, because of high drug prices, the NHS is often not able to approve some new cancer drugs for use. New treatments then have to be rationed. Dr Andrew Hill, senior research fellow in pharmacology and therapeutics at the University of Liverpool, and Melissa Barber from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, collected prices on medicines available on the NHS for their presentation at the cancer conference. They discovered that busulfan, which is used to treat leukaemia, cost 21p per tablet in 2011 and £2.61 in 2016. Tamoxifen, used to treat breast cancer, cost 10p per tablet in 2011 and £1.21 in 2016. Of 89 cancer medicines looked at in the analysis, 21 showed price rises from 2011 to 2016 - with 17 of those classified as generic. Fourteen generic cancer drugs showed price rises of more than 100%. And compared with prices for the same drugs in India, the UK drugs were roughly 20 times more expensive. 'Worrying' Dr Hill said he was surprised to find several companies had consistently raised the prices of cancer treatment. "We have found that some companies take over the supply of some generic cancer medicines and then raise the price progressively," he said. He said this was "worrying", particularly when the Cancer Drugs Fund is under pressure from high prices. But Warwick Smith, director-general of the British Generic Manufacturers Association, said the actual prices paid by hospitals were usually much lower than the list prices. He said the tendered price paid by hospitals for tamoxifen 10mg tablets is £4.85 for a pack of 30, or 16p per tablet. 'Significant savings' "Generic competition in the oncology market has produced very significant savings for the NHS and generated access for patients to medicines such as tamoxifen which can be used to reduce the risk of breast cancer and not just to treat it. "In the case of generic medicines used in hospitals, it is important to distinguish between the actual price paid by trusts and the much higher list prices often quoted." The Health Services Medical Supplies (Costs) Bill, currently going through Parliament, is designed to allow the NHS to regulate prices in the future. As a result of the bill, companies found to be raising prices with no clear justification will be referred to the Competition and Markets Authority, and could face fines. A Department of Health spokeswoman said: "We will continue to work closely with the pharmaceutical sector to make a success of these new measures, and all the money saved will be invested in the NHS to help provide the highest quality of care for patients." Other European countries have taken similar measures. In Spain and Italy, failure to accept the high prices demanded for some generic treatments has led to warnings from companies that they could stop their supply. "At a time when cancer patients are living longer and better lives due to effective treatments, this situation is particularly worrying," Dr Hill said.	UK prices for generic cancer drugs have risen sharply in the past five years, restricting their use in treating NHS patients, research from the European Cancer Congress has found.
+text: An inquest found Pte Sean Benton killed himself although his family are applying for a fresh hearing. Ex-soldier Stewart Thompson has said Pte Benton was singled out and bullied. He said the 20-year-old from Hastings ended up stuttering and nervous in the seven months he trained alongside him. Mr Thompson said he disputed conclusions in a report in 2006 by Nicholas Blake QC that four recruits who died from gunshot wounds were not "bullied to death". Last month, at the end of a second inquest into the death of Pte Cheryl James, coroner Brian Barker said she killed herself. Speaking to the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire show, Mr Thompson said: "He [Pte Benton] was constantly, constantly punished, often for no reason." The former ammunitions supply specialist who served in Bosnia said: "His reputation preceded him. You could often see him walking across a field or running across a field with an instructor shouting behind him." Mr Thompson added: "I spoke to him in the cookhouse during breakfast maybe five or six weeks before his death and he was a completely different person. "He was stuttering his speech. He was nervous." Mr Thompson said he had an exemplary military career - but six years after training at Deepcut suffered a breakdown. He said teenage recruits physically hid from instructors at Deepcut, under beds, or above ceiling rafters, or they asked friends to padlock them into cupboards. Punishments he witnessed included recruits being put on parade in the early hours and physically hit, he said. "The instructors singled out people. They did it privately. They did it in rooms. They did it when often a lot of people weren't there," he added. The recruits had all had systematic, basic training at Pirbright, but at Deepcut they were washing clothes, peeling potatoes, cutting grass, cleaning rifles, carrying out guard duty and physical training and going on parade, he said. "It was completely chaotic and psychologically it was tiring," he added. He said recruits were part of a "brutal and unaccountable" regime and were either pushed to leave the Army or "improve their own personal issues". He said he backed calls for a public inquiry.	An Army recruit who died at Deepcut barracks from five bullet wounds to the chest was constantly punished and had a changed personality before his death, a former soldier has said.
+text: Officers evacuated an area of the city while they assessed the white Nissan Micra in Rusholme. The cordon has now been lifted and the car removed. The BBC has also learned that bomber Salman Abedi visited a jailed British-Libyan convicted of terrorism offences in the months before the attack. Counter-terrorist police were aware of the visits but chose not to block them. Abedi killed 22 people at Manchester Arena on 22 May. Speaking about the car find, Det Ch Supt Russ Jackson said it was "potentially a significant development". "We are very interested in anything people can tell us about the movements of this car, and who was in it, over the past months," he added. Forensics and bomb disposal units were seen leaving the area at about 17:30 BST. The vehicle was seized at Devell House, and a search is continuing. A 100m cordon, which had been in place since the discovery on Friday morning, was lifted at about 20:00 BST. "We are also interested in any information about who may have had access to the car or who may have gone to and from it." The Manchester Royal Infirmary remained open but people had been evacuated from Ronald McDonald House, which accommodates families of patients at the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital. Police also released new CCTV images of Abedi before the attack at Manchester Arena. The BBC has learned that Abedi visited Abdal Raouf Abdallah at Altcourse Prison in Merseyside twice in March. Abdallah was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in July 2016 after trying to help four people - including an RAF veteran - to travel to Syria to fight with militants against the Assad regime. Abedi's visits to Abdallah - who was left paralysed after fighting during the 2011 Libyan uprising - were known about by the prison authorities and counter-terrorism officers. Analysis by Danny Shaw, home affairs correspondent Every week across the UK thousands of people visit relatives and friends in jail. It's a major logistical and security exercise, particularly if they're visiting one of the 150 offenders imprisoned for terrorism-related offences. These visits have to be approved by counter-terrorism officers, who can prevent them if they have concerns. Salman Abedi, however, was allowed to go ahead with his visit, a decision which is likely to be scrutinised as part of a review into the handling of his case. Nevertheless, it's understood Abedi was closely monitored when he met Abdal Raouf Abdallah; staff have the capability to listen into prisoners' phone calls and examine their mail, so it would be surprising if they didn't apply the same rigour during visits to prisoners convicted of terror offences. The key question is whether any useful information emerged and if it was passed onto MI5 whose list of former 'subjects of interest' included Abedi. On Friday Greater Manchester Police said they had so far found no record of any calls to the anti-terrorist hotline about Abedi. After the attack, a community worker said two people had made separate calls to the hotline about five years ago to raise concerns about his behaviour. Meanwhile, two of the bomber's cousins have said they had no idea he was planning his attack. Isaac and Abz Forjani were arrested by police after the attack - and were questioned for a week - but have since been released without charge. They say they did not know about Abedi's extremist views - adding that he may have been radicalised abroad. Isaac, 24, said: "It's not easy being connected to 22 lost, innocent lives. "The fact that the person that did this is related to us by blood is something that's going to stay with me for the rest of my life. "My thoughts are with the families of the victims. I really do feel for them. "We went in, we could come out, we can try and move on with our lives. They've lost their loved ones." The two brothers said they last saw Abedi three months before the attack, when he got his hair trimmed at Abz Forjani's barber shop. Abz, 21, said he had a "pretty close relationship" with Abedi. He said his cousin was not part of "a big network". He said: "I believe it was all done by one man, (who) developed some sort of thoughts in the past few years which he kept to himself, secretly to himself. "He never shared it with any members of the family - if he would have, we could have done something to stop that happening. "He never admitted extremist views - it was just political opinions, so it wasn't focused or aimed at a particular group," Abz added. "The thought was he was just a religious man taking it way too far, becoming judgemental maybe. "There's never been a hint of extremism." The brothers also insisted they shared the same British values as everyone else. "We're Mancunians ourselves," said Isaac. The pair's younger brother Alharth, 19, is still in custody. Sixteen people have been arrested over the bombing at an Ariana Grande concert and 10 remain in custody. The Duke of Cambridge has visited the city to meet some of the police officers who were first on the scene following the attack. Prince William met Chief Constable Ian Hopkins on his visit to the Greater Manchester Police headquarters, before speaking to some of the first officers to attend the area after the bomb went off. He also met taxi drivers and other members of the community who responded to the attack during a visit to Manchester Cathedral, where he signed a book of condolence. His visit comes after the Queen visited the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital, where some of the 116 people injured in the attack were being treated, last week. Inquests into the deaths of victims of the Manchester attack will be opened on 9 June and adjourned, pending a police investigation.	Police investigating the Manchester bombing have found a car they say may be "significant" to their inquiry.
+text: By Mary-Ann RussonBusiness reporter, BBC News Customers like Ms Armstrong are one of the reasons that UK High Street retail chain Arcadia, owner of popular brands such as Topshop, Miss Selfridge and Dorothy Perkins, is in trouble and seeking a rescue deal. "What's in style right now is streetwear, and Topshop hasn't got much of that," she tells the BBC. Ms Armstrong is a typical consumer, someone who used to shop there often, but has since moved onto other brands. Meanwhile, she says that people younger than her don't see Topshop's styles as being "on trend". Of course, the current retail environment is tough, but consumers still like to shop - they're just pickier about where. At the peak of its popularity, Topshop clothes could be found in the pages of Vogue alongside high-end couture, but now it's a different story. Have we just fallen out of love with Topshop? "[People] are shopping at places like & Other Stories, Weekday, Cos and Urban Outfitters," says Ms Armstrong. "I also buy a lot of stuff from Nike." Ms Armstrong's friend and colleague Catherine Thynne, also 24, is more positive about Topshop, but buys less than half of her wardrobe from the retailer nowadays. "I shop in Topshop loads, but the fashionability is a bit hit and miss," she says. Both Ms Thynne and Ms Armstrong also buy a lot of clothes online, from places such as Asos, Pretty Little Things and Missguided. Young men the BBC spoke to had a similarly negative impression of Topman. "It's definitely less popular - they're quite behind what men want to wear," says university student Ben Reynolds, 19. "It's generic - you get your essentials from Topman like black t-shirts or jeans, but if you want more fashionable stuff you go to Urban Outfitters." Threat from sports brands Their views don't come as a surprise to Maureen Hinton, retail research director at GlobalData, because fashion retailers are now facing much stronger competition from newer brands. "Topshop tends to be more expensive than its competitors but it doesn't have the fashion kudos anymore - if you're paying a premium, it isn't exactly worth it now," she tells the BBC. "And Miss Selfridge is quite niche [in its appeal]." Ms Hinton cites former Topshop brand director Jane Shepherdson as a "visionary" leader who marketed the brand "strongly". Without strong leadership, a strong brand identity and a lack of investment, she feels that the retailer is floundering. And then there's the threat from sportswear brands. "Another factor in diluting the sales of these secondary fashion brands is how strong the sports brands have become with athleisure fashion," she says. Ms Hinton says sports brands such as Adidas and Nike are now competing directly with fashion brands: "The spending is being spread across more retailers. Topshop is not top of the list anymore." Mixed marketing messages Natalie Berg, retail analyst at NBK Retail, feels that Topshop and Miss Selfridge have fallen behind in popularity because they haven't been as aggressive in embracing technology as other retailers have. "Topshop is an iconic brand but its main problem is that it hasn't followed the customer. It's still too reliant on concessions in department stores when it should really be focused on the 21st Century version - online marketplaces and social commerce," she says. "Partnering with Asos is a great move but they're clutching at straws now, this is something they should have done years ago." And although Topshop's flagship store in Oxford Street, London features experiences galore, this same strategy is not implemented across the rest of its outlets. Simon Penson, founder and managing director of UK-based digital content marketing agency, Zazzle Media, disagrees with Ms Berg about Topshop's use of technology. Topshop was one of the first retailers to launch an app. The real problem, he says, is that Topshop "doesn't have a cohesive marketing approach". He feels the retailer has also missed a trick by not collaborating with influencers on collections. "They should have clarified a digital approach and an in-store approach that would work together," he says. According to Zazzle Media, online brands Boohoo and Asos, as well as High Street retailer New Look, began using digital marketing features like catwalk videos and inspirational photo collections featuring outfit ideas in 2011 and 2012 respectively to promote products. In comparison, Topshop's website still doesn't have catwalk videos, and its photo collection section - showing models in various outfits - is less sophisticated than other websites. The Philip Green factor But it's not just about the clothes. In recent years, Arcadia's chief executive Sir Philip Green has been in the media a lot - with allegations, which he denies - of sexual harassment and anti-feminist views. With the digital age, all of this information is readily accessible online, and some young people have told the BBC that they no longer feel comfortable supporting brands owned by Sir Philip. "Generation Z tends to stick with their morals more than any other generation when it comes to purchases, and they exercise brand loyalty more than anyone else," says Mr Penson. Jamie Windust, 22, a popular influencer on Instagram with over 27,000 followers, who has collaborated with Asos in the past on campaigns targeting the LGBTQ+ community, tells the BBC: "I have noticed I'm cutting down - I try to shop where my ethics lie. I get sent a lot of stuff from High Street brands, but I tend to shop either vintage or charity shop. "When working with brands, it really depends on the message behind the campaign."	"I'm a lot less interested in Topshop nowadays, it's just not really how I dress," says 24-year-old advertising account executive Beth Armstrong.
+text: London recently exceeded 10,000 Covid-related deaths, a figure mayor Sadiq Khan described as "heartbreaking". Four temporary mortuary sites were set up in London during the first wave of coronavirus, but were put on standby. The use of the Ruislip site has been called "a visual, sobering reminder" of the continuing cost of the pandemic. Westminster City Council chief executive Stuart Love, who is leading the London-wide response, added: "We want to give people hope but we are not there yet. "From my point of view, we have built this really hoping it doesn't get used to its capacity. "This just re-emphasises the message of staying at home and looking after your loved ones." The Breakspear Crematorium facility, which is made up of tents with refrigeration units, is expected to receive bodies from Friday. Officials say it will provide an extra 20% in capacity for public mortuaries in London. The facility in Ruislip, which took over a week to construct, is the latest of a number of temporary mortuaries set up across the country. Others include the former military hospital Headley Court in Leatherhead, Surrey, and an aircraft hangar at the former RAF Coltishall, near Norwich. For more London news follow on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel.	A temporary mortuary that can hold up to 1,300 bodies has been opened in Ruislip, west London, as the capital faces a growing coronavirus death toll.
+text: They will elect 18 MPs in an election defined by Brexit. But other issues will be debated on the campaign trail including health, public spending, the future of Stormont, calls for a border poll and changes to abortion law. We want to know what questions you have about the issues that matter to you in this election. It could be a query about what the general election could mean for your constituency, or about the electoral process. Or it could be how issues in Northern Ireland will affect the UK-wide campaign, or the final outcome of the election and how the next government is formed. If you have questions, please ask us using the form below and we will try to answer them. Send us your questions and we could be in touch. In some cases your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read the terms and conditions. Your contact info I am over 16 years old I accept the Terms of Service The BBC retains the right to select from these contributions based on editorial requirements and subject to online terms and conditions and BBC editorial guidelines. For more information about how the BBC handles your personal data, see here. If you are reading this page on the BBC News app, you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question on this topic.	Voters in Northern Ireland will go to the polls on 12 December for the third time this year.
+text: Francesca O'Brien, who is running for the Gower seat in December's election, made the comments about Channel 4's Benefits Street in January 2014. Ms O'Brien said her comments were made "off the cuff" but admitted her "use of language was unacceptable". Labour and the Lib Dems called for the candidate to be dropped. But Welsh Conservative chairman Byron Davies has stood by Ms O'Brien, who is still set to run in the general election on 12 December. Labour First Minister Mark Drakeford said he could not imagine voters in Gower backing such a candidate, while a Tory peer has said the candidate should consider her position. The former commissioned officer with the RAF Air Cadets was selected to be the Conservative party candidate for Gower in October after an open primary in which residents were able to participate as opposed to just party members. Having lost Gower to Labour in the 2017 election, the seat is a top Tory target in Wales. In the posts following the broadcast of the first episode of Benefits Street five years ago, Ms O'Brien said: "Benefit Street..anyone else watching this?? Wow, these people are unreal!!!" Responding to another user's comment, she said: "My blood is boiling, these people need putting down." In a statement released on Sunday, Ms O'Brien said: "These comments were made off the cuff, a number of years ago. "However, I accept that my use of language was unacceptable and I would like to apologise for any upset I have caused." Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey told the Today programme what Ms O'Brien said was "clearly wrong", adding it was important she had apologised. Asked if Ms O'Brien should stand, she said: "I think that would be a decision for the people of Gower to make the choice on who they want to be their next Member of Parliament." But Welsh Labour leader Mark Drakeford said he could not imagine "decent people" in the constituency backing a candidate with "views of that sort". "I think she is condemned out of her own mouth more eloquently than anything I could say," Mr Drakeford told his monthly press conference. Ian Lavery, Labour Party chairman, said: "Removing a candidate who used such vile language about people on benefits should be a no brainer. "The cuts to benefits and Universal Credit programme that Therese Coffey and her party are responsible for have forced people into poverty." He said Ms O'Brien's candidacy was "shameful". Speaking on BBC Two's Politics Live, Conservative peer Lord Finkelstein said he thought Ms O'Brien's comments were "awful". "I'm sure she does too," he added. "I do think she should consider her position." The chairman of the Welsh Conservatives said Ms O'Brien was not subject to any internal disciplinary process. Lord Davies - a former MP for the constituency - said: "The comments were inadvisable, obviously, but made in the heat of the moment watching a television programme. "But I don't condone it in any shape or form. However, this is a dredging exercise on the part of the Labour Party whose candidate in the Gower doesn't want to talk about Brexit." Benefits Street, which featured the residents of James Turner Street in Birmingham, was a ratings hit for Channel 4 when it was broadcast. But a total of 887 viewers complained to the broadcasting regulator, claiming the show had vilified and misrepresented benefits claimants. Ofcom decided the programme did not breach broadcasting rules. Ms O'Brien is due to stand against Labour's Tonia Antoniazzi, Plaid Cymru's John Davies and Sam Bennett of the Liberal Democrats. Other parties are yet to confirm their candidates. Mr Davies invited Ms O'Brien to join him on a soup run "to see how real people have been affected by Tory cuts to public housing". Lib Dem Mr Bennett called for her to step down, adding: "These kind of comments show the Tories are still very much the nasty party."	A Conservative general election candidate has apologised for a Facebook post in which she said people on a TV show needed "putting down".
+text: The airport, which announced job losses earlier this week, also posted a £344m loss as sales fell across its business. Despite signs of recovery, Gatwick said it expected air traffic and passenger numbers to remain under pressure. It also warned passenger levels would take between four and five years to recover to pre-Covid levels. The West Sussex airport has been hard-hit by the pandemic. Virgin Atlantic has said it will cease operating at Gatwick, while British Airways has shifted its short-haul flights to Heathrow and is cutting hundreds of ground staff jobs at the airport. The number of travellers at Gatwick dropped by 66% to 7.5 million during the six months to June. Gatwick said this was "due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the effects of which began to be felt during February, increasing significantly in March and causing a near-complete drop in volume during April, May and June 2020". Pre-tax losses in the first half of the year hit £343.9m compared with a £59.4m profit a year earlier. Sales more than halved to £144.2m. Gatwick Airport chief executive Stewart Wingate said: "Like any other international airport, the negative impact of Covid-19 on our passenger numbers and air traffic at the start of the year was dramatic and, although there are small signs of recovery, it is a trend we expect to continue to see." The company also said: "The recovery period to pre-pandemic traffic levels is forecast to be four to five years." Gatwick has already announced plans to cut 600 jobs. About 75% of staff are currently on the government's furlough scheme, which is due to end in October. 'Use it or lose it' Despite announcing plans to cease operations at Gatwick, struggling airline Virgin Atlantic said it planned to retain its slots at the airport to "enable a return in future years as demand recovers". In the meantime, Virgin Atlantic intends to lease slots to rival carrier Norwegian. But on Friday, Norwegian itself admitted that it might need more financial help in order to survive. Norwegian chief executive Jacob Schram said: "We are thankful for the loan guarantee made available to us by the Norwegian government which we worked hard to obtain. "However, given the current market conditions it is not enough to get through this prolonged crisis." Wizz Air has been lobbying to increase its number of flights from Gatwick from one to 20. But the Hungarian airline said it was being stopped from expansion because the European Union relaxed its "use-it-or-lose-it" slot restriction rules. This allows airlines to hang onto the slots despite not using them. Wizz Air co-founder and chief executive József Váradi told the BBC's Today programme: "We are talking to the regulators, we are talking to decision makers at EU level as well as country-level. We are saying that the relaxation of the slots rules is not fair and it distorts the market, it distorts a level playing field." He said: "We would be ready to move, we would be ready to invest, ready to create jobs. It was just announced Gatwick is going to lose 600 jobs as a result of airlines' inability to scale back. We would reverse that."	Gatwick airport says passenger numbers fell by 14.7 million, or two-thirds, in the first half of the year as air travel collapsed amid the pandemic.
+text: Removal of asbestos from ceilings above theatres and corridors at Ysbyty Glan Clwyd in Bodelwyddan, Denbighshire will now start in the new year. Asbestos was a popular building material when the hospital was constructed in the 1970s. A spokesman for Betsi Cadwaladr Local Health Board said the asbestos posed no "immediate risk" to patients' safety. Emergency and elective surgery will continue despite the disruption. The Health Board said medical staff will lead the planning to make sure patients can access care during the work. The work is expected to be completed by next winter. A spokesman for the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board said: "We would like to reassure patients, visitors and staff that there is no immediate risk to their safety." Asbestos is a problem when fibres become airborne and are inhaled, and can lead to life-threatening illness. In a statement, Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board said air quality at the hospital is regularly monitored.	Work to remove asbestos from one of north Wales' main hospitals has been brought forward.
+text: The robot, which is analysing rock samples on the Red Planet, is now running from a back-up computer. Nasa engineers are looking into possible causes for the files on the robot's flash memory being damaged. The fault means the rover's work has been put on temporary hold while the back-up computer is reconfigured so it can take full control. "We're still early on in the process," said project manager Richard Cook, in an interview with Space.com. "We have probably several days, maybe a week, of activities to get everything back and reconfigured." The rover has been running on the back-up computer since Thursday. "We switched computers to get to a standard state from which to begin restoring routine operations," Mr Cook said. On the robot's Twitter feed, Nasa wrote: "Don't flip out: I just flipped over to my B-side computer while the team looks into an A-side memory issue." The corrupted files may have been caused by stray cosmic rays. Speaking to Space.com, Mr Cook said: "The hardware that we fly is radiation-tolerant, but there's a limit to how hardened it can be. "You can still get high-energy particles that can cause the memory to be corrupted. It certainly is a possibility and that's what we're looking into." The timing of the glitch would frustrate Nasa as Curiosity had just begun analysing rock samples, the BBC's science correspondent, Jonathan Amos, said. Samples from Mars' surface had been ingested into the rover's on-board laboratories last month. Our correspondent added that the back-up computer on the rover had previously been used to test software updates before they were installed on the main machine. Due to capacity limitations on the craft, the rover launched with only the software needed to land. Once on the planet, new software had to then be installed remotely.	Nasa's Curiosity Mars rover has been put into "safe mode" after a computer glitch caused by corrupted files.
+text: By Matt McGrathScience reporter, BBC World Service For 150 years, a species called Archaeopteryx has been regarded as the first true bird, representing a major evolutionary step away from dinosaurs. But the new fossil suggests this creature was just another feathery dinosaur and not the significant link that palaeontologists had believed. The discovery of Xiaotingia, as it is known, is reported in Nature magazine. The authors of the report argue that three other species named in the past decade might now be serious contenders for the title of "the oldest bird". Archaeopteryx has a hallowed place in science, long hailed as not just the first bird but as one of the clearest examples of evolution in action. Discovered in Bavaria in 1861 just two years after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, the fossil seemed to blend attributes of both reptiles and birds and was quickly accepted as the "original bird". But in recent years, doubts have arisen as older fossils with similar bird-like features such as feathers and wishbones and three fingered hands were discovered. Now, renowned Chinese palaeontologist Professor Xu Xing believes his new discovery has finally knocked Archaeopteryx off its perch. His team has detailed the discovery of a similar species, Xiaotingia, which dates back 155 million years to the Jurassic Period. By carefully analysing and comparing the bony bumps and grooves of this new chicken-sized fossil, Prof Xu now believe that both Archaeopteryx and Xiaotingia are in fact feathery dinosaurs and not birds at all. "There are many, many features that suggest that Xiaotingia and Archaeopteryx are a type of dinosaur called Deinonychosaurs rather than birds. For example, both have a large hole in front of the eye; this big hole is only seen in these species and is not present in any other birds. "Archaeopteryx and Xiaotingia are very, very similar to other Deinonychosaurs in having a quite interesting feature - the whole group is categorised by a highly specialised second pedo-digit which is highly extensible, and both Archaeopteryx and Xiaotingia show initial development of this feature." The origins of the new fossil are a little murky having originally been purchased from a dealer. Prof Xu first saw the specimen at the Shandong Tianyu Museum. He knew right away it was special "When I visited the museum which houses more than 1,000 feathery dinosaur skeletons, I saw this specimen and immediately recognised that it was something new, very interesting; but I did not expect it would have such a big impact on the origin of birds." Other scientists agree that the discovery could fundamentally change our understanding of birds. Prof Lawrence Witmer from Ohio University has written a commentary on the finding. "Since Archaeopteryx was found 150 years ago, it has been the most primitive bird and consequently every theory about the beginnings of birds - how they evolved flight, what their diet was like - were viewed through the lens of Archaeopteryx. "So, if we don't view birds through this we might have a different set of hypotheses." There is a great deal of confusion in the field says Prof Witmer as scientists try to understand where dinosaurs end and where birds begin. "It's kind of a nightmare for those of us trying to understand it. When we go back into the late Jurassic, 150-160 million years ago, all the primitive members of these different species are all very similar. "So, on the one hand, it's really frustrating trying to tease apart the threads of this evolutionary knot, but it's really a very exciting thing to be working on and taking apart this evolutionary origin." Such are the similarities between these transition species of reptiles and birds that other scientists believe that the new finding certainly will not mean the end of the argument. Prof Mike Benton from the University of Bristol, UK, agrees that the new fossil is about the closest relative to Archaeopteryx that has yet been found. But he argues that it is far from certain that the new finding dethrones its claim to be the first bird. "Professor Xu and his colleagues show that the evolutionary pattern varies according to their different analyses. "Some show Archaeopteryx as the basal bird; others show it hopped sideways into the Deinonychosaurs. "New fossils like Xiaotingia can make it harder to be 100% sure of the exact pattern of relationships." According to Prof Witmer, little is certain in trying to determine the earliest bird and new findings can rapidly change perspectives. "The reality is, that next fossil find could kick Archaeopteryx right back into birds. That's the thing that's really exciting about all of this."	A chicken-sized dinosaur fossil found in China may have overturned a long-held theory about the origin of birds.
+text: About 26 properties in Talybont, near Aberystwyth, were flooded when a month's worth of rain fell in 24 hours in June last year. Volunteers from the community played out a scenario to test the arrangements they had put in place. They also trialled the roles villagers would play in an emergency. As part of the exercise by Natural Resources Wales (NRW), residents installed flood gates to their properties to make sure they could fit them quickly and efficiently. NRW said it would work with the volunteers to identify areas where the flood plan could be strengthened. Talybont, Aberystwyth, Dol-y-Bont, Penrhyncoch and Llandre were among the areas affected by the rising water on 8 and 9 June last year. Some areas had 5ft (1.5m) of standing water, with caravan parks, homes and businesses all suffering from the effects of the deluge. Many of those who had to leave their flood-hit houses stayed in temporary accommodation for up to 10 months. Simone Eade of NRW said: "People in Talybont experienced a terrible ordeal last year when the village flooded and we want to help make the community better prepared to deal with flooding in the future. "Over the last 12 months we've been working closely with volunteers from the community to develop a plan which captures all the important information and actions they need to take if a flood warning is issued. 'Traumatic' "We can't prevent all flooding from happening, but if floods were to threaten the area again in the future, the hard work these volunteers have put in now will mean that they are better placed to respond and protect their homes." The exercise was supported by Ceredigion council, Dyfed-Powys Police and Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Service whose crews took part. Ceredigion council leader Ellen ap Gwynn, who lives in Talybont, also participated. She said it was essential "we find out how resilient Talybont would be if it ever happened again". "As traumatic as the floods were, it really brought the community together and the hard work that went in to getting ourselves back on our feet has continued as we, together with partners from other agencies, plan how to deal with any such incidents in the future," Mrs ap Gwynn added. A new village flood warning service is being developed and is planned to go live in autumn 2014.	Villagers forced to flee their homes in Ceredigion following torrential rain have put a flood plan to the test in an emergency exercise.
+text: A search was launched on Sunday after emergency services received reports a 13-year-old had gone into the water near Bishop Auckland. Formal identification has not yet taken place, but the missing boy's family have been informed. Members of the public were urged to stay away from the search area by officers due to "hazardous conditions". Durham Police said there were no suspicious circumstances. Related Internet Links Durham Police	The body of a teenage boy has been found in the River Wear in County Durham.
+text: Liverpool City Council has been forced to use extra metal cladding on the boarded up home in Madryn Street for health and safety reasons. The house, along with the rest of the terraces, is part of the Welsh Streets, which are due to be knocked down soon. The bulldozers are due to arrive in the new year. The community is divided over whether they should be saved. A spokesman said: "A number of bricks have been removed from around the window frames of 9 Madryn Street, presumably by souvenir hunters. "If more bricks were removed this could present a danger to passers-by so the city council obtained the permission of the property's owners Merseytravel, to add extra metal sheeting to the house." Notices were plastered on many of the derelict homes in the Welsh Streets at the beginning of summer declaring demolition would start in October. However, due to the widespread interest and various campaigns to save Madryn Street and the surrounding homes this has been delayed. Admiral Grove Save Madryn Street (SMS) campaign was established earlier in the year in a bid to fight the council's plans to knock down the Welsh Streets and regenerate the area. At the time, founder member of SMS, Mr Coppell said: "We are going to fight tooth and nail in Liverpool, and around the world, to call a halt to this crazy decision to demolish Madryn Street. "The homes of Paul McCartney and John Lennon are already preserved and Ringo is no less important. "We want to see Ringo's birthplace conserved and turned into proper tourist destination." Disputes have raged between the council and the campaigners over the best course of action. SMS group wants the council to refurbish the homes, but the council says this will be too expensive. Ringo Starr was born in Madryn Street and lived there for a few months before moving to nearby Admiral Grove where he spent most of his childhood.	Souvenir hunters are chiselling out bricks from Ringo Starr's former home before it is demolished.
+text: By Cemlyn DaviesBBC Wales political reporter Lesley Griffiths said more home working was one way of reducing pollution. Her comments came ahead of a week of debates on the issue organised by the Welsh Government. The Climate Change Committee said a "green recovery" from the pandemic could create jobs whilst also tackling emissions. Speaking to the BBC's Politics Wales programme, Ms Griffiths said: "I think we always have to look for opportunities amongst the challenges and certainly I've heard lots of people - not just within government or within the Senedd - say we don't want to go back to how it was before, we want things to be different. "So I think it is an opportunity to make those differences." Ms Griffiths said the roads had been much quieter during lockdown as a result of more people working from home and that had led to less pollution. "There are, I think, opportunities for people to look at the way they travel to work, the way they work. I think businesses are certainly looking at that too," she said. Ms Griffiths insisted that the Welsh Government had "kept its focus" on the climate crisis despite the "incredible challenges" around the pandemic. Call to create jobs 'in green economy' This week the Welsh Government will hold a number of debates on the issue to mark a year until the start of COP26 - the United Nations' climate summit that had to be postponed until 2021 because of the pandemic. Speaking to the same programme, Dr Rebecca Heaton from the Climate Change Committee, which advises the Welsh Government on its climate policy, said: "I think understandably and quite rightly, the pandemic is the focus of day to day activity and it has to be - it is this truly terrible thing. "But climate change does have parallels - it's this other great big global risk that we are facing. "I do think it's really important to look at how addressing climate change can also address Covid recovery. "So when we're looking at where we need to create jobs, create them in the green economy with green infrastructure."	The coronavirus crisis is an "opportunity" to make changes to tackle the climate crisis, according to Wales' environment minister.
+text: By Hannah RichardsonBBC News education and social affairs reporter Six-year-olds have to read aloud 20 real words and 20 made-up words in the check, testing their ability to sound out words using the phonics system. It is meant to test knowledge of the system's 85 letter combinations, but looks at only two-thirds of them. Pupils also needed vocabulary knowledge to read the test words, the study said. The research, presented at the British Educational Research Association conference by Dr Jonathan Solity and Dr Cat Darnell, is a detailed analysis of the words pupils have been asked to read in the check between 2012 and 2014. 'Pseudo words' The controversial test was introduced in 2012 to ensure all children at the end of Year 1 had what the government believed was sufficient phonics knowledge to develop their reading skills. And so it was designed to check only how well children were deploying their knowledge of the letter combinations or "graphemes", rather than using their knowledge of vocabulary to read. Hence the inclusion of 20 so-called "pseudo words". But the researchers said, because of the complexity of the English language, children needed to use vocabulary knowledge to work out how to pronounce 40% of the words in the test. For example, the word "brown" was included in the 2014 test. But as the "ow" sound can be pronounced in two different ways - to rhyme with "cow" or "slow", the researchers said it was only by knowing the meaning of the word "brown" that children would be able to pronounce it correctly. They also said children could get high scores in the test even if they were able to read only words made up of simple sounds such as the sound "d" in "dog". 'Language rich' Ministers strongly advocate the teaching of systematic synthetic phonics in schools. This is where children use only their knowledge of graphemes in order to sound out simple words - before they go on to tackle more irregular words that they simply have to remember how to pronounce. The researchers said schools may be wasting their time teaching more complex graphemes of little use to children in reading. And the children, particularly those who are disadvantaged and from less "language rich" homes, would benefit more from efforts to build vocabulary. This undue focus on the rarer language sounds could leave pupils struggling to read, the researchers said. Dr Solity, an honorary research fellow at University College London, said: "This is not an anti-phonics argument. It is absolutely clear that children need to be taught phonics, and systematic synthetic phonics in particular. "What we are questioning is whether it is worth teachers spending a great amount of time making sure pupils learn all 85 , rather than concentrating on the most frequent ones and then building pupils' vocabulary." The government has insisted that its test works well to pick up the children struggling to read using phonics and enables interventions to be put in at an early stage. A Department for Education spokesperson said the research was misleading. "We test a wide range of phonics knowledge from a range of content, but it would be impossible to test every aspect that is taught in a single check. "Over time, as more tests are carried out, they will cover the full breadth of knowledge required under the curriculum."	Children can pass the phonics test with just a basic knowledge of the government's preferred system for learning to read, research suggests.
+text: Farmers in the west of the county have been licensed by the government to shoot up to 70% of badgers in an effort to tackle bovine TB. A small part of the Forest of Dean falls within the 300 sq km zone, the exact location of which is secret. District councillors voted to ban the cull on the authority's land at a meeting on Thursday night. Campaigners say the cull will not have a significant impact in reducing the disease and are calling for the government to focus on the vaccination methods instead. But those in support of a cull argue the move is needed because badgers spread TB to livestock, costing taxpayers and farmers millions of pounds.	A council in Gloucestershire has voted to ban the culling of badgers on its land.
+text: Reparations are a restitution for slavery - an apology and repayment to black citizens whose ancestors were forced into the slave trade. It's a policy notion that many black academics and advocates have long called for, but one that politicians have largely sidestepped or ignored. But increased activism around racial inequalities and discussions among Democratic 2020 presidential candidates have thrust the issue into the national spotlight. This week, talk of reparations made headlines after a Fox News contributor argued against the policy by saying the US actually deserves more credit for ending slavery as quickly as it did. "America came along as the first country to end it within 150 years, and we get no credit for that," Katie Pavlich said on Tuesday, adding that reparations would only "inflame racial tension even more". The backlash to her comments from liberals and activists was swift. Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King Jr, responded by saying America "doesn't deserve credit for 'ending slavery'" when the ideologies are still prevalent. What's the history? Talk of repaying African-Americans has been around since the Civil War era, when centuries of slavery officially ended. Some experts have calculated the worth of black labour during slavery as anywhere from billions to trillions of dollars. Adding in exploitative low-income work post-slavery pushes those figures even higher. Even after the technical end of the slave trade, black Americans were denied education, voting rights, and the right to own property - treated in many ways as second-class citizens. Those arguing for reparations point to these historic inequalities as reasons for current schisms between white and black Americans when it comes to income, housing, healthcare and incarceration rates. Prof Darrick Hamilton, Executive Director of Ohio State University's Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, says this history is part of America's unique problem. "From our founding fabric we have based our political and economic institutions on chattel slavery," he told the BBC. "Which makes our institutions not only pernicious but structurally entrenched [in inequalities]." A brief timeline of slavery in the US 1619 - Some of the first African slaves are purchased in Virginia by English colonists, though slaves had been used by European colonists long before 1788 - The US constitution is ratified; under it, slaves are considered by law to be three-fifths of a person 1808 - President Thomas Jefferson officially ends the African slave trade, but domestic slave trade, particularly in the southern states, begins to grow 1822 - Freed African-Americans found Liberia in West Africa as a new home for freed slaves 1860 - Abraham Lincoln becomes president of the US; the southern states secede and the Civil War begins the following year 1862 - President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation frees all slaves in the seceded states 1865 - The South loses the war; the 13th Amendment to the Constitution formally abolishes slavery 1868 - The 14th Amendment grants freed African Americans citizenship 1870 - The 15th Amendment gives African American men the right to vote; the South begins passing segregation laws A case for reparations... In arguing for reparations, Prof Hamilton says the impact of slavery continues to manifest in American society. "The material consequence is vivid with the racial wealth gap. Psychologically, the consequence is [how] we treat blacks without dignity, that we dehumanise them in public spaces." From policies excluding primarily black populations - like social security once did - to pushing narratives that blame black Americans for their economic problems, Prof Hamilton says the US has structural problems that must be addressed in order to move forward. In 2014, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates brought similar ideas into the national conversation with his piece The Case for Reparations. Coates detailed how housing policy and wealth gaps in particular most clearly illustrate the ways black citizens are still affected by America's past. Decades of segregation kept black families away from white areas, which had better access to education, healthcare, food and other necessities, while institutionalised discrimination hindered black Americans' economic development. "As we go further back in our history, one can see it as explicitly violent," Prof Hamilton says. "Now it might be implicitly violent." Subconscious racism in police forces, enduring bias against black Americans in the courts and financial institutions are some examples of that subtle violence, he adds. ...and a case against it But support for reparations today remains largely divided along racial lines. A 2016 Marist poll found 58% of black Americans were in favour of reparations, while 81% of white Americans opposed the idea. A 2018 Data for Progress survey also found reparations to be unpopular among the general public, and especially so among white Americans. One argument against reparations echoes what Fox's Ms Pavlich said - that they would only build walls between Americans. Some contend that the reason reparations have worked elsewhere, namely Germany, which has paid billions to Holocaust survivors since the end of World War Two, is because the reparations are between nations, not within one. "For the United States to do the same for the descendants of slaves would be to imply that afterward, we will be going our separate ways, with no special obligations on either side," columnist Megan McArdle wrote for the Washington Post. "A one-time payment, and then nothing more owed...That is the only conception of reparations that could possibly be politically viable. It would also be utterly toxic, ultimately widening divisions that we're trying to shrink." Even for some black activists reparations seem an unreasonable ask. Bayard Rustin, who organised the March on Washington and was a friend of Martin Luther King Jr, called it a "ridiculous idea". "If my great-grandfather picked cotton for 50 years, then he may deserve some money, but he's dead and gone and nobody owes me anything," Mr Rustin told the New York Times in 1969. He later expanded on the views, writing that a payout would demean "the integrity of blacks" and exploit white guilt. "It is insulting to Negroes to offer them reparations for past generations for suffering, as if the balance of an irreparable past could be set straight with a handout." How would reparations work? A monetary payout to black Americans usually comes to mind when discussing reparations in the US. And critics are quick to point out such a payment would cost the US trillions. But just throwing cash at the issue, advocates say, would not address the root of the problem. Prof Hamilton told the BBC he supports a payout mostly as a symbolic gesture. "In any case where there's an injustice, to achieve justice not only do you need the acknowledgment, you need the restitution." "We need to couple it with an economic justice bill of rights," he adds. "Simply paying the debt doesn't address the structural problems America has, with certain classes of Americans being able to extract and exploit." But acknowledgement isn't "trivial", he says - it would help refute existing narratives that dehumanise black Americans as lazy or dysfunctional. Economist William Darity has also suggested a "portfolio of reparations" that would combine payments with black-oriented policies focusing on funding black education, healthcare, and asset building as well as ensuring that public schools properly teaches the full impact of slavery. What have Democratic candidates said? President Barack Obama never endorsed a reparations policy - nor did 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton - but next year's presidential contenders have been more outspoken, if vague. Senator Kamala Harris has said she is in favour of "some type" of reparations. Senator Elizabeth Warren has also expressed support for reparations, calling racial injustices "a stain on America" that has "happened generation after generation" at a CNN town hall this month. Senator Bernie Sanders saw some backlash during the last presidential election over rejecting the idea, but he maintains that a reparations cheque would not fix the problems. Senator Cory Booker, like Mrs Harris, has proposed a "form of reparations". Former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro said the idea of reparations was something "worth" discussing. Author Marianne Williamson has said she supports a reparations plan. To Prof Hamilton, regardless of policy, the fact that these conversations are happening is a step forward. "The conversation in and of itself is valuable. It's opening the door to reframe our understandings of racial inequality overall." Additional reporting by Paula Hong.	How does a country recover from centuries of slavery and racism? In the US, a growing number of voices are saying the answer is reparations.
+text: One woman and 13 men were found not guilty after Northumbria Police did not secure evidence properly or meet strict investigations guidelines. The force said it had apologised to the alleged victims for "police failings which resulted in the cases not going ahead at court". The 14 defendants had denied the charges against them. Northumbria Police's head of safeguarding Ch Supt Scott Hall said: "We will now conduct a review to understand how the failings occurred." The force said its Professional Standards Department would also launch an investigation. It said if any if misconduct issues were identified they would be "addressed appropriately". Three linked trials were due to take place as part of the force's Operation Optic. The operation had investigated allegations that the group had groomed, raped and trafficked three girls, including one aged 12, in Newcastle between 2010 and 2014. 'No prospect of conviction' The first of the trials, which started in January at Newcastle Crown Court, saw five juries sworn in over eight weeks after four had to be discharged. It ended on Tuesday after concerns about the gathering of evidence were raised. Judge Robert Adams said the investigation "must be transparent and it must be fair". "There must be integrity and the process must stand up to scrutiny," he added. "During the last week a number of officers were cross-examined about the investigation process and in relation to how the recording of inquiries were made or, as the case may be, not made." The prosecution said it had decided not to proceed as there was no "reasonable prospect of conviction in each case". Reporting restrictions had been imposed until the completion of the last trial, meaning no details could be reported until now.	The case against a gang accused of trafficking and raping young girls has collapsed because of police failings.
+text: The trust began treating badgers on nine of its nature reserves six months ago to tackle the spread of bovine TB. So far more than 75% of badgers have been vaccinated which the trust said was a "very good start". The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has said other methods were still needed. Trust vaccinator Liz Oldring, said: "Vaccination is a real alternative to culling badgers and we hope to expand the programme further in the south of Derbyshire next year." The trust said much of the programme's success had been down to working with other organisations such as Derbyshire County Council, the National Farmers Union and the Badger Trust. It is part of a five-year plan aimed at convincing the government to fund alternatives to culling. Project leader Tim Birch said vaccinating badgers was a more effective way of preventing the spread of the disease. "We are leading the way locally and nationally on this important issue and working with multiple partners has been absolutely vital," he said. He said the trust hopes to expand the programme in Derbyshire with the help of the government to prevent a badger cull. Defra carried out pilot culls in Gloucestershire and West Somerset last year to try and halt the spread of the disease. An independent scientific assessment concluded they were not effective and the number of badgers killed fell short of the necessary target. The Derbyshire Wildlife Trust raised £54,000 for the programme this year and is accepting donations for 2015.	Derbyshire Wildlife Trust has completed its first season of badger vaccinations in a programme that aims to prevent the need for culling.
+text: By Sean CoughlanBBC News education correspondent Online universities have been claimed as a "revolution" for higher education and this will be seen as a significant step forward. Education company Pearson will provide test centres for the edX online courses provided by Harvard and MIT. This will give online courses "real world" value, says the edX president. As well as providing supervised exam centres they will also authenticate the identity of online learners. It will also see formidable partnership between some of the world's most famous universities and the world's biggest education firm, Pearson. This year has seen growing interest in the idea of delivering university courses online - allowing universities to reach much bigger numbers of students and cutting the cost of tuition. There have been claims that the emergence of online universities, and the accessibility of lectures and study groups online, will have a far-reaching impact on the traditional model of higher education. Format war Alliances of major US universities have been in a race to develop online courses - in a kind of academic format war - with the edX project providing courses from Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley. A rival project called Coursera was launched by academics from Stanford in California and is now offering courses from 16 universities, including the University of Edinburgh. So far all the courses, delivered entirely over the internet, are available free - and almost all of them are not formally accredited by the university. In a matter of months, these courses have acquired hundreds of thousands of students. In the UK, about 40,000 students have signed up for courses on the Coursera platform. MIT said that a pilot course, run earlier this year, had been studied by more students than all the university's previous living alumni combined. But a practical question for these online students has been how their work can be recognised - and how such courses can overcome the risk of cheating and how they can validate the identity of the candidate. The deal announced on Thursday will allow students who have studied online to sit edX exams in supervised centres, where their work can be formally tested. Students, who will have to pay a fee for this service, will be able to use test centres run by Pearson VUE, which has 450 centres in 110 countries. The intention is that students will be able to show employers that they have taken these courses, which have been set by some of the biggest names in higher education. However, with many students at these universities paying more than $50,000 per year for their full campus experience, there will still be a distinction between degrees from the universities and these online versions. "Our online learners who want the flexibility to provide potential employers with an independently validated certificate may now choose to take the course exam at a proctored [supervised] test site," said Prof Agarwal, who had been director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory before becoming the inaugural president of edX.	Students taking online courses from prestigious US universities will be able to take final exams in a global network of invigilated test centres.
+text: Mark Zuckerberg made the disclosure during his second day of being questioned in Washington. In a related development, the political consultancy at the heart of the affair has announced its acting chief executive is stepping down. He also revealed that his firm was exploring whether to take action against the University of Cambridge. The institution is where the researcher Aleksandr Kogan, who had collected and sold personal data to Cambridge Analytica, was based. "What we found now is that there's a whole programme associated with Cambridge University where... there were a number of other researchers building similar apps," Mr Zuckerberg said. "So, we do need to understand whether there was something bad going on at Cambridge University overall that will require a stronger reaction from us." The university has reacted by saying it would be "surprised" if Mr Zuckerberg was only now aware of the work. "Our researchers have been publishing such research since 2013 in major peer-reviewed scientific journals, and these studies have been reported widely in international media," it added. "These have included one study in 2015 led by Dr Aleksandr Spectre (Kogan) and co-authored by two Facebook employees. "We have found no evidence that University researchers are improperly gathering personal data." Mr Zuckerberg had earlier apologised for having failed to check in 2015 that Cambridge Analytica had deleted information gathered about millions of Facebook users. Instead Facebook let the political consultancy self-certify that it had destroyed the records, which it said had been acquired in violation of the social network's rules. "We have a responsibility to make sure what happened with [app developer] Kogan and Cambridge Analytica doesn't happen again," Mr Zuckerberg said. The 33-year-old added that Facebook's audit of other apps would take many months to complete. But he said that the firm had seen no evidence as yet that Russia or China had attempted to scrape people's information. Please upgrade your browser to view this content. Timeline Facebook apologies Share this timeline Cambridge Analytica has denied breaking the law and said it did indeed delete the data. The company has also announced that its acting chief executive Dr Alexander Tayler is stepping down from the post to resume his previous position as its chief data officer. Alexander Nix, who had been in charge until March, remains suspended. Mr Zuckerberg's four hour appearance before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce followed a five hour session in front of two Senate committees yesterday. During a testy early exchange, he declined to give a commitment to change all users' default privacy settings to collect the minimum amount of personal information. "This is a complex issue," Mr Zuckerberg said. "That's disappointing to me," responded Democratic congressman Frank Pallone. Elsewhere in the hearing, Mr Zuckerberg acknowledged that he believed it was "inevitable" that the internet would need new regulations. "My position is not that there should be no regulation, but I also think you have to be careful about what regulation you put in place," he said. The Facebook chief also faced fresh accusations from Republican congressman Steve Scalise that the News Feed's algorithm was discriminating against conservative news and content in favour of liberal posts. "There is absolutely no directive in any of the changes that we make to have a bias," responded Mr Zuckerberg. "To the contrary our goal is to be a platform for all ideas." Another Republican pulled a surprise by displaying photos of illegal adverts for opioid drugs that he said had been live on Facebook yesterday. "Facebook is actually enabling an illegal activity and in so doing you are hurting people," said congressman David McKinley. "There are a number of areas of content that we need to do a better job of policing," Mr Zuckerberg replied, adding that he believed artificial intelligence tools would make this possible in the future. However, several of the politicians urged Facebook to be more proactive about the matter. Mr Zuckerberg also faced questions about the illegal trade of ivory in closed Facebook groups. In another combative exchange, the business leader was questioned about the data his firm collected on people who had never signed up to his service. Mr Zuckerberg said this was done for security purposes. But he professed not to be familiar with the term "shadow profiles" despite it having been used widely by the media during a past Facebook data privacy controversy. And he was unable to say how many types of data were being gathered about non-members. "You said everyone controls their data," said Democratic congressman Ben Ray Lujan. "But you are collecting data on people that are not even Facebook users, that have never signed a consent or privacy agreement. "When you go to Facebook's 'I don't have a Facebook account page and would like to request all my personal data stored by Facebook', it takes you to a form that says go to your Facebook page and then on your account settings you can download your data. "We've got to fix that" Other developments over the past day include:	Facebook's chief executive has revealed that his data was among that harvested in a privacy scandal.
+text: By Yogita LimayeBBC News, Mumbai The main purpose of the launch which took place at the Sriharikota space centre off India's eastern coast, was to put into orbit SCATSAT-1, a satellite that will help weather forecasting. Five of the other satellites that were on board are foreign, from the US, Canada and Algeria. In June India launched 20 satellites in a single mission, the most in the history of the country's ambitious space programme. Seventeen of those were foreign. Monday's launch takes the number of foreign satellites launched by India to 79. This has earned the country more than $120m (£92m). And India's space agency has already secured deals to launch dozens more foreign satellites. Good news This is good news for a country that has often faced criticism for spending money on a space programme when it has problems like poverty and hunger to tackle. AS Kiran Kumar, chairman of the state-run Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), says the agency is trying to make its operations more cost-effective. "We will be able to maximise our returns by making use of the excess space available in the vehicle while we are launching the satellites we make for our national requirements," he says. India's ability to launch multiple satellites in a single mission has also put it on firm footing in the global market. Many private companies are developing satellites that they need for their operations, but most cannot afford to launch these independently. So they need to piggyback on missions from agencies like Isro that have launch facilities. "The need for launches is growing exponentially worldwide, primarily because of new companies that are planning to launch entire commercial constellations [groups] of satellites, where a single company might need to launch anything between 24 to 648 satellites," says Susmita Mohanty, chief executive of Earth2Orbit, a company that has been helping negotiate launch deals between India's space agency and private firms. 'Fairly complex' Another thing that could be making India an attractive proposition is the frequency of its launches and its ability to meet deadlines. "So far we have been able to meet the time requirements of the customers," says Mr Kumar. India now plans to have as many as 12 launches a year, a pace that's more than doubled since 2015. Still, getting foreign satellites on board is not simple. "It's fairly complex to get a foreign commercial company to launch on a rocket built by a government space agency,' says Ms Mohanty. "There are regulatory hurdles, contractual, legal and export control complications." And of course there's competition too, not only from other space-faring countries but also increasingly from private firms like Elon Musk's SpaceX. So far India has only been launching small and light foreign satellites, using the PSLV, which has become its most reliable launch vehicle, with 36 consecutive successful launches so far. "In this weight class there are not too many operators,' says Mr Kumar. "In the heavier weight class there are many, for example Europe's Ariane rocket has established itself and from the new lot there is SpaceX, but even they have not provided many opportunities for such small satellite operators." Heavy advantage But launching heavier satellites is where the big money is, which is why many players are even reducing the price of their rocket launches to bag more deals. India has been launching heavy satellites on its Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) but so far it has only been used for domestic satellites. In recent months though, there have been queries from foreign companies for launches on the GSLV. If India can successfully start taking more heavy satellites to space, it could really fire up its position in a market that's worth billions of dollars.	On Monday, India sent a rocket into space which successfully launched eight satellites in one go.
+text: Contenders for The Royal Institute of British Architects' (RIBA) annual award include a monastery, two university libraries, an art gallery and a recycling facility. The winners will be announced at a ceremony in Leeds, on 21 April. AMRC Factory 2050, Sheffield The steel-framed circular glass building was designed by Bond Bryan Architects for the University of Sheffield's Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), which is a joint venture with aircraft-maker Boeing. Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull Brynmor Jones Library was redesigned by Sheppard Robson to modernise and connect two contrasting buildings - one from the 1950s, which had an Art Deco influence, while the other was a 1960s design in the brutalist style. Private house, Harrogate Doma Architects redeveloped a Victorian house, opening up new living areas for a family with young children. The highlight of the home is a "quirky and contemporary version" of the lean-to, which holds the staircase. The Diamond, Sheffield Twelve architects and master-planners developed a honeycomb-style exterior made of aluminium and glass, which was inspired by the surrounding historic buildings, for the University of Sheffield's Faculty of Engineering. The Hiscox Building, York Make Architects, asked by insurance company Hiscox to create a "beautiful but functional building", created a design influenced by the city's ancient walls and the former hay and wool market that existed on the site until the 1920s. Humberston Park Special School, Grimsby Humberston Park Special School, which serves pupils aged two to 19, was designed by Hodson Architects and is divided into "a pair of pavilions" with intricate folded roofs and glazed lanterns. Laidlaw Library, University of Leeds The design of the library by architects ADP aimed to complement the fact it sits between two Grade II listed churches and the University of Leeds' Grade I listed Parkinson Building. Leeds College of Building, Hunslet Campus Fuse Studios's brief by the college was to design a sustainable building providing plenty of natural light. Solar panels have been installed on the south-facing saw-tooth shaped roof. Leeds Recycling & Energy Recovery Facility, Leeds TSP Architects said they used sustainably sourced wood to create a 123m-long and 42m-high building, which is believed to be the largest timber frame structure of its type in Europe. New house, Brigsley Another commission by architects Hodson Architects. This time the firm designed a private detached white house on a large plot, which features a hall with two glazed walls and a raised seat/pergola outside. Stanbrook Abbey, Wass Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios intended to create a tranquil space for the nuns at the Abbey who had asked for the monastery to be remodelled for the 21st century, which was economic to run while being environmentally-friendly. York Art Gallery, York Two architect firms, Simpson and Brown and Ushida Findlay Architects, together won a design competition in 2010 to remodel the entire gallery. They created a new "secret gallery" in the ceramic-clad roof-top space, as well as a new garden entrance and balcony to the west.	Twelve buildings across Yorkshire have been shortlisted for a regional architecture award.
+text: Treasury Minister Alfred Cannan said the move had been backed "in principle" and could save taxpayers £1m. The airport, which is currently part of the Department of Infrastructure (DOI), makes an annual loss of £3.7m. A detailed plan of how the changes could be rolled out will be presented to Tynwald in April 2020. The change would mostly likely see the airport remain in public ownership but run on a commercial basis by a private operator. It would mirror the government's involvement with the Steam Packet Company, which came under public ownership last year, but is also operated at arm's length. However, concerns have been raised about a potential increase in charges at the airport, such as fees for parking, picking-up and dropping-off and arrangements for taxis. Ramsey MHK Alex Allinson said he hoped the airport would not come to be seen as "a cash cow to be milked". Supporting the plans, DOI Minister Ray Harmer said a "different approach" to running the airport "might look better" and more research was needed first. Douglas East MHK Chris Robertshaw said the Treasury was "being completely rational, stable and sensible". "It's a very modest proposal that should enjoy our complete support," he added. Mr Cannan said a private operator could "take the airport to a better place".	The Isle of Man's Ronaldsway Airport could be run at arm's length from government in the future, politicians have said.
+text: Nicholas WattNewsnight political editor@nicholaswatton Twitter The drinks were flowing and the mood was humming as the Tory great and good met to celebrate their election victory this week. Michael Gove had a telling analogy as he praised Tory thinkers who had steered the party towards the ambition of breaching Labour's "Red Wall". The likes of the former No 10 aide Will Tanner had provided a form of "in-flight refuelling" for the aircraft of the Tory party. There was a danger, Gove noted, that after nearly a decade in office, the Conservative Party could run low on the fuel of ideas. But Will Tanner's Onward think tank had been on hand with its in flight refuelling tanker. Onward had identified Workington Man, a northern rugby league supporter, as a key target for the Tories. The party duly won Workington for the first time in over 40 years. The in-flight refuelling had performed a starring role, Gove noted, in helping to deliver an unprecedented fourth successive general election first place with an increased Tory vote each time. All so happy, all so relaxed as the Tories celebrated their success at the Westminster gathering. But hovering in the air before, and long after that successful political in flight refuelling, is Brexit. With or without the bongs of Big Ben, Brexit will, in a technical sense, be delivered on 31 January as Britain leaves the EU. But the Brexit story will be far from over then as attention turns immediately to talks on the UK's future relationship with the EU. As the Tories have been basking in their election victory, the EU has in recent weeks issued warnings about how tough the talks will be. In Brussels there is a strong sense that the Tories have not woken up to the trade offs and compromises that will inevitably characterise the talks. Officials believe the UK has only tuned into two aspirations agreed by all - the need for zero tariffs and zero quotas on goods. These EU officials fear the UK has not focused on a third EU demand - no dumping. That means that if the UK wants zero tariffs and zero quotas it cannot embark on social dumping - gaining a competitive advantage over the EU by cutting labour and environmental standards and lowering taxes. Senior UK officials say they understand exactly what the EU is saying. One tells me: "We understand the EU is nervous about having a big economy on its doorstep that could undercut it by reducing standards. But we're not bothered. We want to do our own thing. Lots of our standards will be better." Cabinet ministers close to the future trade talks believe the UK also has two advantages in the talks: Failure to reach a deal in the trade talks would have less grave consequences for Britain than a no deal Brexit without a withdrawal agreement last year, according to ministers. They point out that the three elements at the heart of last year's deal - Northern Ireland, citizens' rights and the UK's exit payment - will stand whatever happens. The cabinet minister told me: "Boris can say to the EU: you know I was prepared for the original no deal last year but was thwarted by parliament which blocked no-deal. I am now prepared for a WTO no-deal [trading on WTO terms in the event of no trade deal] which isn't so bad and I can do what I like in Parliament. So it is a credible threat." These interpretations will be hotly contested by the EU and by pro-Europeans who want to fashion a close relationship with the EU. Brussels will say the EU has an abiding and common interest in preserving the integrity of the single market. And pro-Europeans will challenge the idea that relying on WTO trading terms for the largest part of the UK's exports would be straightforward. The opening skirmishes in the next round of Brexit talks have so far been a gentle affair. The Tories are still riding high after their election win but the atmosphere will soon heat up as the pace quickens. You can watch Newsnight on BBC Two at 22:30 on weekdays. Catch up on iPlayer, subscribe to the programme on YouTube and follow it on Twitter.	In Brussels there is a strong sense that the Conservative Party have not woken up to the trade offs and compromises that will inevitably characterise the talks, writes Nicholas Watt.
+text: Twenty-one candidates stood for the 14 conseiller positions, half of those available in the island's government. Sitting member Peter Cole polled just nine votes less than John Hunt, the successful candidate with the least votes. Almost 80% of the island turned out with 362 of the 456 eligible voting. Dave Cocksedge topped the poll with 293 votes. Andrew Bache became the new member with 242 votes. It was the second time the island had held a fully democratic general election, after its first was held in December 2008. Then the 28 elected conseillers drew lots for who would serve two-year and four-year terms, to allow for half of the house to be elected every two years. For the first time one of the 28 conseillers will be elected president of Chief Pleas. It follows the decision to split the role of seneschal, who until the decision in October was both chief judge and head of the island's government. The successful candidates were: David Cocksedge 293; Helen Plummer 281; David Melling 267; Christopher Nightingale 258; Andrew Bache 242; Edric Baker 212; Christopher Bateson 211; Stefan Gomoll 211; Diane Baker 201; Anthony Ventress 192; Andrew Cook 189; Michelle Perree 189; Janet Guy 169; John Hunt 167. The unsuccessful candidates were: Peter Cole 158; Fiona Bird 152; Tony Le Lievre 147; John Donnelly 133; Stephen Taylor 116; Paul Burgess 107; Peter Stisted 104.	Just one of the 14 Sark politicians standing for re-election failed to retain a seat as half of Chief Pleas was elected on Wednesday.
+text: What Makes You Beautiful, the group's debut single, is the fastest-selling record of the year. The song spent a week at number one in September. The band will play 24 dates starting at the Civic Hall in Wolverhampton on 21 December. Harry, Liam, Niall, Louis and Zayn posted a video on their website saying they were "very excited". The full dates are: Civic Hall, Wolverhampton - 21 December Manchester 02 Apollo, Manchester - 22 Manchester 02 Apollo, Manchester (Matinee Show) - 23 Manchester 02 Apollo, Manchester (Evening Show) - 23 International Arena, Bournemouth - 3 January NIA Arena, Birmingham - 4 Pavilions, Plymouth - 5 Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham (Matinee Show) - 7 Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham (Evening show) - 7 Brighton Centre, Brighton - 8 London HMV Apollo, London - 10 London HMV Apollo, London - 11 Clyde Auditorium, Glasgow - 13 Clyde Auditorium, Glasgow (Matinee show) - 14 Clyde Auditorium, Glasgow (Evening show) - 14 Echo Arena, Liverpool - 15 City Hall, Newcastle - 17 Opera House, Blackpool - 18 City Hall, Sheffield - 20 Cardiff Motorpoint Arena, Cardiff - 21 London HMV Apollo, London - 22 The 02, Dublin - 24 The Waterfront, Belfast - 25 The Waterfront, Belfast - 26 Tickets go on general sale on Saturday 1 October.	Last year's X Factor finalists One Direction have announced their first UK tour.
+text: Edgars Grisulis was jailed for nine years and nine months after killing Annette Booth when his car reversed into her at the Leicester bus stop. On Wednesday, Leicester Crown Court heard how Ahmad Karwan followed the killer driver and flagged a police car. Judge Martin Hurst said Grisulis, 27, had torn Mrs Booth's family apart with his "selfish and cowardly act". Grisulis, a Latvian national, pleaded guilty to death by dangerous driving when he hit the 57-year-old on 29 September 2018. The court heard how the father-of-one, of Saxby Street, Leicester, had borrowed his partner's Mercedes GLX after drinking. 'Coward's way out' Blood taken from the inside of the car showed Grisulis had 144mg of alcohol in his bloodstream, the legal limit is 80mg. As he drove towards the city centre on the A50 in Woodgate at a "terrifyingly high speed", his car "collided with the rear of a Nissan vehicle", driven by Mr Karwan. Prosecutor Alex Wolfson said Mr Karwan knew Grisulis was going too fast, and was "bracing himself for the inevitable collision". He got out of his car to confront Grisulis, but Grisulis "selected reverse gear" and began "swerving" across the carriageway. He eventually hit Mrs Booth at the bus stop. Mrs Booth's husband Stephen, who was with her at the bus stop, said: "All I can remember is the noise and the sound, and the carnage. "At first I didn't realise that Annette had been hit, and the car sped off." Mrs Booth, who had been due to become a grandmother the following month, later died at Nottingham Queen's Medical Centre. Mr Wolfson said the Nissan driver "followed the defendant" and saw him abandon his car, with an unidentified passenger, under the archway of Grand Central Street. Judge Hurst said: "You took the coward's way out, you threw your car into reverse and hurtled backwards a distance of 105m." The judge said he was "weaving" along the carriageway "completely out of control", and he "mounted the pavement and collided at that spot with Annette Booth." As part of their victim statements, a statement was read out by Mrs Booth's brother Michael Skeete. It said: "I have watched my mum's health deteriorate, no mother should have to bury their child." Her son Luke Skeete said: "My mum, my inspiration, my best friend, gone. Just like that without warning." Her husband Stephen said: "The real truth is a massive part of me died with her that night. "The only thing that keeps me going is our two sons and, of course, our new granddaughter." Commenting on the sentence outside of court, Mr Booth said: "I feel like we've been served more of an injustice than justice as a family. "He's 27 years old, once he turns 33 it's all going to be done and dusted, whereas we're living that life sentence." Grisulis, who had previous driving convictions and did not have a British licence at the time of the incident, was also banned from driving for 14 years and 10 months. In sentencing, Judge Hurst said Grisulis had a "cavalier disregard of the laws of this land and the appropriate way to drive". "This family has been torn apart by your selfish and cowardly act," he said. "You will be released from your sentence, they will continue to serve the life sentence you imposed on them." Follow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.	A man followed a drink-driver and flagged down a police car after the man "cowardly" fled a fatal crash scene.
+text: The Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust said many "second surge" Covid-19 cases had been detected more than eight days after people had been discharged. This indicated "infection was due to acquisition in the hospital", the report said. A trust spokesman said "strict infection prevention processes" were in place. The report said the high number of hospital-acquired infections was due to the "highly transmissible nature" of the virus, as well as the inability to isolate patients, infections in staff and "asymptomatic carriage". "A significant proportion of cases in the second surge were detected eight-plus days following admission, indicating infection was due to acquisition in the hospital," the report said. The report for the trust's board of directors added: "Case reviews have shown that a number of these patients acquired infection while awaiting appropriate and safe discharge." In some parts of Bedfordshire, cases had peaked at about 1,000 per 100,000 people in the first week of January but had reduced towards the end of the month, the report said. The trust includes the Luton and Dunstable Hospital and Bedford Hospital, where Capt Sir Tom Moore died on Tuesday. It said it had implemented a full programme of testing early in the pandemic. A spokesman said: "We have strict infection prevention processes, social distancing measures and visiting restrictions in place to help keep everyone safe, while every patient and staff member is regularly tested." Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk Related Internet Links Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust	A "significant proportion" of patients caught Covid while being treated in hospitals, an NHS trust said.
+text: One animal was found dead in a garden in London Road in Knebworth, Hertfordshire, and the other, which lives next door, had to be put to sleep shortly after being shot. The two cats, both aged three, died within a week of each other and their owners are convinced the same person is responsible. They are warning neighbours to be vigilant and have informed the police. Nick and Juliet Cox's short-haired black and white cat Ziggy was shot on Saturday morning. The family had been out briefly and found him in a distressed state in their London Road home. Although he was rushed to a vet who confirmed an air rifle pellet had lodged in his flank, he could not be saved. Chris Unitt's Siberian cat, Leo, died in a neighbour's garden the previous Sunday. Although Mr Unitt noticed some blood, he did not have his pet checked and buried it. "After hearing about Nick's cat, I'm now 99.9% certain Leo met the same fate as Ziggy," he said. Both owners said their families were "devastated", with Mr Unitt's toddler "still asking where Leo is". Mr Cox said: "Ziggy had a twin brother and he is wondering what's going on in the world." The families have shared what happened on social media and are posting leaflets in the neighbourhood warning other pet owners to be vigilant. Mr Cox said the incidents had been reported to both Hertfordshire Police and the RSPCA.	Two cats have died after apparently being shot with an air rifle.
+text: By Douglas FraserBusiness/economy editor, Scotland The plan is being put forward by a London firm as an alternative to keeping Longannet power station open. The giant coal-burner in Fife faces closure within a year unless it wins an auction to provide back-up supply. That would keep it going for at least two years while grid connections between Scotland and England are improved. Only once more transmission capacity is in place can Scotland be sure of maintaining voltage. A sub-sea link is being installed between Ayrshire and Merseyside, and cross-border links are being upgraded. But until then, National Grid, which has responsibility to ensure the energy supply is maintained, says it has to strike a deal with a generating company to provide back-up power from coal, gas or oil burning power stations. A decision is expected as early as this week. Deputy First Minister John Swinney was at Longannet on Monday to press the case for a decision that would retain the coal-burning plant and its 260 jobs. Three companies are in the auction to provide the power. ScottishPower is bidding with the Longannet plant. SSE/Scottish Hydro wants the contract to go to its gas-burning Peterhead plant. The third bid is understood to be from Tower Bridge Ventures, based in London, which plans to build specialised barges. These would burn liquified natural gas (LNG) to provide power, as well as generating heat and cooling. These are designed to be more efficient than existing thermal power stations, and could also produce compressed air and fresh water. The company's website refers to a pipeline of projects, the biggest of which is in Scotland, and for 375 megawatts (MW). The auction is for at least 350 MW. Industry insiders say the barge-based bid could be at a major advantage if it can avoid the fixed grid access charge which the existing power plants have to pay. These run to tens of millions of pounds per year. "This is untried and untested," said one source. "They're taking risks with the Scottish economy. This wouldn't even be considered for power supply in London." Helen Corey, chief executive of Tower Bridge Ventures, said the firm was set up in 2009, and will soon announce its engineering partners. She declined to comment on the National Grid auction for Scotland, saying the company is in several commercially-sensitive discussions. Its proposal to build floating power plants avoids the delays around planning approval for conventional ones. They can be moved to the communities where power is needed. She said they could be a permanent solution to energy needs, or temporary to meet shortfalls, or provide emergency power, in the case of natural disasters. 'Political football' Although the company is not yet operating any, the plan is for a variety of sizes, from 40MW up to 150 MW (30,000 to 110,000 homes). Tower Bridge Ventures has been reported to be interested in setting up a base in Portsmouth, following the closure of the naval shipyard, from which it would also be able to supply power to the port city. During his visit to Longannet, Mr Swinney urged the UK government to help prevent the early closure of Longannet, insisting it still had a vital role to play in delivering the country's energy supply. Scottish Conservative energy spokesman Murdo Fraser claimed it was the Scottish government's "obsession with developing vast amounts of intermittent and expensive wind energy that has contributed to the current situation". The energy union Prospect urged politicians to stop treating the troubled power station like a "political football" and urged them to work together to secure its long-term future.	Scotland's back-up energy supply could be provided by three to 10 gas-fuelled power stations on coastal barges.
+text: Local authority permission for the Oasis Academy Temple Quarter school in east Bristol could now be overturned after concerns about flooding. Parents have been campaigning for years for a new secondary school to address a shortage of year 7 places in the area. Campaigner Jenny Grinsted said the failure to deliver the school affected more than 200 children each year. The school was originally expected to open in 2018 but has been plagued by planning delays related to the nature of the site, which is alongside the Feeder Canal. The government has now intervened to "call in" the planning consent, which will involve a public inquiry lasting at least six months. Speaking on behalf of BS5 Secondary Forum and the children and families of east Bristol, Ms Grinsted told scrutiny councillors errors had been made by a number of organisations including Bristol City Council and the Department for Education (DfE). "There is a real risk that this school may never open at all," she said. 'Extensive searches' Commission chair, Claire Hiscott, told the meeting it was "highly likely" the planning application would be rejected and called on officers to identify potential alternative sites for the school. But cabinet member for schools Anna Keen said council officers had already made "extensive" searches for suitable sites which had all been turned down by the DfE. It was revealed the council has now made a deal with Cabot Learning Federation to create around 140 places for year 7 students, partly by moving dozens of sixth formers to a facility in South Gloucestershire. Director of education Alison Hurley said the deal provides a solution for the September 2021 intake and "potentially" for the following year's batch of year 7 students in east Bristol "if the Oasis doesn't go ahead". Related Internet Links Bristol City Council	The future of a new secondary school is in jeopardy after a government decision to "call in" the planning consent.
+text: By Eunan McConvilleBBC News NI Infection rates and the number of positive cases are down. The amount of people in hospital and the number of patients in intensive care with Covid-19 are likewise down. And the percentage of the population that has received a vaccine dose continues to rise. That all comes with a proviso however - the process of unlocking will almost certainly mean some of these numbers will go the wrong way. It is all a case of balance and proportionality. Yes, the figures indicate that we are in a much better place than we have been in a long time. But that comes in the context of warnings about a potential third wave in the autumn, concerns about vaccine availability and other European countries introducing fresh lockdowns. The Stormont Executive will soon have tough decisions to make about when - and which - restrictions are eased, but here is what the numbers tell us about Covid-19 in Northern Ireland right now. Infection rates Northern Ireland's infection rate continues to fall. It has undulated slightly in recent weeks, but has generally maintained a downward trend over the past eight weeks or so. Data from the UK government indicate Northern Ireland's infection rate to be 67.1 cases per 100,000 population. This figure takes in the seven days up until 14 March. The Department of Health's indicative infection rate for Northern Ireland up until 18 March is 58.6 per 100,000 population. This suggests a continuation of the downward trend, although it's worth noting that the most current data published by the department can frequently be subject to some revision and updating. In any case, it is fair to say that Northern Ireland's infection rate is falling. According to the UK government figures, the infection rates in the UK - based on cases per 100,000 population (up until 14 March) are as follows: The Republic of Ireland does not publish an equivalent infection rate on its dashboard, but based on published data, the infection rate for the week up until 14 March was 70.9 - slightly higher but very similar to Northern Ireland. Most council areas in Northern Ireland have seen falling infection rates over the past week. Eight council areas had falling rates, with Derry and Strabane seeing the biggest rise. Fermanagh and Omagh rose ever so slightly, while Newry, Mourne and Down remained the same. On a more local level, the infection rate remains higher around Ballymena. This has been the case for a few weeks. The greater Shankill/Ballysillan area of Belfast has seen an increase in infections, and is now just behind Ballymena in its rate of spread of the virus. Whether you consider Northern Ireland's current infection rate to be low is a matter of perspective. Considering where we were two months ago, it is indeed a lot lower. At previous points in the pandemic, authorities started to introduce restrictions when infection rates hit the 200 per 100,000 population mark. And our current rate is evidently lower than that. But the current rate is still one that many experts would not be comfortable with. Testing Another continuing trend is in testing. For the past few weeks the number of people in Northern Ireland getting tested for coronavirus has been increasing week-on-week - but the number of positive results have been falling. This is another really good indication that the spread of the virus is subsiding. Currently about one in every 29 people tested for Covid-19 gets a positive result. At the height of the winter wave, it was more than one in four. The infection rates and number of cases help inform the R number - the indicator of whether the spread of the virus is speeding up or slowing down. If the value is over one, the virus is spreading; under one means the spread is contracting. The R number for cases in the public is currently estimated to be between 0.9 and 1.1. This is a slight rise from the previous week. There is every chance that the R number will fall again next week, but if the increase continues, it will be a cause for concern. Hospital inpatients The number of patients in our hospitals with the virus is falling and has been since the middle of January. There are fewer than 170 people with the virus in hospital at the minute. There were more than 1,000 at the peak of the new year surge. Admissions are also low, indicating that the number of people in hospital with Covid-19 should continue to fall. That fall is mirrored somewhat in intensive care units (ICU). It's five months since there have been as few Covid-positive patients in ICU - that is undoubtedly good news. But it should be tempered by the fact that we still have more people receiving intensive care than there would usually be in non-Covid times. In short, ICUs remain under pressure. Deaths It has been a year since the first coronavirus-related death in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland's Covid-19 death rate is particularly low at the minute. According to the Department of Health here have been six deaths over the past week, meaning a rolling average of fewer than one death per day. The last time our Covid death rate was so low was September. However, a note of caution - this rate can change quickly if there are multiple deaths on consecutive days. For the seventh week in a row, Nisra reported a drop in the number of death certificates which mentioned Covid-19. Based on a rolling seven-day time window, Northern Ireland has the lowest death rate by population in the UK. In the same period, the Republic of Ireland has seen comparatively more deaths than the UK. However, looking at deaths across the entire duration of the pandemic indicates that Britain has had higher death tolls than the island of Ireland. The figures below for the UK nations indicate deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test result. The figure for the Republic includes probable and possible Covid deaths. Another way of looking at death rates is to consider the number of fatalities among those who tested positive for the virus. Again, there is an Ireland-Britain split in the rates. Taking a look at deaths in Northern Ireland on a more local level, there are indications that Mid and East Antrim, and Antrim and Newtownabbey council areas have had the highest rates of death over the course of the pandemic. Vaccinations Northern Ireland's vaccination programme continues to make good progress, although the speed at which first dose jabs are being administered has slowed somewhat over the past two weeks or so. The plans for the mass vaccination centre at the SSE Arena in Belfast have been scaled down because of the anticipated delay in delivery of some vaccine doses. Those appointments already booked for first and second doses will be honoured, but another dip in the administration of the vaccination programme should be anticipated. Dr Patricia Donnelly told a Stormont committee that the delay in vaccine delivery could set Northern Ireland's vaccination programme back by four weeks in the worst case scenario. But added that she was hopeful it would be more like a two week delay. More than 650,000 people in Northern Ireland have been vaccinated so far - about 35% of the overall population, or almost 46% of the adult population. Comparatively, the other parts of the UK are slightly ahead of Northern Ireland in terms of percentage of the population vaccinated. The Republic of Ireland is still languishing quite far behind Northern Ireland and the UK. To date, about 9.3% of the Republic's population has been vaccinated. More second doses are now being given out in Northern Ireland - the vast majority of them to health care workers. This is unsurprising as we are about 10-12 weeks on from when the vaccination programme started in earnest. More than half the people vaccinated so far in Northern Ireland got their jab through GPs. If you're interested in finding out the level of vaccination in your area, BBC's Visual and Data Journalism Team has created a very useful tool.	There is much cause for positivity in what statistics are currently telling us about the coronavirus pandemic in Northern Ireland.
+text: Clients pulled £3.4bn out of the company's funds in the three months to the end of June, with total funds under management at £209.6bn. The Aberdeen-based group described markets conditions as "difficult". However, it said its long-term investment philosophy and disciplined process have served investors well. Martin Gilbert, chief executive of Aberdeen, said: "We have delivered resilient figures during the third quarter given the volatile global market conditions. "Our disciplined investment approach meant a broad range of our products attracted interest from investors although towards the end of the period outflows increased due to heightened market turbulence." 'New trend' During the period, Aberdeen made two acquisitions. It bought the New York-based asset management firm Artio Global Investors for more than £100m and a stake in SVG Advisers (SVGA) for £17.5m. At the time, Mr Gilbert said the deals were part of a strategy of expansion through bolt-on acquisitions and not the start of an aggressive buying spree. Although the company is a specialist in emerging markets, Mr Gilbert said it liked "US, European and American companies right now". This included UK firms. He told the BBC that recently his company was seeing a "new trend of clients not investing in the UK index but in the world index and a lot of UK companies are global companies which is why they've done so well in the past five years".	Funds under management fell by 1% at investment firm Aberdeen Asset Management in the face of "volatile global market conditions".
+text: By Joe BoyleBBC News The North's leader is following in the footsteps of some of the world's most infamous rulers. Here are five of the most notorious political purges of the last century. Hitler, Germany, 1934 Hitler used a combination of the ballot box and bullying to gain power in Germany in 1933. The Sturmabteilung (SA), otherwise known as the "brownshirts", acted as the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. Under charismatic leader Ernst Roehm, they beat up and intimidated potential opponents during the 1920s and early 1930s. However, by 1934 they had become too powerful. Between 30 June and 2 July, Roehm and dozens of other SA leaders were shot dead. The incident became known as the Night of the Long Knives. Although the SA continued to exist, the purge had hobbled it. Stalin, Soviet Union, 1934-1939 Stalin used the killing of his right-hand man, Sergei Kirov, as a pretext for launching a ferocious purge of the leadership. Many historians believe Stalin had ordered Kirov's assassination to give him the excuse he needed. Dozens of party leaders were subsequently exiled or killed, often after show trials where they were accused of being in league with Leon Trotsky, Stalin's rival for the leadership who fled in 1929. Relatives, friends and even possible sympathisers of anyone labelled a traitor were brutally despatched. Trotsky was murdered, presumably on Stalin's orders, in Mexico in 1940. Saddam Hussein, Iraq, 1979 When Saddam came to power, he carried out a very public purge of more than 60 senior members of the ruling Baath Party, the organisation that had put him in his post as president. Black-and-white video footage shows Saddam smoking a cigar as various politicians are denounced as traitors. They are led away, until only about half of the members are left. Many were subsequently tried and executed for treason. Deng Xiaoping, 1980, China After Mao Zedong's death in 1976, a bitter struggle for power broke out at the top of the Communist Party. By 1978 Mao's chosen successor Hua Guofeng had been usurped by Deng Xiaoping, a reformer who had earlier been frozen out by Mao. In 1980, some of Mao's most extreme allies were put on trial. It was a political show trial accompanied by a massive propaganda campaign denouncing the so-called Gang of Four. It was designed to cement the power of the new leadership under Deng. All four were found guilty and eventually sentenced to life in prison. Than Shwe, Burma/Myanmar, 2004 Until 2010, one man dominated the politics Burma (also known as Myanmar): Than Shwe, a self-styled senior general who reigned imperiously for more than two decades. For a brief time, however, a younger more charismatic general, Khin Nyunt, threatened to upset the power balance. As prime minister and head of military intelligence he had built a substantial power base. He even established his own newspaper. Than Shwe acted quickly, deposing him, and then putting him on trial for corruption and bribery. He was jailed in 2005 for 44 years, but freed from house arrest in an amnesty earlier this year.	North Korea has shocked the world by purging and executing one of its most powerful figures, Chang Song-thaek, who was uncle of leader Kim Jong-un.
+text: The victim is believed to be a spear fisherman, 35, whose boat was found empty off Palmer Point, in Far North Queensland, on Saturday. Queensland Police said an initial investigation suggested the man was killed by a crocodile. On Sunday, an 18-year-old man survived a crocodile attack about 65km (40 miles) south at Innisfail. Police investigating the man's death said they had begun searching for a crocodile more than 4m long. If a crocodile is confirmed to be responsible, it would be the ninth fatal attack in Queensland since 1985. Authorities said a large crocodile made an aggressive rush towards a police boat on Sunday night. "It appears that this animal may be responsible for the death of this man," said Dr Matt Brien, from Queensland's Department of Environment and Heritage Protection. "It's not consistent with a wild crocodile. They tend to be fairly wary of people. It's a behaviour that we have seen before in crocodiles that have attacked people." If found the reptile would be captured or killed, he said. Teenager's escape In the Innisfail incident, teenager Lee de Paauw was bitten on the arm by a crocodile after jumping into a river late at night. He suffered lacerations and fractures before undergoing surgery in hospital. "I hit it once on the nose [and] it loosened a bit," Mr de Paauw told radio station Nova FM on Monday. "I got another hit in and it was right on its eye. I was lucky because it just dropped me." Witnesses said Mr de Paauw went into the river as part of a dare. "It all happened very fast, pretty much as soon as he jumped in, there was splashing and screaming," Sophie Paterson, a British backpacker, told the Courier Mail. Queensland paramedic Neil Noble said the teenager was lucky to be alive.	A man has been found dead after a suspected crocodile attack in Australia, authorities say.
+text: Guto Bebb's comments follow yesterday's Spending Review with the money S4C receives from the UK government set to be cut from £6.7m to £5m by 2019. The Aberconwy MP said it sent a "very negative message" about the party's commitment to the Welsh language. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport said the cut was "in line with savings being made elsewhere". The channel receives the bulk of its money from the BBC licence fee. Its funding reduced from £101m in 2009 to £82.8m in 2014/15. Mr Bebb told BBC Radio Wales: "The financial sum in question is not significant although in the context of S4C's budget, any cut is now problematic, but it does send a very negative message. "In terms of sending a signal to people who care about the Welsh language, who care about culture, who care about media plurality in a Welsh context, I think yesterday was a missed opportunity." A DCMS spokesman said the budget cut represented a "modest reduction in S4C's overall funding". TAC, the trade body for independent TV production companies in Wales, called the settlement disappointing. Chairman Iestyn Garlick said: "We are disappointed that despite what the chancellor said in his statement about the economic importance of the creative industries, the government has not listened to the argument that S4C's funding is not sustainable without further investment. "It is unfortunate that such a culturally and economically important institution is being gradually undermined by a constant decrease in real-terms funding." S4C Authority chairman Huw Jones said it was "inevitable that cuts of this nature will have implications for the range and diversity of the service that we provide and for our ability to take advantage of new opportunities".	A Conservative MP has criticised cuts on Welsh broadcaster S4C's funding by his party at Westminster.
+text: By Helen BriggsBBC News The recommended sugar intake will stay at below 10% of total calorie intake a day, with 5% the target, says the WHO. The suggested limits apply to all sugars added to food, as well as sugar naturally present in honey, syrups, fruit juices and fruit concentrates. UK campaigners say it is a "tragedy" that the WHO has taken 10 years to think about changing its advice. The recommendation that sugar should account for no more than 10% of the calories in the diet, was passed in 2002. It works out at about 50g a day for an adult of normal weight, said the WHO. However, a number of experts now think 10% is too high, amid rising obesity levels around the world. Announcing the new draft measures, the WHO said in a statement: "WHO's current recommendation, from 2002, is that sugars should make up less than 10% of total energy intake per day. "The new draft guideline also proposes that sugars should be less than 10% of total energy intake per day. "It further suggests that a reduction to below 5% of total energy intake per day would have additional benefits." Dr Francesco Branca, WHO's nutrition director, told a news conference that the 10% target was a "strong recommendation" while the 5% target was "conditional", based on current evidence. "We should aim for 5% if we can," he added. The plans will now go for public consultation, with firm recommendations expected this summer. Public Health England said its scientific advisory committee on nutrition was reviewing evidence on sugar in the UK diet. Director of Nutrition and Diet, Alison Tedstone, said: "Our surveys show that the UK population should reduce their sugar intake as average intake for adults is 11.6% and for children is 15.2%, which is above the current UK recommendation of 10%. " Campaign group, Action for Sugar, said it was pressing for 5% to become the firm recommendation. Nutritionist, Katharine Jenner, said: "It is a tragedy that it has taken 10 years for the WHO to think about changing their recommendation on sugar, which will have had astronomic implications on the millions affected by obesity and type 2 diabetes the world over. " The WHO guidelines are based on a review of scientific evidence on the health impact of sugar, including damage to teeth and the effect on obesity. The obesity study, published last year in the BMJ, found while sugar did not directly cause obesity, those who consumed a lot of it, particularly in sweetened drinks, tended to put on weight as sugary food did not make them feel full. A review of the link between sugar intake and tooth decay, carried out by UK researchers, found cases of tooth decay were lower when sugar made up less than 10% of daily calories. Paula Moynihan, Professor of Nutrition and Oral Health at Newcastle University, said: "The less sugar you eat, the lower your risk of dental decay." Prof Tom Sanders of the School of Medicine, King's College London, said a limit of 5% added sugar "would be very tough to meet". He added: "5% is untried and untested; 10% we can live with." Dr Nita Forouhi, of the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge, said the 5% target was "ambitious, and challenging". On Tuesday a leading doctor called for a tax on sugar to help combat growing levels of obesity. Dame Sally Davies, England's Chief Medical Officer, told MPs: "We may need to move toward some kind of sugar tax, but I hope we don't have to. "	People will be advised to halve the amount of sugar in their diet, under new World Health Organization guidance.
+text: By Paul GlynnEntertainment reporter The comments come in response to a petition - signed by stars like Ronan Keating, KT Tunstall, Gary Kemp and Tim Burgess - calling for visa-free travel around Europe for artists and crews. The petition, which has now amassed more than 200,000 signatures, will be debated in parliament, the government confirmed. From 1 January, the free movement of people between the UK and the EU will end. Touring musicians and their technical crews will face new rules, and could be subject to additional visa costs and paperwork. Music bosses have said that entire tours could now be at risk, as a result. What does the deal say? Whereas previously UK nationals were able to move around the EU freely, from this Friday they will need a visa for stays of longer than 90 days in a 180-day period, and there will be restrictions on their activities. While three months will probably be enough to cover most bands' European tours, matters may be complicated by the fact there are different rules in place in different EU countries. The likes of Spain, Italy and Denmark, for example, require additional work permits. "Short-term visitors to the EU can continue to join business meetings, receive training, and attend sporting and cultural events, amongst other permitted activities, without requiring a visa," a government spokeswoman told the BBC on Wednesday. "Some member states may allow other types of business travel visa-free, so people should check the rules of the country they are travelling to." She added: "The UK pushed for a more ambitious agreement with the EU on the temporary movement of business travellers, which would have covered musicians and others, but our proposals were rejected by the EU. "We recognise that there could be some additional processes for those working in creative industries, but we have ensured that the visa application processes for longer-term business travel will be transparent to provide certainty and clarity." Last year, former culture minister Nigel Adams said free movement for artists would be "absolutely essential" post-Brexit. After the deal was announced last week, Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire said touring visa provisions should have been part of the agreement. What is the industry calling for? The music industry contributes around £5.8bn to the UK economy. Live music accounted for about 20% of that figure in 2019, although the industry has been decimated by the coronavirus pandemic this year. Reacting to the news last week, UK Music, a lobbying group which represents the industry, said it "welcomed" the securement of a Brexit deal. Chief Executive James Njoku-Goodwin, however, did go on to stress that the government "now needs to ensure the ability of our workforce to move freely around Europe". Musicians' Union general secretary Horace Trubridge told the BBC the current outcome "suggests that the government fails to understand the issues facing touring musicians" travelling both ways, and often carrying goods. "Our understanding from analysis of the trade agreement, is that the main barriers for musicians in the short term will be work permits, which could vary from territory to territory, and costly carnets [permits] for movement of instruments and equipment," said Trubridge. "We have been calling for a reciprocal arrangement," he added. "We understand that EU-based performers and crew will want to work here, by including the UK on an international tour for example, and many of our members rely heavily on working in EU countries. It is extremely disappointing that no such arrangement has been agreed. "We will continue to work with the UK Government to try to secure an acceptable agreement. Given the massive impact of the Covid-19 crisis on the UK music industry, this is another devastating blow." Freelance camera director and live video tech engineer Tim Brennan, who started the aforementioned petition, stated that touring "will become impossible due to cost and time if we do not have visa free travel", across the 27 member states, as well as a "carnet exception for touring equipment". 'Chronically devalued' Coronavirus is likely to prevent artists from touring and promoting their wares in the early part of 2021 anyway, but going forward, visa regulations and carnets could present some practical problems. Psych-pop singer, and BBC Radio 6 Music favourite, Jane Weaver, is used to setting off in the tour van with her band and their gear from her home in Stockport, and driving around the continent "without any particular checks" and without getting stopped. "The thought of not being able to do that... It's very crushing - to not have that freedom," she told the BBC. With her new album, Flock, due out early next year, Weaver is determined to remain upbeat and to play gigs as soon as is safely possible, but she believes life is becoming ever harder for her and musical peers. "I just think musicians are chronically devalued and the information that everybody's bandying about needs to be very clear, because there's going to be loads of mental health issues coming out with the fact that we can't tour anyway because of lockdown. "We're not get paid properly by Spotify; and now we can't tour the rest of Europe because we cant make money," she added. "It's pretty depressing, I just refuse to let myself feel completely doomed about it, and I think that we've got to find some kind of way." South London post-punk rock band Shame are optimistically booked in to appear at festivals in Europe next summer, such as Barcelona's Primavera Sound. They delayed the release of their forthcoming second album, Drunk Tank Pink, until the possibility of a UK tour (albeit a socially distanced one) was in-sight. Having driven to France and back in one day for a gig years ago, to save money early on, they said they are concerned for new bands who may have added costs to consider from January. "I think it just makes everything a lot more complex," said frontman Charlie Steen. "The tragedy is - although everything is very tough at the moment, we are still very fortunate that we've got a label, we've got a booking agent and because of our previous years of relentless touring, we have some sort of experience and knowledge." He added: "It is a necessity to push forward, to do all those festivals, and to think of all the people who are just starting out who might not have the opportunity because they can just about scrape the money to get over to Paris or whatever, but they can't afford the visas on top of it." Merchandise, Steen continued, is also a "crucial" consideration these days. For non-established acts it is "sometimes the only way to break even or make any money at all when touring", he said. "Any carnet/visa required will definitely affect the merch you're able to bring and sell, and will cause even more of a financial strain." Follow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	The government says it tried to secure better conditions for UK touring musicians during the Brexit negotiations, but its proposals were rejected by the EU.
+text: The company said it would screen new and existing photos and remove pictures featuring weapons from the app. However, military and law enforcement officers in uniform will be allowed to show weapons in their photos. Bumble said it was taking "an opportunity to make our platform safer". "As mass shootings continue to devastate communities across the country, it's time to state unequivocally that gun violence is not in line with our values, nor do these weapons belong on Bumble," the company said in a statement. In February, 17 people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Since then, survivors have campaigned for stricter gun control in the US. Bumble says it has 30 million members worldwide, and the company already employs 5,000 moderators. They will now filter out photos of guns in addition to nudity, knives and hate speech. However, photos displayed on a Bumble profile from a linked Instagram account will not be screened. "Online behaviour can both mirror and predict how people treat each other in the real world. Bumble has a responsibility to our users and a larger goal to encourage accountability offline," the company said in a statement. The app's founder Whitney Wolfe Herd acknowledged that the ban would affect law-abiding gun owners, hobbyists and hunters. "It's a very tricky battle we've chosen to take on, but I'd rather pursue this than just ignore it," she told the New York Times. The company has also donated $100,000 (£72,000) to the March For Our Lives campaign, which was founded by survivors of the Parkland shooting. "We stand with them, and join them in working towards a non-violent future," the company said.	Dating app Bumble has banned members from posing with guns in their profile pictures, following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida.
+text: The new organisation will also affect Bridlington Hospital in East Yorkshire. Discussions over a merger between the York and Scarborough hospitals trusts began more than two years ago. More than 2,000 staff at the Scarborough trust will transfer to the York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. A single organisation will employ 8,500 staff working across 10 hospital sites in North and East Yorkshire. 'Beginning of process' The Scarborough and North East Yorkshire Healthcare NHS Trust was identified this month as one of 20 NHS trusts across England that were no longer financially sustainable. It ran hospital services in Scarborough, Malton, Whitby and Bridlington, East Yorkshire. Those services will be provided in the future by the York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, which already runs hospitals in York and Selby. Patrick Crowley, chief executive of the York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, said: "In many respects this marks the beginning rather than the end of the process. "It is now that much of the detailed work must be undertaken to integrate the two organisations and ensure we're all working towards bringing the best out of the new trust and making sure we're offering the very best services that our patients deserve. "We are optimistic that becoming one organisation will enable us to meet future challenges and ensure the continuation of high quality, safe and sustainable services across North Yorkshire."	Two hospital health trusts, which provide the bulk of hospital care in North Yorkshire, have merged.
+text: By Owain ClarkeBBC Wales health correspondent The £10m Wolfson Centre at Cardiff University wants to develop new ways of reducing anxiety and depression. It will look at whether parents, family or genetic factors play a part, as well as social media and wider lifestyle and environmental issues. It will track the progress of thousands of teenagers and adolescents to better understand what happens. The charitable Wolfson Foundation is investing £10m over the next five years and will bring together experts from different fields. Cardiff University will work in partnership with Swansea University experts, the Welsh Government, NHS Wales, university health boards and schools across Wales. Welcoming the investment, Cardiff University psychologist Fran Rice, who will co-direct the new centre, said it would "shine a light" on adolescent mental health. "It's an appreciation of this area of research, the significance of the problem and involves schools, young people, healthcare professionals, scientists and government working together to try to understand the causes and develop new methods of ensuring there is adequate help and support early on," said Prof Rice. In the UK, one in eight young people experience anxiety or depression - a rise of 50% compared to 20 years ago - and the vast majority go unrecognised, according to the team. But the start of the increase predated social media, so there was not a simple cause. The Wolfson Centre will focus on five scientific areas: Co-director Stephan Collishaw added: "Wales is a living lab of some 1.3m young people. "This major investment will allow us not only to understand the causes of anxiety and depression but help create early interventions to ensure that young people get the right help, advice and support they need." Survey of 3,000 children, aged 11 to 19 44%didn’t find support at school helpful 56%wouldn’t feel confident approaching teachers or other staff 22%had accessed support for their mental health in school 48%wouldn’t know where to go to access support within school Mental health charity Mind Cymru said in the last year to June there had been 21,000 referrals and its recent survey of hundreds of children found one in seven describing their mental health as either poor or very poor. Policy officer Rhiannon Hedge said the new centre would help identify gaps in support. "There are a lot of things we don't know, the rise of social media is still an area of very little research, exam stress, job prospects - all of those sorts of things can impact on children and young people," she said. 'It's a constant 24/7' At Ysgol Gyfun Gymraeg Bro Edern in Cardiff, there are health and wellbeing lessons and a counsellor. Teachers also believe there is far more openness about mental health issues now. But there are also more expectations and less downtime. "I feel young people are under far more pressure than they were 20 or 30 years ago," said Alan Williams, the deputy head teacher. "There's more pressure on examinations, there's a focus on it in the media, schools are held accountable but unintentionally, more pressure is passed onto young children." He believes there is also less quality time spent away from social media. Sixth former Grace, 17, echoes this. "Some people rely on social media for validation - it's something you put on yourself but then you've got to step away from it for a bit and I think that's really hard for some people." Olwen, 13, said: "You're expected to feel, act or behave in a certain way - whether comparing yourself to celebrities or just the more popular groups in school. It can be hard if you're not included." Gwion, 15, added: "One of the main things is exam pressure - it's huge - and social media, you're always comparing yourself to people who have the perfect life or mindset. You can see it every minute of every day. Before phones were around, if you had an argument or were getting bullied, it would stop at the end of the day when the bell went. Now it's a constant 24/7 and you're more vulnerable." He would like to see the support available at all schools. Prof Rice said it would be important to involve young people themselves when it comes to improving services. The Wolfson Centre's plans include developing the next generation of youth mental health experts and holding an annual adolescent mental health summer school for training. The Wolfson Foundation is a charity which has already made £900m worth of grants and was set up in the name of the late mail-order tycoon and philanthropist Sir Isaac Wolfson.	A new research centre will aim to "shine a light" on why young people develop mental health problems.
+text: Permanent secretary Derek Jones said he wanted an organisation that was "restless" to do better. Mr Jones heads the 5,000-strong civil service in Wales responsible for carrying out ministers' policies. Public spending cuts have reduced numbers by a fifth, and the financial climate has had an effect, he said. Speaking in a rare interview, he told BBC Wales: "I think particularly over the period of austerity budgeting, there's been a tendency to lock things down, and good intentions to be prudent with public money. "But I think it has also had the effect of hampering some of our decisiveness, and I want managers to manage and take responsibility for their decisions." A number of controls had already been removed aimed at making the government more decisive and agile, he added. However, the civil service has also faced repeated criticism in recent years from the Wales Audit Office, which has published a number of highly critical reports into the Welsh government's management of the grants it gives to outside organisations. 'Systems failure' Most recently it was scathing about the handling of money given to the collapsed race equality body, the All Wales Ethnic Minority Association (Awema), which received millions of pounds of public funding. The report exonerated ministers, but Mr Jones said that although he took overall responsibility, what occurred had been a "systems failure" rather than a result of any individual culpability. He added that lessons had been learned and the government "can do and should do better" in future. Mr Jones said his and the civil service's main priorities were economic growth and tackling poverty, in line with those of ministers. He said: "As everyone knows, we've been hit by a really serious, deep and now long-running recession, but for Wales, it's not just the recession... that impact comes on top of the structural weaknesses in the Welsh economy that are still with us. "Too many of our families and our communities are still suffering from poverty, relative poverty, of one kind or another." A commission headed by Paul Silk is currently examining whether further powers should be devolved to Wales. Mr Jones said he saw the potential for wider powers was an opportunity for the Welsh civil service. "There are challenge elements in it, we will need to find new capabilities to meet those responsibilities, whether it's large scale borrowing or taxation powers, whether it's policy or legislative responsibility on social justice, we will need to find those capabilities," he said. "But what a great opportunity for a government and a government service."	Austerity cuts have affected the Welsh government's decisiveness and it must become more agile, says Wales' top civil servant.
+text: Police fired five plastic bullets as rioters threw more than 30 petrol bombs. The most serious violence took place in parts of County Antrim. A crowd of over 100 loyalists threw missiles at police in Carrickfergus. Fireworks, petrol bombs and rocks were used to attack police in the O'Neill's Road area of Newtownabbey. A bus was set alight near the Rathcoole estate. Meanwhile, a viable pipe bomb was found after a security alert on the Westlink, Belfast's busiest road. Loyalist street protests have being taking place for almost six weeks, since Belfast City Council voted to change its longstanding union flag policy on 3 December. The council, which now has more nationalist members than unionists and with the Alliance party holding the balance of power, voted to fly the flag at Belfast City Hall on a number of designated days, rather than every day of the year. The majority of the street demonstrations have passed without incident, but some have resulted in serious rioting. Dozens of police officers have been injured in almost 40 days of protests and more than 100 people have been arrested. On Friday night, two arrests were made. Of the four police officers who were injured, one required hospital treatment. A PSNI spokesman said police "will continue to pursue a vigorous evidence gathering operation to bring those involved in the violence to justice". Friday's protests - most of which passed without violence - took place in Counties Antrim, Armagh, Down, and Londonderry. They began in some areas at 15:00 GMT, causing disruption to traffic and blocking and many arterial routes in Belfast. Translink withdrew all its bus services in Belfast, apart from Falls Road services and buses to Belfast International Airport. There have been no reports of violence in the city itself and all roads are now open again. However, in County Antrim, police used water cannon during trouble on the Shore Road in Whiteabbey and also in Newtownabbey, where a PSNI Land Rover with a CCTV camera on the roof was set alight with a petrol bomb. In Rathcoole in Newtownabbey, a distressed pensioner pleaded with protesters to let him pass through a road block so he could make his way to visit his seriously ill wife in hospital. The protesters jeered at the elderly man and refused to let him through. Stewart Dickson, an Alliance MLA for East Antrim, said the protests on Friday night had caused "widespread misery". He said: "This violence is unacceptable, these rioters are harming their own community. The scenes in Carrickfergus and Newtownabbey are a disgrace. "This was just wanton violence. These protests have got nothing to do with a flag, it is about a major disconnect that has developed between protestors and those unionists that they have previously looked to for political representation." Last month, Mr Dickson's Alliance party office in Carrickfergus was severely damaged in an arson attack - one of several attacks on the homes and offices of political representatives since the protests began. In Belfast, thousands of Ulster rugby supporters encountered delays getting to Ravenhill stadium in the east of the city for Friday night's Heineken Cup pool match between Ulster and Glasgow. There were also protests in Glasgow and in Liverpool at 18:00 GMT on Friday. Operation Sit In Meanwhile, people used social media to initiate Operation Sit In - a counter to the protests that encouraged people to come out regardless and support their local pubs or restaurants. Stephen Magorrian, the managing director of Botanic Inns, said people could have a great night out in the city centre. "There is great entertainment, so stay in the city. We need the support. "Things are still going and we have some of the best restaurants and bars, but if we don't support them we will lose them."	Four police officers have been injured during rioting linked to union flag protests in Northern Ireland.
+text: Mining firm Banks Group has permission to extract 500,000 tonnes of coal from Pont Valley, near Dipton, County Durham. In April protestors tied themselves to trees and hid in underground tunnels claiming the mine would damage wildlife and the environment. Dozens have now returned after it was confirmed extraction work had begun. Campaigners claim work at the site could not commence until an access road had been built. However, Banks Group said all permissions were in place and it was legally allowed to began extracting coal. Some protesters lined the road to the mine in an attempt to block the main entrance. But the firm said police were on hand to ensure staff could access the site safely from an alternative entrance. A spokeswoman for the protesters said: "We've campaigned for 30 years to keep this area free of opencast extraction for the sake of our health and environment. If Banks think we're giving up now, they've got another thing coming." Banks Group said: "Around 30 new jobs will be supported at the site when it is fully operational, along with others in the local supply chain. "Site operations are scheduled to run for between two and three years, with all on site activity complete in 2021. "Restoration will include the creation of new woodland and a nature reserve area, as well as the return of some of the land to agricultural use." Durham Police said it had officers on site to deal with any disruption. April's protest ended in a number of arrests.	Demonstrators have returned to the site of an opencast coal mine after a lengthy protest earlier this year.
+text: The Royal Mail and the Communication Workers Union (CWU) said they were committed to "finalising an agreement" by 13 November. The planned industrial action would have been the first national strike at Royal Mail in almost four years. The Royal Mail was privatised earlier this month. Staff were given free shares in the company in an attempt to improve labour relations, with staff not allowed to sell their shares for at least three years. Royal Mail shares are trading well above the 330p sale price they launched at earlier this month. An offer made by Royal Mail management in the summer also included an 8.6% pay rise over three years. But CWU members voted for strike action earlier in October after unions leaders called the deal "misleading and unacceptable", and demanded a longer-term agreement to protect postal workers' job security, pay and pensions. The original ballot involved 115,000 postal workers in Royal Mail and Parcelforce, but not the Post Office, which is a separate business. According to a joint statement issued by Royal Mail and the CWU, a new agreement will include an improved pay offer and a separate agreement for pensions. Both parties said they would "ensure all our efforts are focused on reaching an agreement" by 13 November.	A Royal Mail workers' strike planned for Monday has been called off after progress was made in talks over pay and pensions.
+text: Gavin Chappell-Bates, from Cambridge, and Giles Bryant, from Clare, Suffolk, have recorded Peace on Your Plate. They hope their song will succeed last year's festive chart-topper, We Built This City on Sausage Rolls by LadBaby. Mr Bryant said: "It's about peace to people and all living creatures and that's what Christmas should be about; primarily love and goodwill." The idea for the song came from Mr Chappell-Bates, who said: "I couldn't stop thinking about what it would feel like to wake up on Christmas Day, turn on the radio and to hear the song that is top of the charts being about peace to all creatures on Earth." The song was recorded at Abbey Road studios with producers who have previously worked with Ed Sheeran and Kylie Minogue. 'Bunch of hippies' The pair invited vegan musicians from across the world to collaborate on the record, which will be released on 13 December. It currently has odds of 25-1 to reach the festive top spot, the same as Elton John and Michael Buble. Its lyrics include: "Children are playing by the fireside, there's magic at yuletide. But in a distant land it's a different scene, in a factory shed the animals scream." The duo, also called Peace On Your Plate, said the song was not aimed at trying to make people become vegan. "We're just a bunch of hippies from East Anglia just doing our best," said Mr Bryant. All proceeds from sales of the song will support vegan campaigning charity Viva! and Tower Hill Stables Animal Sanctuary. Current joint-favourites for the Christmas number one spot are Robbie Williams and Lewis Capaldi.	Two musicians are hoping to achieve the first "vegan Christmas number one" with a song urging compassion for animals.
+text: By Jim MuirBBC News, Beirut But it is an ominous development. The Arab League observers, who tried to play the same role in December and January, similarly had their movements curtailed before eventually being pulled out. The general's announcement was a recognition that the observer mission, and the Kofi Annan peace plan of which it is part, have hit the rocks. But if the international community can somehow find a way to refloat the foundering Annan plan, which remains the only hope for a peaceful resolution, the monitoring mission could be resumed. Gen Mood made it clear that the observers would remain at their bases, ready to resume their normal activities as soon as conditions permitted. As he had already explained in a news conference on Friday, the sharp upsurge in violence over the past 10 days had limited the monitors' ability to do their job of observing, verifying and reporting developments on the ground and trying to foster dialogue. Cry for help Specifically, in the past two weeks or so, observers have been physically obstructed from reaching trouble-spots, they have had their vehicles attacked, battered and shot at, and they have been close to bomb and shell explosions. The US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, said some time ago that the unarmed observers were "one IED [home-made bomb] away from a disaster". The general's announcement could be seen as a cry for help from the international powers. Clearly, in his view, the parties on the ground - regime and rebels - are not interested in pursuing political dialogue, and are bent on maximising their military positions. He studiously avoided taking sides or apportioning blame, referring only to "the parties" rather than specifiying the regime and the rebels. So the only hope for implementing the Annan plan - for which the whole world, including the Syrian government, continues to aver support - lies in pressure being applied on both sides by their outside allies to abandon arms and enter dialogue. The focal point for that process is the proposed but not yet certain international conference projected for 30 June in Geneva, to bring together all interested parties to the conflict. While the opposition's corner would be supported in general by the Western powers and regional states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, the regime's position would be bolstered by the participation of Russia, China and Iran. Just getting all those parties together would be an achievement in itself, far less producing a credible agreement that would bring about a real change of heart and behaviour by regime and rebels. Similar but less overt mechanisms were used to launch and gain at least pro forma acceptance for the Kofi Annan plan in the first place. Deep divisions Now that it has so clearly come badly unstuck, and so much more blood has been spilled, a much more serious and concerted push is clearly needed. And with the world and regional powers deeply divided, including some bitter diplomatic sniping between Moscow and Washington, that is hard to imagine. But the alternative - an accelerating slide into brutal and increasingly sectarian carnage and disintegration - is hardly an attractive prospect for any of the outside powers, far less the Syrians themselves, so it is not impossible that minds might finally become concentrated. Russian, Chinese and Iranian reluctance to pressure Damascus and help ease regime change might, when it comes to the crunch, be tempered by the consideration that, while there is clearly little appetite in the West for military intervention, voices advocating or exploring the idea are becoming louder as the crisis deepens and the carnage worsens. The suspension of the observers' normal activities has raised fears that, with the eyes and ears of the world no longer there to bear witness, the brutality might get even worse, though it had already reached pre-ceasefire levels before the suspension was announced. Those dire predictions might come true, though the impression at present is that both sides are already very stretched and going at one other with everything they can muster.	The decision by General Robert Mood to ground his 300 or so UN observers does not necessarily mean the UNSMIS mission is over.
+text: The UK four-piece released a statement on their website confirming the name, which had been rumoured in recent weeks. "Hello everybody, we have finished our new album, it's called Mylo Xyloto," it said. "We hope you like it and hope you are all well, love from Chris, Will, Jonny, Guy and Phil." The band also told fans: "It is pronounced MY-lo ZY-letoe." The record is the follow-up to 2008's Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, which sold nine million copies worldwide. The band's first single from Mylo Xyloto, Every Tear Drop Is A Waterfall charted at number six in the UK. The next single from the record will be called Paradise and is out on 12 September.	Coldplay have confirmed their fifth album will be called Mylo Xyloto and is to be released on 24 October.
+text: Tyla Gopaul, 22, stabbed 26-year-old Zakaria Abukar Shariff Ali outside the Rolling Stock nightclub in Shoreditch in the early hours of 24 November 2018. The jury heard Mr Ali was acting as a "peacemaker" in a dispute between two other men when he was attacked. Gopaul, from Islington, had admitted manslaughter but was found guilty of murder after a trial at the Old Bailey. The court heard that a verbal exchange had taken place inside the club between two men - Lee Haydon and Mohamad Ahmed, known as Hamza. They went out on to Waterson Street to settle the dispute where Mr Ali had intervened and acted as a "peacemaker". Prosecutor Anthony Orchard QC said the pair had "calmed" but Gopaul then "ran round the corner" shouting and "plunged" a knife into the 26-year-old's stomach. Mr Ali was taken to hospital but died later that day. 'Fell on the knife' Gopaul was seen on CCTV running away from the venue and fled the country within 24 hours, the jury was told. He was extradited from Cyprus in November 2019. Giving evidence, Gopaul said he had gone "to make sure there wasn't a fight and... to calm everyone down". He then pulled out a lock-knife to scare Hamza but he was knocked towards Mr Ali who had "fallen on the knife", the defendant claimed. He will be sentenced on Thursday along with another man, Destiny Bannerman, 20, from Ilford, who previously pleaded guilty to assisting an offender.	A fugitive who went on the run after killing a man outside a north London club has been found guilty of murder.
+text: But the Force was not with Star Wars: The Last Jedi in the battle to be the UK's most popular film of 2017. The foe to defeat the all-action space sequel in the year-end box office rankings was Emma Watson, with her hit Beauty and the Beast. Beauty and the Beast earned £4.1m more than The Last Jedi in 2017. Episode VIII of the long-running sci-fi franchise had taken £68.3m by the end of 31 December, according to the Press Association. But while Beauty and the Beast was released in March and has now disappeared from cinemas, The Last Jedi is still playing on hundreds of screens, so its total will continue to grow in the coming weeks. Beauty and the Beast was also the most popular film around the world, taking $1.26bn (£929m) at global box offices. Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	Star Wars' Jedi warriors normally emerge victorious in their battles - be they against the evil First Order or box office rivals.
+text: The Foundation Wing at Kettering General Hospital includes children's and cardiac wards and a new intensive care unit. Work on the three-storey extension began in December 2010. It includes a new 16-bed Intensive Care Unit, a 32-bed children's ward, a children's outpatients department and a 28-bed cardiac ward. It was originally due to open last autumn but flooding, caused by burst pipes, led to a delay.	A £30m hospital extension in Northamptonshire has opened to patients.
+text: Donald Tusk said the plans risked undermining the EU's single market. He was speaking at the end of an EU summit in Salzburg where leaders of the 27 remaining member states discussed Brexit. Mrs May said her proposals were the "only serious credible" way to avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland. She said she had held "frank" talks with Mr Tusk, adding: "Yes, concerns have been raised and I want to know what those concerns are." There was "a lot of hard work to be done", she said, but added that the UK was also making preparations in case no deal could be reached. Mrs May reiterated that she would not accept the EU's "backstop" plan to avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland, and said the UK would shortly be bringing forward its own proposals. The UK is due to leave the EU on 29 March 2019, and both sides are trying to reach a deal in time. There is still no agreement on some issues, including how to avoid new checks on the Northern Ireland-Republic of Ireland border. At a press conference, Mr Tusk said there were some "positive elements" in the UK's blueprint for future relations with the EU, which was agreed by ministers at Chequers in July. But, he added: "The suggested framework for economic cooperation will not work." Mr Tusk added that October would be the "moment of truth" for reaching a deal, and that "if the conditions are there" an additional summit would be held in November to "formalise" it. Analysis by BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg Can the prime minister really cling on to her Chequers plan now? The EU clearly won't accept it as it stands. Significant chunks of her party won't wear the deal either. The opposition parties won't back her. Of course there are tactics at play here. One government minister has already suggested that the EU always knows how to overplay their hand. Sometimes in negotiations, there needs to be a crisis to focus minds. And in her press conference, Theresa May seemed frustrated that her proposals perhaps have not been properly digested or considered yet. Of course this is only one day, one set of fraught meetings, in a tangled and lengthy process. But as things stand, it seems Theresa May is going to have to budge, or walk away. Read the rest of Laura's blog The EU leaders had been discussing the UK's plans, which were presented to them by Mrs May on Wednesday evening. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said "substantial progress" was needed on the UK's withdrawal agreement by the next European Council meeting in October, with "still a large piece of work" on the separate issue of future trade relations with the UK. The 27 remaining EU members were "united that, in the matter of the single market, there can be no compromises," she said. French President Emmanuel Macron said Brexit had been "pushed by certain people who predicted easy solutions". He added: "Brexit has shown us one thing - and I fully respect British sovereignty in saying this - it has demonstrated that those who said you can easily do without Europe, that it will all go very well, that it is easy and there will be lots of money, are liars. "This is all the more true because they left the next day, so they didn't have to manage it." As well the criticism from the EU, Mrs May's proposal for the UK to sign up to a common rule book for trade in goods and a combined customs territory with the EU is unpopular with many in her own party, who believe it will erode British sovereignty and is not what people voted for when they backed Brexit in the 2016 referendum. Former Brexit secretary David Davis said although EU leaders "were trying to give some warm words" it was now going to be "very, very difficult" to meet their requirements: "So it's time for a reset, time for a rethink". And another prominent Brexiteer, Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, said Mr Tusk's remarks signalled the end for the Chequers proposals. Please upgrade your browser Your guide to Brexit jargon "I think Chequers now has no supporters at all," he told the BBC. "I think the time has come for Mrs May to say 'This is not going to work'." For Labour, shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer said Mrs May had to "urgently drop her reckless red lines and put forward a credible plan for Brexit". But DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds blamed the EU for its "unreasonable and inflexible approach" adding: "The UK government must demonstrate a resolute determination not to be bullied." He said preserving the "political, constitutional and economic integrity of the United Kingdom" was the "absolute priority for us". Earlier Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said Mrs May must delay Brexit beyond next March if there is not a detailed agreement on future trading arrangements.	Theresa May's proposed new economic partnership with the EU "will not work", the head of the European Council has said.
+text: Nathan Gill also told his party conference in Doncaster that UKIP had matured as a party and would look at May's assembly election with "a fresh pair of eyes". "We are not going in with a hammer to knock it down but with a chisel to sort out the rough edges," he said. Opinion polls suggested UKIP could win several seats in the Senedd. Mr Gill said he was "extremely hopeful" of winning seven or eight assembly seats next May, after UKIP came third in terms of votes in Wales at the general election. 'No silly predictions' "I have long predicted Wales will be one of the strongest regions for UKIP in the United Kingdom," he said. "Next May will see that come to fruition." "We will not make silly predictions but if we get this right... we could become the official opposition in the Welsh assembly next year", he added. Responding to concerns about high profile figures from England standing, Mr Gill said the aim was to get the right team. "I fully understand concerns of party members and constituency parties," he said. "I understand whatever team fights the campaign it has to be a team people can unite behind." Some UKIP Wales members have claimed candidates from outside Wales may be rejected by the voters.	Wales could become the UK Independence Party's strongest UK region, the party's Welsh leader has said.
+text: Campaigners said the authority's money-saving move, which starts in some areas next month, could lead to increased crime and more road accidents. The Conservative-run council estimated changes to the 93,000 lights would save about £1.25m. Crime and accident blackspots will continue to be lit, the council said. Teena Needham, who lives in Stanton Hill, said she was concerned about a rise in crime. Ms Needham said: "There are alleyways between the houses. There are three on each street. "If they turn the lights out, it's going to be a muggers' paradise because there's no other way of lighting those [areas]." Councillor Richard Jackson, cabinet member for transport and highways, said: "I know from our current Big Budget Conversation that there are many Nottinghamshire residents who will welcome this project and several parish councils have already expressed an interest in having lights in their areas altered. "Where this work has been carried out by other authorities, collisions and crime have not increased. "We will continue to light crime and accident black spots and we will monitor the project carefully."	Thousands of people have signed a petition calling for Nottinghamshire County Council to scrap plans to switch off some street lights at night.
+text: Anna Soubry claimed there would be a Commons majority against leaving the single market and customs union. Labour's Chuka Umunna, appearing alongside Ms Soubry on the Andrew Marr show, agreed with her comments. MPs have been promised a "meaningful vote" on the terms of Brexit before it happens in March next year. "If this government doesn't get this right," said Ms Soubry, "the majority of members of parliament, putting their constituents first, will find themselves unable to vote for a withdrawal agreement." 'Huge mistake' Theresa May is set to deliver a major speech within the next three weeks outlining the future relationship Britain wants to have with the EU. The prime minister has ruled out continued membership of the single market and customs union. But Ms Soubry, one of 11 pro-European Conservative MPs who defeated the government in December on the right to get a vote on any final Brexit deal, said the PM's stance was a "huge mistake". "Not only is it bad for our economy but it also fundamentally undermines the [Northern Ireland] peace process that was achieved and this is really important," she told Andrew Marr. She said she wanted the UK to remain in the European Free Trade Area, like Norway, which would allow access to the single market without being a member of the EU. Asked by Andrew Marr if they believed they had a majority in the House of Commons to defeat "the kind of Brexit the prime minister wants", Ms Soubry said: "If she's not careful, yes." Mr Umunna said: "There is no majority in the House of Commons for us simply to jump off a cliff." Another referendum? When Andrew Marr suggested to Ms Soubry that she was politically closer to Mr Umunna than she was to leading Brexiteer and Conservative colleague Jacob Rees-Mogg, she said: "I'm not denying that." Asked if she thought Brexit would definitely happen, Ms Soubry said: "I genuinely don't know what is going to happen." Responding to whether it might be stopped, she said: "Well I'll tell you who might stop it, and that's the people of this country. "We won't stop it. It is the people. We gave the people a referendum to start this process." Mr Umunna said he also backed another referendum on the terms of the Brexit deal - something his party leader Jeremy Corbyn has appeared to rule out. He claimed the Labour leader - who last month rejected calls to attend a cross-party summit on avoiding a "hard Brexit" - was "open minded" about staying in the single market. 'National interest' "I cannot conceive of circumstances where Labour MPs are marshalled to go through the lobby and vote against us staying in the customs union and the single market, with the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove," said Mr Umunna. Both MPs insisted they were acting in the "national interest," which they said transcended party politics. Labour's shadow chancellor John McDonnell said another Brexit referendum would cause divisions and a "better route" would be to have a general election. "Better we have a general election. On the issue, and all the other issues, because you then have a wider debate as well," he told told ITV's Peston On Sunday. Lib Dem leader Sir Vince Cable, who is campaigning for another referendum, said: "It is good to see cross-party cooperation between Tory and Labour rebels." He said he was "optimistic that the rebellions in both Tory and Labour parties will spread in coming weeks", and that his party was working with them in the House of Lords.	Pro-European Conservative MPs could join forces with Labour to block the kind of Brexit Theresa May wants, a Tory rebel has warned the PM.
+text: Binero, the Swedish company that hosts the site's web address, said that it had recently received a letter from the country's Prosecution Authority and police requesting information. TPB's webmasters had earlier claimed that an inquiry initiated in 2010 had been"cranked up a notch". The operators denied TPB was illegal. TPB claims to have more than 5.5 million registered users. It offers Magnet links which provide users the ability to download copyrighted movies, music, books and computer applications. In February the site's original administrators were told they could not appeal jail sentences and fines relating to their role in helping people circumvent copyright controls. The site remained online as it was not part of the legal proceedings. Shortly after the verdict was announced, the site's current operators switched it from a US-based .org address to a Sweden-based .se address. They said they wanted to prevent the risk of the US authorities seizing the site, and to "make a statement" about their friends' prison sentences. Limited response Binero's marketing manager, Erik Arnberg, told the BBC that his firm had been contacted in the latter half of February with a request to divulge information about a customer owning the domain names thepiratebay.se and piratebay.se. "It said an investigation is being conducted, but there was no specific mention which crime was being investigated nor which law was applicable in this case apart from a general Swedish law which is a general requirement of any citizen to help the police with their questions," Mr Arnberg said. "We do try to protect our customers' integrity, so in this case we have chosen not to answer all of the questions, but rather just forward onto them public information." Public records only list thepiratebay.se's owner as "fredri4218-37643". Mr Arnberg stressed that his company only hosted TPB's domain name and not any of the file-sharing links that it provided. 'Going nowhere' Neither the Swedish Prosecution Authority nor the Stockholm County Police could confirm the details of the inquiry when approached by the BBC. However, the Torrentfreak news site, which has closely followed the story, reports that the prosecution told its editor that it was "interested in torrent sites" without providing more detail. Torrentfreak speculates that the authorities may be trying what they failed to achieve after a 2006 investigation: to"shut down The Pirate Bay website for good". TPB's webmasters say that their servers are set up in "a special way" so that they can never be pinpointed to one country. "We think that the investigation is interesting considering nothing that TPB does is illegal," they wrote on its blog. "We're staying put where we are. We're going nowhere." However, users in the UK may find themselves unable to access the site later this year. The High Court has ruled that it facilitates copyright infringement and will decide in June if internet service providers must block it.	The Pirate Bay file-sharing site appears to be the subject of a deepening investigation by the Swedish authorities.
+text: Kris Boyson was accused of telling a police officer he was going to break his jaw, but was cleared. Mr Boyson said Price became emotional while being "hounded" by two photographers outside his home in Gravesend, Kent, in October 2018. He had been on trial at Medway Magistrates' Court. He described the acquittal as "a massive relief". The 31-year-old was found not guilty of a charge of using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with intent to cause fear of or provoke unlawful violence towards PC Paul Blundell. Chairman of the bench, Christine Rose, said: "We do not believe the defendant caused fear or provoked unlawful violence against PC Blundell. "The situation was inflamed by the fact someone now known to be a police officer appeared to be photographing Mr Boyson's girlfriend." She added that magistrates did not feel the video evidence supported the prosecution case. Speaking outside court, Mr Boyson said: "I feel like I was being mistreated because of who I was and the situation. "It's a massive relief, I can get on with my life." Follow BBC South East on Facebook, on Twitter, and on Instagram. Send your story ideas to southeasttoday@bbc.co.uk.	Katie Price's on-off boyfriend has been acquitted of threatening a police officer following a row with paparazzi.
+text: Harry Baker, 17, from Cardiff was stabbed nine times in a shipping container yard at Barry Docks in the Vale of Glamorgan in August 2019. Six men and a 17-year-old boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, deny murder at Newport Crown Court. Jurors were read transcripts of police interviews with the defendants. Ryan Palmer was interviewed at Cardiff Bay police station, where he denied being responsible for injuries to the victim. The jury has heard Harry Baker's body was found in the Intermodal Yard in Barry Docks and that some of the defendants were seen on CCTV entering and leaving the yard. The court heard on Tuesday that the time between them entering and leaving was one minute and 48 seconds. Mr Palmer told police: "I didn't see the boy get stabbed, I didn't hear no screams or nothing." In the interview, Mr Palmer said he had given money to a defendant the night Harry Baker was stabbed and only followed him to Barry Docks to get the drugs he had paid for. He said: "I don't know nothing about his murder." Mr Palmer said a confrontation earlier in the night, which the prosecution said was an ambush on Harry Baker, was an argument between "two separate gangs of Cardiff boys". "The two Ely boys were arguing with each other, swinging blades around," Mr Palmer said in his police interview. 'New shotters' He said there was then a chase that ended at the docks, adding: "The other two Ely boys spotted them in the compound." The "youngsters" were brandishing "big knives, like a machete, machete-looking knives". Mr Palmer said he picked up a plank of wood in case anyone "turned" on him. In the interview played to the court, the police officer asked him whether he had thrown the piece of wood away "because the threat had been neutralised?" He said: "I didn't neutralise no threat. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time". He told police "I haven't seen nothing" when he was in the compound. The jury heard he had received his drugs when the defendants climbed back over the fence. He said: "I didn't take no-one's life". The "Ely boys" were "new shotters in Barry" - which the police officer clarified as drug dealers. Mr Palmer said the incident "was a savage attack" but added: "I just wanted my drugs." The court also heard co-defendant Leon Clifford's police interviews when made no comment to all questions. But the jury heard his solicitor produced a prepared, handwritten statement which said: "My name is Leon Clifford, I did not stab Harry Baker. I do not wish to add any furtherer comments at this stage." Leon Clifford, 23; Raymond Thompson, 48; Lewis Evans, 62; Ryan Palmer, 34 and Peter McCarthy, 37, all from Barry; Leon Symons, 22, from Ely, in Cardiff, and a 17-year-old boy deny murder. The trial continues.	A man accused of murdering a teenager in a docks told police it was "a savage attack" but he "didn't see the boy get stabbed", a court has heard.
+text: The blaze was believed to have originated below the home's letterbox, a media conference was told. Jade Philpott, 10, and brothers John, nine, Jack, seven, Jessie, six, and Jayden, five, all died in the fire. Duwayne, 13, died later in hospital. The children's father, Mick Philpott, said the family had been "overwhelmed" with support from the local community. He said Duwayne's organs had been donated to save the life of another child and made an appeal for privacy. "Please leave my family alone. If you've got any questions or anything at all please don't come through me and my family, please go to the police. "You're disrupting what these officers are trying to do. So please, I beg you, leave us alone and let us try and grieve in peace and quiet." Mr Philpott paid tribute to the efforts of the emergency services in trying to rescue his children and thanked people for their messages of support. He said: "We grew up in a community that's been through a lot of problems with violence and to see this community come together like it has, it's too overwhelming. "Those poor gentlemen from the fire brigade, who saw what we saw - my heart goes out to them." Derbyshire Constabulary said the investigation into Friday's fire, on Victory Road in Allenton, was progressing well. Assistant Chief Constable Steve Cotterill said: "I would ask people to continue helping us with our investigation by checking the area where they live for signs of discarded containers which may have contained petrol. "Please check your gardens or any hedges in your street and call us if you find anything you believe could have stored petrol. "I am also appealing for forecourt staff to come forward if they can recall selling petrol in a container to anyone in the days leading up to the fire." The funerals of the six children are to be held at Derby Cathedral.	Petrol was used to start a fire in a house in Derby in which six children died, police have said.
+text: By Judith BurnsEducation reporter "There is a strong indication that families on below average earnings are not being helped by the current grammar school system," said the Sutton Trust. Grammar schools in England should not expand until the government can ensure fair admissions, the charity argues. Ministers said their plans would address these issues. The government's consultation on proposals to lift the ban on opening new grammar schools ends on Monday. Prime Minister Theresa May has insisted that the plan will not represent a return to "the system of binary education from the 1950s" with a grammar in every town. Unequal access The Sutton Trust looked at entry to selective schools in 2015, according to neighbourhood deprivation. In selective education areas outside London, the researchers found a third (34%) of Year 7 pupils were from the richest neighbourhoods while only 4% came from the poorest and 11% were from neighbourhoods with below average incomes. The report says that in these poorer areas, children from non-disadvantaged groups - those not-receiving free school meals - are likely to be from the "just about managing" families, which the prime minister has said she wants to prioritise. But the researchers found these children "were substantially less likely to attend grammar schools" than children from better off areas. "A lack of access to grammar schools isn't merely restricted to those at the very bottom of the scale," say the researchers. "There is a steep social gradient across the wealth distribution." In October, BBC research found that less than half of England's 163 grammar schools prioritised poor pupils in allocating places. The Sutton Trust report also finds that ethnic background plays a significant role in grammar school entry - with disadvantaged Indian pupils four times more likely than disadvantaged white British pupils to attend a grammar school. Disadvantaged black pupils are also significantly under-represented, according to the analysis. "Today's research raises concerns about the government's plans to use new grammars as a vehicle for social mobility," said Sutton Trust Chairman Sir Peter Lampl. "We need to get existing grammars moving in the right direction before we consider expanding their number." The report urges the government to focus on improving fair access to existing grammars before any expansion in their numbers. It recommends: Shadow education secretary Angela Rayner said the evidence from the report was clear and "grammar schools reinforce advantage and offer nothing to most kids". "School budgets are seeing cuts for the first time in decades, class sizes are soaring and teachers are leaving the profession in droves," she said. "It is time the Tories stopped putting politics before pupils, and started standing up for all our children, not just a lucky few." A Department for Education spokesman said previous Sutton Trust research had "highlighted the positive impact grammar schools can have on pupils from less well-off backgrounds". "Our proposals will address the issues highlighted in the report, creating more good school places in more communities and ensuring new and existing selective schools prioritise the admission of lower income pupils and support other schools to help drive up academic standards across the system."	Lack of access to grammar schools is not confined to the poorest children, those from "just managing" families are also left out, research suggests.
+text: Two victims were thrown from the Thunder River Rapids ride and two were trapped inside in the tragedy on 25 October. Dreamworld said it would demolish the ride and conduct a "multi-level" independent safety review. The park, on Queensland's Gold Coast, will reopen with a charity weekend in time for local school holidays. The families of the victims - Kate Goodchild, 32, Luke Dorsett, 35, Roozbeh Araghi, 38, and Cindy Low, 42 - are understood to have been informed about the development. Dreamworld's owner Ardent Leisure said the attraction and its adjoining water park, Whitewater World, would only offer rides that had passed rigorous safety checks. "Dreamworld's other rides will progressively open as they are signed off as part of the safety review process," the company said in a statement. Dreamworld chief Craig Davidson said four independent safety investigations will have been conducted by 10 December. One investigation, by Queensland Workplace Health and Safety, last week issued seven improvement notices for Dreamworld and Whitewater World. The investigation found a faded "emergency stop" button on the Green Room Waterslide, outdated protective equipment on the Flowrider and a register to notify authorities about storing hazardous chemicals. Mr Davidson said Dreamworld would donate A$25 (£15; $19) to the Red Cross for every ticket sold at the "Open Hearts - Open Doors" charity weekend. In a statement to the Australian Securities Exchange, Ardent Leisure said the closure of both parks throughout November 2016 would "result in no significant revenue being recorded for that month". It noted that the parks earned A$7.6m in the corresponding period last year. Ardent said the parks incurred operating costs of between A$4m and A$4.2m for the period and that the company expected to incur "one-off costs of A$1.6m associated with the tragedy" through insurance claims. A coroner's investigation into the deaths is ongoing. Dreamworld has hosted 30 million people since opening in 1981, with October's tragedy its first fatal accident.	Australia's Dreamworld theme park will reopen on 10 December, six weeks after four people died in a ride malfunction.
+text: It is the latest ruling in a long running battle with Cadbury. Nestle wants to stop rivals producing a similar shaped bar. But the court agreed with Cadbury that the shape was not distinctive enough for consumers to identify all such bars as KitKats. Nestle said in a statement: "KitKat is much loved and the iconic shape of the four-finger bar, which has been used in the UK for more than 80 years, is well known by consumers. "We believe that the shape deserves to be protected as a trade mark in the UK and are disappointed that the court did not agree on this occasion." Its case was not helped by the existence of a similar Norwegian bar, called Kvikk Lunsj, which means 'quick lunch' and has been around since 1937. In September last year the company failed to persuade European judges of its arguments. The European Court of Justice said that the company had to demonstrate the public relied on the shape alone to identify the snack. They concluded this was difficult to prove if goods also showed a brand name such as KitKat. Nestle has experience of trying to register difficult trade marks. It took more than 40 years for it to register the slogan "Have a Break" as a trade mark, finally succeeding in 2006. Chocolate wars Nestle first tried to trademark the shape of the four-fingered chocolate bar in 2010, but its attempts were opposed by Cadbury. The two have also battled over other trademarks. In 2013 Nestle blocked Cadbury's attempts to register the shade of purple used in the packaging of Dairy Milk. Now it would appear Cadbury, which is owned by US company Mondelez International, has scored a significant but not final victory in the continuing chocolate war. It has always argued the shape alone was not distinctive enough for consumers to associate it with the rival snack. Nestle has not sought to trademark the two-fingered bar.	Confectionery giant Nestle will appeal against a High Court decision that denies it the right to trademark its four-fingered KitKat in the UK.
+text: Elphicke, 49, the former MP for Dover, was convicted of groping the women in similar situations, nine years apart. He denied the charges, but was found guilty of one count of sexual assault in 2007 and two further counts in 2016, after a trial at Southwark Crown Court. The judge told Elphicke he was a "sexual predator who used your success and respectability as a cover". Within minutes of his jailing, Elphicke confirmed he would appeal against his conviction, arguing he had not had a "fair trial". 'Pack of lies' Mrs Justice Whipple said Elphicke's denials had left his victims faced with the ordeal of giving evidence in court. "They told the truth, and you told a pack of lies - not only to the jury, but your wife, the whips and the police," she told him during the sentencing hearing. Despite the fact the defendant's wife Natalie - the current Dover MP - ended their marriage when he was convicted in July, she agreed he had not had a fair trial and confirmed she would support his appeal. Before Elphicke was sentenced, the court heard victim impact statements from both of the women he attacked. His first victim, who was attacked at the then MP's London home in 2007, said his actions had had a "lasting impact" on her life, leaving her cautious of being around men. He had forced the woman on to a sofa and groped her breast while trying to kiss her, before chasing her and chanting "I'm a naughty Tory", his trial had heard. 'Stole my self-worth' The second victim, a parliamentary worker aged in her 20s, said the assaults in 2016 left her with a feeling of "fear and helplessness". "He stole a large part of my self-worth and self-esteem," she said in a statement read to the court. Elphicke sexually assaulted her twice, the first involving him attempting to kiss her and groping her breast. In the second assault several weeks later, he ran his hand up the inside of her thigh towards her groin. Ian Winter QC, defending, had argued Elphicke should not be jailed because he had "fully and completely" learned his lesson. "Shortly, Mr Elphicke's descent into total disgrace will be complete," Mr Winter said. As well as his marriage ending he is estranged from his daughter as a result of the conviction, he added. "The only further degradation would be to lose his liberty," Mr Winter said. Elphicke had come to court with 34 character witnesses, including from some "serving members of parliament," Mr Winter added. The names of the MPs were not disclosed in court. 'Innocent of criminal wrongdoing' Mrs Justice Whipple said she "considered carefully" whether the sentence should be suspended. "[But] bearing in mind the gross breach of your position of power... I am satisfied that appropriate punishment can only be achieved by immediate custody," she said. However, a spokesman for Elphicke said his lawyers had begun an attempt to overturn the conviction. "I know that I am innocent of any criminal wrongdoing and will continue to fight to clear my name," Elphicke said in a statement. Mrs Elphicke confirmed she supported an appeal against conviction and "today's excessive sentence," adding that "the court seems to be on a bit of a mission". There was "no doubt that Charlie behaved badly," but he had been denied a fair trial, she said. He was suspended by the Conservatives when "serious allegations" were passed to police in November 2017, but the whip was restored ahead of a confidence vote against then-Prime Minister Theresa May in 2018. He was again suspended after being charged with the three counts of sexual assault on 22 July 2019.	Ex-Conservative MP Charlie Elphicke has been jailed for two years for sexually assaulting two women.
+text: Cairney, 84, was sentenced in February to four years in prison on nine charges dating back to the 1980s. He had asked to be granted bail on health grounds but a judge refused after a hearing at the Court of Criminal Appeal. Cairney was acquitted of similar charges 20 years ago. His trial at Hamilton Sheriff Court last December heard his victims had suffered badly from the abuse. Sheriff Daniel Kelly described Cairney, of Viewpark, North Lanarkshire, as a "wolf in sheep's clothing". Heart Problems The former coach also applied for bail at a hearing last May. The court heard he wanted to be released from prison ahead of his appeal because of "health difficulties" including heart problems. Lord Turnbull heard that Cairney, who was not present in court, would not pose a flight risk and would abide by any orders made by the court ahead of his appeal. But the judge concluded that it was not appropriate to grant him bail. Cairney is to appeal his conviction on the basis that prosecutors allegedly failed to disclose a key piece of evidence to him ahead of his trial. The court also heard that Cairney believes he did not receive a fair trial due to prejudicial press reporting. The appeal is expected to be heard later this year. Club abusers Cairney is among four former Celtic Boys Club coaches to be convicted of child sex abuse. In November, Boys Club founder Jim Torbett was jailed for six years, while another coach, teacher Gerald King, was also convicted of abusing boys at a school. Jim McCafferty, 73, was given a further jail sentence after admitting a series of child sex abuse crimes. He was sentenced to six years and nine months after he admitted 12 charges related to attacks on 10 teenage boys between 1972 and 1996. He was already serving a jail term for abuse.	Former Celtic Boys Club manager Frank Cairney has lost his second bid to be released while appealing his conviction for sexually abusing young footballers.
+text: Kite Power Solutions is behind the proposal at West Freugh near Stranraer. An application to Dumfries and Galloway Council said the company would "continue to engage" with the community over the plans. If the bid is successful, KPS could move its operations to the region, which it said would bring 19 jobs. West Freugh has operated as a military base since the 1930s and is currently run by QinetiQ on behalf of the Ministry of Defence. The application relates to part of the site and would only be used in the summer months. The technology sees two kites tethered to spool drums and as they fly they turn the drums to produce electricity. The company said research and development success was a "crucial step" in achieving its business aspirations. It estimated that it could employ up to 500 people by 2025 if the project entered the manufacturing stage.	An application has been submitted to carry out research and development into kite energy technology on part of a military range in south west Scotland.
+text: The troubled retailer has sold 20 of its stores out of administration to former competitor Sports Direct, with three remaining open in Northern Ireland. They are in Antrim, Lisburn and Londonderry. Around 65 jobs will remain in the Northern Ireland stores. Store closures took immediate effect. The administrators KPMG said staff being made redundant were paid all wages and entitlements due. Among the shops closed are those in Ballymena, Bangor, Belfast, Coleraine, Craigavon, Londonderry, Newry and Newtownards JJB is the latest in a long line of retailers to go bust since the beginning of the recession, which has had a devastating effect on the high street. A recent survey found that many shops were lying vacant, with one in four retail units in Belfast now empty.	More than 150 jobs are going at retailer JJB Sports as it closes ten stores in Northern Ireland.
+text: A viewer complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) that the actress's wrinkles, specifically around her mouth, had been airbrushed. L'Oreal responded with four red carpet images, demonstrating that Dame Helen's appearance was consistent with the commercial; and said no post-production techniques had been applied. The ASA upheld the company's claims. The advertising watchdog added that consumers would expect Dame Helen to have been professionally styled and made up for the photo shoot. "We (therefore) considered that the ads had not altered Ms Mirren's appearance in a way that would exaggerate the likely effect that could be achieved by consumers' use of the product, and concluded that the ads were not misleading," they said. In the TV ad, for the Age Perfect moisturising cream, the 69-year-old is offered a seat at a bus stop and looks unhappy, before saying: "Ever feel like you go unnoticed?", After transforming her image, she adds: "It's the science I trust to help me look like me. Nourish and indulge your skin, and show those age spots who's boss." A print ad featured an image of Dame Helen under the heading "Age Perfect" with accompanying text that read: "Age spots appear reduced. Skin feels nourished with moisture. Complexion looks more radiant." Following the complaint, L'Oreal supplied the ASA with recent images of Dame Helen at events when she had also been professionally styled and made up. They noted that the lines around the Oscar-winner's mouth were consistent in both the ads and the red carpet photos. They also provided a list of post-production techniques that had been used in the print ad, none of which related to wrinkles or to the skin on her face or neck, and confirmed that no post-production changes were made to her face in the television ad. The ASA concluded, "that the recent press images of Ms Mirren would have reflected a similar degree of professional styling and make-up as the images in the ad, without any post-production amendments, and that her appearance in the ads was comparable to those more candid images."	A L'Oreal advert starring Dame Helen Mirren has been cleared over claims the star's face was digitally retouched.
+text: The singer, from Bethnal Green in London, was the eldest sister in the trio, who were known for songs including Little Drummer Boy and the Irving Berlin standard Sisters. They had their own BBC TV show in the 1950s and were made MBEs in 2006. Joy was also married to Wolverhampton Wanderers' star Billy Wright until his death from cancer in 1994. She died on Monday after suffering a stroke last week her son, Vince Wright, told the Express and Star. "We all thought the world of her and we are devastated she is gone," he said. "She was a very bubbly, but private, character. We are all going to miss her terribly, she has been a part of our lives for so long now it really is going to be a big loss for all of us." World record holder Joy, born Joycelyn V Chinery in 1924, and the twins Babs and Teddie, born in 1927, were brought up in Bethnal Green in east London. Their parents were George and Victoria Beverley - who performed as music-hall duo, Coram and Mills. During their formative years, money was scarce and the sisters shared a bed until they were teenagers. Speaking in 2002, Joy insisted they did not notice being poor. "Mother was very clever," she told the Independent. "If we said we wanted a bike, she'd say: 'Oh, I love you too much to give you a bike.'" During the Second World War the girls were evacuated to the Midlands. There they secured a contract to become "Bonnie Babies" in an advertising campaign for the bedtime drink Ovaltine. Radio appearances for the BBC followed - with support from bandleader Glenn Miller they became professional singers, renowned for their close harmonies and glamorous lifestyles. After the war the siblings were given their own TV show, initially called Three Little Girls in View and later retitled Those Beverley Sisters as the group's profile improved. In 1951, the trio signed a recording contract with Columbia Records that helped them become the highest paid female act in the UK, earning more than £700 a week at a time when the average weekly wage was £5. They were the first British female group to break into the US top 10 and enjoyed chart success with Christmas records like I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus. Other favourites included Bye Bye Love and Always and Forever. But they all but retired after Joy married Billy Wright, then captain of the England football team, at Poole Register Office in 1958. "I felt it was time we had an ordinary life," she recalled in a 1995 interview. "We'd had a successful career and I felt no guilt." But the trio reunited in the 1980s, resurrecting old songs such as It's Illegal, It's Immoral Or It Makes You Fat for gay clubs and variety shows. The sisters entered the Guinness Book Of Records in 2002, as the world's longest surviving vocal group without a change in the line up. The same year, they sang for the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at a Jubilee concert. In 2006, the group were made MBEs for services to music, and arrived at Buckingham Palace - as always - in identical outfits. Joy is survived by her twin sisters, three children, Vince, Vicky and Babette, as well as three granddaughters and one grandson.	Joy Beverley, one third of the vocal harmony group the Beverley Sisters, has died at the age of 91.
+text: A £10,000 payment was sent automatically to any business in receipt of small business rates relief, but some were found to be ineligible. Mrs Dodds said of the 452 payments made incorrectly, 74 have been recouped by her department. Three Sinn Féin offices each mistakenly received £10,000. They were repaid but the delay in returning the payments has led to the resignations of four party members. Former Foyle MP and Irish senator Elisha McCallion and West Tyrone MLA Catherine Kelly were among those who stepped down. No Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) politicians received the payment but a landlord who rents an office to DUP MP Paul Girvan received a grant, however this has now been repaid. First Minister Arlene Foster has said she supports a call for police to investigate delays in repaying Covid support payments made in error. Mrs Foster told BBC Radio Ulster's Good Morning Ulster programme her party could not "deal with a situation where tenants are taking responsibility for their landlords' actions". "It's not the fact that people received the money in error, it's the fact that the money hadn't been returned after seven months." In a statement issued on Monday, Cinq Properties Ltd, which rents office space to Mr Girvan, confirmed it did "receive an unsolicited £10,000 small business grant earlier this year". "However, it has now transpired that the company was not entitled to this grant," the firm said. "Several attempts were made to repay the funds and the £10,000 was repaid to an account of the Department of Finance on Friday." Last week, Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald said the "incorrect" payments came to the attention of the party's leadership on Monday 26 and Tuesday 27 October and were repaid on those dates. Investigation request On Friday, it emerged Gary Middleton from the DUP had asked police to carry out a criminal investigation into the delayed repayments. The PSNI said it was considering whether a criminal investigation is required. "I think Gary is right to report this to the police," Mrs Foster said on Monday. "The money is not theirs, the money was received in error and therefore it should have been returned." She added that public representatives have "particular duty" over public funds. "It's up to the police, of course, whether they decide to instigate a criminal investigation but I absolutely support my party colleague in the complaint he has made." 'Accountability for taxpayers' money' Payments were also sent to 52 wind turbine owners who were ineligible. Appearing in the assembly on Monday to face MLAs about the matter, Mrs Dodds defended her department's handling of the scheme. She said ineligible payments issued amounted to less than 2% of all grants approved by the Department of the Economy back in March. "I am content my department took the necessary and swift action to support tens of thousands of businesses and jobs under threat caused by Covid-19," she added. "My department is committed to undertaking a post-scheme evaluation and will put in a place a process." The small business rates relief grant scheme closed on 20 October. "Payments made in error will be recovered and we will be writing to everyone that we identify as being ineligible for payment and asking them to return the money," insisted the minister. "It is important that we have proper accountability for taxpayers' money and indeed particularly important at a time like this when so many businesses and individuals are suffering." The controversy was first revealed by the BBC's Stephen Nolan Show last week. Following Ms Kelly's resignation, Sinn Féin's leader said the party's examination of the matter was now complete. Meanwhile Sinn Féin have seven days to replace Ms Kelly as MLA for West Tyrone once her resignation letter has been handed in.	All payments made in error through Stormont's emergency Covid grant scheme will be recovered, Economy Minister Diane Dodds has said.
+text: Portsmouth University students were told they could not move in to the 17-storey Stanhope House, days before the start of the academic year. Prime Student Living apologised "unreservedly" for the "disappointing, concerning and distressing" delay. The university said it was "working to secure alternative accommodation". One third-year student, who wished to remain anonymous over fears his tenancy agreement could be terminated, said he felt "betrayed" after paying £2,800 for a studio flat for a term. 'Terribly mismanaged' He received an email on Saturday telling him completion had been delayed by a "short period", shortly after contacting the firm himself with concerns the building did not look ready. "Prime Student Living expected Stanhope House to be ready ahead of the start of the academic year, but circumstances have now changed," the email said. "Whilst this is out of our control, we unreservedly apologise for what is very disappointing and concerning news." He has since been placed in halls of residence. He said: "It's been terribly mismanaged. They were ignoring and denying issues until the very last minute." Prime Student Living managing director Steve Goldstraw said: "We have been taking a number of actions to source temporary alternative accommodation solutions in the short term whilst construction at Stanhope House is finished. "There are a number of students for whom Prime Student Living have not been able to source accommodation that meet their needs, so we have referred these to the University of Portsmouth who are providing assistance to help find accommodation." The problems follow delays to the company's 310-bed Coppergate scheme in Swansea which also left students looking for alternative accommodation. The central Portsmouth development was advertised as having 138 studio apartments and 118 en-suite flats, with charges of up to £10,600 a year. The university said it was confident it could find alternative accommodation for 64 students who had not been re-housed by the company. Many are freshers who are due to start university next week. University vice-chancellor Graham Galbraith said concerns were raised about the progress of Stanhope House with Prime Student Living in July. He said: "We were reassured they had everything under control. "We have no control over them and cannot insist they do things for us, but it is a very irritating situation that was predictable."	More than 250 university students have been unable to move in to their accommodation because of delays to a £30m development.
+text: By Julian O'NeillBBC NI business correspondent The energy plant will be adjacent to the company factory in the city's Harbour Estate. The new facility will turn waste product into power at the factory which makes wings for the new CSeries jet. As well as the construction jobs, a further 20 posts will be created when the plant becomes operational. It will convert 120,000 tonnes of commercial and industrial waste annually into electricity and heat using a gasification process. Gasification plants operate by heating waste to produce a gas that is used to generate steam. The steam then drives a turbine that creates electricity. Granting planning permission, Environment Minister Mark Durkan said: "This is good news for Bombardier's workforce. No objection "It will help it reduce electricity costs and safeguard employment." His department received no objection letters in respect of the proposal. According to the planning application, the plant will take 18 months to build. The project will reduce energy costs significantly. Currently Bombardier pays three times more for power in Belfast than it does at its sister facilities in North America. Mr Durkan said: "This facility will draw value from waste which cannot be recycled, preventing it going to landfill and will instead use it to generate energy. "This proposal is a win for the environment and and a win for the economy." Last November, Bombardier was granted permission for a smaller renewable energy plant at its factory in Newtownabbey.	An £85m energy plant which will create 130 construction jobs has been given the green light at Bombardier Aerospace in east Belfast.
+text: The company, under the name First West Coast Limited, will take over from 9 December and is due to to operate the service until 2026. It wants to extend services to Bangor from Chester and use longer trains. Additional evening services will also be provided from 2016. The service between Wrexham and Euston will also be retained, with one train a day in each direction. FirstGroup already operates a number of rail routes, including Great Western - which serves south Wales - ScotRail and Capital Connect. The West Coast Mainline route serves 31m passengers travelling between London, the west Midlands, north west England, north Wales and the central belt of Scotland. Rail analyst Christian Wolmar gave the news a cautious welcome. "FirstGroup will be familiar to many as it runs First Great Western, where it has had something of a patchy record but has improved greatly of late," he said. "There was a fuss a few years ago with them taking off some of the trains and causing overcrowding particularly in the Bristol Severn Tunnel area, but they have in recent years improved their performance. "They do operate several other franchises around the country." But Louise Courtnage, who lives on the Llyn Peninsula and has used the line for the last seven years, was disappointed. 'Casts uncertainty' "I think it's a case of if it ain't broke, don't fix it," she told BBC Radio Wales. "I know this is how the system goes nowadays, but for the customer I don't think it's a good thing at all. "Virgin is a respected name and I think the company taking over is less familiar to people. "I think it casts uncertainty over the whole thing. It's quite worrying to hear bids for franchises that have been successful financially have actually failed to deliver the product." FirstGroup said it would "offer substantial improvements in the quality and frequency of services". But there are concerns that FirstGroup may have bid too much for the franchise. Mr Wolmar added: "On the East Coast Mainline, it's happened twice, first with Sea Containers [collapsing] and then National Express and those were both rather optimistic bids. "First Group reckons this is not going to happen to them, that they can deliver this level of growth. "Given that we are in a recession, the railways have been very buoyant, but it's very dependent on oil prices pushing people towards using the rail line rather than their cars. "So there's a lot of unknowns out there." Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Rail has operated the West Coast Mainline franchise since 1997 after the privatisation of UK railways. He said Virgin Rail's bid had been a realistic one and it was "very disappointing news" to have lost the franchise.	Rail operator FirstGroup says it is "firmly committed" to improving services between north Wales and London after winning the West Coast Mainline franchise from Virgin Rail.
+text: Sutherland, who starred in several of Schumacher's films, said his "joy, spirit and talent will live on". Carrey, who appeared in Batman Forever, also remembered Schumacher fondly following his death at the age of 80. The Falling Down filmmaker had been ill with cancer for more than a year. Minnie Driver, who appeared in Schumacher's film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera in 2004, remembered the director as "the funniest, chicest, most hilarious director I ever worked with". She recalled: "Once, on set, an actress was complaining about me within earshot; how I was dreadfully over the top (I was) Joel barely looked up from his NYT + said 'Oh Honey, no one ever paid to see under the top.'" 'A beautiful soul' Matthew McConaughey, who was given his big break by Schumacher in 1996's A Time to Kill, told Variety: "Joel not only took a chance on me, he fought for me... I don't see how my career could have gone to the wonderful places it has if it wasn't for Joel Schumacher believing in me back then." Corey Feldman, who appeared in The Lost Boys, said the director was "a beautiful soul" who had "sent me supportive messages tight til the end of his life". Actress and presenter Padma Lakshmi described him as "sharp, whip smart, witty and wise", adding: "He was kind and always had the best advice." Fellow director Kevin Smith tweeted: "He couldn't have been nicer or more hospitable." Star Trek writer and producer Bryan Fuller wrote: "I distinctly remember feeling hopeful when I learned he was gay and out and that there may be a place for me yet." Variety wrote that the director "brought his fashion background" to directing and captured the feel of an era with his "stylish films". The New York native first entered the film industry as a costume designer in the 1970s, working alongside luminaries such as Woody Allen. He went on to write the 1976 low-budget comedy Car Wash, as well as the screenplay for a film adaptation of the Broadway musical The Wiz. But his big break came in 1985, with his third feature film St Elmo's Fire, which he co-wrote and directed. Cannes nomination Alongside The Breakfast Club, which came out in the same year, it became one of the seminal films of the Brat Pack era and launched Demi Moore's film career. His follow-up, The Lost Boys - about a group of young vampires in small-town California - became a cult favourite, and his 1990 hit Flatliners saw him again team up with Kiefer Sutherland. Schumacher worked with some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts and Michael Douglas. He directed Douglas in 1993's Falling Down, which was nominated for the Cannes Film Festival's prestigious Palme D'Or. He took over the reins of the Batman franchise from Tim Burton in 1995, casting Val Kilmer as the Caped Crusader and Jim Carrey as the Riddler. The film grossed more than $300m worldwide. However, his second outing - Batman and Robin - starring George Clooney in the lead and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr Freeze was critically panned and nearly finished off Clooney's burgeoning film career. Schumacher was noted for his ability to pick out new talent and he was fundamental in establishing the careers of A-list stars such as Sutherland, Rob Lowe and Colin Farrell. He directed Farrell in 2000's Tigerland, the actor's first leading role, and later in Phone Booth. Schumacher's style came to the fore in two memorable music videos, Seal's Kiss From a Rose and INXS's Devil Inside. His film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical The Phantom of the Opera, which received three Oscar nominations despite lukewarm reviews, was among his last films. Schumacher was reportedly the composer's first choice as director, with Lord Lloyd Webber having admired his work with music on The Lost Boys. Most recently, in 2013, he took the helm on a couple of episodes of the first season of Netflix series House of Cards, before more or less retiring from working life. He once said: "If you love a movie, there are hundreds of people who made it lovable for you. If you don't like it, blame the director. That's what our name's there for."	Stars including Kiefer Sutherland, Jim Carrey and Sharon Stone have paid tribute to the "wonderfully creative and heroic" St Elmo's Fire, Flatliners and Lost Boys director Joel Schumacher.
+text: Prof Ian Pallister of Swansea's Morriston Hospital said one person had died and others had suffered life-changing injuries in the past week. He said that followed eight weeks without a single case. "Just because the roads are quiet does not mean they are any less dangerous," he said. Police have also accused some drivers of using roads that are much quieter than usual as "racing tracks". Prof Pallister speculated that could be why his hospital had seen a recent rise in motorcyclists with serious injuries. "It could be that they [motorcyclists] are now starting to take advantage of the quieter roads and going out and about more," he said. "However, just because the roads are quiet does not mean they are any less dangerous." He said motorcyclists should, whenever possible, heed the message of stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives, to ease pressure on the NHS. "Our theatre capacity is nothing like what it usually is," he said. "We have to prioritise serious injuries and emergencies above everything. "Unfortunately, that does mean someone else will not get the treatment they have been waiting for." Dyfed Powys Police is among forces to have raised concerns that speeding motorists have been travelling at more than double the limit during lockdown. Only essential travel is permitted in Wales under lockdown rules, unlike in England.	A trauma consultant has urged motorcyclists not to "take advantage" of quiet roads in lockdown after seeing a rise in serious crash casualties.
+text: The new president said the inquiry would include "those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal". Mr Trump also said the probe would focus on "those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time)". He has alleged that up to five million illegal votes were cast for Hillary Clinton, but has offered no proof. Mrs Clinton, the Democratic candidate, received nearly three million votes more than Mr Trump, who won the presidency by prevailing in so-called swing states. Is there any evidence? "Depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures!" Mr Trump said of his planned inquiry. Mr Trump is later expected to sign immigration-related decrees, including on his plan to build a wall along the US border with Mexico. The president first made the claim about voter fraud in a late November tweet. Fact-checkers have rejected it as untrue and Republican election officials in key states have said they found no proof of fraudulent voting. White House press secretary Sean Spicer said on Tuesday that Mr Trump continues to believe it, "based on studies and evidence that people have presented to him". Mr Spicer was repeatedly pressed to specify such research, but failed to do so. BBC Reality Check: Did millions vote illegally? Non-citizens of the United States, including permanent legal residents, do not have the right to vote in presidential elections. Voter registration requires applicants to declare their citizenship status, and they could face criminal punishment if they falsely claim citizenship rights. In addition to being registered voters, in two-thirds of states, voters are required to bring identification to the polls in order to be allowed to vote. In all states, first-time voters who register to vote by post must provide valid identification before voting. Although it is not impossible for non-citizens to break voting laws, there is no evidence that millions of immigrants without the right to vote influenced the outcome of the popular vote. Read more from Reality Check on Mr Trump's claim. On Tuesday, the National Association of Secretaries of State said it had confidence in the "systemic integrity of our election process" and was not aware of any evidence related to Mr Trump's claims. Some fellow Republicans also admonished Mr Trump and urged him to drop the matter a day after the closed doors meeting with congressional leaders. Senator Lindsey Graham called the comments "inappropriate", adding that Mr Trump should "knock this off". He continued that the president "seems to be obsessed with the idea that he could not have possibly lost the popular vote without cheating and fraud". Republican Pennsylvania Representative Charlie Dent also weighed in, saying Mr Trump needed to move on and "get to the serious business of governing". Independent Senator Bernie Sanders said it was "nonsensical" and he feared Mr Trump was paving the way for Republican governors to "go forward with voter suppression".	President Donald Trump has promised a "major investigation into voter fraud", after making claims about millions of illegal ballots.
+text: Lucas Allard, 28, went to A&E at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King's Lynn, Norfolk, where tests were carried out. An inquest in Norwich heard he was discharged when a previous CT image was looked at by mistake. He was recalled to the hospital, after the correct scan was seen, but died soon after he arrived. He suffered a cardiac arrest due to a ruptured aortic aneurysm. Area coroner Yvonne Blake, who recorded a narrative conclusion, said Mr Allard had Marfan syndrome and had been awaiting heart surgery at Papworth Hospital in Cambridge. The genetic disorder affects connective tissue and had caused the death of several members of Mr Allard's family, including his older brother in 2015. 'Flummoxed' doctor Late at night on 12 March 2019, the technological support worker from King's Lynn went to A&E with chest pain, which he said was radiating into his back, shoulders and abdomen. A&E doctor Masud Isham ran a series of tests but called up the incorrect CT scan, from the previous November, when assessing the results. It showed nothing critically wrong, while the correct CT scan showed abnormalities in the aorta. Recalling evidence from an earlier hearing, Mrs Blake said the "flummoxed" Dr Isham was "not quite sure" how he made the mistake. "There seemed to be a lot of confusion over the IT system in place at the hospital at the time," said Mrs Blake. 'Pain was subsiding' She added: "I asked him why he discharged a 28-year-old man with crushing chest pain; he knew he had Marfan syndrome, and was awaiting an operation. "He said the ECG was normal, there was nothing abnormal about his blood, and he had said the chest pain was subsiding. "He said had he seen the [CT] report, he wouldn't have sent him home." Mr Allard was discharged at about 02:00 GMT and advised to return should the pain come back. He was recalled when the correct scan was seen by a consultant reviewing referrals from overnight. 'Tired brain' A&E consultant Robert Florance said he tried to replicate what Dr Isham may have done while trying to find a CT scan on the IT system. "When we click on something and nothing happens, we tend to click on it again, then something opens up behind and I think that's when the other report appeared," he said. "If you have been told there is something there, your brain - a tired brain - sees something that may not have occurred." Mrs Blake was told that since Mr Allard's death, a referring doctor will receive a phone call from radiology to discuss any abnormal scan, instead of an "admin" call to say a report was available. "If radiology had phoned [Dr Isham] themselves, the situation could never have occurred - they could have told him what the abnormality was," said consultant radiologist Dr David Smith. Mrs Blake said she was satisfied that various computer systems, which she described as "unwieldy", were due to be replaced by the hospital in May 2021.	A man with a heart disorder and chest pain died two days after a doctor viewed the wrong scan and sent him home, an inquest heard.
+text: Porthmeor in St Ives and Portheras Cove near Pendeen are among the beaches affected by the oily, yellow substance - which can be toxic to dogs. Delia Webb from the Friends of Portheras Cove group, said it was "horrific" to see and has put up warning signs. Cornwall Council is asking people to report any other sightings. Palm oil can cause problems if released - legally - into the marine environment at sea by ships. Whilst on the ships, and whilst in the sea, palm oil can become contaminated with other waste products and because it is edible, it can be attractive to some animals despite it being toxic to them. "You can't really miss it", Ms Webb said. "I don't think we've ever seen this much coming ashore at one time - it's quite horrific when you see an orange rock pool. "It's not like we usually see palm oil washing ashore in hard, waxier lumps. This seems to be very fresh - still very squishy, waxy, oily and it's forming tiny globules now." Dog owners have been warned by the council to be particularly vigilant "as palm oil can be dangerous for dogs". The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) has been made aware of the problem, which is being investigated.	A warning has been issued to dog owners after palm oil washed up on beaches in Cornwall.
+text: Only 13 of the 1948 Gandhi 10-rupee Purple Brown and Lake 'Service' stamps are in circulation. The block of four was sold to a private collector-investor in Australia for the highest ever price for Indian stamps, said dealer Stanley Gibbons. However, the record price for a stamp sold an auction was $9.5m (£7.4m). That British Guiana one-cent magenta stamp was sold to an anonymous bidder in June 2014. Collection The Indian stamps were particularly rare owing to the fact they were in a set of four. Stanley Gibbons previously sold one of these singles for £160,000 to a client in Uruguay last year. A block of four is in the Queen's stamp collection, which is believed to be the world's largest and most valuable in private hands. Keith Heddle, managing director of investments at Stanley Gibbons, said: "The market for high-quality Indian rarities has been strong for several years and is supported by the ongoing desire of the wealthy Indian diaspora and savvy international clients to own these historic assets."	A set of four stamps featuring the portrait of Gandhi has been sold for £500,000 - but the total remains well short of an international record.
+text: Pete Leonard, head of the council department which includes Aberdeen's Hazlehead Crematorium, was said to be on annual leave. A summary of the report was shown to councillors. It was then taken back. Council chief executive Angela Scott said the pain of bereaved families would stay with her "forever". Mr Leonard was quoted by investigators as referring to "slow cooking" babies - comments for which he has since been heavily criticised. The new report to the council will remain secret because it contains confidential details of the conduct of staff. Councillors were given about 10 minutes to read a summary of external report. It was then taken back as they are not allowed to keep it. Council leader Jenny Laing said of the report: "Every one of us would like nothing better than to make its contents known to the public." It followed the council being heavily criticised a report by Dame Elish Angiolini in June into the handling of ashes of cremated babies. BBC Scotland revealed in 2013 that no ashes had been offered to the families of infants cremated in Aberdeen over a five-year period. Baby and adult ashes were mixed together and given back to relatives of the adult, while the parents of infants were told there were no ashes. The crematorium at Hazlehead was among those investigated after it emerged staff at the Mortonhall crematorium in Edinburgh had been burying baby ashes in secret for decades. Former Lord Advocate Dame Elish Angiolini's original report described as "abhorrent" the routine practice of cremating babies bodies with unrelated adults. Families touched by the baby ashes scandal in Aberdeen have since met with the chief executive.	The director responsible for a crematorium at the centre of the baby ashes scandal did not attend a council meeting discussing a secret report.
+text: Tom EdwardsTransport correspondent, London@BBCTomEdwardson Twitter I was given a quick tour as the work progresses to redevelop the station. I was trying to show that as well as a train company's dividend, fares are increasing to pay for this kind of investment. The cost of the whole redevelopment - including the Western concourse - is £550m. Some locally have questioned if that is value for money. The clock tower gives a great view over the old front of King's Cross. That is being knocked down to make way for a pedestrianised area. It'll be open next summer. The "temporary" structure from 1972 will finally be demolished on Christmas Day. Meanwhile rail season ticket holders will face increases of on average 4.2% in the New Year. Off-peak tickets will probably go up by more than that. An announcement is expected soon.	Behind a small door tucked away opposite platform six is the entrance to the famous King's Cross clock tower.
+text: By Hannah RichardsonBBC News education and social affairs reporter The Children's Commissioner for England says that as well as the 124,000 children officially homeless, a further 90,000 are estimated to be "sofa-surfing". Her report tells of families housed in repurposed shipping containers and office blocks, and whole families living in tiny spaces. Councils blamed a £159m funding gap. A spokesman for the Department for Communities and Local Government said anyone who feels they have been placed in unsuitable accommodation should request a review. 'Blisteringly hot' The report, entitled Bleak Houses, found the use of shipping containers as temporary accommodation was leading to cramped conditions and inhospitable temperatures. One mother told the report's authors she had to sleep with the front door wide open in the summer and her baby got heat rash - but in winter it was too cold. Often, the units have not been properly designed with children in mind, the report found, with ovens and other dangers too close to the ground and in reach of very young children. The Children's Commissioner, Anne Longfield, who visited children affected by homelessness, said it was sad and surprising to learn of the new developments councils were turning to in order to deal with the problem. "Office block conversions, in which whole families live in single rooms barely bigger than a parking space, and shipping containers which are blisteringly hot in summer and freezing in the winter months," she said. The report does not contain data on how many councils are using shipping containers to house families, but it said areas where this happens include Brighton, Cardiff, Ealing, in west London, and Bristol. Bristol City Council said it did not direct families to the containers and only provided land for them, and the units were instead operated by a charity. The Children's Commissioner also expressed concern about families living in converted offices. In Harlow, Essex, 13 office blocks have been converted into more than 1,000 individual flats. In one such building, Templefields House, some units measure 18 sq m and are being used to house whole families, with parents and children sleeping in a single room also used as the kitchen. The average size of a home in England and Wales is 90 sq m. In the area surrounding another building, Terminus House, also in Harlow, crime rose by 20% in the first 10 months after tenants moved there in April 2018. Office block conversions are often located on or near industrial estates, presenting risks to safety, and are far away from shops and other amenities. Living in the developments can also be a "stigmatising experience", the report said, with children being referred to as "office block kids". This was "compounding their sense of isolation and difference to their peers". 'Intimidating' B&Bs are also being used as temporary accommodation, creating "intimidating and potentially unsafe environments" for children. The bathrooms in B&Bs are often shared with other residents and vulnerable adults, including those with mental health or drug abuse problems. Ealing Council, which has converted shipping containers into temporary housing, says the accommodation is much better than standard B&Bs with shared facilities. It says it has been pushed into using novel solutions because of the wider housing crisis. Of the 2,420 families known to be living in B&Bs in December 2018, a third had been there for more than six weeks - despite this being unlawful. Analysis in the report, released on Wednesday, found that in 2017, around two in five children in temporary accommodation had been there for at least six months. Around one in 20 - an estimated 6,000 children - had been there for at least a year. The figures used for the analysis of those in temporary accommodation relate to the end of 2018, while the number of those estimated to be sofa-surfing are taken from an official household survey for the year 2016-17. At risk The report warns that a further 375,000 children in England are in households that have fallen behind on rent or mortgage payments. This means thousands more are at financial risk of becoming homeless in the future. Polly Neate, chief executive of housing and homelessness charity, Shelter, said no child should be spending months, if not years, living in a shipping container, office block or emergency B&B. She said the charity constantly heard of struggling families being forced to accept "downright dangerous accommodation" because they had nowhere else to go. She said housing benefit must be increased urgently and that three million more social homes needed to be built. Local Government Association housing spokesman Martin Tett said councils desperately wanted to find every family a secure home. "However, the severe lack of social rented homes available in which to house families means councils have no choice but to place households in temporary accommodation." He highlighted a £159m funding gap in councils' homelessness services budgets, and urged the government to fund and give back councils their historic role of building homes with the right infrastructure required. The DCLG spokesman said the government had invested £1.2bn to tackle all types of homelessness which had helped reduce the number of families in B&B accommodation. Have you been housed in a converted shipping container or other converted temporary accommodation? Get in touch by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also contact us in the following ways:	More than 210,000 children are estimated to be homeless, with some being temporarily housed in converted shipping containers, a report says.
+text: The Whitesands project would see the creation of a raised walkway along the waterfront area. The scheme has been revised a number of times to address public concerns about the river view and loss of car parking. Last year an estimate of project costs put the overall bill at between £15m and £17.8m. The Scottish government would provide 80% of the funding for the scheme with the remainder coming from Dumfries and Galloway Council. It has already approved nearly £4.5m towards the project which means it has a maximum of about £500,000 to find. A report to the local authority will ask it to agree that the project be officially published and adopted as a flood protections scheme. It cites a range of reasons for the increased costs which include: The council has spent nearly a year refining the scheme which it said had produced a range of "positive developments". Those actions include: Councillor Colin Smyth said: "I am pleased that we are now at the stage to seek committee agreement to commence the formal process of publishing the Whitesands project as a flood protection scheme. "It is unacceptable that the largest town in our region continues to flood. "That is why all councillors agreed for a flood protection and regeneration scheme to be progressed for the Whitesands, demonstrating the need for change and putting an end to the regular flooding that has plagued our regional capital for too long." He added that it was more than a flood protection scheme and could create a "high quality public open space" to encourage the use of the Whitesands. Related Internet Links Dumfries and Galloway Council	A major flood protection scheme in Dumfries is set to make a step forward but has seen its cost estimate rise significantly to £25m.
+text: About 200 to 250 brain tumour cases are operated on in Northern Ireland each year. Across the UK, more children and people under the age of 40 die of a brain tumour than any other cancer. Dr Tom Flannery said that more funding into research on brain tumours was essential in order to lower the number of people dying from the disease. Dr Flannery is the lead brain tumour researcher at the Centre for Cancer Research and Cell Biology (CCRCB) at Queen's. The centre and theBrainwaves NIcharity are hosting an information evening on Wednesday to raise awareness about the prevalence of brain tumours. Sandra McKillop from Brainwaves NI said: "There is a real need to accelerate progress and improve treatments and outcomes for those affected by a brain tumour in Northern Ireland. "Research into brain tumours receives less than 1% of the national spend on cancer research and we, along with the researchers at Queen's, are calling for this to be increased.	A brain tumour expert at Queen's University has called for more funding for research into the cancer.
+text: By Iolo ap DafyddBBC Wales environment correspondent Almost 10,000 solar panels have been imported from the United States and are placed in 12 lines in a six-acre field. The £2.5m investment will be onstream three weeks before the UK government lowers the subsidy for large-scale solar energy investors. The site's owner Western Solar still hopes to double its size. It is run by Dr Glen Peters who owns Rhosygilwen mansion and art centre with his family. He said: "There are 10,000 panels here. They are very cutting edge from the States. "They are thin film, particularly suited to our climate here of largely cloudy skies." He has planning consent for a development twice the size but had to rethink his plans. "There was no bank financing available. I then had to take a total act of faith and said 'okay, we will halve the scheme, we will do one megawatt initially' and I basically raided my pension fund." The development would be enough to power 300 homes. Other applications for three and five megawatt solar parks at Cynheidre and Ffos Las in west Wales are said to be still in planning. But while Rhosygilwen has beaten the government's closing of a lucrative loophole, developers like Nigel Payne of Allied Renewables in Swansea are setting their sights lower. His company hopes to complete three much smaller, 50 kilowatt, solar parks by September. Expansion concern Another 10 are in the planning stage and, by reducing the size of the output, will still be able to generate a return of 30.7p per kilowatt hour. "It spreads the feed-in tariff to what it was designed for - not supporting large-scale solar farms where subsidies would be absolutely gobbled up," he said. The Department of Energy and Climate Change has said from 1 August tariffs would be reduced for large solar panel investors. Any large-scale solar farms above 250 kilowatts, and up to 5 megawatts, will be able to claim 8.5p per kilowatt hour. Schemes between 150 kilowatts and 250 kilowatts will be able to claim 15p per kilowatt hour and schemes ranging from 50 kilowatts to 150 kilowatts 19p per kilowatt hour. Solar installations below 50 kilowatts are unchanged. The average household installation, less than 4 kilowatts, will still be claiming the highest bracket of 43.3p per kilowatt hour. With the solar industry increasing over the past 12 months from generating 4 megawatt of power in Britain to 96 megawatts, Dr Owen Guy, Swansea University's senior lecturer in nano technology, said there were some concerns that expansion could slow down. "It's still available for the small-scale projects. Individuals will be able to install four kilowatt systems on their homes and will still be able to get a good return on their investment," he said. "But the large scale companies wont be able to make the profit they have been."	The first solar park in Wales is expected to start converting sunlight into electricity later at the Rhosygilwen estate in Pembrokeshire.
+text: Johnston said the findings of a study into the fund's liabilities should see the current £90m deficit cut by £50m. It also stated that a change to the scheme rules meant it could participate in any surplus when the scheme closes. Johnston added: "These adjustments, taken together, reduce the scheme deficit by some £53m." At 11:30 on Wednesday, Johnston's share price was up by 13% at 41.25p. The Edinburgh-based group, whose titles include The Scotsman and the Yorkshire Post, plans to announce full details of the study when it presents its preliminary annual results in late March. Johnston Press recently revealed plans to cut editorial jobs across its operations in the UK as part of a bid to reduce costs following a decline in revenue.	Shares in publisher Johnston Press rose by more than 10% on Wednesday after it said it expected a major reduction in its pension scheme deficit.
+text: Brynmawr Foundation School, Blaen-y-Cwm Primary School, in Brynmawr, and Ystruth Primary School, in Blaina, will stay shut until at least 13 July. Blaenau Gwent Council previously said there was a "localised contamination" of legionella. The schools' water system is being chlorinated and will be retested to ensure it is safe. A council spokesman said the contamination was "low level". A letter sent to parents last week from Brynmawr Foundation School's head teacher Gerard McNamara said the discovery of legionella would "require a full-system chlorination." Legionella - which causes Legionnaires' disease - occurs in natural water sources such as rivers and lakes but usually in low amounts. In certain conditions, such as when water is static for a long time, bacteria can grow and become hazardous. Joanne Collins, executive member for education said: "This is disappointing for the pupils who planned to return to school and their families, but the safety and wellbeing of all our pupils and school staff is always the top priority." She told the Local Democracy Reporting Service health teams were working to resolve the matter as "quickly as possible." Labour councillor Hedley McCarthy said: "An urgent independent inquiry should be set up by Welsh Government to give transparency as to how this could have been allowed to happen." Public Health Wales said it was currently "not aware of any risk to the population." Welsh Water said internal pipework problems posed no risk to water supplies. Tredegar Comprehensive and Willowtown Primary School, in Ebbw Vale, also did not reopen as planned on Monday but it is hoped they will be able to this week.	Three schools will remain closed after bacteria that can cause Legionnaires' disease was found in pipes.
+text: By Katie SmithReporter, BBC Newcastle Three women from Newcastle said they were "groped" by men, propositioned for sex and told by bosses it was "just part of the job". They were employed to carry shots of alcohol on a tray around nightclubs and try to sell them. They made 30p a shot in commission and often took home only £5 a shift. The company in question denies the claims. After failing to pay her the minimum wage, one woman claimed the firm, which the BBC is not naming, said it was her fault for not working hard enough. Katie Readshaw, 25, from Durham, originally worked behind a bar but said she wanted to become a so-called shot girl because it looked "glamorous". She said: "I was behind the bar in a dingy horrible uniform, covered in vodka and they were wandering around in lovely little dresses and they seemed like they were always busy and making money." During an interview with her employers, she felt they were "sizing up girls to see if they were pretty enough to work for them". The company said all staff were "expertly trained". Ms Readshaw said training included a three-slide PowerPoint presentation telling them to "never give up and to keep flirting". After they signed a contract, the firm sent the women into bars around Newcastle where they had agreements to provide shot girls. The company was not responsible for breaches of the law by bar customers, staff or bouncers. Ms Readshaw said: "I've had a few gropings and things. A married man giving me his keycard for his hotel, with the hand with his wedding ring on." She said other men wanted to do "violent acts" to her. "You laugh it off and pretend it's all right, but it really makes your skin crawl. And you think well, if I leave and I go to walk home, what if they follow me?" She also said there were some nights when she would make £5 but her taxi home would be £6, meaning she had worked a full shift but ended the night with less money than she started it. 'Non-stop touching' Another woman who worked as a shot girl, who did not want to be named, said: "I had one friend who tripped and her bottle went flying everywhere. "She had to replace that, but you have to do it at the price they get all the individual shots for. "So that particular bottle of sambuca retailed at £30, but she had to pay £90 for it." She said her worst experience was in a pub, when "from start to finish it was a non-stop bombardment" of men inappropriately touching her and commenting on her body. "The thing I remember mainly at the end of the shift was being quite shaken up by how horrible it was, and then one of the managers coming in, their reaction was 'Well, that's kind of what happens isn't it, it comes with the territory of the job'," she said. Another woman told how she failed to sell a single shot and only had 20 minutes until her last train home. She asked her manager if she could leave but they refused. She left anyway and that night she made nothing. Employment lawyer Ruby Dinsmore said the company was ultimately "breaking the law" by not paying staff the national minimum wage. She said: "I note that one of the girls said that she was told that harassment, sexual harassment, was just part and parcel of the job. "Well, that's certainly not the case. The manager and certainly the employer is fully responsible for ensuring that the girls are adequately protected from sexual harassment." The company said it was shocked and categorically denied the claims. A Department for Business spokesperson said they were unable to comment on individual cases, but said anyone who thought they had been paid less than the minimum wage should contact Acas (Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service) - which provides free and impartial information and advice on workplace relations and employment law. The spokesperson added: "HMRC (HM Revenue and Customs) follows up every complaint made and investigates employers where necessary." • £8.21for ages 25+ • £7.70for ages 21 to 24 • £6.15for ages 18 to 20 • £4.35 for ages 16 to 17 • £3.90for apprentices aged 16 to 18 In Newcastle in 2018, 9,400 out of 140,000 employed people were working in the leisure and hospitality industry, according to the Office for National Statistics. There are no equivalent official figures for how many women work as shot girls.	"Shot girls" have described how they had been routinely sexually assaulted and often paid below the minimum wage.
+text: By Steve HoldenNewsbeat entertainment reporter He says the term is "a derogatory phrase no different to the ones concerning race or sex". The rapper says "certain sectors of Middle England" need to stop ridiculing the poor and less fortunate. His comments surround the release of new track Ill Manors which includes the lyric: "Oi look there's a chav, that means council housed and violent." It's a song which he says tries to try to address some of the causes of last summer's riots in England. Other lyrics include: "He's got a hoodie on give him a hug, on second thoughts don't, you don't wanna get mugged." In the statement to accompany the video, he criticised the use of the word chav by the media. "The papers use it publicly," it read. "If they did the same with racial or sexist derogatory terms it would be deemed, and rightly so, as offensive and politically incorrect. That in my opinion is hypocrisy." 'Alienated' The video for Ill Manors features footage from last summer's violence. His statement went on: "I think one of the reasons (for the riots) is that there is a very public prejudice in this country towards the underclass". Plan B, whose real name is Ben Drew, recently spoke to Mistajam on BBC Radio 1Xtra about the meanings behind the song. Speaking then he said: "I'm not trying to condone what happened during the riots but those kids have played into the hands of what Middle England thinks of them. "When you attack someone for the way they talk, the way they dress, the music they listen to or their lack of education and you do it publicly you make them alienated. "Anyone beaten into that apathy won't care about society," he added. "They feel in their eyes that society has made it very clear they don't care about them. "Just because you were lucky to be born into a family that can afford to give you a good education doesn't make you better than anyone, it makes you lucky." Last year he posted a seven-minute video in which he questioned the rioters' motives.	Plan B has criticised people who use the word 'chav', in a statement on his website.
+text: Dave LeeNorth America technology reporter Because of this, the company is suing him for $1m. But Mr Tripp - Marty to his friends - says he’s a whisteblower being smeared for speaking out about standards and safety at the company, and deserves protection. He says he was sharing details of what he claims is a huge amount of raw material waste at the company, and concerns about battery safety. In documents filed to a Nevada district court on Wednesday, Tesla painted Mr Tripp as a disgruntled former employee, a man who had wanted a promotion from his job as a “process technician”, a role he had been in since October 2017. He was based at the company’s enormous Gigafactory battery plant near Reno, Nevada. “Tripp retaliated against Tesla by stealing confidential and trade secret information and disclosing it to third parties, and by making false statements intended to harm the company,” the court documents alleged, adding that Mr Tripp admitted some of the accusations when confronted. 'Betraying your word of honour' “You’re a horrible human being,” the head of Tesla Elon Musk wrote in a tense email exchange between himself and Mr Tripp, seen by BBC News. The exchange had began with Mr Tripp saying: “You have what’s coming to you for the lies you have told to the public and investors.” “Threatening me only makes it worse for you,” Mr Musk replied, later adding: “Betraying your word of honour, breaking the deal you had when Tesla gave you a job and framing your colleagues are wrong and some come with legal penalties. So it goes. Be well.” Among the details Mr Tripp says he shared as a whistleblower - to a reporter at Business Insider - is an allegation that punctured batteries had made their way into Tesla’s cars. Tesla has strongly denied the claim. The row took a bizarre twist late on Wednesday night when Tesla said it had received a credible threat - from a “friend of Mr Tripp” - that Mr Tripp was “coming to the Gigafactory to ‘shoot the place up’”. The company said: “Police have been notified and actions are being taken to enhance security at the Gigafactory.” Local police later said after several hours of investigation they found there to be no “credible threat”. Mr Musk, as he often does, used Twitter to share his extended view on the lawsuit. He suggested, in response to a tweet from Ars Technica reporter Cyrus Favriar, that Mr Tripp may not be an isolated case. “There is more,” he wrote. “But the actions of a few bad apples will not stop Tesla from reaching its goals. With 40,000 people, the worst 1 in 1,000 will have issues. That’s still ~40 people.” Tesla would not say if it planned to launch more legal action against any current or former employees. 'Horrible human being' - the email exchange June 20, 2018 From: Marty Tripp To: Elon Musk 8:57 AM Don't worry, you have what's coming to you for the lies you have told to the public and investors. ____ From: Elon Musk To: Marty Tripp 9:42 AM Threatening me only makes it worse for you ____ From: Marty Tripp To: Elon Musk 9:59 AM I never made a threat. I simply told you that you have what's coming. Thank you for this gift!!!! ____ From: Elon Musk To: Marty Tripp 10:00 AM You should ashamed of yourself for framing other people. You're a horrible human being. ____ From: Marty Tripp To: Elon Musk 10:03 AM I NEVER 'framed' anyone else or even insinuated anyone else as being involved in my production of documents of your MILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF WASTE, Safety concerns, lying to investors/the WORLD. Putting cars on the road with safety issues is being a horrible human being! ____ From: Elon Musk To: Marty Tripp 10:28 AM There are literally [no] injuries with Model 3. It is by far the safest car in the world for any midsize vehicle. And of course a company with billions of dollars in product is going to have millions of dollars in scrap. This is not news. However, betraying your word of honour, breaking the deal you had when Tesla gave you a job and framing your colleagues are wrong and some come with legal penalties. So it goes. Be well. _______ Follow Dave Lee on Twitter @DaveLeeBBC Do you have more information about this or any other technology story? You can reach Dave directly and securely through encrypted messaging app Signal on: +1 (628) 400-7370	Tesla describes former employee Martin Tripp as a criminal, a man who hacked into Tesla’s systems in order steal information and sully the company’s reputation on safety.
+text: A police boat faced off with Sentinelese tribesmen on Saturday but withdrew to avoid confrontation. John Allen Chau was said to have been killed with arrows when he landed on North Sentinel. He was trying to convert the protected people to Christianity. The fishermen who ferried Chau, 27, to North Sentinel on 17 November said they saw tribesmen drag a body along a beach and bury it. The fishermen later accompanied police back to the point on the island where they believed the body was buried. Six fishermen and one other person have been arrested over the incident. On Saturday, police stationed their boat about 400m (437 yards) offshore and, using binoculars, saw tribesmen on the beach armed with bows and arrows. Regional police chief Dependra Pathak told Agence France-Presse: "They stared at us and we were looking at them." The boat then withdrew. "We have mapped the area with the help of these fishermen. We have not spotted the body yet but we roughly know the area where he is believed to be buried," Mr Pathak said. Outsiders are banned from even approaching the island so as to protect the people who live there, and their way of life. The complete isolation of the Sentinelese people means contact with the outside world could put them at risk, as they are likely to have no immunity to even common illnesses such as flu and measles. The tribesmen have treated outsiders with hostility for years. In 2006, two fishermen were killed and their bodies placed on bamboo stakes, Mr Pathak said. Those bodies were recovered but fears remain that Chau's may never be retrieved. A murder case has been registered against unknown persons but it has not been suggested tribesmen will face any charges. Chau's family have said they forgive those who killed him. Read more on uncontacted tribes:	Indian officials are facing a difficult task to retrieve the body of an American missionary reportedly killed by an endangered tribe in the Andaman and Nicobar islands.
+text: By Andrew MonaghanChatham House He named five people: Fifteen years later, these men still form President Putin's core group and dominate the strategic heights of Russian government and big business: This core group illustrates two important points about who runs Russia. First, there has been continuity in terms of the personnel closest to Mr Putin. Real reshuffles are rare, and very few have been evicted from this core group. Second, the heart of the leadership team is made up of allies who served with Mr Putin in the KGB, in 1990s St Petersburg, or both. This core group also includes others whom the president trusts to implement major infrastructure projects, such as Arkady Rotenberg, one of those responsible for the Sochi Winter Olympics, as well as several regional figures and senior bureaucrats. Many of these figures held senior positions even before Mr Putin's rise to power. Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, formerly Minister of Emergency Situations, was a prominent party political figure in the second half of the 1990s and leader of the United Russia party from 2001-05. Such figures convene in the security council, one of the most important organisations for co-ordinating high-level decision-making and resources. At the same time, the Russian administrative system - the so-called vertical of power - does not function well: policy instructions are often implemented tardily and sometimes not at all, so others have important roles helping develop and implement projects. One such individual is Yuri Trutnev, elected as a regional governor in 2000, and then appointed Minister for Natural Resources and Ecology in 2004. In 2013, he was promoted to Deputy Prime Minister and Presidential Plenipotentiary to the Russian Far Eastern Federal District, a high priority post for Mr Putin. Russian observers also point to the role played by Vyacheslav Volodin in helping Mr Putin run Russian politics since 2011. Mr Volodin rose through regional and then national party politics, before being appointed to government positions. He established the influential All-Russian Popular Front in 2011, which makes an increasingly significant contribution to formulation, implementation and monitoring of the leadership's policies. Mr Volodin was subsequently appointed First Deputy Head of the presidential administration, responsible for overseeing a "reset" of Russian domestic politics since 2012. Alongside continuity in the core leadership team, there has been a growing need for effective managers to implement its policies. Indeed, rather than shrinking, as some commentators have suggested, the leadership team appears to be expanding. There are several rising stars who play increasingly important roles in party politics and administration. One is 39-year-old Alexander Galushka, who is a member of the Popular Front and many of the president's and prime minister's advisory committees. He was appointed Minister of the Far Eastern region in 2013. This leads us to the final point about who runs Russia with Mr Putin - while the President is the central figure, he is part of a team, which itself is part of a system, and therefore highlights the importance of effectiveness in implementing tasks. All the individuals have reputations for hard work, loyalty and proven effectiveness in completing difficult tasks in business, state administration and politics. As one Russian close to Mr Putin has observed, he did not choose them for their pretty eyes, but because they get things done. Andrew Monaghan is a senior research fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House.	When Vladimir Putin first came to power, he was asked in an interview which of his colleagues he trusted most.
+text: Paddy, a messenger pigeon who served with the RAF during the Normandy operations in June 1944, was remembered in his home town of Larne on Friday. PDSA, Britain's biggest veterinary charity, awarded Paddy the Dickin Medal, dubbed the animals' "Victoria Cross", 65 years ago this month. He received it for being the fastest pigeon to reach England with a coded message from the battle-front beaches of Normandy. The brave bird brought back vital information about the Allies' progress, flying 230 miles in four hours 50 minutes - the fastest time of any of the messenger pigeons involved in the mission with an average speed of 56mph. PDSA spokesman James Puxty said: "Paddy's contribution to the D-Day operations was a credit to the thousands of messenger pigeons donated by the racing pigeon fraternity for service during World War II. "He was one of 32 brave, feathered heroes that received the PDSA Dickin Medal for their life-saving flights during the war, and the only recipient from Northern Ireland." Local hero Paddy was born and raised in Carnlough and joined thousands of other racing birds who were trained and drafted to RAF Hurn in Hampshire for military service. Impressing military brass with his flying in the Air-Sea rescue units he was seconded to the United States First Army for undercover missions during the Normandy Landings. In the face of poor weather conditions and the threat of German falcons, deployed to intercept Paddy and his comrades, he delivered his message to his home loft at RAF Hurn. After the war Paddy returned to Carnlough and lived out his days with his owner Captain Andrew Hughes, until his death in 1954. A memorial to the winged hero was erected in Carnlough harbour. A feathered fly-past of pigeons formed part of the Paddy Memorial Day event held at Larne Museum and Arts Centre. Larne Borough Council and the town's historical society were joined by guests from PDSA and the owner of Paddy's PDSA Dickin Medal, former Irish Army officer Kevin Spring. Younger guests were entertained by Gail Seekamp, the children's author, who read from her book "Paddy the Pigeon". The Dickin Medal was introduced in 1943 by Maria Dickin, PDSA's founder. She wanted to recognise the gallantry and devotion to duty of animals serving with the Armed Forces and Civil Defence units during WWII.	One of Northern Ireland's smallest World War II heroes has been honoured.
+text: By Jonathan AmosBBC Science Correspondent Called NovaSAR, it has the ability to take pictures of the surface of the Earth in every kind of weather, day or night. The spacecraft will assume a number of roles but its designers specifically want to see if it can help monitor suspicious shipping activity. Lift-off from the Satish Dhawan spaceport occurred at 17:38 BST. NovaSAR was joined on its rocket by a high-resolution optical satellite - that is, an imager that sees in ordinary light. Known as S1-4, this spacecraft will discern objects on the ground as small as 87cm across. Both it and NovaSAR were manufactured by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited of Guildford. UK engineers have long had expertise in space radar but their technology has previously always gone on broader missions, such as those for the European Space Agency. NovaSAR, which has the distinctive shape of a cheesegrater, is uniquely British, however. Its radar instrument was developed for SSTL by Airbus in Portsmouth. The mission incorporates low-cost, miniaturised components and will aim to demonstrate a more affordable approach to radar imaging. It will operate in a number of modes for applications that include the detection of oil spills, flood and forestry monitoring, disaster response, and crop assessment. But perhaps its most interesting role will be in maritime observation. The satellite is equipped with a receiver that can pick up Automatic Identification System (AIS) radio signals. These are the positional transmissions that large ships are obliged to broadcast under international law. Vessels that tamper with or disable these messages very often are engaged in smuggling or illegal fishing activity. If such ships appear in NovaSAR's pictures, they will be reported to the authorities. "We are very interested in this maritime mode, which is a 400km-plus swath mode," said Luis Gomes, the chief technology officer at SSTL. "It is important to be able to monitor large areas of the ocean - something we don't do at the moment. We all saw with the Malaysian airline crash in the Indian Ocean the difficulty there was in monitoring that vast area. We can do that kind of thing with radar and NovaSAR is good for that," he told BBC News. The NovaSAR project was initiated inside SSTL in 2008/9. Back then the idea of a radar satellite that measured 3m by 1m was regarded as something of a breakthrough because, up that point, such spacecraft had been big, power-hungry beasts that cost a lot of money. It is a little unfortunate therefore that the programme got delayed because in the meantime others have also managed to package radar systems into small volumes. The Finnish start-up Iceye has a platform flying now that is the size of a suitcase. And an American company called Capella is promising a radar satellite that is not much bigger than a shoebox. But radar expert Martin Cohen from Airbus is unperturbed by these developments. "NovaSAR is still a step change, certainly for Airbus in terms of what you can do for a particular amount of money. But while we've been waiting for a launch, we haven't stood still," he said. "We've done lots of work on the next generation. "NovaSAR is just the first in a family of instruments that will offer different capabilities, such as finer resolutions and other parameters; and we will be putting those capabilities on smaller spacecraft than NovaSAR." The satellite, as presently configured, will operate in the S-band (3.2 gigahertz), giving a best resolution of 6m with a swath width of 15-20km. Future variants will go to the higher-frequency X-band and sense features on the ground as small as a metre across, and less. The Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) was programmed to put NovaSAR and S1-4 into an orbit that is 580km above the Earth. S1-4 will be taking pictures of China for Twenty First Century Aerospace Technology (21AT). This company, based in Beijing, will use the data in the Asian nation to help with urban planning, working out crop yields, pollution monitoring and doing biodiversity assessments, among many other applications. Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos	The first all-British radar satellite has launched to orbit on an Indian rocket.
+text: Many people live with hidden disabilities - conditions which don't have physical signs but are painful, exhausting and isolating. Sympathy and understanding from others can often be in short supply. Simon Magnus, Georgia Macqueen Black, Erika North and Natasha Lipman explain what it's like to have a hidden disability, which some of your friends and family may silently be dealing with. Simon Magnus is dyslexic. He is the artistic director of arts charity Root Experience. It's taken me some time to properly "own" my dyslexia. It has been a source of shame and embarrassment for most of my life. In trying to conceal my condition, I have let people think I am lazy and disorganised. The truth is, I really can't get my ideas onto paper, and my fear and anxiety around "being unable to write" has stopped me from achieving things I wanted. I had a meeting recently and it was going well, then they asked me to do a written evaluation. It made my heart sink. I had to tell them that I couldn't do it. Eyebrows were raised, but I told them about my dyslexia and owned it. The outcome might not have been what I wanted, but it was a huge step for me. Provision for dyslexic people in everyday life is not available across the board yet, and nor is provision for those of us with anxiety or other hidden disabilities, but I hope they thought about it afterwards and perhaps, in the future, they might consider how they could work with someone like me. Invisible conditions are just different to how we think the world operates, but the more of us that 'come out' the more we realise how many people live with these experiences and that a simple change in a process can mean all the difference. Georgia Macqueen Black has Type 1 Diabetes and was diagnosed at the age of 11. She works for Shape Arts on the National Disability Arts Collection and Archive. Type 1 Diabetes cannot be seen until I take out my insulin pen and inject myself, but the mechanical parts - blood tests and injections - are only the surface layers of what I have to manage. Someone may see me inject, but there's an isolating exhaustion I take with me afterwards. There will always be another injection and it can generate a disconnection between myself and other people. Every day I gather the willpower to be a "good" diabetic, but when I follow the rules and still have high blood sugar I feel alone. It makes me feel foggy with a limited ability to concentrate. And the side-effects of too much or too little sugar in your blood can lead to you turning in on yourself. The biggest challenge is accepting the monotony of managing diabetes. There are days when I'm tired of having a weaker immune system - a lesser know side-effect of diabetes - or when I find lumps under my skin from injections, but then I have to put those feelings to one side and carry on. Some people might not think diabetes deserves the label "disability", but if unmanaged it affects my ability to carry out tasks and I have to think how exercise, stress or dehydration will impact my blood sugar levels. I often worry about how life will be when I'm older. This feeling of uncertainty hangs over me from time to time, and can make me feel lonely and a bit lost. But I know there's a silent solidarity out there. Someone with an impairment could be having a day where everything has become derailed and they feel ill, but I bet you they won't show it. It's that resilience that I really connect to. Georgia, Simon and Natasha's top tips on hidden disabilities Erika North has multiple sclerosis (MS). She is a broadcaster. Natasha Lipman has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. It's a connective tissue disorder that causes dislocations, chronic pain and fatigue. She is a blogger and podcaster. If you've got an invisible disability, you've got to look convincingly stricken because people often don't believe it's there. If you were to meet me on the street, you'd probably think I was a pretty average 20-something. You'd certainly take for granted that I can stand, walk up the stairs, work and move without pain. But I can't. I suffer from severe chronic pain, my joints pop out at will and I'm often too fatigued to get out of bed. If someone knocks into me in the wrong way I could end up in hospital or wiped out from high pain levels for weeks. Standing makes me dizzy and worsens my fatigue, and being squished against other people sends me into a panic. I'm legally entitled to the same support that other disabled people get, yet I often find myself ignored or told those resources "aren't for you". One week, five people refused to let me sit down on the Tube - three of whom told me a healthy young girl like me should give up her seat. The only time people ever gave up their seat was when I passed out on the floor - a pretty visible sign something was wrong. I often feel humiliated when I have to beg for help and I've been lectured more times than I can count for using disabled toilets. I'm told over and over that I'm "not disabled enough". Over the years I've become too scared to ask for help. Things change when I show "evidence" of my disabilities. I use an Access Card, which states any difficulties I might face and the adjustments that could be made, and I purchased a Radar Key, which unlocks accessible toilets across the country without me having to ask permission. Despite proof, some people only take me seriously when they see me struggling. I realise most people don't understand what they can't see, but my disabilities shouldn't need to be displayed to be believed. Produced by Beth Rose For more Disability News, follow BBC Ouch on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to the weekly podcast.	Imagine having to inject yourself thousands of times over the course of your lifetime, but never talking about it to anyone.
+text: His good deed came to light after Jenniffer Gonzalez, Puerto Rico's representative in Washington, thanked him on Twitter. The Miami-born star - real name Armando Perez - told the New York Daily News he was "just doing [his] part." "Thank God we're blessed to help," he was quoted as saying. Much of the US island territory has lost its power after being ravaged by Hurricanes Irma and Maria. Almost half of its 3.5 million residents are without clean drinking water, while hospitals are running short of the diesel needed to power their life support systems. At least 16 people are known to have died from the effects of the most recent hurricane. Writing in the Hollywood Reporter, Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda urged people to donate to the recovery effort. "Puerto Ricans need supplies and resources just as badly as their fellow Americans in Texas and Florida," wrote the composer and performer. Daddy Yankee, singer of worldwide hit Despacito, has also called for donations, as have Oscar winner Benicio Del Toro and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres. Jennifer Lopez, meanwhile, has joined forces with her ex-husband Marc Anthony to create Somos Una Voz (We Are A Voice), "an alliance of artists working together to rush food, shelter, medicine, power and communications to those in need." Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran, Edward Norton and Jada Pinkett Smith are among those who have so far signed up to the initiative, which aims to bring relief to all those affected by "recent natural disasters". Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	Rapper Pitbull has been praised after sending his private plane to hurricane-hit Puerto Rico to transport cancer patients to the US mainland.
+text: Highlands MP Danny Alexander wrote to the Scottish government's Transport Secretary Keith Brown saying the move was a "knee-jerk decision". But Mr Brown's spokesman accused the UK government minister of "hypocrisy". It is hoped the cameras will improve safety on the road, but Mr Alexander said he wanted to see evidence they would prevent accidents. The Scottish government has pledged to upgrade 80 miles (128.7km) of single carriageway between Perth and Inverness to dual carriageway. However, because the project will not be completed until 2025, average speed cameras between Dunblane and Inverness will be installed. Holyrood ministers said the A9 Safety Group, which includes representation from Perth and Kinross Council and Highlands Council, "reviewed a detailed evidence base of the accident history and speed profiles of the route" before reaching its decision. Mr Alexander, Lib Dem MP for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, said: "It is clear the high speeds are a significant factor in some of the horrific accidents we have seen on the A9 and I would support the targeted use of speed cameras at blackspots. "But it is also clear that some of the dangerous driving on display is caused by frustrated drivers caught in very long queues behind lorries and tankers. That frustration is only relieved by dual carriageways and by hauliers politely pulling over to let queues past. "I'd like to see the full assessment of all the options for road safety improvements published, so we can all see how the average speed proposal compared to other options which I presume were on the table, like a more targeted approach." A spokesman for Mr Brown responded by saying: "This is the height of hypocrisy from Danny Alexander, given the Lib Dems' utter failure to commit to dualling the A9 during the years they were in office at Holyrood. "People know that Mr Alexander's first loyalty is to the Treasury, not to the Highlands and its transport needs, something underlined by his failure to fight properly to protect key flights to the region." The average speed camera system on the A9, which is due to be up and running by next summer, will be the second in Scotland. The first was installed on the A77 in Ayrshire between Bogend Toll and Ardwell Bay in 2005. It has been credited with improving safety. Transport Scotland said it had delivered a 46% reduction in fatal accidents and 35% cut in serious accidents. The cameras read the number plates of passing vehicles and measure the time it takes for them to pass from point A to point B, measuring average speed.	Two senior politicians have become embroiled in a row over plans to install average speed cameras on the notorious A9.
+text: By Marie-Louise ConnollyBBC News NI Health Correspondent Aimee Brady knows exactly what it is like - she has been in the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children waiting for a new heart since January. The family from Magherafelt have called on the public to open up a discussion around organ transplant donation. Aimee says she loves the nurses but desperately wants to go home to be with her 14-year-old brother. "Being stuck in here it's just you have no life, just sitting here every day hoping you get that call - I just want to go home," she says. 'Worrying time' This week, Aimee was moved to PICU, the Children's Intensive Care Unit. Aimee's mum, Valerie, says while her daughter is doing better it is a very "worrying time". "Families, including parents and their children need to have that chat around organ donation," says Valerie. "Please have the chat; it can make such a difference to a family that is waiting." Twice as long Being on a list is a waiting game. There are currently four children in Northern Ireland waiting for a heart. Meanwhile, some 181 children in the UK are waiting for a life-saving organ transplant, with 17 dying last year while on the waiting list. Dr Brian McCrossan is a consultant paediatric cardiologist in Belfast. "It is the sad truth that children waiting for a heart or lung transplant do wait twice as long as adults," he says. "And what that means is that more children die waiting for a heart or lung transplant than would be the case." 'I am very grateful' While Aimee waits, 11-year-old Ryan O'Callaghan is recovering. He had his heart transplant 15 months ago, a bitter sweet time as he appreciates someone's death allowed him to live. "I am very grateful for it. I feel very lucky and I feel like more people should have that opportunity as well," he says. "Now I can go up the stairs with ease. I can do what normal kids do, I can play football, I can play with my dog, I can even run." Ryan is telling his story via the Children's Heartbeat Trust to help others. "Before I couldn't go up and down the stairs. I'd be out of breath all the time, and I know I was annoying - well just a little bit." When asked how he felt having a new heart inside he says: "It's actually kind of fun. It's probably better than your old one." His family really appreciates the meaning of life thanks to the generosity of others. "One of the amazing things is adults can donate organs to children and children can donate to children but often there is still not enough," says Ryan's dad, Shane. "Sadly, it takes a tragedy to happen but it means you can give something back to society. "The gift of seeing somebody, in our case leading a completely new life, and the opportunity to do things that Ryan could never do - we are so very, very lucky."	Imagine being 10 years old and waiting for a heart transplant.
+text: The plans will mean a 50p increase in several Douglas car parks as well as the introduction of charges for civil servants and politicians, while school bus journeys will no longer be free. The moves are part of the government's bid to raise £500,000 by next April. Infrastructure Minister Phil Gawne said: "Increases on this scale will not be contemplated in the years ahead." He added: "Charging for services that have previously been free or heavily subsidised is never going to be popular. "The department has not focused on charges in isolation when looking to meet its budget - job cuts and the streamlining of services have been by far the biggest part of this process." The move to put parking charges up follows a public consultation which ran until the end of July. In 2010, the island was left with a £175m hole in its budget - about a third of its projected total income - when the UK announced changes to its VAT revenue-sharing agreement with the island. Since then about 600 government posts have been cut - 8% of all staff. Other cost-saving measures include the introduction a pay-and-display system on Douglas Promenade, a £25 charge for residential permits, a 50p charge for school bus journeys and an increase in the eligibility age for pensioners' bus passes. A 30-minute free parking period at the Isle of Man Airport will also be axed. The date for the changes to be introduced has yet to be finalised. Related Internet Links Isle of Man Government	Proposals to increase parking charges in the Isle of Man have been announced by the infrastructure department.
+text: In the past 24 hours, the number of positive cases linked to the 2 Sisters factory has risen by 11 to 188. Health officials said 164 workers at the chicken factory had now tested positive, along with 24 contacts. They confirmed that the plant was set to reopen next Monday following a two-week closure. It is understood staff will be given training before the factory restarts fully on Tuesday. The decision was made after risk assessments were carried out by the Health and Safety Executive, Food Standards Scotland and Environmental Health. Extra steps have also been taken to ensure workers are physically distanced and further hygiene measures have been put in place. However, indoor visiting in the area's care homes remains suspended until at least next Friday (4 September). This will be reviewed in the middle of next week. The plant employs 1,200 workers, including approximately 300 agency staff. All workers and their household contacts must continue to self-isolate and must not leave their homes, unless it is an emergency, until 31 August, even if they have a negative result. In a statement, the company said: "Whilst it is important to ensure our measures on site are robust and working, we believe it is also critically important for our people to understand their obligations away from the factory in the local community, which our initial analysis suggests has played a significant role in the transmission of the virus." The statement said staff would receive training and best practice guides on issues ranging from transport arrangements, conduct in the community, to keeping Covid-safe in a shared household. "We expect each and every colleague to take personal responsibility for their own behaviours outside of work," it added. Self-isolation guidance Dr Emma Fletcher, associate director of public health and chairwoman of the Incident management Team (IMT) said, "The IMT considered the risk assessments and were satisfied that the factory should be able to reopen from Monday, 31 August. "The majority of staff will be able to return from Monday, August 31. However, those who have had positive tests themselves, or those who live with a positive case, must follow the specific self-isolation guidance they have been given and not return to work until their period of isolation is over." All of the non-agency workers at the factory are receiving full pay while the plant is closed. Support, including food parcels, is being offered to all workers by councils in Perth and Kinross, Dundee, and Angus.	A food processing plant in Coupar Angus that was closed due to a cluster of Covid-19 cases has been given the go-ahead to reopen next week.
+text: Liverpool City Region's Steve Rotheram backed London Mayor Sadiq Khan who has called for the wearing of masks while travelling to become compulsory. He said the "time has come" for people to start using masks in public. Hospital bosses said earlier that NHS mask supplies could be "at risk" if the general population start wearing them. The advice currently issued by the government is that there is no strong evidence that wearing face masks in public lowers the spread of infection, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said. Mr Rotheram said after speaking to "leaders of cities all over the world", he had found "a growing move towards encouraging people to wear non-medical masks in public, or some kind of facial covering". "It is common practice in certain parts of Asia and we've seen major cities like New York and countries across Europe also back this approach," he said. He added that wearing a mask was "not a substitute" to following social distancing advice, but he believed "the time has come that anybody in public spaces should also cover their face to protect others". He referenced a letter from 100 doctors published in The Times at the weekend, in which they said they were "alarmed at official inaction" over the use of homemade face masks, adding that it was "illogical" to advise people to wear masks if they are showing symptoms, but not if they appear symptom-free. However, the World Health Organization has said there is no evidence to support the use of face masks by the general public.	The public should wear masks when they leave their homes to help slow the spread of coronavirus, a region's mayor has said.
+text: The Google Play store lets Android users buy and download apps using a simple interface, although Google takes a 30% cut of sales made. Epic Games' chief executive Tim Sweeney said 30% was "disproportionate" to the contribution Google made. The studio has not yet announced when the game will arrive on Android. Fortnite Battle Royale sees 100 players land on an island to look for weapons and build defences. The person who survives the longest wins. The game is free to play, although gamers can choose to buy cosmetic customisations such as clothes and dance moves for their character. In a statement about the decision to avoid Google Play, sent to news site The Verge, Mr Sweeney said that Epic Games wanted to have a "direct relationship with our customers on all platforms where that's possible". Fortnite is already available to download on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch via each platform's official store. It is also available on the iPhone and iPad via Apple's app store, where Apple takes a 30% cut of sales. However, these platforms are tightly controlled, and make it difficult for people to install software from unofficial sources. 'Store tax' In contrast, Fortnite can be easily installed on a PC or Mac from Epic Games' own website. Third-party apps can also be installed on Android phones from the web browser, if the correct permissions are enabled on the handset. However, novice users are typically discouraged from doing so, because apps from unknown sources could pose a security risk. Fake versions of Fortnite, promising to give Android users access to the game, have been circulated online. In a longer statement published by games site Eurogamer, Mr Sweeney said gamers should "only install software from sources you trust". Fortnite Battle Royale has become a global hit and has more than 125 million players worldwide. Mr Sweeney said Google's 30% "store tax" was a "high cost in a world where game developers' 70% must cover all the cost of developing, operating and supporting their games. "30% is disproportionate to the cost of the services these stores perform." According to Eurogamer, the company would also have avoided Apple's app store, if it had been possible.	The developer of Fortnite has confirmed it will bypass the Google Play app store when the game is released for Android smartphones.
+text: But British Transport Police said that overall the number of crimes committed had fallen for the seventh consecutive year. New figures show a 5.1% reduction in crime between April 2010 and March 2011. The rising cost of copper and metal is thought to have fuelled the 186 cable thefts recorded in the past 12 months. A total of 4,879 crimes were committed on railways across Scotland last year. They included trespassing, stone-throwing, obstruction and line-side vandalism. Violent crimes - including assaults on rail staff - fell from 415 to 328. There were also fewer robberies and sexual offences. Real challenge More passengers had belongings stolen, with the number of recorded thefts of property rising from 335 to 350. Ch Supt Ellie Bird, area commander for Scotland, said: "A record seventh year of reducing crime is a remarkable achievement and is indeed testament to the hard work of our officers and partners. "While I welcome the continued reduction in crime, cable theft continues to cause significant disruption and remains a real challenge for us, the rail industry and other utilities and businesses. "These thieves put themselves in grave danger, although the actual returns are pretty modest." She added: "We are working closely with our rail industry partners and other organisations, such as BT and Sepa, as well as increasing the resources devoted to this resource to find more effective ways of reversing this trend."	Cable thefts on Scotland's railways have more than trebled in the past year.
+text: The 16-year-old boy suffered the bullet wound shortly before 04:00 BST in Thricknells Close, Marsh Farm. He was taken to hospital where he is in a serious but stable condition. Police have offered a £1,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction, and are stepping up armed patrols in the area. Patrols will be doubled and will be using stop and search powers to ensure public safety. 'Gun crime increase' Assistant Chief Constable Andrew Richer said: "We understand that there will be a number of law abiding citizens who will be affected by this action. "However, we hope that they will understand that this action is being taken to keep them and their loved ones safe and they will agree with us that this level of criminality will not be tolerated. "These measures are being used to ensure those who commit these crimes are stopped so we would ask the public for their forbearance." Assistant Chief Constable Richer said: "Since January we have seen an escalation in gun crime in the town and this issue remains a top priority for the force. Over the last few weeks numerous warrants have been executed and 11 people arrested in connection with ongoing drugs and firearms inquiries. 'Targeted incident' "There have also been two firearms and ammunition recovered." A man was seen leaving the area at the time the shooting happened and he is described as white, in his mid-teens, wearing a blue top and blue jeans, police said. Det Insp Sean Quinn said: "We are in the early stages of this investigation and are piecing together exactly what happened. "However, we believe this was a targeted incident and we would urge anyone who has information about this shooting or anyone who can help identify the person seen leaving the scene to contact the police immediately. "They can do this in complete confidence and we can reassure them that any information given will be used confidentially."	A teenager is in a serious condition in hospital after being shot in the back in Luton in a "targeted" attack - the ninth shooting in the town this year.
+text: According to the Sunday Times, 11 of the company's biggest franchisees have written to the board threatening to "declare war" on the firm unless they get a bigger slice of the company's profits. They warned they could stop opening new stores if their demands were not met. Domino's declined to comment. In total the firm has about 70 franchisees to whom it supplies ingredients and other goods and services. But the disgruntled operators, which have set up a group called Domino's Franchise Association UK & Ireland, say they face rising costs and want more support from the company. They also say they are being asked to open more sites in existing locations - something that benefits the wider company and customers but eats into their profits. A record 95 new Domino's stores were opened in 2017 - mostly by the biggest franchisees - but the firm is targeting a more modest 60 this year, in part because of the row. It's put pressure on the FTSE 250 firm's shares, which are down by about a third since June. Some analysts believe Domino's will be unable to meet a goal of having of 1,600 stores in the UK - up from the current 1,060 - while the conflict rumbles on. Despite the market moves, sales at the group sales have been growing, climbing 6% to £303.3m in the third quarter. The firm also continues to open stores despite a wider consumer spending slowdown driven by concerns about Brexit and a rise in inflation.	Shares in Domino's Pizza Group have dived 7% amid reports of an escalating row between the firm and its franchisees.
+text: Mia, a Bichon Frise, was stolen from Adam Harcup close to his home in Wraysbury in Berkshire. He and his family began a social media campaign to bring her home about five weeks ago. Mr Harcup said he was "shocked" when he got a phone call from a dog warden to say Mia had been found. He said: "We were all devastated. We were in shock that somebody had just stolen our dog. "I ran into the house to get my car keys to follow them, but I didn't know where they had gone. "We rang the police and put loads of messages on Facebook. We had people sharing the posts the length and breadth of the country." On 11 May, he said he got a phone call from a Leicester dog warden who scanned her microchip after she had been found wandering the streets. "I drove up the next morning to get her," he said. "[The kids] were over the moon. She was a bit dirty, so we gave her a bit of pampering. "But I don't think she's been affected by it - she's behaving as if nothing has happened and she's just been away on a holiday. "If only dogs could talk, she could tell us what went on."	A dog that was bundled into the back of a car in front of its owner has been found about 100 miles (160 km) away in Leicester.
+text: By Robbie MeredithBBC News NI Education Correspondent That is because it is still not clear if they will be treated as non-EU students after Brexit. Non-EU students pay much higher fees than students from the Republic and the rest of the EU. There are calls for the Irish government to provide clarity on the matter. There has been a a gradual rise in the number of students from Northern Ireland in the Republic in recent years. They pay a "student contribution" fee of €3,000 (£2,700) a year towards their tuition, the same as their counterparts from Ireland and the EU. The majority receive a student loan to cover that charge. 'Impossible to pay' However, those fees could rise by at least €10,000 (£9,000) a year if Northern Ireland students were classed as non-EU after Brexit. Students from Northern Ireland who are already at an Irish university have been told their current fees will not change over the course of their degree. However, pupils intending to begin their studies in September have received no such clarity, in spite of the first stage of the university application process in the Irish Republic closing on 1 February. One of those affected is north Belfast sixth-former Hannah Kerr, who has applied to study at Trinity College in Dublin and the National University of Ireland in Galway. She could face tuition fees of €19,000 (£17,000) a year depending on the course she chooses and she said that would be impossible for her to pay. "There's no way anybody really could afford to pay that much, when you could be paying around £4,000 here or £9,000 in the rest of the UK," she said. "I would really just hope for some clarity to be provided on that." "It's very frustrating to not know because obviously it's a huge decision that's going to impact the rest of your life. "So if we don't have all the information there at our disposal we can't make that decision as best we can." 'Really need guidance' Nichola Mallon, the SDLP MLA for north Belfast, said that the Irish government needed to give Northern Ireland pupils financial clarity. "The lack of certainty around fees and the status of northern students is causing huge anxiety and confusion," she said. "Where people can provide some kind of direction they should and we really need direction, guidance and advice from the Irish government." The Republic of Ireland's Department for Education and Skills has so far been unable to tell BBC News NI when any decision is likely to be made. Sources at universities in the Republic have said they expect the existing fees for Northern Ireland students to continue after Brexit. But, until that is confirmed, those like Hannah and others looking south to start university are left in limbo.	Northern Ireland pupils applying to start university in the Republic of Ireland this year still do not know how much they will pay in tuition fees.
+text: The proposal by DK Ice Enterprises will see unit four of the Western Centre converted into a 17m x 34m rink. It comes after the John Nike Leisuresport (JNL) complex announced in July that its dry ski slope and ice rink would permanently close. Bracknell Forest Council received 336 letters supporting the new facility, which will be named the Ozone Ice Rink. Almost 12,000 people signed a petition to keep the JNL complex open after it shut, leaving 67 members of staff redundant. The closure also resulted in the Berkshire town's ice hockey team, the Bracknell Bees, changing its name and relocating to Slough. Letters in support of the new facility on Western Road said it would "give our young people and alike a real boost" and allow them to "carry on doing what they love". However, the council also received eight letters of objection, citing concerns about the quantity of parking and the new rink's smaller size in comparison to the one at the JNL. The new ice rink will only be available for pre-booked "elite" sports and training, with no access allowed for walk-in sessions. 'Sub-standard' Local resident Robert Francis said he could not support the plan "on this token scale". "If we support this we commit ourselves to a sub-standard ice rink offering for probably decades to come," he added. A council report recommending the plans for approval said the applicant had demonstrated there were no other suitable sites in or around the town centre. The report added: "The proposed development is not considered to have an adverse impact on the character of the area or residential amenity, and the parking in conjunction with the proposed travel plan is considered acceptable." Related Internet Links Bracknell Forest Council	Plans to bring ice skating back to Bracknell by building a new rink at an industrial estate have been approved.
+text: Initially priced at $20 a share, they closed at $29.68. The company, which makes wristbands that track your calories and footsteps, raised $732m (£460m) from the share sale. Fitbit plans to use the money raised for research and development and possible acquisitions. Unlike many technology companies to list, the company is already profitable, making $131.8m in net income in 2014 with sales of 10.9 million devices last year. Market leader Fitbit's Woody Scal told the BBC that the company was just at the beginning of its journey. "There's tremendous innovation ahead in hardware and in what sensors can say about what the body is doing," said Mr Scal. "And then it's about taking that information and helping motivate people. The next step is guiding them to what they can do with that information." It is currently the market leader in the industry, according to the research firm IDC. However IDC, and others, warn that it faces stiff competition in the the form of Apple's newly-launched watch, as well as from Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, which makes the Mi-Band. "Demand from emerging markets is on the rise and vendors are eager to meet these new opportunities," said Ramon Llamas from IDC in a research note. "What remains to be seen is how Apple's arrival will change the landscape," he added. "The Apple Watch will likely become the device that other wearables will be measured against, fairly or not. This will force the competition to up their game in order to stay on the leading edge of the market." Julie Ask, mobile analyst at Forrester believes that Fitbit still needs to work out a way of generating sustainable revenue from services connected to its devices. "This battle will be won or lost by the company that can provide services that motivates the consumer to change their behaviour. It's not just the hardware that counts," she said. Fitbit is also facing two lawsuits from its rival Jawbone, which accuse Fitbit of stealing data and patents. It denies the accusations.	Shares in the wearable technology company Fitbit have soared nearly 50% on their first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
+text: By John CampbellBBC News NI Economics & Business Editor Darren Donnelly confirmed his interest in the Ballymena business on Saturday. However, he has now said he is no longer pursuing a deal with the business, which has been facing financial problems. Wrightbus, which employs around 1,200 people, said it is still in discussions with "a limited number of investors". In 2016, Mr Donnelly and his father sold their main business, SDC Trailers, for almost £100m. His spokesperson said: "Whilst discussions had been ongoing over the past number of weeks, Mr Donnelly has confirmed that he has withdrawn from the process and is no longer pursuing the potential purchase of the Wrightbus company. "Mr Donnelly has no further comment to make at this time." 'We are optimistic' Wrightbus said it was "optimistic and working hard towards getting the best possible outcome for the skilled workforce we have in Ballymena". "We will ensure that staff are kept informed throughout this process. "Due to the commercial nature of these final discussions, we are unable to comment further until the process is completed." Wrightbus confirmed in July that it was seeking an investor or buyer as it faces cash flow problems. Management apologised to staff, saying the news had been "leaked" to the media. Latest accounts show Wrightbus made a pre-tax profit of about £5m on turnover of more than £181m in 2017. But its financial situation has deteriorated since then. It made two rounds of redundancies last year with 95 jobs going in February and June - which it said reflected continued low levels of demand for new buses in the UK market.	A leading Northern Ireland industrialist who had been in the running to buy Wrightbus has withdrawn from the process.
+text: Enterprise Minister Edwina Hart said the cash paid for oxygen to be pumped to seabass being raised at the former Selonda (UK) plant at Penmon. Mrs Hart said the payment last month kept the fish alive while the firm was bought by Anglesey Aquaculture. The fish farm, established in 2002, produces 1,000 tonnes of sea bass every year. Future secured In a letter to the Tory AM Antoinette Sandbach, Mrs Hart wrote: "In November 2011, Selonda (UK) Limited approached the Welsh government regarding its cash flow difficulties, following technological and production problems encountered last summer. "The Welsh government made a one off payment of £40k to the suppliers of air products for the site in December 2011. "This enabled the company to keep the current stock of fish alive in the short term whilst alternative arrangements for ownership of the site were explored with administration Pricewaterhouse. "The seabass farm has now been sold to Anglesey Aquaculture Ltd who now own and manage the site securing both the facility and the jobs." Mrs Hart added the new owners had been made aware of their animal welfare and environmental obligations. In October 2011 the previous owners Selonda (UK) pleaded guilty to permitting the discharge of "trade effluent and chemicals" in a prosecution brought by Environment Agency Wales.	The Welsh government says a £40,000 grant has saved 32 jobs and millions of farmed fish on Anglesey.
+text: Dreamland heritage amusement park, which opened in June, has 17 vintage fairground attractions from funfairs around the UK. The listed, wooden Scenic Railway, which was to be the star attraction at the park, has not yet opened. Thanet District Council's cabinet has approved a proposal to fund the shortfall with a loan paid for by revenue from Dreamland's car park. The main areas of the project which overspent were the Scenic Railway restoration, external areas of the park and professional fees, the cabinet was told. Thanet's cabinet approved additional funding of £2.25 million for the project, including the car park contribution, the council has announced. The council said the overspend of £396,000 on professional fees was due to the work carried out over the compulsory purchase of the site. The site on Margate seafront had been closed for 10 years with campaigners fighting to save it from development. The council said: "The original budgets have to be based on estimations that often need revising as the project advances. "In this instance this is due mainly to unforeseen works on site and the elongation of the project timeline due to the compulsory purchase process." The wooden Grade II*-listed rollercoaster, badly damaged in an arson attack in 2008, was not restored in time for the opening. Testing on the Scenic Railway's trains is continuing, the council said. Dreamland's history 1920 Dreamland opens with Scenic Railway rollercoaster 1939 Site requisitioned by the government and closed for the duration of World War Two 1946 Park reopens, with additional funding a year later from Butlins 1980 The opening of the then largest Big Wheel in Europe 2002 Scenic Railway rollercoaster gets Grade-II listed status 2005 Park closed and site sold to Margate Town Centre Regeneration Company. Save Dreamland Campaign set up 2008 Scenic Railway badly damaged in arson attack. 2012 Thanet District Council approves compulsory purchase order. Wayne Hemingway becomes theme park designer 2013 Council takes over ownership of the site 2015 First phase of new Dreamland opens on 19 June	The £18m project to restore a seaside funfair has overspent by more than £2m.
+text: There is an increased police presence in the town after dozens of migrants tried to storm a ferry bound for Dover. Police are giving drivers guidance to avoid unwittingly taking on migrants as some seeking to enter the UK have attempted to jump into vehicles. A large influx of migrants has arrived at Calais in recent months. Earlier this week scores of illegal migrants tried to run up the main ramp of a ferry bound for the UK, but were foiled when the crew raised the ramp and turned a fire hose on them. They were later detained by French police. Mayor of Calais Natacha Bouchart has threatened to blockade the port unless the UK helps to control the number of migrants, claiming the town has been "taken hostage" by more than 1,000 migrants who want to cross the channel. Many of the migrants are from African countries, including Somalia, Sudan and Eritrea, while others have fled from the conflict in Syria. It has been reported that clashes have erupted between rival African migrants. At the scene Duncan Crawford, BBC News in Calais "We will continue until the end. Human rights for all," said one banner held aloft by some of the migrants. "Stop beating us," stated another. About 200 had gathered in Calais to protest and make their voices heard. Police officers watched on as they marched through the streets. Many of the migrants are from East Africa, from places like Sudan and Eritrea. Almost all say they left their homes to escape poverty or persecution. Noreldin, 30, from Darfur, Sudan, told me he paid people smugglers 1,000 euros to go by boat from Libya to Italy, before arriving in Calais last month. Now he spends his days trying to reach Britain. "Sometimes I try under the truck, sometimes inside the truck," he says. He adds that he's already risked his life seven times trying to smuggle himself across the Channel. There are many more like him. 'Migration no crime' The protesters who took to the streets handed out a statement to journalists signed "the migrant communities in Calais". It read: "Migration is not a crime and each and every one of us has reasons why we had to leave our countries and our families and why we are here now. "Europe is always talking about human rights and freedom but we cannot find this here. "This is why we want to demonstrate and bring our demands on the streets." Former Conservative Home Secretary Lord Howard, who was the MP for Folkestone and Hythe until 2010, said the UK was not a soft touch for migrants. "I've some sympathy for the mayor of Calais and the problems which she's had to face but she's directing her frustration and her anger at the wrong target. "The general principle which every member state of the European Union has subscribed to is that people fleeing persecution should apply for asylum in the first safe country they reach. "France used to take this very seriously. When I was home secretary we had agreement with France under which if people came to the United Kingdom from France and claimed asylum we would return them to France, and France dealt with their claim." Richard Ashworth, Conservative MEP for South East England which includes Dover, said it was not just for the UK government to do something. He said: "These are large-scale, organised, people-trafficking criminal gangs who are bringing the people here. It is the criminal gangs who are doing it and as far as I'm aware there hasn't been a single prosecution of a criminal gang. "The police forces right throughout Europe - and I'm not just talking about the United Kingdom here - through France, through Italy, Greece or any other country they come through should be doing more to stop and arrest those criminal gangs." 'Scandalous' Kent Police Roads Policing Unit said three men were arrested on Friday on suspicion of illegal entry to the UK. One man was found clinging onto the bottom of a mobile home on the M20 motorway and was later handed over to the Home Office. Two other men were later detained having been found under another mobile home, the unit said. A worker at a migrants' charity clothes shop called on UK Prime Minister David Cameron to offer help to the migrants, saying they were becoming overwhelmed by the situation. Volunteer Pascal Froehly said: "I have seen men women and children sleeping in the snow. I have seen people running on lorries. It's scandalous." He added: "This is Europe. You call yourself civilised and you allow women and children to walk around unprotected on the street. It's that bad." In 2002 the French government closed the main Red Cross centre at Sangatte near Calais, but insanitary illegal camps have constantly sprung up in its place since then. In recent months French police have tried to break up the camps, but the migrants say they have nowhere else to go. They can often be seen sheltering under plastic bags and sheets, with many depending on charities for food. UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said on Thursday that Home Secretary Theresa May had been in touch with the French government on the issue and added: "We will do whatever is needed with the French authorities to make sure that our border is safe."	Migrants in Calais have taken part in a protest asking for human rights protection amid rising tensions at the French port.
+text: The event determines who will lead the Party. Those people will go on to lead the 1.3 billion people of China - most of whom don't get a say - and helm the world's second largest economy. The 19th congress will begin on 18 October and while significant leadership changes are expected current Party leader and Chinese President Xi Jinping is widely expected to stay in the top job. What does the congress do? In mid-October, Communist Party of China (CPC) delegates from across China will meet at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. The party has 2,300 delegates - although only 2,287 have been elected to attend, with reports suggesting the remaining 13 delegates were disqualified because of "improper behaviour". Behind closed doors, those CPC delegates will elect the powerful Central Committee, which has about 200 members. This committee in turn elects the Politburo and from that, the Politburo Standing Committee is chosen. Those are China's real decision-making bodies. The Politburo currently has 24 members, while the Standing Committee has seven, although these numbers have varied over the years. While there is a vote, in reality many of these people have already been handpicked by the current leadership, and the committee just approves their edict. The Central Committee also elects the Party's top leader - the general secretary - who becomes the country's president. That is, and will most likely continue to be, Xi Jinping. What do we expect this year? The 19th Congress will be closely watched for two main things. First, Mr Xi will deliver a lengthy report that will be scrutinised by analysts for signs on China's political policy direction for the next five years. Secondly, the Politburo Standing Committee is expected to be nearly completely refreshed. In recent years, the party has set informal term and age limits on certain posts. Most Politburo members are expected to step down as they are past the informal retirement age of 68. They include Wang Qishan, head of the anti-corruption agency, although as a key Xi ally he may be persuaded to stay. Mr Xi and Premier Li Keqiang are in their early 60s. We would normally expect to see a new line-up of future leaders presented to the public at the congress - including a possible eventual successor to Mr Xi - who would take over in five years' time. However, there is some speculation Mr Xi might break with tradition this time round and delay this step. What else does it mean for Xi Jinping? It's likely there'll be a further overall consolidation of power by Mr Xi. He has assumed an unprecedented number of positions since coming to power in 2012, including the title of a "core" leader of China, which puts him on par with past political giants like Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. There are likely to be more of his allies placed in leadership positions at the congress, and we may see the enshrining of his policies, known as "Xi Jinping Thought", in the party charter. That move would again place him on the level of Mao in Chinese political history. Some believe he may even announce a move that would extend his rule past the traditional two-term limit for the presidency. Since becoming president in 2012, Mr Xi has spearheaded a sweeping anti-corruption campaign which has seen more than a million officials disciplined. It has been seen by some as a massive internal purge of opponents. A movement dubbed by some as "the cult of Xi" has also emerged, with propaganda songs dedicated to him and a deluge of positive press in state media, who have coined a nickname aimed at endearing him to citizens - "Xi Dada", or Uncle Xi. What does this mean for the rest of the world? Analysts believe that while a major reshuffle of the Standing Committee could herald some policy changes, by and large China would continue on the same track, with Mr Xi still at the helm to ensure stability. At home, China's five-year economic reform plan is still in play, as is Mr Xi's anti-corruption campaign and growing authoritarian rule. China's push for the spotlight on the global stage, fronted by Mr Xi, is also expected to continue. This ranges from the controversial South China Sea expansion and the One Belt One Road trade project, to China's positioning as the alternative superpower compared to the US under President Donald Trump. But one tricky question that remains is North Korea and its ongoing nuclear crisis. Some analysts believe that China would continue to hold back from taking decisive action as, even after the congress, its new leadership would still be "mired in internal debate" on how to handle its hot-tempered neighbour.	Every five years, the eyes of the world turn to China as the ruling Communist Party holds its congress.
+text: By Emma Jane KirbyBroadcasting House, BBC Radio 4 "The thing about Dickens," says food historian Pen Vogler as she takes a tray of caraway seed biscuits out of the oven, "is that he knew what it was like to be hungry." She's explored how cuisine shaped his writing in her recipe book, Dinner With Dickens. In it she recreates dishes that the literary giant wrote about, and shows how he used food to create character and comedy but also highlighted social issues. She's also whipped up a Christmas pudding but thankfully has avoided making gruel. "Dickens did not have food security as a child," continues Pen as she slips the steaming biscuits onto a wire rack to cool. "His novels often contain innocent, hungry children - he wanted to show readers that good food and nourishment were a human right, even if you were poor." When Charles Dickens was 12, his father was imprisoned for debt and while the rest of the family went to live with him in prison, Charles was sent to work in a blacking factory where he had to manage his tiny wages to buy penny buns and bread to eat. His interest in food, says Pen, stems from this time. In his writing, his characters' attitude to food often gives us clues to their morality. Fat adults often starve thin children; characters who share and enjoy lavish feasts are good, characters who make lavish food just for show or who waste food are generally bad. Think Miss Havisham's wedding cake…. "If the right emotional feelings are not there, it is worse than worthless," says Pen. "Food's got to be enjoyed in the right way and appreciated. Food for him was much more emotional than showy." Charles Dickens was a serious foodie (check out his leg of mutton stuffed with oysters) who was famous for his generous dinner parties; his wife Catherine even published a little book of recipes to suit all budgets. "If Dickens had been alive today," muses Pen as she chops apples, "I could definitely see him judging Bake Off, although he was much more of a savoury man than a pudding man." She grates some nutmeg. "There are very few cakes and puddings in his writings except in the autobiographical David Copperfield where he remembers the sweet tooth and treats of childhood." Pen's little black cat watches attentively from the floor as she stirs currants into her Christmas pudding mix. She tips in a very generous amount of brandy. "Dickens loved a drink!" she says. "He even sent a recipe to a friend for punch so we know exactly how he made it - and his characters drink it all the time! He also drank champagne and claret for celebrations and things we've lost the taste for like purl, flip, dog's nose and wassail." In 1843, Dickens published A Christmas Carol, which contained the famous scene of the Cratchits contentedly gathered round the crackling fire with their goose, apples and oranges, chestnuts and the "speckled cannon ball" pudding. With his emphasis on a family gathering, believes Pen, Dickens set the template for today's Christmas celebrations. "Until the publication of a Christmas Carol," says Pen, "Christmas pudding was known only as plum pudding - but after that, plum pudding was afterwards always referred to as Christmas pudding… and if you think about it, our Christmas menu hasn't changed since the Cratchits!" Leg of Mutton Stuffed with Oysters Young John Chivery, son of the Marshalsea Turnkeeper, is rewarded for running "mysterious missions" with a banquet, for which Miss Rugg "with her own hands stuffed a leg of mutton with oysters." Dickens invited Daniel Maclise to share the same dish before a night walk through the slums (letter, November 20, 1840), and later invented his own twist, adding veal to the stuffing, served at the office of his journal, Household Words. SERVES 6-8 2 tablespoons freshly chopped flat-leaf parsley 1 dessertspoon freshly chopped thyme leaves 1 dessertspoon freshly chopped savoury 2 hard-boiled egg yolks 6 oysters, cleaned, shucked, and chopped, reserving the liquor, or 6 finely chopped anchovies 3 garlic cloves, minced (I think garlic is better than onion in this dish, but if you prefer to follow Catherine, use one very finely chopped shallot) leg of mutton (or lamb if you cannot find mutton), approx. 5½-6¾ lb/2.5-3kg 2 teaspoons all-purpose/plain flour 1¼ cups/300ml lamb or chicken stock Preheat the oven to 425°F/220°C/Gas 7. Chop the herbs as finely as possible - a meat cleaver is useful for this. Bind them together with the egg yolks, oysters (or anchovies), and garlic (or shallot). Using a sharp knife, make about 6 indentations in the fleshy part of the leg of mutton (or lamb) and push in the mixture. If you make the indentations at a slight angle, you can pull the fat back over the cut. Place the meat in a roasting pan and roast in the preheated oven for about 30 minutes, then turn the oven down to 325°F/160°C/Gas 3. Baste the joint with the fat and juices in the pan and continue roasting for 15-20 minutes per 1 lb/450g. When the meat is done, remove it from the oven, cover with foil, and let it rest for 15-20 minutes. Make the gravy by mixing the flour with the fat in the roasting dish over a low heat, and slowly adding the stock and the oyster liquor. Skim the fat off the gravy (putting it in the freezer helps it coagulate on the top) and serve as it is, or add to the Piquant Sauce ingredients PIQUANT SAUCE 1 shallot, finely chopped a little oil 1 tablespoon finely chopped gherkins 1 tablespoon finely chopped capers 4 tablespoons good red wine vinegar 1 anchovy fillet, pounded Sweat the shallot in the oil until it softens, then add the gherkins, capers, and vinegar. Simmer for 4 minutes. Make gravy from the joint, add the oyster liquor (to make about 1¼ cups/300ml), the shallot mixture, and the pounded anchovy. Simmer for a few minutes before serving in a gravy boat. "Adult hunger is dangerous in Dickens," warns Pen as she puts the kettle on for tea. In A Tale of Two Cities, adult hunger leads to riot and revolution, and in Great Expectations, the hungry Magwitch, an escaped convict, is dangerous and frightening to young Pip who must steal food for him. The seedy biscuits are delicious - the same kind that the young David Copperfield offered to a little girl he had fallen in love with as a token of his esteem- and they go beautifully with our Darjeeling tea. Pen has worked out that good characters take tea in Dickens' work while the slightly dubious ones tend to drink coffee. Under the circumstances, it seems only polite to pour another cup and have another soft seedy biscuit... You can hear more on BBC Radio 4's Broadcasting House programme on Sunday 24 December from 09:00 GMT. Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	Charles Dickens was a serious foodie and his literature introduced a festive menu that has barely changed since the Cratchits gathered round their table in A Christmas Carol.
+text: Earlier the Electoral Office described voting as "steady". A total of 819 candidates were standing. Polling stations opened at 07:00 BST and closed at 22:00 BST in the proportional representation election. Turnout reports from polling stations at 17:00 BST ranged from a low of 15% in east Belfast to as high as 36% in one venue in the north of the city. The final turnout in the last council elections five years ago was just over 51%. Full lists of the candidates standing in each council area can be found on the Electoral Office's website. A total of 1,305,553 people were eligible to vote. The single transferable vote (STV) system is used in council elections, in which voters rank candidates by numerical preference. Voters marked their ballot with 1, 2, 3 and so on and could indicate as many or as few preferences as they wanted. Candidates are then elected according to the share of the vote they receive. Analysis By Mark Devenport, BBC News NI Political Editor In advance of this election there had been some concern expressed that the turnout might be down, perhaps due to public disenchantment with politics, perhaps because for the first time in more than two decades these council elections were not happening in tandem with another contest. In the event the good weather seems to have brought the voters out in force, with reports of people having to queue to get into some polling stations. So it may be we will match the turnout in the last council election five years ago, which was 51%. Counting begins in the morning, and results will start to be declared during the afternoon. But the full makeup of our new councils won't be clear until Saturday. The number of candidates was down from the 905 people who put their names forward for the previous council elections five years ago. Counting in the elections will begin on Friday morning. BBC News NI will cover the latest election results and analysis on its website, mobile app and on Facebook and Twitter on Friday and throughout the weekend. There will also be special election programmes on BBC Radio Ulster from 16:00 on Friday and 10:00 on Saturday and on BBC Radio Foyle from 17:00 on Friday. Television coverage will be on BBC One Northern Ireland at 15:30 on Friday, BBC Two Northern Ireland at 19:30 on Friday and 10:00 on Saturday, with an hour-long Sunday Politics programme on the same channel at 11:00 on Sunday.	The polls have closed in the elections for 462 new members of Northern Ireland's 11 district councils.
+text: Council leader Rosemarie Harris said it could raise up to £60,000 a year for causes the cash-strapped authority could no longer fund from its budget. Stephen Hayes, cabinet member for adult services, said he feared adding to the burden of gambling addicts. But Myfanwy Alexander, responsible for education, said council lotteries in England had not caused new problems. The Powys cabinet - a coalition of independent and Conservative members - voted in favour of the scheme on Wednesday despite reservations from some members. The meeting heard that community groups told cabinet members at this week's Royal Welsh Winter Fair at Llanelwedd they were "excited" by the idea. Gatherwell, which runs a lottery at Aylesbury Vale District Council in England, will be invited to run the lottery in Powys. Tickets would be bought online and cost £1 with a maximum jackpot of £25,000 for matching all six numbers. A report to the cabinet said 60% of the proceeds of ticket sales would go to good causes, compared to 28% in the National Lottery. Ms Harris said she saw the lottery as being "very much like a raffle". She added: "We are in a state of reduced funding and for some years it has become increasingly difficult for us to provide grants to any community groups." The council is hoping to start the lottery in early spring and it would be the first to be run by a local authority in Wales.	Charities and voluntary groups in Powys could be among the winners as council bosses back plans for a local lottery.
+text: Judges will need to clear at least 700 cases a year in order to receive a "satisfactory" performance rating. But critics warn the plan could see hearings rushed and compromised, with an estimated 600,000 currently waiting to have their immigration cases heard. President Trump has demanded "tough" new legislation in recent days. He has posted several tweets pressing lawmakers to "act now". Administration officials say they are working on a new legislative package to close "loopholes" in current US immigration law, and may use the so-called "nuclear option" to push it through Congress with a smaller majority if necessary, the Associated Press reports. What are the changes? US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been working on new policies to help clear the backlog of pending cases in immigration courts. In its guidelines, the justice department said that setting an annual minimum on the number cases processed will ensure that hearings are completed in a "timely, efficient and effective manner". Department spokesman Devin O'Malley said judges completed an average of 678 cases a year, but some judges completed more than 1,000 cases, the Washington Post reports. But the National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ) told the Post that the system could lead to legal challenges. "It could call into question the integrity and impartiality of the court if a judge's decision is influenced by factors outside the facts of the case, or if motions are denied out of a judge's concern about keeping his or her job," NAIJ President Ashley Tabaddor said. The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) told the Daily Beast website that judges should not be put under undue pressure to clear the backlog of cases. "We're very concerned that cases will be rushed through the system and due process will be circumvented with these new quotas," AILA Senior Policy Counsel Laura Lynch said.	The US justice department is to set increase pressure on judges in an attempt to speed up the processing of immigration cases, US media report.
+text: Eilidh MacLeod, 14, died and her friend Laura MacIntyre, 15, was badly injured in the terrorist attack which killed 22 people on 22 May. The pair from the Isle of Barra were attending an Ariana Grande concert with thousands of other music fans. Sir Paul donated a special edition box set of music by The Beatles. The former Beatle has offered to personalise the 50th anniversary Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band collection of discs, which was auctioned earlier on Wednesday by Bonhams. It sold for £2,700, but the auctioneers also donated their commission. Eilidh was passionate about music and was a piper with Sgoil Lionacleit Pipe Band. Her parents, Roddy and Marion MacLeod, said they were "extremely grateful" for Sir Paul's "kind gesture". Laura's father Michael MacIntyre described the gift as "an amazing and brilliant gesture".	An auction of a gift from Sir Paul McCartney has raised more than £3,000 for Scottish families affected by the Manchester Arena attack.
+text: Talisman said 100 staff and 200 contractors would be affected, from a workforce of about 3,000. The company said it needed to take appropriate action to offset the declining oil price and increasing operating costs. BP, Shell, Chevron and Conoco Phillips have all announced reductions to their workforces recently. 'Not immune' Talisman Sinopec managing director Paul Warwick said: "Our industry is operating in a mature environment, against a backdrop of a declining oil price and ever-increasing operating costs alongside falling production levels, reduction in exploration and asset integrity and maintenance issues. "We are not immune to those challenges and are taking appropriate actions to tackle them. "We have spoken with our workforce and are supporting them through the process."	Oil company Talisman Sinopec has announced plans for 300 job losses from its North Sea operations.
+text: Repower Systems is to build five turbines for Wathegar Wind Farm in Caithness. It will also produce a total of 10 turbines for International Power's Blantyre Muir Wind Farm in South Lanarkshire and Barlockhart Moor near Glenluce in Dumfries and Galloway. Together the turbines can supply enough power for more than 17,000 homes. The deals, together with two other contracts in England, will bring Hamburg-based Repower's overall UK capacity to more than 1GW. Since its launch in 2004, Repower UK has delivered 39 onshore wind farms in Scotland, England and Wales and two offshore wind farms - Project Beatrice in the North Sea and Ormonde wind farm in the Irish Sea. Chief executive Andreas Nauen said: "Reaching 1GW of signed contracts is a huge achievement for us. Repower UK is enjoying a period of steady growth, having signed contracts totalling 190MW since the end of last year. "I believe this demonstrates the growing reputation of Repower turbines in the British market, and is a solid indication that the wind sector remains in good health."	A German firm has signed contracts to supply turbines for three onshore wind farms in Scotland.
+text: Andrew Wilson headed an SNP commission which recommended keeping the pound in the years after independence. Scotland would then introduce its own currency if a series of economic tests are met. The proposals have faced heavy criticism from some within the independence movement. They claim the plan is not radical enough, and would keep Scotland tied too closely to the UK's economic policy after independence - while opponents of independence have predicted that people will not be willing to "gamble" their mortgage, salary and pension on the proposals. But Nicola Sturgeon insisted the currency proposals were "entirely credible" when the report was published in May of last year. The SNP's deputy leader, Keith Brown, lodged his own proposals in March for an independent Scottish Parliament to decide within its first term when to introduce a separate currency. The announcement was widely seen as an attempt to find a compromise in the debate, with the party due to discuss the proposals at its conference later this month. The Scottish government proposed a formal currency union with the rest of the UK ahead of the 2014 referendum - but the move was ruled out by then-Chancellor George Osborne. In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC's Good Morning Scotland programme, Mr Wilson said the Growth Commission had aimed to offer a "more balanced view of the future, which says independence will take significant effort but that effort will be worth it." He said polling suggests people are more likely than before to believe that independence would benefit the economy in the long-term - but they remain to be convinced about how orderly the transition will be, especially given the confusion over Brexit. The former SNP MSP added: "The level of integration we've got with the rest of the UK over 300 years in financial services, in wages and pensions and mortgages is pretty unique, so we have to tend and steward the transition towards the country we want to become. "We want to be fast growing, we want our trade to diversify from overdependence on one of the slowest growing economies in the developed world. "But transitions need to be managed and they need to be managed honestly so that people can say as we're going through it we knew this was what was going to happen. "One of the big lessons from Brexit is effectively how not to do change, how not to manage transitions." Former SNP MP George Kerevan is among those to have criticised the Growth Commission's currency proposals, which he has described as "too conservative". Mr Kerevan wants a much faster transition to a separate currency, and to abolish the six tests which the commission said should be met before that happens. But in his interview with BBC Scotland's economy editor Douglas Fraser, Mr Wilson said an independent Scotland would need to "fund public services sustainably" and convince lenders that "we are a good counterparty that will pay them back". Acknowledging the criticism that has been aimed at him, he said he was "not seeking personal popularity - I'm seeking to win". 'Going to be a challenge' Mr Wilson said: "We need to win by persuading people that are currently not convinced by the case, and all of the polling evidence is suggesting they are persuaded by a message that says the case for Britain is collapsing and the case for Scotland is developing. "We have an argument that independence will be an effort. Money doesn't drop out a tree, Rome isn't built in a day, nothing falls in your lap. That's not real life. You don't win the lottery. "What happens is you get a tool box and the ability to work, and that work will be worth it. It's going to be an effort, it's going to be a challenge, but all of the evidence of history in the small best performing countries in the world is that that challenge is worth it." When the Growth Commission report was published, Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson said the SNP plan to retain sterling would leave an independent Scotland using "the currency of what would then be a foreign country without asking, without their own central bank and without any backstops". She added that the plans for what would follow sterling were not clear, adding: "I'm not entirely sure that is enough for the people of Scotland to want to gamble their mortgage on, their pensions on, their wages on and their future on." Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard said the report was a "cuts commission" rather than a growth commission. He added: "Proposals to cut Scotland's deficit by almost two thirds over a decade would result in a level of austerity that not even George Osborne attempted".	The man who drew up controversial proposals for an independent Scotland's currency has insisted they offer the best chance of winning a referendum.
+text: Professor Jonathan Van-Tam has been helping to administer the vaccine in his spare time. The city's clinical commissioning group shared photos of him wearing scrubs at the Richard Herrod Centre, in Carlton. The respiratory virus expert is a member of the University of Nottingham's School of Medicine. The Richard Herrod Centre, which usually hosts indoor bowling and social events, reopened as a vaccination hub on 6 January. "Thank you to all the volunteers and staff for the professional and warm welcome," said Prof Van-Tam. "We are at the worst stage of the pandemic so far and the situation is extremely concerning but your contribution will make a positive difference." Prof Van-Tam has served as England's deputy chief medical officer since October 2017 and has played a lead role in the national response to the pandemic. Last month he said the first wave of vaccinations could help to prevent up to 99% of Covid-19 hospitalisations and deaths. He also told BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat earlier a 24-hour vaccination centre was to be piloted at an undisclosed location "very soon". The government said 2.6m people in the UK had received their first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine up to the end of Tuesday. Follow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk. Related Internet Links NHS Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Clinical Commissioning Group	England's deputy chief medical officer has praised health workers' efforts, as he joined them to give out Covid-19 jabs at a Nottingham community centre.
+text: The presenter, who has fronted the show for 10 years, will host his final episode on 19 December. He is not leaving the BBC and will continue commentating Eurovision, judging on Drag Race UK and hosting his weekly chat show on BBC One. Norton said he was "sad to be stepping away" from Radio 2, adding that he will "miss the listeners and their lives". It has not yet been announced who will replace him on Saturday mornings. Norton took over the slot from Jonathan Ross, who left the BBC in 2010. "Obviously I'm sad to be stepping away from my Radio 2 show," he said in a statement. "I'll miss being a part of the Wogan House family, as well as the listeners and their lives. I'd like to thank my producer Malcolm Prince and all the teams I've worked with for a great decade of radio. "Happily with the chat show, Eurovision and Drag Race the BBC continues to be my perfect TV home." Norton's guests on his Radio 2 show over the last decade have included Olivia Colman, Kylie Minogue, JK Rowling and Tina Turner. Regular features include the agony aunt slot Grill Graham, with co-presenter Maria McErlane, and his pick of a cheesy song of the week, I Can't Believe It's Not Better. Charlotte Moore, the BBC's chief content officer, said he would be "hugely missed on Saturday mornings on Radio 2". "He is a first class broadcaster but I'm thrilled he's committed to continuing to be a regular fixture on the BBC," she added. Helen Thomas, Head of Radio 2 said: "For the past decade, Graham has made Saturday mornings his own on Radio 2. "His sparkling interviews, as well as his brilliant shows from the Eurovision host city each May, have kept millions of listeners entertained each week." Follow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	Graham Norton will leave his Saturday morning show on Radio 2 before the end of the year, the BBC has announced.
+text: It follows the successful completion of a pilot scheme testing new mini barriers at a level crossing in Ardrossan in Ayrshire. The first places to get them are all in the Highlands. They are Corpach, Brora, Kirkton and Dalchalm. There are 23 open level crossings in Scotland, most of them in the Highlands. Network Rail also said that a half-length barrier would be put in place at Halkirk in Caithness. £4m Upgrade It was the scene of a crash between a car and a train that killed three elderly members of the same family in September 2009. Network rail is to spend £4m on upgrading the crossings and expects to have completed the improvements by 2014. The new barriers can be installed for about £100,000 a crossing, compared to an average of more than £500,000 under the old system. David Simpson, Network Rail route managing director for Scotland, said: "The trial of this new system on single line railway at Ardrossan has been a fantastic success. "We have developed and successfully tested an affordable, innovative system that will improve the safety of open level crossings." Dave Thompson, SNP MSP for Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch, has been a vocal supporter of the new system. Welcome announcement He said: "I was delighted to see the successful completion of the new AOCL+B level crossing system at Ardrossan. "I welcome the announcement that four Highland crossings will now be upgraded forthwith. "These four barrier implementations on open Highland crossings are the initial first tranche of a roll-out to all the open crossings that remain in the Highlands." He called the move a "major step forward" in road and rail safety. Cabinet Secretary for Infrastructure and Capital Investment, Alex Neil, said: "Railway safety, including at level crossings, remains reserved to Westminster. "However, to demonstrate our commitment, the Scottish government earlier this year announced an additional £10m fund to help facilitate the closure of level crossings and I will continue to liaise with Network Rail on these issues."	All railway level crossings in Scotland are to get safety barriers, Network Rail have confirmed.
+text: Howard Quayle said families could be allowed to visit under strict controls sometime between May and August. A three-phase approach for easing the restrictions would see the island "pivot" from a strategy of elimination to one of mitigation, he said. Mr Quayle said the exit strategy was one of "balancing risks". The island's border has been closed to almost all non-residents since March last year. The progression of the phases would be aligned to the rate of vaccine delivery. Currently all adults are expected to have received their first jab by the end of May, with their second delivered by the end of July. People in the top priority groups should have received both doses by the end of June. 'Biggest threat' Those "key milestones" would enable the government to assess the levels of defence and remaining threat and "adjust our position accordingly", Mr Quayle said. The "preparation phase" would see "very little change" to the restrictions, as measures are put in place for a "much more profound set of changes" during the "transition phase", when friends and family may be allowed to visit. Those preparations are due to run into late April. The "release phase", which is expected to come into force in September, will coincide with the vaccination of the entire population, including children if the vaccine is approved for them, Mr Quayle said. He said the phases were "not set in stone" and would depend on the supply of vaccine to the island and infection rates in the UK. The border was the island's "biggest level of defence" and "biggest threat", he added. The new framework will be debated by Tynwald members next week. Why not follow BBC Isle of Man on Facebook and Twitter? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk Related Internet Links Isle of Man - Coronavirus Exit Framework Isle of Man Government - Coronavirus	Border restrictions on the Isle of Man could be lifted entirely in September if the vaccination roll-out stays on track, the chief minister has said.
+text: By Victoria GillScience correspondent, BBC News, Washington DC As it orbits the planet every 53 days - Juno performs a science-gathering dive, speeding from pole to pole. Its sensors take measurements of the composition of the planet, in an effort to decipher how the largest world in our Solar System formed. Mapping the magnetic and gravity fields should also expose Jupiter's structure. But images from JunoCam - a camera that was intended to capture images that could be shared with the public - has already given us some surprising insights. Dr Candice Hansen, from the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, is leading the JunoCam project, which she described as "our little outreach camera". She presented some of the remarkable images from the camera - raw images downloaded and processed by members of the public - at the American Geophysical Union meeting here in Washington DC. Other stories from the AGU meeting you might like: "When we made our first pass over the poles, we knew we were seeing a territory on Jupiter we had never seen before," said Prof Hansen. "What we did not expect was that we would see these orderly polygons of cyclones; huge storms - twice the size of Texas. "We thought, wow - that's spectacular." And 16 passes later, she added, those orderly arrangements of giant storms are still there. These "pretty pictures" are starting to teach scientists about how the largest planet in the Solar System formed and evolved. "The objective for the Juno mission is to study the interior structure of Jupiter and how that structure expresses itself out on the cloud tops. That's the kind of connection we're trying to make. But we're not there yet." Jack Connerney, Juno deputy principal investigator from the Space Research Corporation in Annapolis, Maryland, said that the second half of the mission would provide an even more detailed view of "what makes the whole of Jupiter tick". You can find more of these amazing images of Jupiter on the JunoCam site. Follow Victoria on Twitter	Nasa's Juno mission to the gas giant Jupiter has reached its halfway mark and has revealed new views of cyclones at the poles.
+text: The islands have the lowest cumulative total of cases in Scotland, currently 10 once three false positive results are removed from the figures. NHS Western Isles said the new cases were in Uist. All three people have mild symptoms and recovering at home. Close contacts have been advised to self-isolate and contact tracing was ongoing. Close contacts include are home and nursery staff. As a consequence, Cothrom Nursery is closed until further notice while admissions, discharges and visiting has been suspended at the Taigh a'Chridhe Uile Naomh care home. A problem assessment group has been set up to discuss the next steps and the team has been working with the Scottish government and Public Health Scotland to provide advice and support. NHS Western Isles director of public health, Dr Maggie Watts, said: "Following the identification of these positive results, the individuals involved have been asked to self-isolate for 10 days from onset of symptoms. "We are tracing all their contacts, who are also being advised to self-isolate for 14 days from the date of their last contact with the case as a precaution. "We would like to reassure our local communities and visitors to the island that we are taking all necessary steps to contain the virus." Dr Watts urged islanders to follow all Scottish government guidance on how to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Localised restrictions The new cases come amid calls by Western Isles, Shetland and Orkney islands councils for more relaxed, localised Covid-19 restrictions to be applied to their areas. In a joint letter to the Scottish government sent last week, the islands authorities said their lower rates of infections should be taken into consideration. They said some restrictions were needed but the new limits on household gatherings had been met with "dismay". Following confirmation of the three new Western Isles cases, the islands' authority Comhairle nan Eilean Siar said it would always assess new information but would still be discussing its proposal with the Scottish government. Orkney recorded a new case Thursday taking it from a total of 19 positive tests to 20. Shetland has had a total of 60 positive results since the start of the outbreak, with no new cases since 19 September, according to Scottish government figures.	Three new cases of Covid-19 have been confirmed in the Western Isles, the first positive test results since June.
+text: The county's police force confirmed last year that it was reviewing the unit, which costs about £1m a year. Police and crime commissioner (PCC) Shaun Wright said the unit would remain at its Cudworth base but the number of staff and horses would be cut. A merger with West Yorkshire's unit was considered but rejected. West Yorkshire PCC Mark Burns-Williamson said he was also likely to have to make cuts. Had the merger gone ahead, South Yorkshire's horses would have moved to Wakefield and the Cudworth base would have been closed down. The number of police officers in the mounted section is to be cut from 12 to eight, the number of support staff will go from six to four and the number of horses will be cut from 12 to 10. A force spokesman said it was hoped the cuts, which will save the force about £300,000 a year, could be achieved through natural wastage and retirements. 'Deep cuts' South Yorkshire Police is one of 16 police forces in England and Wales that still retains a mounted section. The team help to prevent disorder at events such as football matches and protests. The South Yorkshire Police Federation previously said the section was "a very useful tool and should be saved". Mr Wright said: "The horses improve South Yorkshire Police's visibility and help reduce crime. "Chief Constable David Crompton and I believe the mounted section adds value to the police service and are an effective tactic to any police operation." Mr Burns-Williamson said his force would also continue to have its own mounted section but "sustainable savings" were likely to have to be made. He said: "With such deep cuts being made to our budget we need to ensure we can keep protecting the public, such as at recent protests, and do this at the lowest possible cost."	South Yorkshire's mounted police section has been saved from closure.
+text: Permission is being sought for three single turbines over 200m (655ft) high at Graythorp Industrial Estate, Brenda Road West Industrial Estate and Tofts Road West. The Department of Energy and Climate Change said it believed these would be the highest in England and Wales. Hartlepool Borough Council has recorded about 40 objections to the plans. More than 300 consultation responses have been received from individuals, councils and other organisations. The scheme developer is Hartlepool renewable energy company Seneca Global Energy Ltd. Ward Hadaway solicitor Mark Whitehead, who is acting for the company, said single, taller turbines could generate the same volume of energy as three or four typical turbines used in other schemes. "The increase in wind speeds at height allow the volume of renewable energy generation from each turbine to be maximised, whilst having the benefit of reducing the number of turbines used," he said. "This is intended to deliver high levels of renewable power whilst minimising the visual impact on the surrounding area." Of those replying to the consultation to date, just over one in 10 object on grounds such as reduction of property value, obstruction of view and effect on wildlife. Further discussions are taking place about the location of turbines planned for Tofts Road West and Graythorp Industrial Estate. The Ramblers Association and Network Rail pointed out their current proposed site left them within "topple distance" of the nearby railway line and buildings. The application for three turbines with a maximum tip height - measured from the ground to the top of a turbine blade pointing upwards - of 206m (677ft) is due to be considered next year. By comparison, turbines at Northumberland wind farms such as Lynemouth and Middlemoor are about 120-125m (about 400ft) high. Related Internet Links Graythorp Industrial Estate plans Brenda Road West Industrial Estate plans Tofts Road West plans Hartlepool renewables Renewables map	Plans for what could be the highest wind turbines in England and Wales have been submitted in Hartlepool, Teesside.
+text: By Douglas FraserBusiness/economy editor, Scotland It also found a shortage of suitable skills at middle career level. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) Scotland said skills training has some elements that perform at least as well as the rest of Britain But it concluded that training for those aged 16 and over is not focused on current or future demand. The think tank has challenged Scots to look beyond comparison with the rest of the United Kingdom if it is to compete economically. Its report, Jobs and Skills in Scotland, found 118,000 jobs were created between 2010 and 2015, when the economy was struggling to recover from recession. However, the jobs recovery has been weaker than the rest of the UK, and Scotland's employment rate has gone, in those years, from being higher than the UK average to being lower. Jobs growth in Scotland has been in lower-skill sectors while losing jobs in higher skill industries - including financial services, down by nearly 10% in Scotland between 2010 and 2015. There has been more of a balance in Scotland between manufacturing and the service sector than across the rest of Britain, where 87% of new jobs have been in services. The gap between Scotland and the rest of Britain on average pay and productivity has been narrowed, but largely because the wider UK economy has seen productivity stall. Among the particular problems of the Scottish jobs market is the lowest rate in Britain of career progression from low-skill to higher-skill employment. British career progression is low by international standards. There is also a mismatch of job vacancies in Scotland with middle-level skills at early career level, with around 29,000 too few people qualified to fill them. IPPR Scotland recommends reform which links funding and effort more strongly to career progression, productivity and tackling in-work poverty. It urges better integration of employer needs with engagement of young people. A new regional regime is recommended, combining budgets. The think tank also recommends that skills training should be directed towards new ways of learning that prepare younger people for future jobs, linked to demographic and technological change. More ambition Russell Gunson, director of IPPR Scotland, commented: "This report shows that while Scotland has seen a jobs recovery in recent years, there are real concerns looking ahead. "Scotland needs to be more ambitious than aiming to match the UK economy. When UK pay has been falling in real-terms and productivity has stalled, we need to do more than catch up with the UK. "It's not good enough that if you are currently in a low-skilled job in Scotland, you are more likely to stay in low-skilled employment than in most of the rest of the UK, and many other countries in Europe. Keith Brown, the new economy secretary at the Scottish government, welcomed the report's positive findings about strengths in the Scottish jobs market, and pointed to the administration's commitment to expand the Modern Apprenticeship scheme over the next five years. He added: "We have announced a review of enterprise and skills agencies to ensure we maximise our skills and economic interventions to support businesses and development opportunities, develop the skills the economy needs and create a competitive and supportive business environment".	Scots in lower-skilled jobs are less likely to progress to higher-skilled ones than in the rest of the UK and much of Europe, a report has found.
+text: The company reported an 8% increase in profit to $391m (£273m) for the first three months of 2016. Yum, which also owns Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, said sales at stores in China that have been open a year or more rose 6% compared to the same quarter last year. The news boosted Yum's shares by 4% in after-hours trading. Analysts had expected just a 2.1% growth in sales in China, where Yum is the biggest Western restaurant brand. Chief executive Greg Creed said: "KFC China had an outstanding Chinese New Year bucket promotion." "This is a transformational year for our company as we remain on track to finalise the separation of our China business by year end," Mr Creed said. Yum wants to spin-off its 6,900 China restaurants, its most profitable business, by the end of 2016 in order to focus the company on US operations. It has also been losing market share to rival McDonalds in China.	KFC owner, Yum Brands, has seen a rise in profit, thanks in part to a chicken bucket deal over Chinese New Year.
+text: Murray, who won the men's doubles at the Australian Open, is made an OBE. Along with with brother Andy - a former recipient - he also helped the British team win the Davis Cup for the first time in almost eight decades. Singer Rod Stewart has been given a knighthood, while Prof Sue Black, a world-leading expert in forensic anthropology, becomes a dame. Prof Black, 55, originally from Inverness, has helped secure convictions in several high-profile criminal cases, including one of Britain's worst paedophiles Richard Huckle, who was given 23 life sentences earlier this week for abusing up to 200 children. She also helped to convict Scotland's largest paedophile ring in 2009. She was previously awarded an OBE for her work in exhuming mass graves in Kosovo. Services to politics The Dundee University professor said she was "deeply honoured" by the recognition, "if a little embarrassed". Rod Stewart, 71, who is famous for songs such as Maggie May and Sailing, was born in London, to an English mother and a Scottish father. The famous Celtic supporter receives his knighthood for services to music and charity. Lord Smith of Kelvin, the man tasked by the prime minister with chairing the cross-party commission on Scottish devolution in the wake of the 2014 independence referendum, is being made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour, which is "conferred on persons for having done conspicuous national service". The great and the good Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour - Lord Smith of Kelvin (for public service, particularly in Scotland). Knighthoods - Rod Stewart (for services to music and charity), Labour MP David Hamilton (for political and parliamentary service), Alex Fergusson (For services to politics, Scottish Parliamentary process and public life). Damehoods - Sue Black (For services to forensic anthropology) Dr Denise Coia (for services to mental health and the NHS), Prof Anna Dominiczak (for services to cardiovascular and medical science). Read the full honours list here. The Smith Commission produced a package of recommendations which has led to new tax and welfare powers being devolved to Holyrood. Lord Smith also had a key role in delivering the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. Labour MP David Hamilton, a former miner who spent two months in jail on remand during the miner's strike in the 1980s before being cleared, is given a knighthood for political and parliamentary service. Alex Fergusson, former presiding officer of the Scottish Parliament is also given a knighthood for services to politics. He has now retired as a Conservative MSP. Dr Denise Coia, is being given a damehood for services to mental health and the NHS while Prof Anna Dominiczak is being given the same honour for services to cardiovascular and medical science. Another tennis star being recognised this year is Glasgow-born Leon Smith, captain of the successful Davis Cup team, who also receives an OBE. Music awards Award-winning composer John McLeod, from Edinburgh, is honoured with a CBE for his services to music. Born in Aberdeen, he is said to be one of the UK's busiest and most prolific composers, although he initially studied the clarinet at the Royal Academy of Music in London before later changing direction to take up composition. Dr Brian Lang, who stepped down as chairman of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO) in 2015, also receives a CBE. The honour comes after his seven years in the post saw audience figures rise to the highest in a generation. Steven Torrie, former HM Chief Inspector of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, is awarded a CBE for services to fire and rescue in Scotland. Shirley Spear, a well-known figure in the food-and-drink industry is being awarded on OBE. She is the founder and former head chef of the Michelin-star winning Three Chimneys restaurant on Skye. Businessman Sir Ian Wood, who was knighted in 1994, has been appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire for services to the oil and gas industry. Many local people who have contributed to Scottish life were also honoured by the Queen with MBE's and British Empire Medals.	Tennis star Jamie Murray is among the Scots being honoured in the Queens Birthday Honours list.
+text: Eden Court, a theatre and cinema complex in Inverness, has been closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. It has cancelled live performances until 4 December, but is planning for a phased reopening of the site including its cinema later in that month. Managers said an update on plans for the venue's popular Christmas pantomime would be issued in September. Chief executive James Mackenzie-Blackman said the business was having to navigate "uncharted waters", but there was an aim to have the venue fully operational next year. He said: "We have delayed the announcement of what Christmas will look like at Eden Court to allow further lockdown easing and the publication of Scottish government guidance and advice specific to our industry. "Christmas is an incredibly important time of the year for the success of our business and so whilst so much remains uncertain we will not be rushed into decisions that we might regret in the future."	The largest arts venue in the Highlands has cancelled all live performances until the start of December.
+text: Highways officials report reduced visibility due to rain and surface water on the M4 in Cardiff and Monmouthshire on Saturday. Thousands of rugby fans expected in Cardiff for the Wales v New Zealand match have been warned that trains may be delayed if lines are flooded. South Wales is likely to bear the brunt of the heavy rain, say forecasters. The Environment Agency has two flood alerts in place covering the rivers Wye and Monnow in Monmouthshire and south Pembrokeshire, but no flood warnings. The Met Office weather warning follows Thursday's high winds and heavy rain which left homes and businesses flooded. Motorists were also badly affected and traffic was brought to a standstill as the A55 in north west Wales closed. Cardiff city centre is set to be busier than usual with festive shoppers expected in droves with just four weeks until Christmas and a 74,500 sell-out crowd at the Millennium Stadium for the rugby at 17:15 GMT. "With this in mind and with more bad weather forecast following some of the localised flooding we saw on Thursday night, I have asked the chief executive to ensure plans are in place to equip the council to deal with issues that may arise," said councillor Ashley Govier, Cardiff council's cabinet member for environment. "This includes bringing in extra resources to help our flood team." Clean up Mr Govier added that anyone attending the rugby match should consider their travel plans carefully and allow extra time to make their journey. Arriva Trains Wales said the rail network could potentially be affected by flooding and services may be delayed or cancelled at short notice. It urged people heading to the rugby match to check the status of their journey online before travelling or by ringing National Rail Enquiries. Meanwhile, the clean-up is continuing following Thursday's weather where north Wales was worst affected. Motorists were stranded, workers unable to get home from work and parents had to make arrangements after being unable to collect their children from schools in the Gwynedd and Conwy area. Rest centres were opened at Llandudno Junction, Caernarfon and Bangor overnight after drivers on the A55 in north west Wales abandoned their cars. Flash flooding hit scores of properties in Snowdonia, while winds of up to 90mph battered south-west Wales. Gwynedd council has warned residents the risk that floodwater may be contaminated and gave further advice for the weekend. "Due to the possibility of further extreme weather over the weekend which may involved standing water on roads turning to ice, we have put our gritting teams on standby," said Gareth Roberts, Gwynedd council's environment cabinet member. "We would urge motorists to check the weather reports before embarking on any journeys, especially at night, and to proceed with care," he added. Members of the public who experience difficulties as a result of the weather can ring the council's contact centre, Galw Gwynedd, on 01766 771000. BBC Wales meteorologist Derek Brockway said Wales had not seen the last of the wind and rain. "First thing on Saturday will be some sun, but rain is forecast later, and it will be an unsettled start to next week with snow possible on the mountains. It will also feel cold," he said.	The Met Office is warning people of the possibility of localised flooding with more wet weather forecast.
+text: By Helen BriggsBBC Science correspondent The number of sharks found in the open oceans has plunged by 71% over half a century, mainly due to over-fishing, according to a new study. Three-quarters of the species studied are now threated with extinction. And the researchers say immediate action is needed to secure a brighter future for these "extraordinary, irreplaceable animals". They are calling on governments to implement science-based fishing limits. Study researcher, Dr Richard Sherley of the University of Exeter, said the declines appear to be driven very much by fishing pressures. He told BBC News: "That's the driver for the 70% reduction in the last 50 years. For every 10 sharks you had in the open ocean in the 1970s, you would have three today, across these species, on average." Sharks and rays are caught for their meat, fins and liver oil. They are also captured for recreational fishing and turn up by accident in the catch of fishing boats that are targeting other stocks. Of the 31 species studied, 24 are now threatened with extinction, and three shark species (the oceanic whitetip shark, and the scalloped and great hammerhead sharks) have declined so sharply they are now classified as critically endangered - the highest threat category, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Prof Nicholas Dulvy of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, said oceanic sharks and rays are at exceptionally high risk of extinction, much more so than the average bird, mammal or frog, despite ranging far from land. "Overfishing of oceanic sharks and rays jeopardises the health of entire ocean ecosystems as well as food security for some of the world's poorest countries," he said. 'Wake-up call' The researchers compiled global data on sharks and rays found in the open oceans (as opposed to reef sharks or those found close to shore). Of the 1,200 or so species of sharks and rays in the world, 31 are oceanic, travelling large distances across water. "These are some of the big, important, open ocean predators that people will be familiar with," said Dr Sherley. "The kind of sharks that people might describe as awe-inspiring or charismatic." He said political will is needed to reverse the trends. "The science is there, there needs to be the desire to do those stock assessments, to implement the measures that are needed to reduce the take of sharks and that political will has to come from pressure from citizens," Dr Sherley explained. Despite this "gloomy" picture, the scientists said a few shark conservation stories give cause for hope. Sonja Fordham, president of Shark Advocates International, a non-profit project of The Ocean Foundation, said a couple of species, including the great white, have started to recover through science-based fishing limits. "Relatively simple safeguards can help to save sharks and rays, but time is running out," she said. "We urgently need conservation action across the globe to prevent myriad negative consequences and secure a brighter future for these extraordinary, irreplaceable animals." Sharks are at the top of the food chain, and crucial to the health of the oceans. Their loss impacts other marine animals as well as human livelihoods. "Oceanic sharks and rays are vital to the health of vast marine ecosystems, but because they are hidden beneath the ocean surface, it has been difficult to assess and monitor their status," said Nathan Pacoureau of Simon Fraser University. "Our study represents the first global synthesis of the state of these essential species at a time when countries should be addressing insufficient progress towards global sustainability goals. "While we initially intended it as a useful report card, we now must hope it also serves as an urgent wake-up call." The research is published in the journal, Nature. Follow Helen on Twitter.	Scientists say sharks and rays are disappearing from the world's oceans at an "alarming" rate.
+text: By Katie HopeBusiness reporter, BBC News The sports chain owns an 11.1% stake in House of Fraser, which last month detailed plans to close 31 of its 59 shops as part of a rescue deal. According to Sky News, House of Fraser needs £50m to prevent it collapsing. But sources close to the department store chain have denied the chain's survival is under threat. The department store chain has previously said it has no short-term funding issues. Creditors have already backed House of Fraser's restructuring, but a group of landlords is taking them to court over the plan which has thrown it into doubt. The landlords claim the plan - which will see their rents slashed - is unfair to them. The department store chain is currently awaiting a £70m investment from Chinese investor, C.banner, which also owns toy shop Hamley's. C.banner said in May it planned to take a majority stake in House of Fraser, but has said it will not go ahead with the deal until the store closure and rent reduction rescue plan is agreed. Mr Ashley is believed to have approached House of Fraser around four weeks ago, before landlords challenged the retailer's rescue deal. He is understood to have told House of Fraser's advisers he could "offer something better" than C.banner. Mr Ashley could not be reached for comment. House of Fraser is using company voluntary arrangements (CVAs), a form of insolvency proceedings, to overhaul its business. CVAs are being increasingly used by struggling retailers as a way to close stores, but landlords argue that they are being abused as a quick way to cut rents. House of Fraser is one of a number of retailers struggling amid falling consumer confidence, rising overheads, the weaker pound and the growth of online shopping. Electronics chain Maplin and toy chain Toys R Us both collapsed into administration earlier this year. Other High Street chains such as Mothercare and Carpetright have been forced to close stores in order to survive. The House of Fraser Group has annual sales of £1.2bn. It employs about 5,000 people directly and also has 12,500 concession staff.	Struggling House of Fraser is understood to have been approached by Sports Direct founder Mike Ashley over a fresh investment deal.
+text: By Tom GeogheganBBC News, Washington DC Getting home in the afternoon to find your home ransacked would be distressing enough, but for Peggy Riley there was a much deeper sense of loss. Her two nine-year-old Yorkshire terriers, Baxter and Cooper, had been stolen, making the theft of her laptop and the disturbance to her house in San Antonio, Texas, quite insignificant in comparison. "I don't recall much, other than realising I was in the middle of the street, about two houses down from my home, screaming their names and crying uncontrollably. "The distress has been to such a degree that I can't even explain. It's turned my life upside down. I don't have children so these are my babies." Ms Riley, 48, has spent thousands trying to get them back, with another $10,000 (£6,000) standing by as reward for their safe return. Two private investigators are on the case, there are adverts in several newspapers and billboards, and a Facebook page appealing for their return. She believes the thieves acted opportunistically but the Yorkshire terrier is one of the breeds that is being increasingly targeted by criminals who see valuable dogs as a revenue source in hard times. New figures from the American Kennel Club suggest dog thefts are up 50% this year and have risen fourfold since the start of the recession. Gunpoint robbery "There are economic reasons behind this," says spokeswoman Lisa Peterson. "Criminals sell them on the internet to unsuspecting buyers or at flea markets or roadside sales. I've seen dogs stolen and then miraculously turn up again to get a reward from the owner." The criminals strike in many ways, she says - breaking into a home, into a parked car or just snatching them in the street. A family were playing with their pitbull terrier in Oklahoma when a man approached and asked some questions, says Ms Peterson. He followed them home and broke in the next morning, tied up the family at gunpoint and stole the puppy. And in New York, a Maltese was stolen from its female owner's arms in the street, while in Idaho a similar attack was mounted against a girl holding her dog on a park bench. It's a way to make a quick buck, says Russell Hess, director of the US Police Canine Association, but it's not new. It was also a problem in the 60s and 70s, when he was working in Ohio. "We had dog thefts reported from time to time so it was happening before the recession but I'm sure it's increased due to the number of people that are needing money right now. "The police do take it seriously but the more information and more leads that can be developed, the higher priority they give it. All types of dogs are vulnerable, but particularly small breeds such as Yorkshire terriers and Pomeranians, which are popular and easy to carry. It comes as prospective owners fork out more and more for a dog, according to the American Pets Products Association, up to $364 (£221) last year, from $221 (£134) in 2008. There are now 46 million Americans owning a total of more than 78 million dogs. Such thefts first gained notoriety in the 1940s and 50s, when a series of high-profile ransom cases brought the practice into the public eye, helped by the release of the Disney film 101 Dalmatians in 1961. But it was not until the Animal Welfare Act of 1966 that the practice was formally outlawed in the US. 'Like a death' The spate in recent years appears to have been mirrored in the UK. Animal charity Dog Lost, which helps reunite missing dogs with their owners, says it is dealing with 150 reports a week, double the number of a year ago. "It's rising and rising, and probably due to the recession," says the charity's founder, Jane Hayes. "It's a good way to make money because owners will pay anything to get their dogs back. One owner paid £25,000 and had to remortgage the family house." The large sums involved reflect the way criminals are profiting from the deeply emotional bond between owners and their dogs, says Eve Adamson, author and contributor to US monthly magazine Dog Fancy. People treat their dogs like children in so many ways, buying them presents, giving them good food and giving them expensive medical treatments. So the theft of a dog can feel like a bereavement, she says. "People are likely to get extremely upset. It's how people would feel about the loss of a child. And it's become less fashionable to say 'Oh well, it's just a dog'. "Criminals have been exploiting human emotions throughout time and this is just one more way to do that."	Dog thefts in the US have more than trebled in recent years, according to new figures. So what's behind the surge in stealing pet pooches?
+text: In June, Beijing said that local governments had piled up 10.7tn yuan ($1.6tn) in debt, or the equivalent of 25% of China's annual economic output. The debts were built up to fund public works, which were supposed to be funded by the central government before the financial crisis struck. Concerns have been growing over bad debt in China. "Credit risk has risen from an over-extension of loans to local governments and property - both of which have questionable medium-term repayment capacity," Fitch's senior director Jonathan Lee said. Rival agency Moody's expressed similar concerns in July, saying that the debt burden held by local government could be 3.5tn yuan larger than auditors had estimated. It warned that bad debt could reach between 8% and 10% of the total loans. Both Fitch and Moody's also complained that a lack of transparency at Chinese banks may affect its future creditworthiness. "Disclosure is very poor," Mr Lee said, "which means that unwinding products in the event of default could get very messy."	Bad debts held by local governments in China are raising worries over its banks, ratings agency Fitch has warned.
+text: The 22-year-old is up for best British male, best breakthrough act, best single for Pass Out and album of the year for Disc-Overy. The best breakthrough act honour is the award Radio 1 listeners vote for. Rapper Plan B, folk band Mumford and Sons and The XX all have three nominations, while band Take That are up for two prizes. This year's ceremony will be hosted by comedian James Corden on 15 February. Tempah's debut album, Disc-Overy, went straight to number one last October. He has also had two number one singles. In the prestigious album category he will compete against Plan B, Take That, Mumford and Sons and The XX. Veteran rock star Robert Plant picks up his first ever Brit award nomination. The former Led Zeppelin front man will compete for the best male prize against Tempah, Mark Ronson and Paul Weller. The X Factor dominates the best single shortlist, with judge Cheryl Cole vying against winning acts Matt Cardle and Alexandra Burke. Olly Murs, who came second in the 2009 series, has also been nominated, along with Florence and the Machine, Scouting for Girls, Taio Cruz and The Wanted. Last year's Critics' Choice award winner, Ellie Goulding, will take on Cole, Laura Marling, Paloma Faith and Rumer in the best female artist category. As well as best album, Mumford and Sons are also up for best breakthrough act and best British band. The prize of best international album will go to either Arcade Fire, Cee Lo Green, Eminem, Kings of Leon or Katy Perry. This year's Brits, which will be broadcast live on ITV1, will take place at London's O2 arena for the first time in the awards' 30-year history. Designer Dame Vivienne Westwood has been invited to create a new version of the iconic Brit award especially for the event.	UK urban artist Tinie Tempah leads the charge at this year's Brit awards with four nominations.
+text: In March the Welsh government announced revisions to the preferred route of the bypass which could save the project £5m. This includes bringing the route 80 metres closer to Glandulas Caravan Park, owned by Trevor Bebb. He claims the new plans will cut the park in two. The bypass route revisions will be on display at a public exhibition at The Elephant and Castle Hotel in Newtown between 10:00 BST and 20:00 BST on Tuesday. Mr Bebb said the proposed bypass route would bisect the park which currently has 80 static caravans on it. 'Not viable' He added: "The Welsh government think I can continue operating with a £1m bridge being built to link one part of the park with the other. "This is a popular park that brings money into Newtown but I fear the business will have to close if this bypass route is not changed. "I think the business will not be viable while the bypass is being built let alone afterwards. "People come here for peace and quiet but they will have to put up with the noise of construction work as well as peering out at a roundabout once the bypass is built." Newtown's Mayor, Rhina Clarke, said: "Everyone in Newtown is fed up with gridlock in the town every Friday afternoon although I do not know if the bypass will solve that problem. "Whichever route is decided it is important for the town's businesses that correct signage is used so that people will still be able to come to Newtown and use its shops, cafes and restaurants." Overtaking lane Llanidloes bypass was opened 14 miles from Newtown in 1991. Gareth Morgan, the town's county councillor, said: "I was against the bypass at the time but I think it has benefitted the town. "It would be impossible for the town to cope with the amount of traffic in Mid Wales these days." The Welsh government claims the revisions to the preferred route for the bypass aim to cut its environmental impact. Changes at four locations will avoid gas mains and reduce the amount of earthworks needed. The proposed amendments also include an overtaking lane for the whole length of the bypass and the new route will be further away from Garth Owen housing estate. The new plans also mean drivers will cross over, not under, the Cambrian railway line and at the A489 junction a roundabout will be added. The 3.4 mile (5.6km) route was approved last year and a consultation on the draft orders will be held in the summer. A Welsh government spokesman said: "Comments on the amended route can be submitted during the consultation on draft orders."	A caravan park owner claims plans for a Newtown bypass that will be on public display later will destroy his business.
+text: The campaign promised customers that they would not lose out financially by shopping at Tesco. Sainsbury's complained that some product comparisons were unfair, such as its chicken korma curry, and its value ham. However the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has ruled that Tesco's campaign was not misleading. Tesco launched its Price Promise campaign in March, telling its customers that they would not lose out on "big brands, own-label or fresh foods". It promised to compare prices with equivalent items at Sainsbury's, Asda and Morrisons. Where prices are cheaper at rival supermarkets, Tesco issues its customers with a voucher for the difference. But Sainsbury's complained that not all products were exactly equivalent. It said its own chicken korma curry was made with 100% British chicken, whereas Tesco's was not. Similarly, its "basics" ham range was produced with British pork, whereas Tesco used meat from elsewhere in the EU. "They are priced the same, but our pork is British, and Tesco's is sourced from somewhere else in the EU," said Sainsbury's commercial director, Mike Coupe. "They are not the same product." 'Not misleading' But Tesco argued to the ASA that most people were not primarily concerned about where the meat had been produced. "For the majority of customers, the product's country of origin would only be a minor factor in a customer's decision-making," it told the ASA. Sainsbury disagreed. "If there's one big lesson that we should all have learned from the horsemeat scandal, it's that customers care deeply about where their food comes from," said Mr Coupe. Sainsbury's was untainted by the scandal, although Tesco was affected. The ASA said it noted Sainsbury's concerns, but it said the advertisement had clearly explained the basis of Tesco's price comparison. It said the claim made in it was substantiated, and was not misleading.	Tesco has won a battle with arch-rival Sainsbury's, over the validity of its Price Promise campaign.
+text: By Kerry AllenBBC Monitoring The 73-year-old retired teacher, identified by Pear Video as Ms Qi, says she opted for travelling over providing live-in care to her descendants. The short online video has ignited online debate about the traditional idea that China's elderly should move in with their children and spend the rest of their lives taking care of grandchildren. "Why do elderly Chinese people have to do housework, and look after their children and grandchildren?" she tells Pear Video. "We should have our own lives." 'A diary of memories' Ms Qi says in the video that she has been travelling all her life, visiting countries in Europe, North America and Asia. Pear Video followed her as she embarked on her latest trip to Quanzhou in China's southwest Fujian Province. She stays in a dormitory in the video, and says she saves money by travelling with students and sharing journey costs. She says that meeting young people is one of the most important things about her travels. "I talk with them and they have lots of fresh things to say," she says. Her mother is still alive, and Ms Qi says she video-calls the 92-year-old daily to let her know how she is, and frequently posts pictures on social media for her children and grandchildren. "I have a public account," she says, "And I've had it for about five months. I write everything: my memories, my inspirations - a diary of memories for my children and grandchildren." The three-minute video featuring Ms Qi has been viewed more than 11 million times on video website Miaopai. It has received tens of thousands of comments on Chinese social media, including on the Sina Weibo microblog, with many users speaking with admiration for her as a free-spirited woman. "An independent, enchanting woman," one says, "Her age is not an issue." You might also be interested in: Many users say that watching her enjoying her freedom has empowered them to speak about their own independence and decisions like whether to marry or have children. "Why are Chinese parents always urging marriage and childbirth?" one asks. "This is entirely the reason I don't want to have children - I am too much of a free-spirit," another says. "I would prefer to be one, free person." "There is no meaning to marriage," another adds. "To be free is to be unrestrained, there is positivity in doing what you want to do." 'I hope I can be like her' Ms Qi's video has also got social media users thinking critically about what the role of elderly people should be in family life. "Filial piety", the Confucian value of showing respect towards parents, elders and ancestors, is an important value in Chinese society and culture, and it is culturally acceptable for the elderly to live with their children in their old age. Many parents in China work long hours - or have to move away from their hometowns for work - so grandparents often take on a considerable child-rearing role. But longer life expectancies, economic reform and a low birth rate mean China is now facing an ageing population crisis. By 2050, more than a quarter of the 1.4bn population will be over 65 years old. The Chinese government believes its one-child policy prevented 400 million extra births. But since it was lifted in 2016, there has been no noticeable rise in people having a second child. Women are also having children later in life, or not at all, and millions of people are set to have no descendents. So online commenters are seeing Ms Qi as a new role model for old age. "I hope I can be like her when I'm old," says one. Another adds: "There are not enough people like this: today's elderly seem to think that they can't be the same as when they were young. "But we all have our own lives to think about." BBC Monitoring reports and analyses news from TV, radio, web and print media around the world. You can follow BBC Monitoring on Twitter and Facebook.	An elderly woman who has chosen a life of backpacking in her retirement has won millions of fans on Chinese social media.
+text: By Gareth EvansBBC News, Wyoming County, West Virginia Now, they must decide if they will fight back against an industry they have relied upon for generations. Casey wears a one-dollar wedding ring now. She bought the blue plastic band after her original ring was ruined by the toxic water that has been pumping into her home for more than a decade. "I just needed something there," she says, as she holds the replacement ring up to the light. "I felt empty without it." She places her original wedding band, now discoloured and corroded, in her palm. Her skin, especially on her hands, has become coarse and sore. The taps in her house have been worn down, her washing machine frequently stops working, and her bathroom and kitchen have been stained a deep, bloody orange by the pollutants - iron, sulphur, even arsenic - that have seeped into her home's water supply. This is Appalachia - the heart of America's coal country. It is home to some of the poorest and most isolated communities in the US and the legacy of mining, be it the abandoned processing plants or the scarred landscape, can be seen dotted alongside its vast highways. Casey, who asked not to be identified by her real name, lives in a small, double-berth structure with a wooden porch in southern West Virginia. It's a place where mobile phone reception is yet to reach. She pours a glass of water from her kitchen tap and lets it rest on a table. It has a strange smell and a sticky texture and within minutes begins to turn dark orange. A layer of black sediment soon sinks to the bottom of the glass. "This is what we have to live with," she says. "We don't bathe in the water and we don't cook with it. It stains our fingernails, our knuckles, and our clothes. It's really, really difficult living like this." Casey and her husband Jack (not his real name), have two young children and drive for more than an hour to stock up on bottled water to drink and cook with. So who do they hold responsible? "I've been here all my life, but when the surface [coal] mine came in that's when the water started changing," says Jack, who, despite being a miner himself, believes the industry is accountable for the family's water problems. "I think if they've done wrong they should have to fix it." At the sprawling mine in the neighbouring valley, millions of pounds of explosives are being detonated on the mountaintops so that coal, buried deep below the surface, can be excavated. This process is a type of surface mining known as mountaintop removal, and has drawn the ire not only of nearby residents but of environmental groups who say it devastates the landscape and pollutes the waterways. One study estimates that an area the size of the state of Delaware has been flattened by this type of coal mining since it was first practised in the 1970s. Another report by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that more than 2,000 miles of streams - a distance longer than the Mississippi river - have been buried by the excess rock and soil (known as overburden) that is dumped after the explosions. And in a part of the world where many people rely on their own wells to get water, rather than a conventional, monitored, pipeline, any pollution from mining waste can have devastating consequences. These private wells are essentially unregulated, so it is up to people like Casey and Jack to determine whether their water has been contaminated. But the complex nature of water pollution means many people are completely unaware of what's entering their supply. "When you dump a lot of overburden into the valley, and start covering up streams, you have water sources that end up travelling through the [waste] material,' says Professor Michael McCawley, an environmental engineer who has spent time researching the health impacts of mountaintop removal. "It's kind of like dumping geological trash," he explains. "It ends up increasing the concentration of acidic ions and metals [in the water], things like arsenic and nickel." This pollution, according to his research, has taken a catastrophic toll on the health of those whose water supply lies in its path. "This population is under assault from both water and air," Professor McCawley says. "What we're finding in the water is likely to cause inflammation in the body, which can set off a lot of other chronic diseases. "The big [problems] we have found are certainly cancers. Name a cancer and they're seeing it here." When asked about cancer rates, Casey reels off a list of people living nearby who have been diagnosed in recent month. "Oh Lord everybody has been getting it," she says. "It's scary." Dr Wesley Lafferty, who is based in nearby Boone County, believes a number of health problems are being exacerbated by mining waste. "We get all kinds of symptoms," he told Human Rights Watch last year. "Rashes, restrictive airway disease, dermatitis, generic skin disease. "I definitely feel there is an environmental component to that." In a valley not far from Casey's home, and sitting within earshot of the same mine that she says has caused her water contamination, Jason Walker is describing many of the same problems. "My water was drinkable and clear before the mountaintop removal started," he says. "But then it got worse. It smelt like rotten eggs and the colour of my sinks, faucets [taps], all my laundry, turned orange." He then had his water tested and was warned that it was so toxic that, if he washed his clothes in it, there was a risk that direct sunlight could set them on fire. Jason now cooks with bottled water, but he has been collecting water from a nearby stream and treating it with swimming pool chemicals to supply his house. Last winter, after a spell of severe cold weather, he was forced to use an axe to cut through more than five inches (12.7cm) of ice to access the stream water. But when the pipes he was using to pump it into his home froze solid he had to go without. "I'm getting a new well drilled for $4,000 [£3,088] to keep myself from doing that again, even though I don't know how good the water will be," he says. "I took a loan out against our property to pay for it. It's a huge gamble. "My grandfather was a coal miner, my dad was a coal miner, but if the mines tear something up I think they should replace it. "I want more regulations that actually help the little person and not the big person." In a telephone interview with the BBC, a spokesman for the company that owns the surface mine in Wyoming County said that it operated under strict state regulations and had a valid permit. "We view ourselves as pretty good neighbours and if somebody has an issue then we would address it," said the spokesman for CM Energy, which took over the mine in 2017. But when presented with the complaints of nearby residents, the spokesman declined to take responsibility and said the water contamination could have been caused by a number of different issues. "If we thought we were responsible then we would step up and try and do something about it," the spokesman said. "If there's something that our company can do to facilitate working with politicians and the local community then we would participate." The mine's previous owner, Dynamic Energy, failed to respond to a request for comment. That company is facing a lawsuit from a number of residents - including Casey and Jack - who are seeking compensation for the costs of dealing with their water issues. It won a similar lawsuit a few years ago, and Jason, who was part of that legal battle, said it left the entire community divided between those who supported the coal industry and those who wanted to fight back. "There's a lady down the street here who wouldn't join the lawsuit," he says. "She hasn't spoken to me in almost two years because of it. They were scared it would mean losing jobs." Casey understands their concerns. "It's how people make their living and support their families around here," she says. "If you don't work in the coal mines you either flip burgers or you have to move out of state and do something else." But her husband Jack says it wasn't a difficult decision to join the latest legal action - even if he is a coal miner. "The only thing I really care about is getting fresh water the way it was when I was growing up around here," he says. "I ain't worried about the money. I just want clean water." All images subject to copyright.	In the shadow of some of America's most controversial coal mines, where companies use huge amounts of explosives to blow the tops off mountains, isolated communities say their water has been poisoned.
+text: In the last year, 97,411 people signed up for courses in the trade. Social care was the second most popular course with 62,987 students, whilst hairdressing came in third with 47,506 students. Twenty-one-year-old Lewis is in the second year of his training as an electrician and told Newsbeat: "I'm better with my hands so I thought screwdrivers, drills... that's my kind of environment, rather than heads in books and essays. "It's getting harder and harder to get into universities so I think what I chose to do was the right decision." 'Opening doors' Rachel from Bristol studied drama before deciding to change to a vocational course in hairdressing. She said: "I finished my degree without any real employment direction so I wanted to do something that opened a few doors and had some opportunities in the workplace. "It was really great to do some active learning. "You're continually seeing your improvements as you progress and working with people who are skilled with the profession you want to carry on in." University competition With the costs of university studies continuing to rise and more and more graduates competing for jobs, vocational training might be more appealing to some students. There are warnings it will be tougher than ever to get a place at university this year, with the number of people applying up more than 10%. On top of the high number of applications some universities are also cutting places because they need to save money. Some universities in England, Scotland and Wales say they'll be offering no clearing places at all. City & Guilds says that the number of people taking vocational courses with them has gone up by 11% in the past year. Chris Jones, Director General and Chief Executive of City & Guilds, said: "Growing numbers of people are recognising the value of work-related learning and equipping themselves with the right skills and training they need to succeed and lead in today's fast-paced economy." Other popular courses last year included construction with 43,474 students and hospitality and catering with 43,335 students. City & Guilds offers vocational training across the UK and awards more than one million certificates every year.	Ever fancied being an electrician? Well you're not alone, it's now the most popular course for City & Guilds students.
+text: A person who wrote to the panel said it could lead to "unconscious bias" against some groups of people. The panel, largely made up of local councillors, advises and scrutinises the police and crime commissioner. Panel chairman Alun Lloyd Jones said they represented the make-up of local councils. He said the authorities would be asked to reflect diversity in their nominations. The panel consists of 12 councillors nominated by Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and Powys plus two co-opted members, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service. Dyfed-Powys Police serves a largely rural swathe of mid and west Wales, with just over 2% of the population identifying as black or minority ethnic in the 2011 census. The person who submitted the written question to the panel said they were shocked there was only one "older white woman" serving on it, with the rest being "older white men". They called for the panel to be made more "representative of our society", by considering including younger women, ethnic minorities, and gay members. "Why was it decided that the panel should be made up of county councillors, because these are overwhelmingly retired, white straight older males," asked the complainant, whose name was withheld. Mr Jones told a meeting of the panel on Friday that Home Office regulations required the panels to be politically balanced and, as far as possible, gender balanced and reflective of the area they cover. "The panel only has a say on co-opted members," he said, adding that just two out of eight applications for the co-opted posts in 2016 were from women. Helen Thomas, one of the co-opted members, said she was "not surprised" to hear the complaint. However, she said she was sure there was no evidence of unconscious bias or discrimination on the panel's work. "We probably ought to note the saying 'don't judge a book by its cover'," Ms Thomas added. Related Internet Links Dyfed Powys Police and Crime Panel Dyfed-Powys Police and Crime Commissioner Dyfed-Powys Police	The Dyfed-Powys police and crime panel has been accused of being made up of too many "retired, white straight older" men.
+text: It will be the first Budget since the Conservatives lost their majority in the House of Commons in the snap election in June. Mr Hammond delivered another Budget earlier this year in the spring. But he has previously indicated that the main date for the annual speech, which outlines fiscal forecasts and tax changes, will move to the autumn. The chancellor said the Budget was an opportunity for the government to "set out our thinking on how to keep the economy strong and resilient and fair". Brexit 'uncertainty' Mr Hammond told the Lords Economics Affairs Committee that the UK economy had "inevitably been overshadowed by the uncertainty of the Brexit negotiation process". "The quicker we can generate some clarity about the future for business and consumers, the better, so that we can get back to the business of pursuing what I think looked like a very positive outlook for the UK economy in early 2016," he added. Also on Tuesday, the government moved on public sector pay, announcing pay rises for police and prison officers which go beyond the current cap. Downing Street signalled the end of the 1% pay freeze for other public sector workers, saying they recognised the need for more flexibility in future.	The next Budget will be held on Wednesday 22 November, Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond has said.
+text: Workers from Nepal, Sri Lanka and India say they are still owed 13 months' wages after the contractor collapsed. Some workers had been left stranded in the country, working for as little as $0.85 a day (50p), The Guardian said. In May, Qatar vowed to improve the rights of migrants in the Gulf state amid growing alarm at their treatment. But an investigation by the British newspaper found migrants who had worked on the Qatar 2022 offices in the Al Bidda skyscraper in Doha were still waiting for their pay. The project, which The Guardian says was commissioned by the Qatari government, was carried out by migrants working for the contractor Lee Trading. It cost $4.25m (£2.5m) and the offices were fitted with expensive etched glass and handmade Italian furniture. But Lee Trading's collapse led to Amnesty International raising the case with Qatar's prime minister last November after many of the workers were left stranded. The situation has remained the same and five of the workers have since been arrested and imprisoned after being left without ID papers. In a statement released on Monday, Qatar 2022 said it was "heavily dismayed to learn of the behaviour of Lee Trading with regard to the timely payment of its workers." Officials said they relayed the concerns raised by Amnesty to the "relevant authorities" last year and insisted they would "continue to press for a speedy and fair conclusion to all cases." Qatar moved to change controversial laws on foreign workers in May that tied migrant workers to a single employer. Human rights campaigners had accused that sponsorship system of being akin to modern-day slavery. The Gulf state has seen an influx of foreign workers ahead of the football tournament and expatriates now make up the bulk of the workforce in the country.	Organisers of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar say they are "dismayed" by claims that migrant workers who fitted their offices are still waiting to be paid.
+text: It saw the big centrist blocs lose their majorities – with liberals, the Greens and nationalists gaining ground. German Chancellor Angela Merkel wants centre-right candidate Manfred Weber as the next EU Commission president. But French President Emmanuel Macron did not even mention Mr Weber as a contender for the influential position. Their comments came at a meeting on Tuesday in Brussels, which was a chance for EU leaders to discuss the new political landscape and who might take over the top jobs. The elections left the EU more fragmented with the chances of reaching consensus more difficult. The President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, said Brexit was a factor behind a majority of voters favouring pro-EU parties. "As Europeans see what Brexit means in practice, they also draw conclusions. Brexit has been a vaccine against anti-EU propaganda and fake news." UK Prime Minister Theresa May took part in talks but Mr Tusk said Brexit was not discussed. Who next for the EU Commission? The commission is the body that enforces EU rules and drafts EU law, and its presidency is currently held by Jean-Claude Juncker, who is at the end of his five-year term. In 2014 Mr Juncker was chosen to head the Commission as the centre-right European People's Party (EPP) candidate, after the EPP had won the election. But it is a much tougher challenge this time for the EPP's candidate Manfred Weber - a German - after his bloc shrank from 217 seats to 180 in the 751-seat parliament, although it remains the biggest grouping. After the talks Mrs Merkel said she stood by Mr Weber, but "others stand by their candidate, which is obvious". Earlier in the day, Mr Macron had said he did not want to talk about names, but also mentioned three, none of them Mr Weber. He later refused to name a favourite candidate, saying he wanted them to be "the most charismatic, creative and competent possible". If not Weber, then who? Several others are in the running, among them chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, who is French, Danish liberal Margrethe Vestager and Dutch centre-left candidate Frans Timmermans. The other top EU officials to be replaced later this year are: European Council President Donald Tusk (Polish); European Central Bank President Mario Draghi (Italian) and EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Federica Mogherini (Italian). After lengthy negotiations, the new top officials will take up their posts on 1 November, except for the new European Council chief, who starts on 1 December. Time to negotiate - and compromise The EU has committed to balance gender, political affiliation and geography when it fills its top jobs. The leaders of the 28 member states will have to compromise with each other, and with MEPs who get to approve the choice. The European Parliament has watered down its demands for the selection of the president of the European Commission, issuing a statement which says the winner only had to be someone "who made his/her programme and personality known prior to the elections, and engaged in a European-wide campaign". That potentially opens the door to candidates who weren't strictly candidates before, such as Margrethe Vestager or maybe even Michel Barnier. The previous front-runner Manfred Weber admits that his political family lost seats at the election which weakens his claim on the job. There are also hints that the European Parliament will focus its efforts on defining the EU's future direction, rather than seeking a powerful role in picking its personnel. A lot of names will come and go and rise and fall before the process eventually comes to an end later this year. Countdown to EU top jobs:	France and Germany have disagreed on who should take one of the EU's key roles as leaders from the bloc met following parliamentary elections.
+text: Dominic Raab also said EU chiefs had disrespected Theresa May with "jibes" at a recent summit. He said the UK would leave without a deal rather than be "bullied" into signing a "one-sided" arrangement. Meanwhile EU figures hit back after Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt likened it to a Soviet-era prison, comments diplomats called "insulting". In a speech to the Conservative conference on Sunday, Mr Hunt compared what he said were the EU's attempts to stop members leaving with the actions of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. His words were criticised by a number of European politicians and diplomats while a European Commission spokesman suggested everyone "could benefit from opening a history book from time to time". Speaking in Birmingham on Monday, Mr Raab said the government's proposed deal with the EU was not "perfect" but he urged Tory Eurosceptics who are campaigning for the plan to be ditched to get behind it. And Chancellor Philip Hammond predicted that there would be an economic bounce if and when a Brexit deal was agreed by the UK and the EU. He reminded people saying that a deal could not be struck that people had had the same scepticism about the electric light bulb ever working. With less than six months to go before Brexit day, the UK and the EU have not yet reached a deal on how separation will be managed and what their new relationship will look like. Mr Raab said that if the EU insisted on trying to "lock us in via the back door" of its customs union and single market, the UK could be left with "no choice" but to leave without a deal. The "whole of the government machine is busy preparing for no deal" - not because they want it to happen or because it's likely, but "because it might happen", he said. He dismissed "lurid predictions from the prophets of doom" about no-deal, including planes being grounded and ports blocked. Even if the UK did not reach an agreement with the EU, he said: "I find it hard to believe that they would, for narrow political ends, seek to punish Britain in such a crass and counterproductive way." Mr Raab criticised the EU over its reaction to Theresa May's proposals at last month's summit in Salzburg. "Our Prime Minister has been constructive and respectful," he said. "In return we heard jibes from senior leaders, and we saw a starkly one-sided approach to negotiation." What is wrong with Chequers? Brexiteers feel it keeps the UK far too close to Brussels and doesn't fulfil the Leave campaign's promise during the 2016 referendum campaign to "take back control". EU leaders have rejected the plan because they believe it would undermine the single market by allowing the UK to "cherry pick" from EU law. Theresa May says the ball is now in the EU's court and she wants a more detailed response from them on their objections. The government has said it will not agree to anything that divides Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK nor makes the country a member of the European Economic Area like Norway. Johnson's running joke? One of the most vocal critics of the government's Brexit approach has been former foreign secretary Boris Johnson, who branded Theresa May's plan "deranged" in a newspaper interview at the weekend. Despite not being in Birmingham, Mr Johnson made an eye-catching appearance as he was photographed running through fields near his Oxfordshire home. Given that Mrs May famously said her naughtiest moment was running through fields of wheat as a child, some pundits are wondering whether this was an attempt to "troll" the PM by the former Leave campaign frontman, who resigned in protest at the Chequers plan in July. Row over Hunt's comments Jeremy Hunt has seemingly provoked a diplomatic row after accusing the EU of seeking to punish the UK in order to "keep the club together". In Sunday's speech, he recalled a visit to Latvia earlier this summer and the role that the UK and others played in helping it transition from Soviet rule to becoming a modern democracy and market economy. "What happened to the confidence and ideals of the European dream?", he asked. "The EU was set up to protect freedom. It was the Soviet Union that stopped people leaving." Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament's Brexit co-ordinator, tweeted that the remarks were "outrageous and offensive". And EU Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis suggested Mr Hunt needed a history lesson. Hammond's low wages warning Also on the conference stage on Monday, Mr Hammond warned that slow wage growth and job insecurity meant too many people feared they were being left behind. He announced the government's intention to increase the number of people who can access science and technology courses and spend about £30m on encouraging big business to mentor small firms. His plans also included a £125m package allowing large employers to transfer up to 25% of their apprenticeship levy funds to businesses in their supply chain from April next year. The apprenticeship levy is a tax on large companies intended to pay for training at smaller companies, but uptake of the new policy has been slow. Mr Hammond rejected suggestions that Brexit had caused an irreparable rift between his party and business, telling activists the Conservatives were and "always will be the party of business". Please upgrade your browser Your guide to Brexit jargon	The minister responsible for Brexit has told the EU to "get real" and reach a deal with the UK.
+text: Dave LeeNorth America technology reporter The tweet, the first in a series of three, quoted Nelson Mandela and was accompanied by a picture of Mr Obama smiling with a group of children from different racial backgrounds. It has been liked almost three million times since it was posted on 13 August following the attack in Charlottesville, Virginia. The milestone was reached at approximately 01:07 GMT, Twitter told the BBC. It overtook a tweet posted by Ariana Grande expressing condolences after the Manchester terror attack in May. ‘Taught to love' Over three tweets, Mr Obama quoted a passage from Mr Mandela’s autobiography, The Long Walk To Freedom. "No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin or his background or his religion,” the quote reads. "People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” The picture shows Mr Obama in 2011 visiting a day care centre in Bethesda, Maryland. It was taken by the then-White House photographer, Pete Souza. Since President Trump election win, Mr Souza has been posting topical images on Instagram, mostly highlighting Mr Obama's approach to the presidency in comparison to his successor.	It may be President Trump's communication tool of choice - but it's a tweet by former President Barack Obama that has become the most liked in Twitter's history.
+text: Lord Holmes of Richmond, who is blind, is alleged to have grabbed the massage therapist's buttocks during a treatment last March. The 48-year-old denies the allegations. Jurors at Southwark Crown Court were dismissed only a day after the trial began as prosecutor Linda Strudwick was unable to continue. High Court judge Mr Justice Nicol told jurors: "I am afraid I have been told Ms Strudwick is unwell; she was unable to continue this case. "As a result of this, there is not somebody who can stand in at such short notice and I am afraid I have no option but to discharge you from dealing with this matter." The case will be referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions to decide if the peer will face a second trial. Champion swimmer Lord Holmes won nine gold medals and broke 35 world records during his sporting career. He later worked as a director of Paralympic integration for the London 2012 Games and took his seat as a Conservative peer in the House of Lords in 2013. He is currently non-affiliated and does not belong to any parliamentary group.	The trial of a Paralympian accused of sexually assaulting a masseuse at a five-star hotel has collapsed after the prosecutor became unwell.
+text: Ellandi will be the new asset manager of Intu Milton Keynes, but Savills will run it day-to-day. Intu appointed administrators KPMG in June after failing to agree financial restructuring terms with lenders. The site will continue to be called Intu Milton Keynes until eventually being rebranded, said Ellandi co-founder Morgan Garfield. Mr Garfield said: "For two decades, the centre has been an incredibly important focal point for the city's people and its economy. "We're thrilled at the opportunity to continue its legacy and are committed to improving the existing offer with new operators and complimentary uses," he said. Ellandi runs 25 other centres in places like Kettering in Northamptonshire, Great Yarmouth in Norfolk and Dartford in Kent. The company recently acquired Intu's Merry Hill centre in the west Midlands. Shelley Peppard, general manager for Intu Milton Keynes, said: "The team at Ellandi shares our passion for Milton Keynes and the potential that our site has at the heart of Milton Keynes and its community." Debenhams, which used one of the centre's biggest retail spaces, closed its store in March, but it will reopen as a Next on 2 October. Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk	A major shopping centre has a new operator after the previous company went into administration.
+text: It comes after the annual Isle of Man Passenger Survey showed a 25,000 fall in visitor numbers, from 292,328 in 2016 to 266,850 last year. At the heart of the campaign is a 90-second film, which Tourism said will cost £50K to produce and promote. The Extraordinary Story will be shared on social media to showcase the island. Earlier this month, Manx tourism was accused of lacking "drive and determination" by MHK Chris Robertshaw who claimed the decline in tourism was due to absence of "any ambition to succeed". The department said while competition for visitor numbers "is greater than ever", the Isle of Man needs "to continue to work hard to realise its full potential". Other developments that the government hopes will help boost tourism include building a deep-water berth for visiting cruise liners, various hotel developments and the regeneration of Douglas Promenade. Related Internet Links Isle of Man Photography	A three-year campaign to attract more tourists to the Isle of Man has been launched after official figures showed a 9% decrease in visitor numbers.
+text: The party retook control of Blaenau Gwent, Bridgend, Caerphilly, Merthyr Tydfil, Newport and Swansea. Some 1,200 seats are being contested in 21 of the 22 unitary local authorities in Wales. Council leaders lost their seats in Caerphilly, Ceredigion, Merthyr, the Vale of Glamorgan and Wrexham. Welsh Labour leader and First Minister Carwyn Jones said the party had "reconnected with people". "The momentum is clearly with Welsh Labour tonight," he said. "We are taking seats from every party across the country - with impressive gains in Wrexham, Caerphilly, Newport and a total Lib Dem wipe out in Merthyr. "We have reconnected with people and our community campaigning has resonated with voters right across Wales." Results so far appeared to back up his confidence, although the party is coming from a relatively low base after big losses last time Wales' council seats were contested in 2008. The first full result announced in Wales was in Wrexham, where Labour made large gains to take 23 seats, strengthening its position as the largest party there. Besides retaking control of six councils, the party also comfortably held Neath Port Talbot, winning 52 seats, up from 35 previously. Labour also made gains in Flintshire, but fell short of an overall majority. Party sources said they were also expecting gains in Cardiff, where a second recount is due to take place in Liberal Democrat council leader Rodney Berman's Plasnewydd ward at 13:00 BST. The Welsh Conservatives lost their majority in Monmouthshire, falling three seats short of the 22 they needed to secure outright control. But a Tory party spokesman said that "given the difficult situation inherited by the coalition in Westminster and the tough decisions that must be taken, we recognise that this may not be an easy night in parts of the country". The party also lost control of the Vale of Glamorgan, with Labour now the largest party but without an overall majority. The Conservatives won 11 seats, down from 25 in 2008, while Labour took 22. Plaid Cymru earlier said it was too early to make judgements but on the doorstep "it's been quite difficult in some areas and much easier in others". The party admitted that a low turnout would work against its candidates. The Liberal Democrats, who looked to be facing a difficult night, said there appeared to be a low turnout in some of the counties in which it was previously in power. The new political make-up of councils started to emerge in the early hours of Friday, but other authorities are not due to declare results until the afternoon. Labour is defending about 340 seats, Plaid Cymru almost 200, the Conservatives 165 and the Liberal Democrats 140. The rest were filled by independents or small parties. More than 90 seats for the unitary authorities have already been filled by unopposed candidates. Elections in Anglesey, where ministers have put commissioners in charge after years of political infighting, have been postponed until next year.	Welsh Labour is on course to make substantial gains in the local elections, taking overall control of six councils so far.
+text: Rickie Preddie, 23, was jailed for eight years for manslaughter in October 2006. His brother Danny, 22, also got the same sentence at the Old Bailey. Damilola was stabbed with a broken bottle in November 2000 in Peckham, south London. Preddie was released after serving two-thirds of his sentence, including time spent in custody on remand. A spokesman for the family's charity, The Damilola Taylor Trust, said Damilola's father Richard knew about Preddie's impending release and would not comment on it. He added: "He has done his time and we have to respect that." 'Strict supervision' Nigerian-born Damilola, who had only been in the UK a few months, was found bleeding from a leg wound in a stairwell on a housing estate in Peckham. It is thought he was attacked as he made his way home from an after-school club. There have been three trials and the Preddie brothers, from Peckham, went on trial in 2006 for murder after new forensic evidence was found. It is believed Ricky Preddie, who was 13 when he killed Damilola, was transferred to Wormwood Scrubs prison, west London, on Tuesday night and was let out on Wednesday morning. The Ministry of Justice said it could not comment on individual cases but said that offenders such as Preddie were monitored on their release. A spokeswoman said: "If an offender commits a violent offence prior to 4 April 2005 and receives a determinate sentence of four years or more from the courts, they become eligible for release by the parole board at the half way point of their sentence, or they are automatically released at the two thirds point. She added: "Once released they will be subject to strict supervision in the community. "All offenders subject to probation supervision on release from prison have to adhere to a set of strict conditions. "They are subject to recall to custody if they breach their conditions or their behaviour indicates that it is no longer safe to allow them to remain in the community." Danny Preddie, who was also convicted of manslaughter and ordered to serve the same sentence as his brother, remains in prison serving a sentence for another offence.	One of the men convicted of killing 10-year-old Damilola Taylor has been released from prison.
+text: Ray Tindall arrived in Chester and Nick Dunn landed at Newcastle Airport. They along, with four other British men, were imprisoned in 2013 after Indian officials found weapons and ammunition on a ship. The six were working as guards on the anti-piracy vessel. They won an appeal against their convictions last week. Mr Tindall said he has a grandson he has never met. Mr Dunn, from Northumberland, said he could not have gone through the last four years without support from his family. The Chennai Six: What is their story? Mr Tindall, originally from Hull, said his daughter was aged four when he left and was now eight, and he had a seven-month old grandson he has not met. But he said: "I'm a strong Yorkshireman. I need to be the architect of my future not the prisoner of my past". He kept fit while in custody: "I ran in total, since November 2013, 7,652 miles - I could have run home in that time. "I'm stronger now than I've ever been. In one way it's made me a better person. "I won't ever get the four years back so there is no point looking to the past. "If you're angry, you can't progress, because you can't forgive." 'Juicy steak' Mr Dunn, from Ashington, was greeted by his family as he arrived at Newcastle International Airport. He said he was "overwhelmed, ecstatic... on cloud nine". "I've always had a bit of mental strength from being in the army, but nothing could prepare you for what I've just gone through. "If it wasn't for my sister [Lisa] and everyone's amazing support, I don't know how I would have done it." Mr Dunn said he could not believe how cold it was in the UK and said he wanted to eat a "juicy steak". After the reunion with her brother, Lisa Dunn said: "We've waited four years and we're a family again. It's brilliant." Meanwhile, a supporter of Paul Towers announced his return to Pocklington, Yorkshire on a Facebook page dedicated to his campaign, saying "Paul is finally home... Christmas has just come early." The message added: "On behalf of Paul, Ann and Jordan I want to extend a huge thank you to each and every one of you for providing them with love and support during the last four years. "There aren't the words to express how much this has meant to them as a family." Who are the Chennai Six? The six men were working on the anti-piracy ship MV Seaman Guard Ohio, owned by the US-based company AdvanFort, when they were arrested in 2013. They were held along with three Ukrainians, 14 Estonians and 12 Indians when customs officials and police found weapons and ammunition on board, which Indian authorities said had not been properly declared. Initially the charges were quashed when the men argued the weapons were lawfully held for anti-piracy purposes and the paperwork, issued by the UK government, was in order. But a lower court reinstated the prosecution and in January 2016 they were sentenced to five years in prison. Nick Dunn from Ashington, NorthumberlandChennai Britons 'on cloud nine' Billy Irving from Connel, Argyll Ray Tindall from Chester Paul Towers from Pocklington, East Yorkshire John Armstrong from Wigton, Cumbria Nicholas Simpson from Catterick, North Yorkshire	Two of the so-called Chennai Six, detained in India for four years on weapons charges, are "on cloud nine" after returning home.
+text: Jurors concluded the 29-year-old was lawfully killed by a police marksman in Tottenham, north London, in August 2011. Mr Duggan's mother, Pamela, had asked for the January 2014 finding to be quashed. But three Court of Appeal judges have rejected her case. His family was challenging an October 2014 High Court ruling which found the jury was legally entitled to have reached its conclusion. 'Matter of common sense' They found that the police officer who twice shot Mr Duggan, known as V53, "honestly believed" he was holding a gun at the time. At the appeal court, the family had argued jurors should also have been directed to consider whether the police officer's belief was also reasonable. But the judges said there was "no need for the coroner to spell out to the jury that, as part of their decision whether V53 honestly believed that Mr Duggan had a gun and was about to use it, they needed to consider whether such a belief was reasonable". They said this consideration was, as "a matter of common sense", an "inevitable part of the exercise". Mr Duggan's shooting led to five days of rioting in London, which spread to other cities across the country. Armed officers intercepted the minicab Mr Duggan was travelling in, believing he was part of a gang and had collected a gun. The inquest jury concluded Mr Duggan, who jumped from the taxi, had dropped the firearm on to some grass as soon as the minicab came to a stop. But the jury also accepted officer V53 "honestly believed" Mr Duggan still had a gun at the time he was shot. Despite appealing the verdict of the original inquest, the family did not seek a new hearing because the first was "too traumatic".	The family of Mark Duggan, whose death sparked riots around England, have lost a legal challenge against the conclusion his death was lawful.
+text: That is the date on which the government hopes to lift legal limits on social contact in England. While for many working from home has become normal, Goldman boss David Solomon previously described it as "an aberration". But rival investment bank JP Morgan is planning for "significantly" less office space, it said in April. Goldman bankers have in large part already returned to the office in parts of the Asia-Pacific region. But, in India and Latin America "the devastating rise in the number of infections and deaths is leading to new lockdowns and significant strain", three Goldman top executives said in an internal memo on Tuesday. However, the bank is "encouraged by the rollout of vaccines" in many places, chief executive David Solomon, president John Waldron and chief financial officer Stephen Scherr said. US bankers should be ready to come back into the office on 14 June, and UK bankers should make plans to be back on 21 June, they said. "We know from experience that our culture of collaboration, innovation and apprenticeship thrives when our people come together, and we look forward to having more of our colleagues back in the office so that they can experience that once again on a regular basis," they said. Staff who wish to continue to work from home should discuss this with their manager, they added. While some bank bosses have indicated that working from home may not be a long term option for some employees, others are planning for smaller offices. JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon said in April that the investment bank will require "significantly" less office space in the coming years, needing just 60 seats per 100 people. HSBC boss Noel Quinn said at the end of April that the bank plans to move to a hybrid model of working, with employees having a mixture of working in the office and from home. Some investment bank traders at Canary Wharf have been working from the office during the pandemic. Barclays expects to keep a significant number of traders at Canary Wharf in the future. Barclays boss Jes Staley has previously said home working is "not sustainable" for large financial institutions. Bank employees in London and New York will be coming back into the office on a phased basis from mid-June, but the return to working from the office for Barclays employees will be gradual.	Goldman Sachs has told its UK bankers they need to be ready to return to the office in June.
+text: By Mark SavageBBC 6 Music Playing to 30,000 fans in rural Kent, he stormed through hits like Purple Rain, U Got The Look, 1999 and Kiss. The 53-year-old star came back for three encores in what was his first open air gig in England since 1993, despite years of Glastonbury rumours. "I wish there wasn't no such thing as a curfew. Parties are supposed to go on 'til everyone's asleep," he announced. Instrumental jams The Minneapolis musician does not have a strong association with agricultural life - unless you count the time he took a girl in a raspberry beret "down by Old Man Johnson's Farm". Appropriately, Raspberry Beret got a brief airing on Sunday night, in one of several medleys that took their cue from his Vegas-style shows at the O2 four years ago. But other aspects of the gig felt more like his infamous "aftershow" parties, with extended instrumental jams featuring an athletic seven-piece band. The show even opened with a five-minute funk workout - a lightly-borne necessity, as Prince and his band endeavoured to set their sound levels after previous acts, including Tinie Tempah and Larry Graham, suffered from distorted bass and indistinct mixing. It was a fascinating insight to how the fastidious musician organises his live band - calling on instruments to drop in and out, while issuing instructions to off-stage technicians and sound engineers. Freakishly nimble All the while, he was mindful of the audience - extolling them to chant "soundcheck" as the work continued. With the formalities finally out of the way, a clap of thunder echoed around the park and Prince launched into Let's Go Crazy, swiftly followed by Delirious, setting the tone for an upbeat, hit-fuelled set. Highlights included a steamy, blues-infused run-through of Little Red Corvette, and the coda of Kiss, during which the musician turned his back to the audience and performed a cheeky, rump-shaking dance. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Prince seems untouched by age. His falsetto still soars to the high-notes - in stark contrast to Bono and Paul Simon's fractured vocals at Glastonbury last week. And he remains freakishly nimble, sprinting from one side of the stage to the other, dressed all the while in towering designer heels. Indeed, his only concession to advancing years was the absence of his once-trademark splits. Piano dance His sense of humour is undiminished, however... A glitzy rendition of Nothing Compares 2U elicited huge cheers - until Prince slyly announced, "I didn't write that song. That's Sinead O'Connor's song [O'Connor made the song famous, after Prince donated it to one of his ill-fated 1980s side projects, The Family]." As applause turned to boos, a grin spread across the artist's face. "Aww, come on," he protested. "I bought me a house with that song." The night ended with Prince dancing on top of his purple baby grand piano to 1987's If I Was Your Girlfriend, which segued into a triumphant, accelerated version of Baby, I'm A Star. "It was amazing," said David Moore, from Oxford, who had just seen his first ever Prince concert. "The guitar solo in Purple Rain took my breath away." "I cried. It was life-changing," said Sophie Colbert from Brighton. "A beautiful performance from a seasoned professional." Prince now goes on to play a number of festivals across Europe, including Belgium's Sint-Puetersplein on Tuesday and Ireland's Malahide Castle on 30 July.	Prince has played his first UK festival, with a two-and-a-quarter-hour set at the Hop Farm Festival.
+text: Sport England has announced the move which will affect £25m earmarked for 39 councils in England. One of the schemes affected is work on the Green Bank Leisure Centre in Swadlincote. South Derbyshire District Council had been allocated £650,000 to revamp the pool and changing rooms. The council says it will look at getting the money for the project elsewhere. The councils across England have been told there is no money available to bid for in the next round of funding to modernise public swimming pools. A Department for Culture, Media and Sport spokesman said "We are facing an unprecedented financial situation in this country, and it is essential that we act now to reduce the country's debt. "As part of that, the government has decided to end the £25m capital modernisation programme for swimming pools. Derbyshire Dales District Council and Derbyshire County Council are also affected by the cuts.	Work to upgrade several swimming pools in Derbyshire has been stopped after the government decided to withdraw money for the projects.
+text: Nottinghamshire Police said it had seen a "spike in intelligence reports" as people were "spending more time in their communities". It seized plants with a street value of more than £3m in May - an increase of 280% on the same period in 2019. Reduced crime overall meant it had more time to tackle drug offences, it added. Det Ch Insp Richard Bull said: "What we've seen is a significant increase in the amount of intelligence coming into the police from people who are obviously spending more time at home, and spending more time in their communities. "One of the consequences of that is more drugs intelligence." The force recently raided an abandoned medical building in Eastwood, which was the result of a tip-off from a member of the public, and found cannabis with a street value of £825,000. Mr Bull added that a decrease in crime linked to the "night-time economy", for example, meant it had more resources to investigate tip-offs. Insp Mark Dickson said many people wrongly thought cannabis production was "a victimless crime". He said it "is often linked to ruthless organised criminal gangs who are happy not only to use extreme violence, but also to enslave vulnerable people". Follow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.	People spending more time at home during lockdown have been giving police tip-offs, leading to increased raids on cannabis farms, a force said.
+text: At least 25 people are known to have died but blocked roads and downed communications lines mean the true impact on rural areas is not yet clear. Extensive crop damage is feared in the agricultural province of Cagayan. The storm, which packs a 900km (550 mile) rain band and strong winds, is heading towards southern China. It poses a "severe threat" to Hong Kong, the territory's observatory said, urging residents to stay on high alert. In the Philippines, it made landfall at Baggao, in the north-east of the main island of Luzon, at about 01:40 local time on Saturday (17:40 GMT on Friday) and left some 20 hours later. Originally a super typhoon billed as the strongest storm of 2018, it lost some of its strength on landfall. Five million people were in its path and more than 100,000 sheltered in temporary centres. What is known about the victims? Francis Tolentino, a presidential spokesman and disaster response coordinator, said almost all the deaths had been caused by landslides in the Cordillera and Nueva Vizcaya regions. He added that reports from other areas were still coming in. One person was killed by a falling tree in the province of Ilocos Sur, Mr Tolentino said. Constant threat of landslides By Jonathan Head, BBC South East Asia correspondent, Santiago, Cagayan Well-planned evacuations appear to have minimised casualties in the areas directly in the path of this powerful storm. Nothing though has yet been heard from some more isolated communities. But the huge volume of rain brought by the typhoon has caused numerous landslides, some fatal. This part of the Philippines is mountainous and severely deforested - landslides are a constant danger. The popular resort town of Baguio, well away from the eye of the storm, has been badly affected. President Rodrigo Duterte is flying over the northern Philippines today to assess the damage; perceived failure to respond adequately to a previous typhoon hurt the political standing of his predecessor. Aside from human casualties and the widespread destruction of housing and infrastructure, there is also concern over the longer-term impact on agriculture in this important food-producing area. How bad is the damage? Almost all buildings in the city of Tuguegarao, Cagayan's provincial capital, sustained damage, a government official said. Francis Tolentino, political adviser to President Duterte, told the BBC that there was also extensive crop damage in the agricultural heartland state. He estimated only a fifth of produce there had been harvested in advance - threatening staples like rice and corn. The Philippine Red Cross chairman, Richard Gordon, told the BBC on Saturday that the country was not yet safe of danger. "After the winds come the rains, comes the water, so the next problems that we have to face are floods and access to these areas again," he said. The Philippines is routinely hit during the typhoon season but the strength of Manghukt evoked memories of the deadliest storm on national record - Super Typhoon Haiyan - which killed more than 7,000 in 2013. However, preparation and evacuation procedures have been improved since then - warnings were issued, travel was restricted, schools shut and the army was put on standby in advance. How is China preparing? Mangkhut is still strong as it heads west toward southern China with current sustained wind speeds of 145km/h but fears it will re-strengthen into a super typhoon have receded. Authorities there have upgraded their warning level to a signal ten - the highest level - meaning residents should stay indoors to avoid any flying debris. BBC News' Robin Brant said that the city is now "pretty much shut down", although some cars remain on the roads. Most shops and public services are shut, and more than 800 flights have been cancelled at Hong Kong International Airport - affecting more than 100,000 passengers. Antoine Li, a government official at an emergency centre in the fishing village of Tai O on Hong Kong's Lantau Island, said residents must not underestimate the storm. "This typhoon will be very dangerous as it will arrive when everyone is sleeping and there is no way to leave so we have called on residents to leave the village before it gets dark," he told Reuters news agency. Mangkut is expected to weaken into a tropical depression by Tuesday. Ask a question Share this chatbot.	The Philippines is counting the human and economic cost of Typhoon Mangkhut, which ripped through its main island with deadly consequences on Saturday.
+text: By Imogen FoulkesBBC News, Basle "This is a very focused exhibition, concentrating on the years from 1961 to 1964," explains Bernhard Burgi, director of Basle's Kunstmuseum. "This period is fantastic - I think it is the heart of everything Andy Warhol did." The key to the exhibition is the way it traces the pop artist's transition from a more traditional artistic approach to using subjects repeatedly, in the same canvas, and moving to a more mechanised production of his work. Repetitive style Warhol is especially famous for his Campbell's soup cans. After apparently being advised by a friend to paint subjects that he liked, he chose Campbell's soup because, he said, he ate it almost every day. In Basle, an individual version is on display, together with early sketches of soup cans. They are followed in the exhibition by Campbell's 100 Soup Cans in which Warhol used spray paint to achieve the repetitive style which became one of his hallmarks. "Warhol's work is about repetition," explains Mr Burgi. "So in this exhibition we wanted to make very clear statements so the visitor can realise how he advanced and how he treated certain subjects." In order to achieve this focus, the museum decided not to include any of Warhol's comics, which he was also producing at the time. But several rare sketches have been included, among them pencil and pastel piece Cosmetics and a pencil sketch of the actress Ginger Rogers. Basle has the biggest collection of Warhol drawings and prints on paper outside the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "He was a very talented draughtsman," says Mr Burgi. "He had to do a lot of it as a graphic designer in the 1950s. And these drawings are autonomous, not sketches for later paintings. "He was drawing these and working on Campbell's soup at the same time." Darker subjects But perhaps the highlights of the Basle show are the screen prints of two of the mid-20th Century's biggest stars - Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis Presley. Here, too, the famous repetition is clear in a double Elvis from 1963 as well as Elvis 4 Times, a silk screen in ink and silver paint. It is in this section of the exhibition that Blue Liz - Mr Burgi's personal favourite - appears. "It's Liz Taylor, a still from her in her role as Cleopatra which was an incredibly famous film at the time," he explains. "He had started to work with the silk screen technique and here we can see he is playing with the repetition of the same image, on this very beautiful blue background." In the silk screen, Warhol provides variations of length and shade within the different rows. "So he is really playing with this mechanical addition of the motive and he creates certain rhythms and moments of composition, as in a traditional painting," adds Mr Burgi. Warhol chose some darker subjects for this repetitive style as well. The Basle exhibition has one room devoted to pieces from his Death and Disaster series which use newspaper clippings of fatal car crashes as their source material. $100m sale By 1964, Warhol's artistic output was enormous - he had renamed his studio The Factory and he employed a number of assistants. Mr Burgi says Warhol's subject matter, including photographs, soup cans and soap boxes, and use of repetition - not just in the same painting but over a series of works - made him prone to forgery. "And naturally, because Warhol was an extremely successful artist, I suppose you could be tempted to make a fake Warhol and make a lot of money," he adds. A series of apparently genuine Warhol Brillo soap pad boxes, which sold not long ago for large sums of money, are now believed by many Warhol experts to be forgeries. The trade in genuine Warhols, meanwhile, has become a multi-million dollar industry. One of the Elvis series of paintings sold recently for $100m (£64.7m), a price that only four other artists - Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Gustav Klimt and Willem de Kooning - have achieved. And Basle's museum shop is doing brisk Warhol business with T-shirts and Liz Taylor magnets among items for sale. Not to mention, of course, merchandise emblazoned with the Campbell's soup cans which have become at least as ubiquitous as the original product. Warhol's soup cans have helped to guarantee an enduring fame for the artist who predicted 15 minutes in the spotlight for all.	A major new exhibition of works by Andy Warhol focuses on a four-year period pivotal to his development as an artist.
+text: By Zoe KleinmanTechnology reporter, BBC News She's not exactly an early adopter - in fact, she has resolutely refused to video call anybody, ever, until now. Lockdown has removed the luxury of choice for many of us. If you want to see your relatives, it has to be on screen. As we get over the social awkwardness of the "Zoom boom" - when to mute that mic, when to stop talking - we're realising that, for the most part, video chat works. Whether it's family reunions, pub quizzes, office meetings or even pet appointments with the vet, we can get together quickly without being in the same room - and there's a good chance that is going to stick. Twitter has already told its staff they don't ever need to go back into the office again, and Cambridge University says its lectures will remain purely online until the summer of 2021. This week Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said that up to 50% of the workforce could be working from home in the next 5-10 years. The tech giant's head of Virtual Reality, Andrew Bosworth, shared a fascinating video of what a mixed reality workspace - a combination of the real world and digital images - might look like. 'Reliable sidekick' Broadly speaking the internet infrastructure has coped pretty well with everyone piling onto it - at least for those with access to more robust services. Some experts have long called for the net to be recognised as a public utility, alongside electricity, water and gas - as well as the requisite regulation that comes with it - and perhaps it has finally earned its spurs. John Graham-Cumming, from internet security firm Cloudflare, said the company is now seeing three daily peaks for internet traffic around the world - first thing in the morning, lunchtime and early evening - and they are bigger than ever. "If you think about the internet as a utility, can you think of another utility that could sustain 50% growth [in traffic]?" he said. "The net has been a reliable sidekick through all this." And the tech firms have certainly spotted their opportunity. Microsoft's Satya Nadella says digital transformation has advanced two years in two months, as we seek to be entertained, to be connected and to keep track of what is happening during the pandemic. Tech alternatives We can already see investment and goodwill getting behind tech alternatives in the hunt for new ways of doing things: could this be the moment drone deliveries finally take off (pardon the pun), e-scooters get an easier ride, and virtual gyms put our post-lockdown bodies through their paces, via a headset, in the comfort of our own homes? History will eventually reveal whether lockdown was the dawn of a new era or merely a blip before things returned to the way they were. For tech to truly prove itself as a game-changer, it has to become part of the furniture: consistent, reliable and, therefore, totally unremarkable. And as anyone who has experienced an unexpected outage at a frustrating moment in the past few weeks will tell you, we're not quite there yet.	I first realised just how quickly attitudes towards technology were changing when my mum told me, two days after lockdown began, that she had downloaded Skype.
+text: Ministry of Sound regularly releases collections of dance hits. The compilations are not on Spotify, but the label says Spotify infringes copyright because some users' playlists mirror the albums' track listings. Ministry of Sound said "a lot of research goes into" creating the compilations. Spotify did not comment. "What we do is a lot more than putting playlists together," Ministry of Sound chief executive Lohan Presencer told The Guardian. "A lot of research goes into creating our compilation albums, and the intellectual property involved in that. It's not appropriate for someone to just cut and paste them." Ministry of Sound launched legal proceedings in the High Court in London on Monday. It contends that the law protects "the expertise and creative effort involved" in curating titles such as The Sound Of Dubstep Classics and Ibiza Annual 2013. The company is seeking an injunction requiring Spotify to remove the playlists in question and to permanently block playlists that copy its compilations. It is also seeking damages and costs. Mr Presencer wrote in a separate article: "We painstakingly create, compile and market our albums all over the world. We help music fans discover new genres, records and classic catalogues. "Millions trust our brands, our taste and our selection. We give them great listening experiences at a good price." He said some Spotify users had used the Ministry of Sound name in the titles of their playlists. He also claimed the service had refused to remove those playlists when asked. "Several rounds of legal letters later, this dispute will now be settled in court," he wrote. "We believe we have a clear cut case. After 20 years and more than 50 million album sales, the value and creativity in our compilations are self evident." Ministry of Sound does not own the copyright to many of the tracks on its compilations, the majority of which have been licensed from other record labels. Chris Cook, business editor with music industry magazine CMU said he sympathised with Ministry of Sound's position as "there is an effort and art in curation", adding listings services do enjoy a degree of copyright protection. But he added Ministry of Sound risks a PR backlash over the legal action and could be "portrayed as an old style company desperately trying to protect its compilation business". Kieron Donoghue, whose website playlists.net allows users to explore and share playlists, said he had also been asked by Ministry of Sound to remove lists from his site. "As we're only a small company with no budget for legal expenses we've always complied," he said, but questioned the wisdom of the label's court action. "The very fact that users want to have Ministry of Sound content on Spotify but have to create their own, because it's not there, is a huge compliment," he said in a blog post. "Ministry of Sound need to embrace this and work with their audience, not against them. This could quite easily turn into a huge PR disaster." He noted that rival compilation series Now Music had "even gone so far as to compile playlists of all of their albums and have been publishing them on our site since 2011". However, the Now compilations are a joint venture of music industry giants Sony and Universal, who own the majority of the tracks on their playlists, and earn royalties when they are streamed. Ministry of Sound, whose artists include Example and Wretch 32, would make significantly less by providing a similar service. Spotify allows subscribers to listen to the 20 million songs in its catalogue and use them to create their own playlists. The service, which began in Sweden, now has 24 million users in 28 countries. A Spotify spokesman declined to comment.	Dance record label Ministry of Sound is suing music streaming service Spotify, claiming Spotify playlists copy its compilation albums.
+text: There are more than 2.8 million confirmed cases of Covid-19, according to the tally. It comes after the number of fatalities in the US passed 50,000, as Americans endure the world's deadliest outbreak. Chinese state media reported the first known death linked to the virus on 11 January. More than 210 countries and territories have since reported cases. Five countries have now reported death tolls above 20,000 although the way fatalities are counted varies widely. The US, Italy and Spain have seen the highest number of reported fatalities. The UK's Department of Health announced on Saturday that more than 20,000 people had now died with coronavirus in UK hospitals. Home Secretary Priti Patel described the figure as a "tragic and terrible milestone" and said "the entire nation is grieving". As the UK's daily data does not include people who die at home or in nursing homes, the true figure is certain to be higher. France, which does include deaths in care homes in its statistics, said its toll had risen by 369 on Saturday. There have been 22,614 virus deaths in France since the start of March, but health officials say the mortality rate in hospitals is falling, and the number of people in intensive care has dropped for the seventeenth consecutive day. Among the latest developments: Resurgence in some regions Earlier this week, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) highlighted upward trends in Covid-19 cases in Africa, Eastern Europe, Central America and South America. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that while most of the epidemics in Western Europe appeared to be stable or in decline, for many countries the disease was just getting started. "And some (countries) that were affected early in the pandemic are now starting to see a resurgence in cases," he said. One such country is Singapore, which was initially praised for its success in containing the virus, but has since seen a surge of infections linked to industrial worksites and tightly packed worker dormitories. Elsewhere in Asia, Chinese authorities reported no new deaths for the tenth consecutive day on Saturday, and South Korea had its second day without a death. Why it's difficult to compare between countries Statisticians have cautioned that a reported death toll may not always give the full picture of a country's epidemic. The US has seen the most virus deaths of any individual country, for example, but also has a far larger population than most. With 330 million people, its population exceeds the total number of people living in the five largest countries in Western Europe - the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. Many European countries have reported more deaths per head of population than the US, and Europe as a whole has reported more deaths overall. Death rates also depend on who is counted. Some countries are including deaths in care homes in their data, giving a fuller picture, whereas others only count deaths in hospital where Covid-19 has been confirmed. Belgium has a figure of 6,917 deaths in a population of 11.4 million. More than half the country's deaths have been in care homes for the elderly and are based largely on suspected cases, which makes the country's data look much worse. Read more about comparing death tolls here	More than 200,000 people worldwide have now died with the coronavirus, figures from Johns Hopkins University show.
+text: On Thursday, we spoke to a Swedish woman who was tricked by a Nigerian man posing as a Dane seeking love. Following that story, we received many emails from people saying they had been lured into similar traps. Here are some of their stories. Susan, Hastings "He phoned me and said he was short of $4,000" I was scammed some two months ago by a Nigerian man posing as an American, from Boston, Massachusetts, calling himself Thomas Crane. He sent me a friend request on Facebook, and I just accepted it, partly because I wasn't used to Facebook and also he looked quite nice. We very quickly started chatting on Facebook Messenger and he started phoning me. Looking back, I realise I was being groomed. I'm an intelligent woman, but he was clever enough to find a vulnerability in me as a divorced woman. He got close to me quite quickly and sent me a whole series of photos of himself, all the way back to his childhood. He said he was going to work on a multimillion-pound contract in Spain, and so would soon be in Europe. Then he phoned me and said he was actually short of $4,000 - I was the only one who could help him out. I came within seconds of giving him the money, but then I told a friend and she brought me down to reality. At that point I blocked him. But then a week later he sent me an email saying he had told me some lies, but he really was Thomas Crane. I unblocked him and started talking to him again. Why did I do that? I wanted to believe it was real, even though there was a voice in my head saying it can't be true. Then I decided to play him at his own game, which was dangerous, but exciting. I wanted to teach him a lesson so I kept in touch, but kept him hanging on - making excuses for not sending him money. I was then out of the blue contacted by a Romanian lady on Facebook who saw the picture of "Thomas Crane" and said she too had been scammed by him. At that point I stopped - I told him I knew he was a scammer, and stopped communicating. I never heard from him again, but the whole experience traumatised me. Alan, Bristol "Somehow I wanted to believe it was true" I was scammed last year and I confess I completely lost my sense of reality to the elaborate web of deceit and lies. I was in a peculiar place - married but looking for something else. I'm an artist, and was actively seeking a "muse", and trawling various dating sites. I got an email saying I had a match - and that's when the trouble started. After two or three days, the lady asked me to get instant messenger on Yahoo. From then on for a three-month period I was messaging her and emailing literally her all the time. She said she was American, an ex-Playboy model and was now working in Saudi Arabia, doing deals on gems. Later she ended up in Nigeria. How did I fall for all this? Somehow I wanted to believe it was true. And she supplied enough information that it was hard to prove her story completely untrue. As soon as I started to get suspicious, she would act like a girlfriend I had treated badly, and lure me back in. After a few weeks she said she needed help with this and the other. I was really cautious - I asked her what hotel she was in, Googled it and rang the reception. But they might have been in on it. For three months this was the situation. I was checking facts but ultimately I wanted to believe the romantic fantasy. Some two months after it started, she said she was having trouble with a deal in Nigeria and needed some money to help grease the wheel of the transaction - £300 or £400. I did end up sending the money. But the whole thing stopped quickly after that as my wife warned me if I sent any more money there would be serious consequences. The affair was incredibly harmful to my marriage but thankfully with faith and forgiveness we are now in a much better place. Carol, London "I feel such a fool - I really thought that this was something special" Maybe I am another victim of scamming and have learnt a very expensive lesson - but I am not sure. I have been writing to someone who I met online in August. We hadn't met because he said he wanted to get to know me as a person before we met. He said he had been awarded a civil engineering contract in South Africa worth £3.6m. He was trying to buy a phone to take with him and the iPhone 7 was launched days before he left. He asked if I could get one for him and ship it over. He would pay me back when he got his first payment. At the time everyone said that I should get the money from him first, but I felt he was genuine. In the five weeks that he has been in South Africa he said that he's hit some problems and needed to "borrow" some cash. I had no doubt that this was genuine so I wired over £2,000. We had discussed his return to the UK - I was going to be meeting him at Heathrow. He was often talking about buying a property near to me. We were planning our Christmas together. Last week he hit me with the next crisis - that the job has been shut down and he needed to pay some taxes upfront, which worked out as £200,000. He asked if I could get a loan to go towards the payment of outstanding taxes. My heart believed him, but in my head alarm bells kept ringing. I was in the process of securing a £100,000 loan and then I saw the BBC article about scamming. There are a number of similarities and it has really scared me. I've asked him to FaceTime me or send a current picture - he said he would but hasn't. I feel such a fool - I really thought that this was something special and I totally ignored everyone's warnings. by Nathan Williams, UGC and Social News team	Could you ever be tricked out of money by a stranger posing as a potential romantic partner?
+text: By Daniel DaviesBBC Wales news website political reporter Jane Hutt will publish the Welsh government's draft budget of just under £15bn for next year. Ministers have spoken to opponents in an attempt to get their plans through the assembly. With 30 of 60 seats, Labour must do a deal with another party to secure a majority to get the budget approved. Last year extra money was promised for deprived pupils in return for Liberal Democrats voting for the budget. There has been contact between all three opposition parties and the government, but talks will get under way in earnest once the draft plans are published on Tuesday. With no power to raise its own finances, the Welsh government's budget is reliant on an annual block grant from the Treasury. 'Challenging' The spending plans covering 2013/14 come at a time of cuts in public spending, meaning difficult decisions for Finance Minister Jane Hutt. The block grant is due to fall in cash terms from just over £15bn this year to about £14.95bn. Ms Hutt said the cuts made it a "hugely challenging budget for me to deliver." She said: "We have to have a budget that helps revive the economy and boosts the economy. "It has to be as it was last year, a budget for growth and jobs." There had been particularly big cuts to the Welsh government's capital budget which pays for investment in buildings and infrastructure, she said. Ms Hutt was speaking on a visit to a mental health unit for older people at University Hospital Llandough, Cardiff, funded by £57m from the Welsh government. She added: "It's about saying that our public money has to be used in the most important priorities for the economy, for our public services and that is of course the key message of my budget." The Conservatives, the biggest opposition party, have already signalled they want more spending on the NHS, claiming local health boards are struggling to make ends meet. Plaid Cymru AM Simon Thomas said: "I don't think our focus has changed since the last budget, which is the economy." Under last year's deal with the Lib Dems, schools were given an extra £450 for every child who receives free school dinners. Welsh Lib Dem leader Kirsty Williams said: "In this budget, we are calling on the Welsh Labour government to make further moves to ensure that Wales' children are not allowed to be left behind." A final vote is expected in the Senedd in December.	Wales' finance minister says the country needs a budget to revive the economy as she prepares to set out spending plans for next year.
+text: By Mark KinverEnvironment reporter, BBC News Rossano Ercolini convinced Naples - a city gripped by a long-running waste crisis - to adopt zero-waste goals. Other winners include an anti-fracking campaigner from Africa and an Iraqi leading a marsh restoration project. The awards, called the Oscars of the environment movement, will be presented at a ceremony in San Francisco. Reacting to the news, the 56-year-old primary school teacher said: "I am a bit shocked because I have been committed to what I do for a very long time. "I was aware that there was some attention on my work but I did not know that there was international attention looking at what I was doing," he told BBC News. His first taste of grassroots campaigning was back in the mid-1970s when plans were unveiled to build an incinerator near the school where he taught. In 1994, proposals to construct two incinerators in his hometown of Lucca led to him focusing his efforts on the issue of tackling the growing problem of waste. Today, as an organising member of the Zero Waste International Alliance, his campaign to encourage recycling and waste reduction has led to 117 municipalities across Italy closing incinerators and committing to zero-waste strategies. 'Immoral waste' As well as politicians and business leaders, Mr Ercolini even got the clergy, in the guise of the bishop of Lucca, involved by describing the use of incinerators to burning waste as "immoral". "There are people in the world that die as a result of a lack of food, while there is another half of the world that is wasting too much." In 2011, Mr Ercolini secured arguably one of his biggest campaigning successes when Napoli's mayor agreed to adopt a zero-waste strategy. The city, home to almost a million people, has been gripped by waste management problems - including reports of Mafia involvement - since the 1990s. The problem reached its visible peak in 2007 when rubbish bags were left piled in the city's streets, uncollected for weeks or longer. As part of the solution, the city's unrecycled waste, unable to go to landfill or be incinerated, is being shipped to a refuse processor in the Netherlands. Campaigners are calling for this to be stopped, and the mayor has agreed to do so as soon as it is possible. Mr Ercolini says that they are maintaining "very strong pressure" to ensure the politician delivers on his promise. The Goldman Prize winner added that the answer was not to bury or burn the waste, allowing the problem to "disappear" because out of sight was out of mind. Other winners of the 2013 awards were: Jonathan Deal, South Africa: led a successful campaign against fracking in South Africa to protect the Karoo, a semi-desert region, valued for its agriculture and wildlife. Azzam Alwash, Iraq: returned to the country from the US to lead local communities in restoring the once-lush marshes that had been allowed to dry out under Saddam Hussein's regime. Aleta Baun, Indonesia: organised local villagers to occupy marble mining sites in order to prevent the destruction of sacred forestland on the island of Timor. Kimberly Wasserman, US: led a local campaign to shut down two of the nation's oldest coal-fired power plants and transform Chicago's old industrial sites into parks and multi-use spaces. Nohra Padilla, Colombia: organised Colombia's marginalised waste pickers, in the face of political opposition and threats of violence, in order to make recycling a legitimate part of waste management.	An environmental campaigner, considered to be the driving force behind Italy's zero-waste movement, is one of the winners of the 2013 Goldman Prize.
+text: By Shilpa KannanBBC News, Tirumala The crown jewel is the dazzling gold-plated temple of Lord Venkateshwara. Located in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, this is not just one of Hinduism's holiest shrines, but also one of the richest. It has an annual income of $340m - mostly from donations. Between 50-100,000 people visit this temple every day. This puts enormous pressure on water, electricity and other energy resources. Now the temple is using its religious influence and economic might to change the way energy is used here. Sustainable sources Developing reserve forests around the temple to act as carbon sinks, the management has transformed the environment. They are promoting the use of sustainable technologies and hope to influence public opinion. LV Subramanyam is the executive officer of the temple trust. "While we currently use a mix of conventional and non-conventional energy sources, our aim is make the place more reliant on sustainable sources of energy," he says "Most of our devotees are progressive. In a religious place like Tirumala, we can set the example by going green. Probably the impact will be much more than normal government advertisements or publicity." Inside the temple complex, a large multi-storey building is dedicated to just one thing - cooking free meals for pilgrims. Several cooks work in tandem stirring large pots of rice, curry and vegetables. Nearly 50,000 kilos of rice along with lentils are cooked here every day. Open all day, this community kitchen is the biggest green project for the temple. Located on the roof of this building are rows of solar dishes that automatically move with the angle of the sun, capturing the strong sunlight. Then the energy is used to convert water into high pressure steam, which cooks the food in the kitchen below. Generating over 4,000kgs of steam a day at 180º C, this makes the cooking faster and cheaper. As a result, an average of 500 litres of diesel fuel is saved each day. Credit score By switching to green technologies, the temple cuts its carbon emissions and earns a carbon offset, or credit, which they can sell. Badal Shaw is the managing director of Gadhia Solar Energy Systems, which has set up the solar cookers. He estimates that this has resulted in a reduction of more than 1,350kgs of green house gases in the atmosphere. "This was the first project to get a gold standard certification - it's a registered project and it is issuing carbon credits," he says. "From a monetary value, carbon being a tradable commodity - the prices keeps going up and down ... we sold the carbon credits of this and various other projects to the German government." Blowing on the wind But it's not just the sun that the temple is tapping into. On top of a hill, the site is ideal for harnessing wind energy. Companies like Suzlon and Enercon have donated turbines which generate a combined total of 7.5 megawatts of power. A Tirupati-based company called Green Energy Solutions now wants to develop multiple wind farms to supply the entire temple's energy. Madhu Babu, the founder of the group, says they want to tap into the pool of devotees worldwide, asking them to make a donation of green power to the temple. The temple is unique because devotees are known to make generous donations of both cash and resources. While some have given diamonds in the past, others have given sheets of gold or bundles of cash. "We have found that a lot of non-resident Indians are interested in donating sustainable technology instead," says Mr Babu. "We want to facilitate such donations and translate them into wind farms, so that the entire temple town can be run on green energy." Big appetite India is growing rapidly and is hungry for energy, supplied largely by fossil fuels. Global consultancy McKinsey predicts that the country's carbon emissions will double in the next decade. This is why it is more important than ever for India to look at alternative sources of energy, says CB Jagadeeswara Reddy, the local government officer in charge of promoting non-conventional energy development. The temple city has been identified as a future 'low-carbon footprint city' by European Aid and Development, which works under the European Commission. But a lot of these technologies cost money and Mr Reddy says it's important to involve the private sector. "It's important that we make technology accessible for people," he says. "When pilgrims use the water and learn that sustainable sources of energy are being tapped into make the water, food, power available to them, it inspires them. They too will want to learn more about the technology behind it." Clean-tech India? As India is taking steps to limit its emissions, it's also one of the largest producers of carbon credits in the world. According to a 2010 study by HSBC Research, India's share of the $2.2 trillion market for low carbon goods and services in 2020 could be as much as $135bn. The report further predicts that India's clean technology market could create 10.5m green jobs, and is likely to grow faster than any other country. Dr Prodipto Ghosh from The Energy Research Institute says there are already over 2000 companies in the country involved in research and innovation for the low carbon goods and services market. He says that companies have a financial incentive to use clean development mechanisms, as they monetise projects which otherwise would cost the company a lot more. While going green may not make economic sense for everyone, the carbon offsets or credits offer a lucrative incentive to do so. Businesses can exchange, buy or sell carbon credits in international markets at the prevailing market price. This also is important in relation to the country's energy security. India now spends 45% of export earnings on energy imports, and this is expected to increase even further. While the temple assesses the savings that each of these investments can make, the pilgrims enjoy meals cooked using green sources of energy. To fuel India's growth, there is an increasing demand for alternative sources. Whilst the temple might be one small step, the hope is that this could be a model that is replicated across the country.	Surrounded by seven hills, high above lush green forests is the temple town of Tirumala.
+text: L/Cpl George Partridge ran out of air during a diving exercise at the National Dive Centre in Tidenham. Health and safety inspector Julian Tuvey said: "Just like any other employer, the MoD has a responsibility to reduce dangers to its personnel, as far as they properly can." Two Crown Improvement Notices have been issued to the MoD by the watchdog. The MOD said its "thoughts and sympathies" remain with L/Cpl Partridge's family and friends. "The scenario of a diver running out of air is a very real risk that needs to managed," Mr Tuvey said. The soldier, of 26 Engineer Regiment in Wiltshire, died at Gloucestershire quarry on 26 March 2018 despite attempts to revive him. He and his "dive buddy" were tasked with attaching a line to the underwater wreck of a helicopter at a depth of 89ft (27m). When he was recovered his air cylinders were found to be empty. The two improvement notices relate to the failure to train all army divers how to undertake air endurance calculations and to assess the risk of a diver running out of air. The MoD admitted breaching its duty on 2 September when the the Health and Safety Executive issued the department with a Crown Censure - the maximum sanction for a government body.. A five day jury inquest into the L/Cpl's death due to be held earlier this year has been delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Previously his family claimed he was a victim of 'systemic failures' in safety precautions by the military. A MOD spokesperson said: "The Ministry of Defence and Royal Navy take the safety of our personnel extremely seriously and co-operated fully with the civilian police and Health and Safety Executive investigations to fully understand the circumstances of this tragedy, which we will learn fully from."	Health and safety rules were breached when a soldier died under the care of the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
+text: It comes after Peter Robinson defended comments made by a pastor who described Islam as "heathen" and "satanic". The DUP leader will visit the Belfast Islamic Centre later to meet local representatives of the community. Dr Samina Dornan, a Muslim, said she agreed with Alliance MLA Anna Lo that Mr Robinson should publicly apologise. "He is my leader too, so he needs to represent me as well," she said. "Already severe damage has been done by a few people. We, as the Northern Ireland public, need to repair that," she added. "Everybody wants to make it clear, nobody supports extremism. "No-one wants extreme Islam. I don't even do religion, but I do respect people's faith. I work with all sorts of people. This is a beautiful country, with the most beautiful people I have ever met. "I love this country. Let's not show the world the ugly face we don't even have." Mr Robinson came under fire last week for defending Pastor James McConnell's remarks. The first minister told the Irish News he would not trust Muslims involved in violence or those devoted to Sharia law. Misinterpreted However, the DUP leader said he would "trust them to go to the shops" for him. Mr Robinson later said his remarks had been misinterpreted, and met Muslim leaders in Belfast to apologise. At Stormont on Tuesday, assembly members condemned the recent racial attacks and expressed their opposition to racism, discrimination and intolerance. The assembly passed without a formal vote a motion calling for all parties to show leadership on the issue and urging the first and deputy first ministers to bring forward a racial equality strategy as a matter of urgency. Junior Minister Jennifer McCann, Sinn Féin, said Martin McGuinness had already signed off on a draft strategy under the working title, "A Sense of Belonging", and she believed the document would be published soon. The SDLP's Alban Maginness questioned why Mr Robinson did not attend the debate. Mr Maginness claimed Mr Robinson was in "dereliction of his duty" by not clarifying his position. A number of DUP assembly members made it clear that they unequivocally condemned all racist attacks. However, DUP MLA George Robinson questioned whether the media had shown leadership. The East Londonderry assembly member claimed some sections of the media could "cause division and increasing fear" with continuing coverage to suit "their agenda". A Sinn Féin motion and an Alliance amendment were both passed without a formal vote. Earlier on Tuesday, an Islamic leader who met Mr Robinson said he was 100% satisfied with his explanation about his remarks about Muslims. Imam Ibrahim Noonan from the Galway mosque said he felt very reassured after meeting the first minister, whom he described as "genuine". He said he thought Mr Robinson's remarks had been taken out of context, but was critical of Mr McConnell. He called on him to apologise to the Muslim community. Meanwhile, SDLP leader Alasdair McDonnell said he has written to the assembly's commissioner for standards, Douglas Bain, to lodge a formal complaint about Mr Robinson's comments. He said he believed the comments breached the assembly's code of conduct.	A Belfast hospital consultant says Muslim staff have been very hurt by the recent controversy over comments made by a pastor and the first minister.
+text: The exodus began on 25 August after Rohingya militants attacked police posts, killing 12 members of the security forces. Those attacks led to a security crackdown. Myanmar's military says it is fighting insurgents but those who have fled say troops and Rakhine Buddhists are conducting a brutal campaign to drive them out. The Rohingya - a stateless mostly Muslim minority group - have faced years of persecution in Myanmar. Deep-seated tensions between them and the majority Buddhist population in Rakhine have led to deadly communal violence in the past. When did the latest violence start? On 25 August Rohingya insurgents armed with knives and home-made bombs attacked more than 30 police posts in northern Rakhine, the government said. Huge numbers of Rohingya civilians then began fleeing over the border into Bangladesh. Many of them say that Burmese troops, backed by local Buddhist mobs, began burning their villages and attacking and killing civilians in response to the 25 August attacks. Some of those who have arrived in Bangladesh have bullet or other wounds. Observers on the ground and satellite images confirm many razed Muslim villages across northern Rakhine state. The Myanmar military accuses the militants and the Rohingyas of burning their own homes. But a BBC reporter saw one case of burning that appeared to contradict the official narrative and the UN human rights chief, Zeid Raad Al Hussein, has called on the military to "stop pretending" that Muslims are burning their own homes. Speaking on 11 September, Mr Zeid said the security operation in Myanmar seems "a textbook example of ethnic cleansing". It is not clear how many people have died. The military gave a toll of 400 on 1 September and said most of those were militants. But a UN human rights official said a week later that she thought the number could be over 1,000. Verifying the situation on the ground is difficult because access is restricted. What is the situation at the border? The number of Rohingya seeking safety in Bangladesh had been steadily rising since 25 August, and turned into a flood by early September. The UN says more than 410,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since the attacks. Many have arrived with injuries they say were sustained in the crackdown. Several dozen are reported to have drowned trying to cross the Naf River into Bangladesh. Early on there were reports of people being turned back at the border but that is no longer the case. Aid agencies and the UN are working to provide food, water and shelter for the huge influx. Bangladesh is already home to hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees who have fled previous outbreaks of violence in Myanmar. But existing refugee camps are now full, so the new arrivals are sleeping in any space they can find. Inside Myanmar, early on there were reports of Rakhine Buddhists moving south to escape the violence. Who are the militants? A group called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (Arsa) says it carried out the 25 August attacks. The group first emerged in October 2016, when it carried out similar assaults on police posts, killing nine police officers. It says its main aim is to protect the Rohingya Muslim minority from state repression in Myanmar. The government says Arsa is a terrorist group whose leaders have been trained abroad. Arsa's leader is Ata Ullah, a Rohingya born in Pakistan who was raised in Saudi Arabia, according to the International Crisis Group. But a spokesman for the group told Asia Times that it had no links to jihadist groups and that its members were young Rohingya men angered by events since communal violence in 2012. What are the Rohingyas' grievances? Myanmar's government claims the Rohingya are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and denies them citizenship, even though many say they have been there for generations. Bangladesh also denies they are its citizens. Many are living in temporary camps after being forced from their villages by the wave of communal violence that swept Rakhine in 2012. They live in one of Myanmar's poorest states, and their movements and access to employment are severely restricted. After the first attacks by Arsa in October 2016, many Rohingya accused the security forces of rape, killings, burning villages and torture during a subsequent crackdown. The UN is now carrying out a formal investigation, although the military denies wrongdoing. The UN human rights chief says rights violations in Rakhine have almost certainly contributed to the growth of Rohingya extremism. What has Myanmar said? Myanmar's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi is facing mounting international criticism over her failure to protect the Rohingya. Fellow Nobel Peace laureates - including Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, the Dalai Lama and South Africa's anti-apartheid campaigner Archbishop Desmond Tutu - have called on her to do more to end the violence. Early on Ms Suu Kyi - who faces strong domestic anti-Rohingya sentiment and governs a nation in which significant power remains concentrated in the military - claimed the crisis was being distorted by a "huge iceberg of misinformation". In a speech to the nation on 19 September she condemned "all human rights violations and unlawful violence", saying she felt "deeply for the suffering of all the people caught up in the conflict". She said she wanted to find out why so many people were fleeing, but also pointed out that many Muslims had chosen to stay in Rakhine. She said people verified as refugees would be able to return home. Responding to her speech, rights group Amnesty accused her government of "burying their heads in the sand" and said Rohingya refugees could not "return to this appalling status quo". The plight of the Rohingya has sparked protests in many Muslim nations, including Indonesia, Pakistan and Malaysia.	A fresh outbreak of violence in Myanmar's Rakhine state has caused hundreds of thousands of Rohingya civilians to flee to Bangladesh.
+text: The start of the Great Birmingham 10K on 31 May has been moved to near the Hippodrome theatre with the finish close to Victoria Square. St Paul's Square, the Jewellery Quarter, St Martin's church and the Bullring Markets will all feature. The event will shine a light "on the historic heart of Birmingham", organisers said. New route highlights David Hart, partnerships director for organisers the Great Run Company, said they wanted the new route to be a celebration of all that's great about the city. "The new and improved route for this year's 10k is a perfect showcase for a new-look Birmingham." The Great Run Company has worked with the city council, public transport providers and the city centre's five Business Improvement Districts. Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, on Twitter, and sign up for local news updates direct to your phone. Related Internet Links Great Birmingham 10K	A new route for Birmingham's 10k, which will include some city centre landmarks for the first time, has been unveiled.
+text: Northampton Borough Council was penalised by Arts Council England for selling its Egyptian Sekhemka limestone statue for nearly £16m in July. Some funds will be used to help expand Northampton Museum and Art Gallery. The council said a larger building would "help attract additional funds". Last month Arts Council England ruled that the sale of the 4,000-year-old statue breached the accredited standards for how museums manage their collections, meaning it was now ineligible for a range of arts grants and funding. 'No regrets' Council Leader David Mackintosh said: "The accredited status is still in dispute and we are appealing [over] that process." However, plans to use funds from the sale of the statue to expand the museum - by purchasing the gaol block and Guildhall Road blocks of County Hall - are set to go ahead. Negotiations next week will include agreeing the "right price" with the county council, while acquiring independent valuations, Mr Mackintosh said. He said he "did not regret" the sale of Sekhemka. "I think this has been the catalyst for allowing us to do lots of things and make lots of improvements," he said. "It's very difficult when you have to make these decisions, but I do think the money raised allows us to invest £8m in the museum service... so I think it's good for the people of Northampton."	A council has begun negotiations to purchase buildings enabling it to expand a museum, despite the venue losing its accreditation status after the controversial sale of a statue.
+text: By Tomi OladipoBBC Africa security correspondent In a speech in December outlining the US' Africa policy, President Trump's National Security Adviser John Bolton said "terrorists operating in Africa have... repeatedly targeted US citizens and interests". He gave the impression that there would be no let up in the struggle against militant Islamist groups, such as the Somalia-based al-Shabab, which is affiliated to al-Qaeda. In March 2017, the Pentagon received White House approval to expand its fight against the militants in the Horn of Africa nation. Commanders now no longer require high-level vetting to approve strikes on al-Shabab in "areas of active hostilities" in Somalia. "It allows [us] to prosecute targets in a more rapid fashion," said General Thomas Walhauser of US Africa Command (Africom). The move has seen increased attacks by aircraft, as well as the first public deployment of US boots on the ground since 1993 to "advise and assist" Somali government troops. Africom has now carried out at least 46 confirmed airstrikes in Somalia in 2018, following the previous record of 38 in 2017, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ). Some single strikes have focused on large groups of militants. For example, about 60 were killed on 12 October around Harardere in the central Mudug region, in what was the largest airstrike of its kind in nearly a year. Other strikes focused on individuals, such as the lone militant targeted and killed six days earlier in Kunyo Barrow in southern Somalia. Compared to previous years, 2017 and 2018 marked a significant increase in US action against al-Shabab. In fact, a BIJ tally reveals that at least 538 people have been killed in these airstrikes since the beginning of 2017 - far more than the previous 10 years combined - although not every strike was recorded to have killed someone. Africom says the "airstrikes reduce al-Shabab's ability to plot future attacks, disrupt its leadership networks, and degrade its freedom of manoeuvre within the region". This shows that every trace of the group is considered a threat. As noted by the Long War Journal, the strikes are part of a wider pattern that has ranged from targeting top commanders to the rank and file who make up the group's visible presence on the ground. 'Militants adopt new tactics' But apart from one senior al-Shabab commander, Ali Mohamed Hussein, killed in a joint US-Somalia military raid in the southern Lower Shabelle region in August 2017, few have been significant enough to be named by the US since Mr Trump approved the expansion of military operations in Somalia. Al-Shabab militants, like other jihadist groups, are well aware of the threat from the skies. According to a senior regional security official, the fighters now avoid congregating in large groups. They move in units of three or four and only converge to carry out attacks, including on bases of African Union troops and Somali government forces. Despite the increased strikes, al-Shabab's core capabilities remain solid. The group has not lost control of territory in central and southern parts of Somalia, where it is trying to set up its own administration, including raising taxes from the local population. These are vast areas - far larger than the urban centres that the federal government controls in the same regions. Bill Roggio and Alexandra Gutowski of the Long War Journal conclude that this reflects al-Shabab's primary goal, adopted from al-Qaeda, which is "to overthrow local governments and create emirates which will eventually coalesce into an Islamic caliphate". US 'adheres' to laws of conflict The jihadist group has displayed its confidence through attacks such as the ambush last June on a combined force of Somali, Kenyan and American troops in Jamame town in southern Somalia, in which a US special forces soldier was killed. Despite the insistence of the Somali government and Amisom that the group has been eliminated from the capital, Mogadishu, one of its leaders, Ali Dhere, was recently photographed hosting a charity event near the city. Al-Shabab still mounts occasional forays into neighbouring Kenya's border regions carrying out ambushes and explosive attacks on security forces, and it often publishes videos documenting these incidents as part of its media operation. The group sometimes responds to Ethiopian, Kenyan and US airstrikes by claiming that the casualties were innocent civilians, but from the US action over the past two years, there are no independent records of civilians killed. Meanwhile, at least 32 have been injured in areas held by the militants, according to BIJ statistics. More from Tomi Oladipo In a statement to the BBC, Africom spokeswoman Becky Farmer noted that the US military command for Africa "has not discovered or assessed any civilian casualties resulting from our operations over the last two years". She added: "In fact, [we go] to extraordinary lengths to reduce the likelihood of civilian casualties, exercising restraint as a matter of policy that regularly exceeds the restrictions of the law of armed conflict." There are still vivid memories of America's disastrous exit during its last major military action in Somalia in 1994. At the time, two US Black Hawk helicopters were shot down in Mogadishu. In the ensuing battle, hundreds of Somalis were estimated to have died. Some 18 Americans and two UN soldiers were killed. However, the Pentagon would consider the option of airstrikes today to be far less risky to US troops and possibly more effective in taking out targets. As a result, the campaign is unlikely to be affected by the recent announcement of an impending reduction of US troops in Africa. So far, the increased airstrikes have not given the US, the Somali government and AU troops the upper hand. Al-Shabab will be content to retain its vast geographical control. Even if its commanders are taken out in targeted strikes, the group has established a system to replace them and to continue the conflict for the foreseeable future.	Donald Trump's presidency has coincided with a sharp rise in US-led airstrikes in Somalia and the trend is set to continue in 2019.
+text: That is according to Education Minister Peter Weir. As schools are closed, the families of almost 97,000 children entitled to free school meals are receiving payments of £27 every fortnight per child instead. The scheme was introduced in response to the coronavirus pandemic on 26 March at an initial cost of £19m. The minister faced questions from MLAs on Stormont's education committee on Wednesday. Free school meal payments to about 55,000 families of eligible children continued throughout the Easter school holiday. 'Absolutely realistic' Mr Weir was asked by Sinn Féin MLA Karen Mullan if those payments could continue over the summer. "I want to be absolutely realistic on this," said Mr Weir. "With the normal departmental budget there is not money for free school meals from the department over the summer period. "The amount of Covid resource within the executive is such that at the moment they're moving to a position of over-commitment before even anything could be considered, for instance, over the summer. "The executive, as a whole, will need to take a view on that but in terms of continuation of payments it's certainly not something that can be done by the Department of Education. "There simply isn't the money available." Mr Weir said as the Department for Communities (DfC) had taken wider responsibility for the feeding of vulnerable families, his department would be happy to co-operate with DfC if anything could be done. Earlier, MLAs heard from representatives of the five teaching unions about the measures they wanted to be put in place before schools could re-open to more or all pupils. 'A school-to-school basis' Jacquie White of the Ulster Teachers Union (UTU) said more pupils could only go back to school on the basis of "robust" public health advice. She also said there were questions about how many children and staff could be safely accommodated in schools. "We have had schools who, whenever they've been seeking to measure out classrooms safely, are ranging from anything from five children to 13 children in the class," she said. "I think it's important these decisions are taken on a school to school basis." Mark Langhammer of the National Education Union (NEU) said when children do return, the curriculum would have to be very different. "The immediate focus on returning to school will probably be on care, on recovery, on resilience and well-being," he said. "It won't be business as usual because re-opening is likely to be staged and difficult," he said. "Schools will not be accommodating all pupils at all times so home-based learning will remain, in part." "My best guess would be that somewhere between 20% and 40% of staff would be unlikely to be able to return due to underlying conditions, shielding, pregnancy, caring." Mr Langhammer later suggested primary school pupils could be taught a "creative" curriculum to help them re-integrate, including things such as science through baking and cooking or planting seeds, reading for pleasure, writing to friends or helping out in their local area. Mr Weir said that a "step-by-step approach" to re-opening schools was part of the executive's overall strategy for recovery. Phased return The minister has previously said that it was "extremely likely" there could be a phased return of pupils to school in September. Mr Weir told the committee that the department would seek medical and scientific guidance on a number of practical areas ahead of that. "What will be necessary in terms of PPE? What will be necessary in terms of hygiene? What will be necessary in terms of testing? What will be necessary in terms of social distancing?" he said. "There's clear input that's going have to be put in from the medical side on that." Mr Weir also said the department was "at the start of a process" when it came to the phased re-opening of schools.	The Department of Education (DE) cannot afford to continue to make payments to families eligible for free school meals over the summer.
+text: But if visitors from EU countries wanted to work, study or settle in the UK they would have to apply for permission under the proposals. EU citizens are currently free to live and work in the UK without a permit. The Home Office says managing migration is about access to work and benefits as much as the ability to control entry at a physical border. But ministers are likely to face questions about whether there will be a "back door" into Britain and how the Home Office would stop visitors staying longer and getting jobs without a visa or a work permit. 'More red tape' Labour MP Ben Bradshaw, a member of the Open Britain campaign against a "hard Brexit", said: "Nobody who voted to leave the European Union expected Brexit to mean Britain losing control of immigration, yet that is exactly what the government proposes. "Restricting the right to come and work in Britain while leaving an open door for everyone else seems to be opposite of a common sense immigration system. "It will not restrict anybody coming here from Europe who does not intend to work and may push other EU nationals into the black economy." He said the proposed new system "offers little control while burdening British businesses with yet more red tape" and the government should "put single market membership back on the table" instead. The Migration Watch pressure group said it was a "sensible, proportionate" proposal but the government would need to spend more money on immigration enforcement to deal with overstayers. The Home Office said: "Proposals for the future immigration system for EU citizens will be published in due course." Prime Minister Theresa May said free movement "as we've seen as members of the European Union" will end and there will be immigration rules "for people coming from inside EU - as today we have rules for people coming from outside the EU". Analysis By Chris Morris, Reality Check Correspondent The UK already grants visa-free travel to nationals from 56 countries - ranging from the United States to the Maldives. Passports are stamped on entry, and people are allowed to stay for a maximum of six months. But they are not allowed to work, study or settle. It's hardly surprising that a similar scheme is being considered for nationals from EU countries after Brexit - not least because future arrangements are likely to be reciprocal. In other words, if EU citizens needed visas to come to the UK in the future, UK citizens would need visas to travel to the EU. So it may be that the government's immigration plans will be to add several hundred million Europeans to a scheme that already exists. And the main burden for policing it, and checking whether people are here legitimately, would not fall on a beefed up border guard or immigration service. Rather, it would rest with employers - everyone from the NHS to a small high street cafe - as well as landlords, banks and local government agencies. According to The Times, the new system for EU visitors will be phased in after Britain officially leaves the EU in March 2019, with those coming to work in the UK initially having to register with the Home Office without work restrictions. It would be up to the EU to decide whether the offer of visa-free travel - if it is formally proposed by the UK Brexit negotiating team - would be reciprocated. The EU is working on a travel authorisation scheme for visitors to the EU, similar to the US ESTA visa-waiver scheme. Sources in Brussels said it would be a matter for the negotiations whether UK travellers will have to apply to it after Brexit. Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage has accused the government of caving in to EU demands. But Brexit-backing Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen said: "I don't think anybody ever intended we were just going to pull the shutters down and become a Little England. "The same restrictions will apply to UK citizens who wish to visit the Continent. "I mean, did you really think we were going to have a visa system just to go for a weekend to Paris?" Irish border Lord Green of Deddington, chairman of Migration Watch UK, said: "The point is that a work permit system for EU workers would lead, in due course, to a massive decrease in net migration from the EU as low-paid workers are squeezed out. "The reduction could, by our calculation, be about 100,000 a year." He said enforcement could be done through employers but the government would have to spend more money on a "crackdown" on illegal immigration, something he said was "increasingly necessary" in any case. Migration Watch says 80% of EU migrant workers are currently "low-paid", although their definition is people who would not qualify for a Tier 2 non-EU visa, which has a minimum salary requirement of £35,000. The government says it wants to progress to negotiations with the EU about the future operation of its border controls as quickly as possible. On Wednesday, the government said there should be no hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland after Brexit. A paper detailing its proposals stressed there should be no physical infrastructure - such as customs posts - at the border, which has almost 300 crossing points. Critics said the proposals lacked credible detail, with Labour deriding the plans for the border as a "fantasy frontier".	The government plans to keep visa-free travel to the UK for EU visitors after Brexit, the BBC understands.
+text: By Sean CoughlanBBC News education correspondent Mr Alam is chairman of governors at Park View School, which has faced an inspection following the "Trojan Horse" claims of a hard-line Muslim agenda. There has been speculation that Ofsted will deliver a tough verdict on some schools under investigation. Ofsted has confirmed that Mr Alam was working as one of its inspectors. It appears that he has worked for all three companies who carry out inspections on behalf of Ofsted - carrying out school inspections as recently as October 2013. The claims of extremism against Park View School have been strongly rejected by Mr Alam - who also confirms his separate role as an Ofsted inspector. "We're shocked by so many false allegations," Mr Alam has previously said, in response to claims of the segregation of girls and boys and the promotion of a radical Muslim culture. Stopping contractors The education watchdog uses inspectors from private contractors, so-called additional inspectors, and Mr Alam's name appears on Tribal's list of inspectors. These additional inspectors are the majority of inspectors, carrying out the day to day inspections of England's schools. The Tribal website listing from January 2013 says Mr Alam has been working as an inspector since 2010 and that he has "experience of inspecting primary and secondary schools". "He has experience of senior leadership role in a primary school and as a school governance consultant and trainer for the local authority, delivering a range of training programmes on school performance and school improvement themes. "He is currently working in a senior management role in an independent primary school and as a school improvement consultant and trainer," says the Tribal website. Tribal says that he has not worked for them "in any role" since May 2013. Another contractor, CfBT, includes a Tahir Alam in its list of inspectors from October 2013. And he is on Serco's list of inspectors from September 2013. Last week Ofsted announced that it was going to scrap the use of outsourced contractors for inspectors. From September 2015 all inspectors will be directly contracted by Ofsted. The change will give Ofsted more direct control over the recruitment and training of the staff inspecting schools. Head teachers' leaders welcomed the change saying that it would give more consistency to inspections. They have challenged the reliability of some inspections. Inspector requirements Park View School, which has been at the centre of claims and counter-claims over Trojan Horse, is awaiting a verdict from the latest inspection. There has been much speculation that some of these inspections will be highly critical. But if this overturns previously favourable inspections, it will raise questions about how previous inspections have been conducted. When Park View was last inspected in 2012, Ofsted rated the school as outstanding in all categories. The Trojan Horse claims emerged from an unverified, anonymous letter which set out a strategy for a group of hard-line Muslims to install sympathetic staff and governors in Birmingham schools. There have been four investigations into the claims - with Ofsted reports and the government's response expected in the next week. Inspectors recruited to undertake inspections for Ofsted are required to have skills to "gather, analyse and interpret relevant evidence" and to "make judgements that are objective, fair and based securely on evidence". They are expected to have a teaching qualification or "relevant degree", at least five years of teaching experience credibility and "up-to-date professional knowledge" of areas such as the curriculum.	Tahir Alam, put in the spotlight by allegations of extremist takeovers in Birmingham schools, has himself been working as an Ofsted inspector.
+text: Dave Newman, Richard Wells and Shaun Brown are taking part in the marathon innings at a sports hall in Sleaford, Lincolnshire. They are in three nets alongside each other, facing deliveries from bowling machines and some human bowlers and are hoping to bat for 72 hours. They are raising money for the Lincs and Notts Air Ambulance. The previous record stood at 52 hours and the men, who all play for Billingborough Cricket Club, are now hoping for official Guinness Book of World Records confirmation of their record. The record attempted started at 09:00 GMT on Thursday and is due to end on Sunday afternoon. For every hour of completed batting the men are entitled to a five-minute break. Their endeavours have so far raised about £3,500 for the air ambulance. Three years ago the trio of cricketers batted in the nets for 48 hours to raise money for a team member who had been diagnosed with a brain tumour, raising £16,000.	Three men who have batted for more than 54 hours are claiming a world record for the longest cricket net session.
+text: Elections are due to take place in May in South Gloucestershire, Bath and North East Somerset and North Somerset. Of the 200 councillors, none is from black, Asian or minority ethnic (Bame) backgrounds, and just over 30% are female. The campaign group Operation Black Vote said it was time for a "wake-up call". 'More dynamic' Director Simon Woolley said: "There needs to be a willingness and there needs to be a plan to ensure minority voices have the same route in which they can have a place. "When you have local authorities that are more diverse, more gender, more disabilities and more minorities, everybody wins because the nature of debate is more inclusive and dynamic. "We then have policies that better respond to the change in communities that you are seeking to serve." Louise Harris, Liberal Democrat campaign committee chair for South Gloucestershire, called the statistics "shocking". 'Certain type' She said: "Unfortunately your typical councillor is still white, male, middle-aged and middle class which is something the whole of local democracy is working hard to get past but undoubtedly it's difficult. "When you work full-time, you can't do it full-time unless you have another form of income and that is definitely the main reason why it does attract a certain type of person." Jyo Buddharaju, the Conservative candidate for South Gloucestershire who moved to the UK from India 10 years ago, said "a lack of awareness" was the issue. She said: "People are not aware, especially from my background, of the fact they can actually stand and serve their community." Labour councillor Asher Craig, deputy Mayor on Bristol council, said she had been subjected to racism during her political career. She said: "There is racism to contend with, and I get a lot of that regardless of whether I'm a cabinet member or a councillor. "So what people don't see... is what you get being a councillor; then it's a double whammy if you are a woman and a triple whammy as a black woman."	A "shocking" lack of diversity among local councillors needs to be urgently addressed by political parties, campaigners have said.
+text: By Eleanor LawrieBusiness reporter, BBC News This is a figure that is set to increase to 2.2bn tonnes by 2025, as urban populations grow. Not only is the waste we produce rapidly increasing, but we are also running out of ways to dispose of it. In January this year, China said it would no longer process the millions of tonnes of "foreign garbage" shipped to it each year by the West. At the same time the rising level of plastic in the ocean has become a "planetary crisis", according to the UN, risking irreparable damage to sea life. Out of sheer necessity, we need to rethink the way we approach recycling. Some entrepreneurs are already on the case, taking the most unlikely objects and transforming them into something useful once more. "Over these past few months, our awareness of the issue of plastics in the environment has come to the forefront. It's at a point where governments can't really sidestep the topic any more," says Peter Jones of environmental consultancy Eunomia. When times are tight, consumers tend to let environmental concerns slip down their list of priorities, according to Mr Jones. But he thinks that there is money to be made in these green sector start-ups, provided the idea is scaleable. Here are just some of the inventive recycling hacks businesses are coming up with: Nappies into plastic benches While it may not be the most glamorous endeavour, several organisations worldwide are committed to turning used nappies and sanitary products into everyday items such as plastic benches and bottle tops. It's a huge issue as a staggering three billion nappies are thrown away in the UK every year - and that figure is as high as 20 billion in the US. Waste2Aromatics is a 1.3bn euro ($1.6bn; £1.15bn) project started by the Dutch research firm Biorizon. It is one of many schemes aiming to change this. It focuses on aromatics - the raw materials used by the chemical industry to make products such as plastic. Currently, these are usually produced from fossil sources, generating considerable CO2 emissions. By swapping these with the wood fibre from used nappies and sanitary products, they can cut down on CO2 emissions, and recycle a product that would ordinarily be making its way to landfill. "At the end of last year we convincingly proved that it is possible, on a lab scale, to convert waste streams into furans, the raw materials for aromatics," says Monique Wekking, business development manager of Biorizon/TNO. "We are now scaling up and working towards our ultimate goal: commercial production of bio-aromatics." Bread into beer In the western world, sandwiches are a diet staple. But of course, bread goes stale quickly, making it one of our most discarded foods. In the UK alone, almost half of the bread bought is thrown away. So what can we do to counteract this? Environmental campaigner Tristram Stuart is turning leftover bread into beer, a practice that can be traced at least as back as far as Babylonian times - and probably earlier. Indeed, beer has been called "the midwife of civilisation". His firm Toast Ale uses the heel end of loaves, sourced from bakeries and sandwich makers, as a component in the beer alongside yeast and hops. Founded in London in 2015, the company now also operates out of South Africa and New York City. All of the profits go into Feedback, a charity set up by Mr Stuart aiming to halve all food waste by 2025. Mr Stuart says: "At Toast, we're reinventing an old tradition to tackle a modern problem - food waste. "Food production is the biggest impact we have on the planet, from the resources used to produce it, to deforestation, biodiversity loss and climate change. Yet globally we waste a third of all food produced. "Bread is the most wasted food item so we're tackling the problem directly by turning surplus into beer." Smartphones into...more smartphones Recycling materials tend to be thought of as plastics and cardboard. But these days, it's actually electronic waste that is thought to be the fastest-growing source of rubbish in the world. Also known as e-waste, it consists of unwanted technological items such as smartphones, computers and TV's that are discarded by their owners when they decide to buy an upgrade. About 50m tonnes of e-waste is produced every year according to the UN and only a fraction of those unwanted electronics are recycled, even though they contain precious metals like gold, silver, and copper, a trade worth in the region of £40bn. This makes them a valuable income stream for "urban mining" - the extraction of precious metals for future use, including making more electronic goods. "Closing the gap" in our rapid consumption of electronics sounds like a positive, but there is a dark side to this practice. The Chinese town of Guiyu is known as the "e-waste graveyard" of the world, taking in an estimated 1.6m tonnes of it every year. Extracting the metals, often by hand, has filled the town with fumes and pollution, contaminating the soil and waterways. This has had a drastic effect on the health of the local population, with studies showing incidents of lead poisoning and higher than average chance of miscarriage. But if it can be done without harm, urban mining can be a lucrative way to solve our growing e-waste problem. Start-ups such as BlueOak in the US are dedicated to recycling electronics safely, by creating mini-refineries to do the work. Global Trade More from the BBC's series taking an international perspective on trade:	Like it or not, rubbish is a part of our world. In 2012, the world's cities produced 1.3bn tonnes of solid waste each year, according to the World Bank .
+text: In 2014 it conducted an "extraordinary review", which found serious issues with the quality of supervision of midwives. The review team is back to ensure the recommendations of the previous report have been carried out. A spokeswoman for the council said they worked closely with Guernsey's health department to address the issues. The Nursing and Midwifery Council's extraordinary review was launched after the death of a baby early in 2014. That review found tired facilities and a lack of supervision, as well as concerns about staffing, organisation and the safety of patient records. The reports from the return visit will be available later in the year.	The Nursing and Midwifery Council has returned to Guernsey to review the island's maternity services.
+text: That is despite medical experts advising that face masks do not provide effective protection. At least one of the stars said they were using the mask to make a statement rather than to prevent the spread of the virus. Nigeria has reported just two confirmed cases of coronavirus and no deaths. The first case of the coronavirus in sub-Saharan Africa was an Italian who flew from Milan to Lagos in February. The Big Brother Naija finalist Omashola Kola Oburoh said he turned up to the Africa Magic Viewers' Choice Awards (AMVCA) awards in a glittery mask as a protest. "Fashion can also be a Protest/Educative not just a Statement...... let's join hands to fight Covid19," he said in an Instagram post. It is not clear whether the comment about joining hands was intended as a joke. The celebrities were attending the annual AMVCAs for TV and film stars in a luxury hotel in Lagos on Saturday when they wore the masks. Television presenter and actor Ada Afoluwake Ogunkeye AKA Folu Storms, who wore a jewelled mask on the red carpet, complained that people were getting too close to her. "No one really paid attention to my social distancing cries so I will be avoiding large crowds for the forseeable future!" she said in an Instagram post. "Take care of yourselves people! Wash your hands and avoid touching your face!" she added. Meanwhile, another former Big Brother Naija housemate and fashion designer Iheme Faith Uloma AKA Ifu Ennada posted a picture of herself and used the hashtag #CoronaVirusFashion. They are not the first celebrities to don fashionable masks at awards ceremonies. The US singer Billie Eilish wore a Gucci designer mask at the Grammy awards at the end of January. Masks also appeared on the catwalk at Paris Fashion week at the end of February. The outfits, in French designer Marine Serre's show, were designed before the outbreak. The World Health Organization has advised that most people do not need to wear a face mask. Dr Shunmay Yeung from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine told the BBC that if you are not close to people and they are not coughing or sneezing on you then a facemask is not necessary.	Nigerian celebrities turned up to a glitzy award ceremony wearing glittery, jewelled face masks amid the coronavirus pandemic.
+text: The bomb attack happened near Wattlebridge, close to the border, on Monday. No-one was injured. It is the fifth attempt to murder police officers so far this year. The head of the PSNI's Terrorism Investigation Unit said forensic examinations of the device are ongoing. On Sunday, police received reports that suggested a device had been left on the Wattlebridge Road. They believe a hoax device was used to lure officers and soldiers into the area to catch them by surprise with a real bomb. At about 10:35 BST on Monday, it was reported there had been an explosion at Cavan Road close to its junction with the Wattlebridge Road. 'Detonated without warning' Det Supt Sean Wright said the PSNI worked with An Garda Siochana (Irish police) during the operation. He said the device "detonated without warning" and was not a controlled explosion carried out by officers. "This demonstrates how volatile these devices are and I am thankful that there were no injuries," said Det Supt Wright. "Our investigation has indicated that this was a deliberate attempt by the Continuity IRA to murder police officers and Army personnel. "Thankfully these terrorists did not succeed in their murderous attempt." He added that once "satisfied that no further explosive devices were present", officers completed forensic examination of the bomb and the scene. "Those responsible for this reckless attack clear do not care about their community and the lives of those who live in the local area," added Det Supt Wright. He also appealed for drivers who were in the area between 18:00 BST on Friday 16 August and 200:00 BST on Saturday to come forward - particularly if they have dashcam footage. Following the explosion, Deputy Chief Constable Stephen Martin appealed for political progress in Northern Ireland. There has not been a power-sharing executive since January 2017 - with all attempts to restore government having so far failed. DCC Martin said: "Police play their part, but police on their own are not sufficient to say 'you do not represent the society we want to live in'."	The Continuity IRA were behind an explosion which was a "deliberate attempt" to murder PSNI and Army officers, the police have said.
+text: By Julian O'NeillBBC News NI Business Correspondent The Bank of England is releasing its first £5 polymer note, but the Northern Bank was the first in the UK to issue a polymer fiver back in October 1999. Two million special edition notes were made to mark the millennium; they featured an illustration of the Space Shuttle on one side. The bank stopped issuing them in 2008 but, according to a spokesman, they are still "usable and exchangeable". Internet auction sites are selling the £5 notes for as much as £125 each. Two versions of the note were issued - the one put into general circulation has an MM serial number and was followed by a collector version with a Y2K prefix. The Northern Bank took the name of its owner, Danske Bank, in 2012. But when it issued its polymer note it was owned by the National Australia Group which issued plastic currency in other areas. In Northern Ireland legislation exists to allow its local banks to print and manage their own supply of notes. In 2005, the Northern Bank reprinted all of its bank notes shortly after £26.5m was stolen from its head office by the IRA. The plastic fiver was the only type of note not replaced. The new Bank of England fiver will be followed by a £10 polymer note in summer 2017 and the £20 note by 2020. The paper £5 note will continue to be accepted until its legal tender status is withdrawn in May 2017. The three Scottish issuing banks are also printing their next £5 and £10 notes on polymer. Clydesdale Bank will issue their polymer £5 on 27 September 2016, Bank of Scotland on 4 October and RBS in November.	Northern Ireland beat Britain to a plastic £5 note by 17 years.
+text: By Joe MillerTechnology Reporter The measure will make it more difficult for private information to be hacked or handed to law enforcement agencies. On Thursday, Apple said that devices running its new iOS8 software would be encrypted by default, with even the company itself unable to gain access. Both firms have offered encryption for some time, but many users were unaware of its existence or had not enabled it. Earlier this week, Apple's boss Tim Cook posted an online message assuring users the company's philosophy was that a "great customer experience shouldn't come at the expense of your privacy". Swipe As well as announcing default encryption for all devices running the new iOS8 software, Mr Cook took a thinly veiled swipe at Google, saying that Apple would not use its customers' information to sell things to them. "We don't 'monetise' the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud," he wrote, "and we don't read your email or your messages to get information to market to you." He added that although Apple does have an advertising business, called iAd, the function can be disabled by users. Shortly after, Google announced its stance on privacy, also embracing default encryption. A spokesman said: "For over three years, Android has offered encryption, and keys are not stored off of the device, so they cannot be shared with law enforcement. "As part of our next Android release, encryption will be enabled by default out of the box, so you won't even have to think about turning it on." Both Apple and Google follow in the footsteps of the now somewhat beleaguered Blackberry, which has encrypted data by default for some time. The firms' focus on privacy comes after nude photos of celebrities were leaked online earlier this month. The breach, which affected actress Jennifer Lawrence, among others, was linked by some security experts to vulnerabilities in Apple's iCloud storage service. Law enforcement The introduction of default encryption also protects US firms from having to hand over data to law enforcement agencies. As the companies themselves do not have access to users' passwords, which unlock the encryption, they are not actually in possession of the data concerned. Several of the largest US tech firms have been fighting government requests for their users' private data, including Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Facebook and Dropbox. David Emm, a senior researcher at security firm Kaspersky Lab, told the BBC that automatic encryption was "probably more about privacy than about protection". "Customers will find some reassurance in the fact that their data can't routinely fall into third-party hands," he said. However he added that the measure only "applies to stuff on a [Apple or Android] device, but not necessarily to stuff you put in the cloud, which could still be accessible to law enforcement agencies".	Google has announced that its next mobile operating system, Android L, will encrypt users' data by default.
+text: Powys council revealed its preferred site, the cemetery car park on Newtown Road, at a Machynlleth town council meeting last month. An engagement event takes place at Machynlleth bowling club on Monday from 14:00 GMT until 18:00. Powys council officers will be on hand to provide information and answer any questions. Machynlleth is one of three areas in the county deemed to need a travellers' site to meet rules set out by the Welsh Government. An assessment carried out last year found sites were also required in Brecon and Welshpool, but Machynlleth has been described by Powys council "as an immediate or urgent need". People will be able to provide comments formally on the proposed development when the council submits a planning application.	People are being invited to give their views on plans for a permanent site for Travellers and Gypsies in Powys.
+text: By Chris WoodBBC News The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) event was in doubt as its usual venue - Cooper's Field - is being re-turfed after acting as a Champions League fan zone. But fundraising safeguarded the use of its new site at the Civic Centre. Chairwoman Lu Thomas said it would have been "devastating" had it not happened. More than 100 organisations paraded from Queen Street on Saturday, with road closures throughout Cardiff city centre. "It was touch and go this year whether we were able to put on the event, it came together last minute," Ms Thomas said. "With Cardiff being the capital city, if we were not able to host our annual Pride event, it would have been devastating. "It would have sent a message to the LGBT community that they weren't represented in Wales and were not supported. We want to bring people together to be proud of who they are." After the Cooper's Field issues came to light last September, a campaign was launched to save the event, with actor Sir Ian McKellen calling the situation "alarming" and saying "Pride belongs in the capital". To make it happen, £360,000 has been brought in through fundraising, ticket sales, small sponsorships, market stands and donations. The new site has been safeguarded for the next five years, although fundraising will need to continue to ensure the event can be staged. And despite the problems, Ms Thomas believes the new venue is a "prominent position within the heart of the city" that will help it "reach out to a much wider audience". Ahead of the event, she spoke about issues affecting the LGBT community in Wales. One of these is new regulations allowing gay men to donate blood after abstaining from sex for three months instead of 12 months, but she said this does not go far enough. "The change is obviously welcomed, however we need honest discussions around why gay men need to abstain from sex for three months before donating," Ms Thomas added. "Considering the rise in STDs in the straight community, there needs to be a debate on exactly why gay men are asked to abstain before donating." She also put her support behind a gender identity service in Wales - after one was announced on Friday. "Many GPs are now being trained to help their patients with their gender identity which is a good start, however there is a growing need for a dedicated clinic," she said. A new addition to Pride is a faith tent, with people from different religious backgrounds celebrating their place in the LGBT community. Worship was led by a bishop for the first time - with the Bishop of St Davids Joanna Penberthy also taking part in a discussion on faith and sexuality. Acts performed outside the Civic Centre , with Fun Lovin' criminals having played on Friday, Into the Ark on Saturday and Charlotte Church on Sunday. There was controversy when headliner Goldie Lookin' Chain was dropped from the line-up earlier this month, with organisers saying they had made a "misjudgement" booking them. Questions had been raised about the appropriateness of the Newport rappers, whose hits include Your Mother's Got a Penis. South Wales Police Ch Supt Belinda Davies said officers will be keeping a visible presence over the weekend at the event and encouraged people to "approach them and take a selfie".	It was "touch and go" whether Pride Cymru would happen this year but it was saved - with thousands of people in Cardiff for the event.
+text: Keepers at Noah's Ark Zoo near Bristol noticed their large male tiger, Khan, was "a bit off" and spotted a chip in his five-inch-long (13cm) canine tooth. Faced with the "dilemma" of dealing with a tiger with toothache, the zoo called in London surgeon and part-time zoo dentist Dr Peter Kertesz. Following a 45-minute operation, the zoo said Kahn was "visibly happier". The tiger has the "strongest bite force of any of the big cats", according to the animal park. To perform thee operation, staff had to administer a "carefully calculated dose of anaesthetic" and ensure the big cat's jaw was kept open. "Khan was under general anaesthetic for about two hours," said Jon Woodward, from Noah's Ark. "Too much anaesthetic would have resulted in death and too little would mean he would wake up - and you don't want that. "We also had to keep the tiger's mouth open because if it had snapped shut, it would have taken an arm off." With the help of his dental nurse, Dr Kertesz was able to save the cracked tooth by removing the tip and filling the big cat's root canal. "It was an important procedure, as infections like this can lead to more serious health issues if left untreated," he said. "It was excellent observation on behalf of his keepers to spot the problem early."	A "grumpy" 31-stone (200kg) tiger with an infected tooth has been treated by a Mayfair dentist.
+text: By Tom SymondsHome Affairs correspondent Edward Daffarn and another resident repeatedly attacked the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) in a blog. Mr Daffarn told a public inquiry his description of the organisation was not "glib, shoot from the hip expressions". Seventy-two people died in the Grenfell fire on 14 June 2017. Giving evidence at the inquiry into the disaster, Mr Daffarn said he had "spent a long, long time thinking how to describe this organisation" but he "wouldn't change a single word of it. He added felt like residents of the tower were being "abused" by the KCTMO. The year before the fire, Mr Daffarn's blog, which he wrote with Francis O'Connor, said: "It is a truly terrifying thought but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord, the KCTMO, and bring an end to the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation that they inflict upon their tenants and leaseholders." Mr Daffarn fought a campaign against the KCTMO which had been set up as an "arm's length" organisation to manage council property on behalf of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. He was a bitter critic of the organisation in the years before the refurbishment of the building and during the work. 'Extremely serious consequences' A key complaint raised by Edward Daffarn in the blog related to concerns that contractors were parking in emergency bays at the base of the tower, preventing fire service vehicles from getting access in the event of a blaze. Mr Daffarn wrote to project managers and the KCTMO that the planned closure of a car park for work on the tower would make the problem worse. He was told the work would have no impact on emergency access, but he was not reassured because vehicles continued to take up the emergency bays - he felt, with management approval. He emailed London Fire Brigade (LFB) in March 2014 warning that "if there was a major fire in Grenfell Tower and fire brigade access ever became an issue... we would use the evidence recorded on our blog and in extensive email correspondence to ensure that those in charge at the TMO (Tenant Management Organisation) would face extremely serious consequences". The concerns do not appear to have been resolved at the time, according to today's evidence so far. However, the inquiry has previously found that the first fire engines called to the tower were able to park close to the main entrance and get access to water mains. Another issue raised by Mr Daffarn centred on a power surge at the tower in May 2013. In the email to LFB he said: "We believe that the TMO and the council have never acknowledged the possible consequences of this catastrophic power surge and its associated fire risk. "We believe the TMO must value our lives so little that something so serious can just be covered up and never acknowledged as happening." The cause of the 2017 fire was an electrical fault behind a fridge, although the inquiry has not been able to explain it. The residents were also alarmed by the findings of a fire risk assessment which they obtained after repeated emails. The council and its tenant management organisation will give evidence in coming weeks. 'Challenging meetings' Edward Daffarn was accused of being "disruptive" and "aggressive" at meetings held by KCTMO during consultation with residents about the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower. In an email, the local councillor, Judith Blakeman, said "continuing to give these people so much access to put their views is unhelpful as it gives them greater legitimacy". Mr Daffarn disputed being disruptive but accepted he had a difficult relationship with the councillor. In a closing comment, Mr Daffarn said the building's management "didn't treat us with respect or humanity or empathy and if they had done, we wouldn't be here now". The inquiry continues. Related Internet Links Grenfell Tower Inquiry	A Grenfell resident who predicted a "catastrophic event" would happen at the tower has defended his description of its management as a "mini-mafia".
+text: The man, in his 60s, failed to return home after his trip to Hunstanton in Norfolk on Saturday afternoon. Police were called at about 17:20 GMT and went to Cliff Parade where they scoured the beach, while HM Coastguard checked the water. A spokeswoman for HM Coastguard said: "The search has been ongoing throughout the night, with aircraft and lifeboats. "This morning, weather conditions have improved slightly." A helicopter has also been taking part in the operation, which was due to be replaced by a plane, alongside lifeboats and Norfolk Lowland Search and Rescue Team. The man is believed to have been wearing a black wet suit and was using a wind surfer with a red and white sail. He is described as white, with distinctive, long blond hair. Windsurfer Neil Greentree said the sport's local community had rallied together and they had been searching the area for him. He said he was coming in from windsurfing at the spot when he spoke to the man, who had asked him what the conditions were like. "He went out well-equipped, so we have all been out looking along the beaches and we live in hope," he said. "We're a local community, we're a close community, we all look out for each other. "I think every one of us is concerned. We've been out at first light looking for him, we were out last night and we really do hope that he's found." Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk	A search is under way for a man who has gone missing after going windsurfing.
+text: Campaigners and the area's MP have argued Ilkeston in Derbyshire is one of the largest towns in the UK without a railway station. Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin visited the site on Friday and said trains will be running through there within 12 months. Work had been delayed because of great crested newts and flooding concerns. The station should have been open by last Christmas, and the Transport Secretary questioned whether newts should have delayed it so much. "The truth of the matter is it seems that nearly every site we start work on, that's got any water or anything like that, we find the great crested newt," said Mr McLoughlin. "I don't wish the newt any ill at all, but I don't think it should delay us to the length that it has delayed us on this site." Ilkeston once had three railway stations, but the last one closed in 1967 as a result of the Beeching Report, published in 1963. The new £9.6 million station has been part-funded from the government's New Station Fund. It will provide direct, hourly connections to Nottingham, Chesterfield and Sheffield. The main building work is expected to start in the summer, once any remaining newts have been trapped and relocated.	Work has begun to demolish and rebuild a railway station 50 years after it was axed in the Dr Beeching cuts.
+text: The emergency law was extended in June to help those impacted financially by the coronavirus pandemic. OFT chairman Martyn Perkins said a "balanced approach" must consider the needs of tenants and property owners. He called on landlords to make "reasonable allowances" for those still in financial difficulty. Originally introduced in March under the island's Emergency Powers Act, an extension to the ban on evictions approved by Tynwald in June was limited to a six-month period. Under the regulations, which apply to those in private and public sector housing or business premises, landlords cannot issue eviction notices until 27 December. 'Specific reason' Criticising the lifting of the restrictions so close to Christmas, Douglas councillor Devon Watson told the Local Democracy Reporting Service the move did not "feel like it's fully appropriate". He said many workers, particularly those in the retail sector, were still facing economic uncertainty due to the knock-on effect of Covid-19 on UK retail chains operating branches on the island. "Although the island is protected from Covid, we're not protected from its economic downstream effects," he added. Policy and Reform Minister Ray Harmer said the regulations had been put in place for a "specific reason" and could "only carry on by law for six months". Landlords were facing "their own issues" as a result of reduced rental income during the period, he said. Those facing an eviction notice could still challenge it in the courts, he added. Why not follow BBC Isle of Man on Facebook and Twitter? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk	Protection from eviction for tenants on the Isle of Man in rent arrears will end on 26 December, the Office of Fair Trading has said.
+text: Showcase said it had reinstated screenings of the film on Monday night after "careful consideration". It comes after youths, some armed with machetes, sparked a police operation at Vue's multiplex cinema at Star City in Birmingham. A ban is still in place at Vue cinemas' 91 UK and Ireland venues, it said, after multiple "significant incidents". The move has prompted a backlash on social media with some labelling the ban as "racist". Cinema firm Showcase had initially stopped showing the film, but reinstated screenings on Monday night after "careful consideration and discussions with the distributor". "We have come up with a plan to reinstate screenings of the film supported with increased security protocols and will be doing so from this evening," it said. Five teenagers, including a 13-year-old girl, were arrested in connection with the disturbance, which involved up to 100 young people in a public area of the multiplex, on Saturday night. In a statement, Vue said the film opened in 60 of its sites across the UK and Ireland on Friday. "But during the first 24 hours of the film over 25 significant incidents were reported and escalated to senior management in 16 separate cinemas," it said. "This is the biggest number we have ever seen for any film in a such a short time frame." A spokeswoman for Vue confirmed police had been called to some of the incidents, but could not confirm exactly how many times. The chain has stressed the decision to pull the film was prompted only because of the risk of further violence. A spokeswoman for Vue said a "significant incident" was "any incident that has a risk to audience members", adding that they were awaiting clarification of the details of individual cases. The Odeon chain says it is not withdrawing the film, but "a number of security measures are in place" for Blue Story screenings, though it refused to elaborate on what they are. In Birmingham, a note on the door of the Odeon cinema at the Broadway Plaza said staff would be carrying out bag searches throughout the day. Blue Story's writer and director, Andrew Onwubolu known as Rapman, said Saturday's disturbance in Birmingham was "truly unfortunate". In an Instagram post on Sunday, the rapper-turned-filmmaker wrote: "Sending love to all those involved in yesterday's violence at Star City in Birmingham. "It's truly unfortunate that a small group of people can ruin things for everybody. "Blue Story is a film about love not violence." On Monday, he tweeted: "We lost nearly half of our screens on the third day but we still made history with £1.3m in 3 days. Blue Story is number three in the UK box office. Thank you." An online petition calling for the film to be reinstated at Vue cinemas has attracted more than 13,000 signatures. On Saturday, West Midlands Police officers drew Tasers and used a dispersal order to clear the Star City venue. Footage from inside the multiplex appeared to show fights and people on the floor screaming. The five teenagers - two girls aged 13 and 14 and three 14-year-old boys - have all now been bailed alongside a 19-year-old man. Four were held on suspicion of assaulting police and one of the boys was detained on suspicion of obstructing police. Another of the boys was arrested on suspicion of violent disorder after an image circulated on social media showing a number of youths, with one carrying a machete. Police were called to the complex, in Nechells, at about 17:30 GMT and cleared the area by 21:00. The officers hurt during the disorder suffered minor facial injuries. The film focuses on two friends from different south London postcodes on rival sides of a street war. It is rated 15 for strong language, strong violence, threat, sex and drug misuse. Distributor Paramount Pictures said it was "saddened" by events at Star City but said the movie had had an "incredibly positive reaction and fantastic reviews". In Sheffield on Sunday evening, there was an increased police presence around Centertainment in Broughton Lane ahead of the showing of the film after disorder was reported outside the Cineworld within the complex on Saturday. "Officers carried out patrols of the area to ensure everyone's safety," police said in a statement, adding that they would "be liaising with Cineworld over the coming week to discuss further screenings of this film". Cineworld has confirmed that it will not be pulling the film.	A cinema chain has reversed its decision to pull the film Blue Story after a brawl.
+text: The memorial hall for Park Chung-hee, the country's former military ruler, was badly damaged in the blaze. Police quoted the suspect as saying the president should have resigned or killed herself, South Korean news agency Yonhap reported. Ms Park is facing protests and possible impeachment over a corruption scandal. The house where Ms Park's father was born, in the southern city of Gumi, is a tourist attraction, especially among supporters of the Park family. How a friendship became a scandal Police said the suspect told investigators he used paint thinner to set fire to it, the Associated Press news agency reported. Ms Park has not commented on the incident, though she made her first public appearance in more than three weeks on Thursday, visiting a century-old market in her hometown that had also been damaged by fire. The cause of Wednesday's blaze in Daegu is still being investigated. Parliament is due to discuss on Friday whether Ms Park should face impeachment amid an investigation into whether she allowed a long-time friend, Choi Soon-sil, to influence political decisions for personal gain. The investigation focuses on alleged abuse by Ms Choi, the daughter of the leader of a pseudo-Christian cult, of her closeness to the president to enrich herself and influence policy, as well as her handling of classified documents. On Tuesday, Ms Park asked parliament to help her find a way to stand down. She has apologised twice before, and has said she is "heartbroken" by the political crisis, but has refused to resign. In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of Koreans have joined huge street protests across the country demanding that she leave office. Park Chung-hee ruled the country from 1961, when he took power in a military coup, until 1979, when he was assassinated by his security chief. His rule was authoritarian, but he is credited with industrialisation which brought the country out of poverty in the wake of the Korean War.	South Korean police say they have arrested a man accused of setting fire to the birthplace of the father of embattled President Park Geun-hye.
+text: By Katherine SellgrenBBC News education reporter The Sixth Form Colleges Association's annual survey suggests two-thirds of colleges have had to drop courses. Over half (58%) have also reduced or removed extra-curricular activities such as music, drama and sport. The government said it had protected the base rate of funding for all post-16 students until 2020. There are more than 160,000 young people aged 16 to 18 currently enrolled at a sixth form college and the sector accounts for around 20% of the A-levels taken in England each year. The SFCA sent its annual questionnaire to all 90 sixth form colleges in England in September, and 80 responded. The findings indicate: The SFCA says the sector has suffered three funding cuts since 2011 and has also had to contend with rising costs in increased employer contributions to pensions and national insurance schemes. "This year's funding impact survey suggests these two increases [pensions and national insurance] will cost the average sixth form college an additional £189,932 per annum," the report says. It says the absence of a VAT refund scheme for sixth form colleges - which is available to school and academy sixth forms - leaves the average sixth form college with £385,914 less to spend on front-line education. 'It's an austerity year, I tell my staff' Michael Hill, principal of Carmel Sixth Form College in St Helens, has had to increase teaching contact time for his staff by four hours a week, in an attempt to save money. "Now that's hit the wider, extra-curricular activities because staff have got that much less time and energy," says Mr Hill. "It tends to be the subject-based activities that suffer, like science club and debating society, which tend to be termly now rather than weekly." Like many sixth form colleges, he has had to cut back on less well-subscribed courses. "We've had to lose subjects - German and dance - just because the numbers aren't viable. Below 15 or 16 students and it's too difficult to run those courses." Mr Hill also has less money to spend on equipment and materials - and a £100k photocopying bill will have to be reduced. "The new specification A-levels means staff have wanted new textbooks and materials, but we've had to be quite stingy about what we've allowed." But with many of his students coming from less well-off homes, Mr Hill is reluctant to increase their costs. "I don't think we feel we can start charging students for materials for their courses - it would be quite difficult for a lot of our students to buy extras for art and sport and so on." The SFCA report expresses concern that non-qualification and extra-curricular activities are being reduced or removed. It says: "Enrichment activities such as educational visits, sport and the Duke of Edinburgh award play a vital role in developing the skills that are valued by universities and employers and help sixth form students to become engaged and active citizens." SFCA chief executive Bill Watkin said the report should "act as a wake-up call" to the government. "The message from the most effective and efficient providers of sixth form education is clear - more investment from government is essential if sixth form colleges are to continue providing young people with the high quality education they need to progress to higher education and employment. "A review of sixth form funding is urgently required to ensure it is linked to the realistic costs of delivering a rounded, high-quality curriculum. "Failure to do this risks turning sixth form education into a narrow and part-time experience. That would be bad for students, bad for society and bad for the economy". A spokesman for the Department for Education said: "Every young person should have access to an excellent education and we have protected the base rate of funding for all post-16 students until 2020 to ensure that happens. "We've also ended the unfair discrimination between colleges and school sixth forms and we now ensure funding is based on student numbers rather than discriminating between qualifications. "On top of this we are providing more than half a billion pounds this year alone to help post-16 institutions support students from disadvantaged backgrounds, or with low prior attainment."	Funding pressures mean pupils at sixth-form colleges in England must choose from an increasingly narrow range of A-level subjects, a study has found.
+text: Spall was filming for a BBC Four programme Timothy Spall: Back at Sea on Wednesday when he and four others on the Dutch barge called for help. The RNLI said he radioed the Coastguard when the barge headed the wrong way up the River Medway towards Sheerness. The programme's producer said Spall was exhausted after a difficult 24 hours. The RNLI said the crew of Sheerness lifeboat were receiving training in their boathouse when they overheard discussions between the barge and the Coastguard. The lifeboat was launched at 21:30 BST after authorisation from the RNLI launch authority. "There is lots of mud round there and you need to know where you are otherwise you can end up aground," said crew member Andy Matthews. "He was right to call us. Things could have got much worse. Mr Spall was very grateful for the RNLI's assistance." The barge was located about two miles from the lifeboat station at the entrance to Stangate Creek. Crew member Nicki Wood boarded the barge and escorted it back to safety at Queenborough Harbour, where it moored overnight. Back at Sea producer Paul Crompton said Spall arrived at Chatham Marina on the barge on Thursday, where they would remain for two or three days. Spall and his wife, Shane, have been sailing their Dutch barge around the British Isles for the BBC Four series.	A lifeboat crew was sent out to rescue actor Timothy Spall on board his 55ft barge when he got lost on his way back to Chatham Marina in Kent.
+text: By Robin Levinson-King & Daniele Palumbo BBC News, Toronto From Spanish olives to Canadian steel, no corner of the world has been untouched by US trade tariffs - a tax on foreign products - since President Trump entered the White House. Along the way, he has rewritten the rule book for how the US goes about the process of protecting its domestic trade. How are tariffs usually made? A tariff is a tax on a foreign product designed to protect domestic producers in an effort to boost local economies. But under international trade laws, the US can't just implement them willy-nilly, they need to provide a reason why the tariff is necessary and investigate it fully. Until recently, the vast majority of US tariffs were justified as countervailing and antidumping duties. Not all investigations lead to tariffs - at some point during the process, the US may decide they don't have grounds to be implemented. But many do. No stone unturned Under President Trump, the Department of Commerce has begun 122 investigations into anti-dumping/countervailing duties. These tariffs have targeted all corners of the globe, reaching 31 countries in total and affecting some $12bn (£9.4bn) in imports. China has borne the brunt of US scrutiny, with about 40% of countervailing/antidumping investigations targeting Chinese products ranging from aluminium alloy to rubber bands to silk ribbons. Other countries have found themselves in Mr Trump's crosshairs as well. After receiving a complaint from California farmers, the US levied tariffs on Spanish olives, arguing that EU payments to olive farmers under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) constituted an unfair trading subsidy. Most of the world's olives come from the Mediterranean, but in a meeting with Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy last September, Mr Trump signalled a willingness to protect American farmers. "It must be fair," he said, describing the trade relationship between the US and Spain. "And it must be reciprocal." That decision affects $68m of Spanish exports to the US and has raised the eyebrows of the EU. As with Spain, the US has shown no qualms about going after traditional allies such as Canada. The single largest investigation since Mr Trump took office focused on Canadian aircraft company Bombardier, and affected $5bn of Canadian exports to the US. Eight months later, the US International Trade Commission found Canada's aircraft industry did not harm US businesses, and the 300% duties against the Bombardier C-Series were cancelled. Although most tariff investigations targeted mundane industrial products, like carbon and steel wire or mechanical tubing, many could have a real impact on the US consumer. A far-reaching investigation into citric acid touched three continents, with tariffs issued for Belgium, Colombia and Thailand. The chemical compound mimics the sour tang of lemons and is used in a large amount of common candies and drinks, from Sour Patch Kids to 7Up. Another massive investigation into biodiesel from Argentina and Indonesia led to tariffs being issued on $1.5bn of imports. The fuel, which is made from plants, is used in diesel cars and lorries, as well as airplanes and trains. The market has huge growth potential in the US, which is a major grower of corn and soybeans, and the tariffs could ostensibly help grow the industry. Similar tariffs were introduced by the EU in 2012. Upping the stakes Tariffs are nothing new. Over the last decade, the US government collected approximately $283bn in customs duties. But President Trump has led a charge for the US to get even more aggressive. Last year, the Commerce Department began 82 probes - up 28% compared with the 64 that Barack Obama's administration started in 2015, its most active year, And in a significant change in protocol, officials are no longer waiting for companies to petition for help. Last November, the Department of Commerce self-initiated investigations in Chinese common alloy aluminium. It was the first time the department acted on its own regarding antidumping or countervailing duties, without a complaint from industry, in decades, and a sign of a shift in the department's policy under the new administration. "[President Trump] isn't willing to wait for companies to come forward. He wants to do it himself, he wants to have the government decide," says Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "So he starts self-initiating cases but also... he says we're going to start using other laws where there are much more presidential discretion." But by far the biggest shift in US trade policy has been Trump's willingness to buck with tradition if it will let him get tariffs through faster. Rather than go through lengthy antidumping/countervailing investigations - and risk his tariffs being overturned - Trump has introduced hundreds of billions of tariffs under little-used aspects of trade law. Citing national security concerns, Trump has taken sweeping actions to protect steel and aluminium producers and embarked on a trade war with China, which he accuses of intellectual property theft. These unusual measures far outweigh traditional antidumping/countervailing investigations. In China alone, traditional investigations target $3.4bn of products, while tariffs retaliating against intellectual property theft target $250bn. "You now see a lot more import protection that you would typically see arise," Bown says. Will these stick? Trump's willingness to think outside the box on trade has made him a thorn in the side of countries like China who can't predict his next move. They have also led to retaliatory tariffs on hundreds billions of dollars of US goods. But after a summer of hostile trade negotiations with Canada and Mexico, and an escalating trade war with China, things seem to be calming down. Last week, he signed United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). The agreement signalled the end of a long and tense saga between the three neighbours. He also seems keen to end his trade war with China. But if Trump's past actions have taught anyone anything, it is that the only thing predictable about his trade policy is its unpredictability.	Donald Trump has agreed not to escalate his trade war with China, but many other countries have also been affected by the US president's America First trade policy.
+text: In October, the government said the scheme would have to compete for funds, despite having been approved by the previous Labour administration. On Wednesday, Leeds City Council approved a "best and final bid" to go to the Department for Transport (DfT). If approved, the trolleybus network would link two park-and-ride sites at the edge of Leeds with the city centre. Leeds City Council said the system, involving a fleet of electrically-powered buses, would help the city's economy grow and improve the local environment. 'Really important' Richard Lewis, the council's executive member responsible for development, said: "After the proposal was stalled last year as part of the government's comprehensive spending review, we now have to submit our bid to hopefully get the scheme moving forward again. "We estimate that the trolleybus scheme could generate around 4,000 jobs in Leeds and the wider city region, as well as around 1,000 jobs during the construction, so it's really important we get the nod from the DfT. "The trolleybus network's ability to tackle congestion and reduce the city's carbon footprint will speed Leeds' recovery from recession. "It will boost its economy and enhance the region's ability to compete on the national and international stage. "It is so important we get this bid to the government sooner rather than later to prevent costs going up even more."	Stalled plans for a £245m trolleybus system in Leeds could be back on track after councillors agreed a final bid.
+text: By Joan SoleyBBC News, Kuwait When the last convoy of US troops began the 280km (173 mile) drive from Camp Adder in Iraq to Camp Virginia in Kuwait it was just after midnight - just another dark desert night. But when the 1st Cavalry Division's 3rd Brigade rolled across the border between the two countries, at a junction called Khabari crossing, the sky was turning pink - and they had made history. Their arrival officially marked the end of the Iraq war, which began nearly nine years ago with the ousting of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. As the last remaining troops at Camp Adder prepared to make the trip, most were predictably upbeat and spoke of making it home in time for Christmas with their families. But these final few were also noticeably tired, and many spoke quietly about this being the end of their second or third tour. "I think in the big picture what we did here in Iraq was the right thing to do," a mid-ranking commander told me. "We know that without Saddam, and with the promise of a real democracy, the Iraqi people are in a better place in general now," he said. "But can I say with my whole heart that I think it was worth thousands of American lives? No, not with total conviction." He said after three tours, he had seen "drastic positive change" in the country but regardless of the level of stability, it was very much time for the US to "call it a day". Smiles and waves Another commander with the last convoy was candid about the future of Iraq: "We have trained the Iraqi forces, spent lots of time training them - and now they have to use that training." He spoke while watching his soldiers throw around a football in the last hour of daylight before departing Camp Adder. "We all know there might still be some rocky times in Iraq, but I think they can stand on their own and handle themselves," he said. One private told me: "I am exactly where I want to be, and am damn proud of all the soldiers that have been here before me. "The United States military isn't perfect, but history will show we did everything we could in Iraq to make it a better place." As truck after truck hit Kuwaiti soil, there were smiles and waves from the troops onboard. It was another hour of driving for them to reach Camp Virginia, one of several US bases in Kuwait. And by then excitement was growing - for a hot breakfast, a shower and some sleep. Walking with a lieutenant as he went to turn in his ammunition, he smiled and told me: "I think being a part of history like this is great. "I mean, I was about 10 years old when this all started, and now I'm a part of something really big and something I can tell my kids about one day," he said. "I'll always be proud of having served in Iraq. "But right now, I just want to get home and buy my girlfriend a nice Christmas present and hug my Mum."	The end of Operation New Dawn - the US military mission in Iraq - did indeed involve a sun rising slowly in the Middle East.
+text: Elizabeth Shenton stood down as the leader of Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council after losing the support of independents. The Conservatives have now taken control from Labour. Almost 1,500 people were unable to vote in a constituency that saw the successful MP win by just 30 votes. Two council officials were suspended last month. Chief executive John Sellgren and Elizabeth Dodd, head of audit and elections, were criticised for a number of issues. 'Highly regrettable' The council met on Tuesday to discuss the findings of an independent investigation into the election by the Association of Electoral Administrators (AEA), which found a "complex picture of administrative mistakes around registration and postal voting processes". But as proceedings were getting under way, Ms Shenton announced her resignation. She said: "It's not because I accept any responsibility. "It's highly regrettable that the borough independents have chosen to withdraw their support from the Labour group and that the Tories and their allies have chosen to destabilise the council at a time when senior officers, including the chief executive, are suspended." Ms Shenton has been replaced by Conservative councillor Simon Tagg. "The buck must stop at the top and it has tonight. I understand that I'm taking on this role and the buck will stop with me," Mr Tagg said. "I'll be working hard to ensure that future elections run OK and that we set a budget and that the council gets some standing back." 'Inexperienced staff' Labour's Paul Farrelly got 21,124 votes in the election on 8 June to win the Newcastle-under-Lyme seat, narrowly holding off Conservative Owen Meredith who polled 21,094. The AEA said the result could not be challenged as the 21-day deadline to do so had passed. Its report found first-time voters, including students, postal voters - some in their 80s using the system for the first time - were unable to vote. There was an "inadequate performance by inexperienced and under-resourced elections office staff", it concluded. Related Internet Links Newcastle-Under-Lyme Borough Council	A council leader has resigned as the fallout continues from a row over voting in June's general election.
+text: By News from Elsewhere......as found by BBC Monitoring Local resident Natalya Vakhlova wrote to the council back in January to say it was dangerous to reach her bus stop because of accumulated ice on the pavement. She heard nothing until the first week of April, when the authorities proudly posted before-and-after photos. "You can't be serious??? A photo from 3 April (!!!) to show you dealt with the mounds of ice at the bus stop I complained about on 25 January!!!," she tweeted to the council's Our St Petersburg customer portal. They city had to cope with an unusually severe winter with scarce funds, and Ms Vakhlova acknowledges that council workers did make fitful attempts to clear the ice. "They turned up about ten days later and tried to do something, but they only had a go at the mounds around my bus stop, even though others nearby were also covered in ice," she told the St Petersburg Fontanka news site. 'Problem solved' Two months passed, then Our St Petersburg proudly sent her its photo evidence, declaring "Problem solved". An unimpressed Natalya Vakhlova tweeted the photos, noting that "given it's been well above freezing for some time now, it's not hard to work out that the ice melted on its own." You may also be interested in: Her story moved quickly from social media to the press and television, where sympathy for the problems that street cleaners faced over the severe winter was mixed with exasperation at their employer's glib responses. 'Beglov's shovel' Some commentators gleefully recalled the "Beglov's Shovel" meme, an ironic tribute to city chief Alexander Beglov's decree ordering 20 or so senior city officials to carry shovels inscribed with his name at all times to help clear the snow and ice. Nonetheless, the city fathers appear unchastened. Our St Petersburg has since sent out a similar response claiming success in the battle against the ice - this time to a complaint from 11 January, the Ekho Moskvy news site reports. This prompted Fontanka to dig deeper. It seems Ms Vakhlova was not the first resident to receive a declaration of victory in April - about 30 others had the same dubious honour, and a few thousand more have yet to be dealt with. 'Wait until June' Council official Sergei Malinin told the site that the street cleaners simply hadn't had time to take photographs while on the job, and acknowledged that sending victory reports with sunny pictures "could look like making fun of citizens". He said the council would try to do better, but one St Petersburger had a better idea. "They should wait until June and declare all the problems solved in one go," he told Fontanka. Reporting by Adam Robinson and Martin Morgan Next story: Turkish mayor 'pulls down playground' Use #NewsfromElsewhere to stay up-to-date with our reports via Twitter.	St Petersburg council has come under fire after claiming credit for clearing snow and ice that had just melted in the spring thaw.
+text: News Group Newspapers apologised and agreed to pay "substantial" damages and costs at the High Court in London. The couple were among hundreds of victims of the illegal practice which prompted the paper's closure in 2011. Claims by ex-Blue Peter host John Leslie and the estate of reality TV star Jade Goody were also settled. None of the claimants was at the hearing. 'Unlawful means' Lawyer Jeremy Reed told Mr Justice Voss the Hamiltons started proceedings last year "for misuse of private information and breach of confidence in respect of obtaining their call data by unlawful means". The action related to events that took place in 2001, he said. Mr Reed told the court News Group "now admits that Mr and Mrs Hamilton's call data was obtained for the News of the World by unlawful means". Dinah Rose QC, for News Group, said: "NGN is here today through me to offer its sincere apologies to Mr Hamilton and Mrs Hamilton for the damage, as well as the distress, caused to each of them by the obtaining of their private and confidential information. "NGN acknowledges that the information should never have been obtained in the manner it was, and that NGN is liable to each of them for misuse of private information and for breach of confidence." Mr Reed told the judge that "in the light of this apology from NGN, Mr Hamilton and Mrs Hamilton consider each of their claims to have been vindicated". Regarding Mr Leslie, Mr Reed said that during the relevant period he was working on the Granada Television programme This Morning. Mr Leslie was "targeted by the News of the World because of a number of well-publicised allegations concerning his private life". He was "deeply angry and upset to discover that, owing to the deliberate destruction of documents by the News of the World, he will never find out the true extent to which his privacy was invaded," Mr Reed said. He added that News Group "has now accepted responsibility for its unlawful actions and has, quite rightly, agreed to apologise to the claimant for the invasion of his privacy". A claim by political adviser Matthew Doyle was also settled. He received an undisclosed sum in damages, legal costs and an apology. TV producer Nigel Lythgoe also settled but no details were given in his case, nor in the case of Ms Goody, who died of cancer in 2009. Duchess apology The hearing was the 15th case management conference relating to phone-hacking legal action brought by scores of prominent figures and others. The court heard that 149 of 167 actions originally on the register had now been settled, with eight further claims seeking to be added. In February, the Duchess of York received a public apology and undisclosed damages. Other recently settled cases include those of singer James Blunt, former minister Geoffrey Robinson, actor Christopher Eccleston and entertainer Uri Geller. Actor Hugh Grant, who has been one of the leading voices in the campaign for tougher press regulation since the hacking scandal emerged, accepted a "substantial sum" in December 2012. In January last year, actor Jude Law was among 37 people who settled their cases. His £130,000 settlement was the biggest of the 15 awards revealed at the time. Other amounts included £40,000 to former Labour deputy leader John Prescott, £50,000 to Mr Law's ex-wife Sadie Frost and £30,000 to Labour MP Chris Bryant. The News of the World was closed in July 2011 following revelations that some of its journalists hacked into the mobile phones of celebrities, politicians and crime victims, including the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. The scandal also led to the establishment of the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics, an MPs' inquiry and the launch of three police investigations into alleged widespread phone hacking and corruption.	Ex-Tory MP Neil Hamilton and his wife Christine have settled their phone-hacking claim against the publishers of the News of the World.
+text: They are accused of being behind the 1993 assassination of the country's first elected Hutu president. The killing of Melchior Ndadaye triggered a brutal ethnic civil war. Mr Buyoya, an ethnic Tutsi, says it is a ploy to stir up divisions and shift attention from the current crisis. More than 300,000 people died in a 12-year civil war between the minority Tutsi-dominated army and mainly Hutu rebel groups. Mr Buyoya - who has seized power twice in the last three decades with the backing of the army - is a respected diplomatic figure on the continent. He was involved in the peace process that ended the civil war and led to the election, in 2005, of former Hutu rebel leader Pierre Nkurunziza as president. The current unrest in the country was sparked by Mr Nkurunziza's decision to run and win a third term in office in 2015. "I was astonished to learn about the serious accusations clearly intended to undermine my honour and integrity," the 69-year-old, who is now the AU's special envoy to Mali, said in a statement. He said the case of Mr Ndadaye's assassination, which took place four months after the country's first democratic election, was the subject of much debate during the mediations to end the war. The subsequent peace agreement, known as the Arusha Accord and signed in 2000, was intended to reconcile these blood feuds and bring reconciliation, he said. But by issuing of the arrest warrants, the government was using "diversionary tactics" for electoral purposes, which risked plunging the country into ethnic conflict, he said. Many opposition politicians in Burundi accuse Mr Nkurunziza of turning his back on the 2000 peace deal by serving a third term. Hundreds of people have died since the 2015 unrest began and many of the 400,000 who fled have not returned. Ahead of a regional summit on 27 December 2018, the African Union says that all sides in Burundi should "refrain from any measures, including political and/or judicial, which may complicate the search for a consensual solution". Analysis: Justice or expediency? By Prime Ndikumagenge, BBC expert on Burundi The unresolved case of Melchior Ndadaye's killing came to the fore again in October when the country marked 25 years since the assassination. A number of low-ranking soldiers were found guilty of his killing in 1999, but some people feel true justice has not been done. Last week, the government arrested four former senior military officers and a civilian - and then issued the international arrest warrants. Most of those on that list are also retired army officers or former officials once in the top leadership of the predominately Tutsi Uprona party. Most of them are now living in neighbouring Rwanda or Belgium, the former colonial power. The government boycotted the last round of regional talks on the latest crisis in October, angering East African neighbours. But while the arrest warrants are likely to further complicate relations with the African Union, they could prove a popular move ahead of general elections scheduled for 2020.	The African Union (AU) has warned Burundi against moves to jeopardise peace efforts after an international arrest warrant was issued for ex-leader Pierre Buyoya and 16 other officials.
+text: Jon Hilton, 41, and from Hull, is a Royal Engineers veteran of Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo and Northern Ireland. Mr Hilton, who is due to have his surgery next month, finished the run in 33 minutes and said: "The emotion I felt was hiding the pain of the run." He leg is to be amputated due to a blood clot and damage caused to the vascular system, he said. The run around a course in Hull's East Park has already raised £1,500 pounds. His initial target was £250. He said he had done the run to help the appeal because charities were struggling with Covid restrictions hitting their fundraising. Mr Hilton, who now lives in Beverley, said: "I wanted to do a final run with two legs as something could go wrong. "I started to feel more pain on the second lap of the run and was in agony, but I got to the finish line." Hull's Lord Mayor, Steve Wilson, handed Mr Hilton a Civic Crown award and his Poppy Run 2020 medal. According to the Local Democracy Reporting Service Mr Hilton said: "I just want to say a massive 'thank you' to everyone who's supported me, it's outstanding. "I might never get to do this again, so I want it to be worthwhile." Follow BBC East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk.	An ex-soldier who is due to have his leg amputated has completed a 5km run to raise funds for the Poppy Appeal.
+text: La Fête du Tour celebrations are traditionally held in cities, towns and villages every year across France. Participants dress in yellow and hold cycle rides and have picnics along the route. The race begins in Leeds city centre on 5 July and continues from York to Sheffield on 6 July. Graham Titchener, from the Yorkshire Grand Départ team, said he hoped for a "feel good atmosphere". "It's an opportunity to really celebrate this thing coming, " he said. "It's a fun thing and La Fête is that official start that says lets get really excited about this thing." Many cycling groups will be organising rides along parts of the route, with 600 people expected at an event organised by the Skipton Cycling Club in North Yorkshire on Sunday. In Huddersfield, more than 200 people, including disabled riders, will take part in a cycle around the town on Saturday. In York, a women's cycling group - the Yorkshire Bike Belles - has organised an event at the city's cycle track. Many of the events will also be used to raise money for Marie Curie Cancer Care.	Yorkshire communities on the route of the Tour de France will hold parties to mark the one-month countdown to the start of the cycle race.
+text: By Robert PlummerBusiness reporter, BBC News Sarah and Steve Jarvis, who run the Independent Cottages website, say inquiries in the first week of February were nearly 100% up on last year. They said they had seen "no difference" to the level of interest since the warnings from government ministers. People were showing a "healthy appetite" for holidays, Sarah said. But people booking through the site, which lists more than 1,800 properties, were also studying the small print and making sure they knew about cancellation policies. "Consumers are educated. They know what questions to ask," she added. "Our owners don't want to open up too early, but they've been shut for so long that they really need to see some income," Steve said. "It's quite a desperate situation for some owners. We're seeing some leave the industry because of this." The government is sending "a confusing message" on whether people should book summer breaks, travel industry bosses have told the BBC. Holiday firms are "on their knees" and it is "imperative" that they can count on a good summer, said Visit East of England chairman Andy Wood. But Cornwall's Eden Project boss David Harland said he felt "cautious optimism" despite the uncertainty. "People have been booking and they should book with confidence," he said. The two travel professionals were reacting to a series of statements from government ministers suggesting that it was unclear whether summer holidays could go ahead because of the pandemic. On Thursday, Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the BBC there was still "a lot of uncertainty", but added that he had booked his own summer break in Cornwall "months ago". He was speaking a day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Transport Secretary Grant Shapps both said it was "too early" to be sure about booking getaways. Hours after Mr Shapps' comments, senior travel industry figure Sue Ockwell, of the Association of Independent Tour Operators (AITO), told the BBC he was being "puerile and nonsensical". Visit East of England's Mr Wood echoed the Eden Project chief executive's positive view of demand for summer holidays, saying: "We're seeing strong bookings and that's really important. "Being able to count on a good summer is really imperative for businesses, because we don't want them taking decisions to cut jobs. "The tourism industry's got millions of jobs in it, it's worth about £130bn in sales to the UK, so it's a vital sector." Safe holidays Another holiday provider, holidaycottages.co.uk, also reported that the government's warnings had had no effect on demand. The firm's chief marketing officer, James Starkey, said: "Whilst the comments from the transport secretary cast doubt over when holidays will be able to take place again, we've seen bookings continue to come in from guests who want something to look forward to. "Measures such as contactless key collections, enhanced cleaning and independent cottage units mean that booking a cottage should remain one of the safest ways to enjoy a holiday this year." Holiday booking platform Airbnb has also seen a surge in interest in UK holidays. Domestic searches for British destinations for this summer more than tripled towards the end of last week compared with the first few weeks of January, it said. An Airbnb spokesperson said: "Britain is looking forward to a brighter summer. Travel is taking on more meaning as we pursue experiences closer to home and look forward to reconnecting with family and loved ones. "We have seen an uptick in searches to the great British countryside, to both the traditional favourites and lesser travelled gems, which is great news for hosts in these communities that wouldn't normally benefit." And according to tech firm Avvio, which provides online marketing and booking services to hotels, UK hotel and self-catering bookings for August are 46% ahead of last year. Its chief commercial officer, Michael De Jongh, said: "Everyone is desperate for something to look forward to at the moment, so it makes complete sense that many people are splashing out on a UK holiday. "So long as they ensure they can amend or cancel their booking easily, they won't be left financially worse off if lockdown continues longer than anticipated."	UK holiday providers are still seeing strong demand for summer getaways amid "confusing" warnings that it may be too soon to book because of Covid.
+text: Irma, now downgraded to a tropical storm, reached the highest, category five status, and packed sustained winds of up to 295km/h (185mph). The storm cut a devastating trail across Caribbean countries and territories, killing at least 37 people there. It then moved up through the US states of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, where an estimated 12 people died, before weakening into a tropical depression. Caribbean islands were worst hit Images emerging from storm-hit areas show the extent of damage to island communities. Barbuda Hurricane Irma left the British overseas territory of Barbuda "barely inhabitable" according to the Prime Minister, Gaston Browne. Most of the island's population of just over 1,600 live in the town of Codrington, where an initial assessment using satellite images appears to show most of the buildings have been damaged. Many buildings have been completely destroyed and debris litters the town. Tortola At least five people died in Tortola, part of the British Virgin Islands. Road Town, is the capital, and has become popular as a centre for yacht chartering and tourism. An RAF A400M transport plane arrived on Saturday, bringing dozens of soldiers to help kick-start the recovery process. The airport has been badly damaged, but the arrivals lounge is now being used as a base for the recovery operation. Sint Maarten The island that comprises the French territory of Saint Martin and the Dutch section Sint Maarten has suffered widespread damage. At least nine people have been killed. Two hundred and fifty Dutch troops have been deployed to deliver aid, food, medical supplies and building materials - and to maintain security. French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe has said local authorities on the French side believed 95% of the houses there had been damaged, and 60% had been left uninhabitable. Philipsburg, the main town in the Dutch half of the island, has suffered widespread damage. One resident told the BBC the island looked as if it had been struck by a nuclear bomb, with roofs torn off many of the main buildings, including the hospital. Turks and Caicos Irma struck the Turks and Caicos, ripping off roofs on the main island, Grand Turk, flooding streets and causing a widespread black-out. The island of Providenciales is a popular tourist destination and dozens of holidaymakers were caught on the island unable to leave before the hurricane hit. Cuba Hurricane Irma moved along the north coast of Cuba, killing at least 10 people and causing significant damage to coastal communities and tourist resorts, cutting off power to large areas. Irma's trail of destruction in Caribbean The US Southern Florida, and especially the low-lying archipelago known as the Keys, bore the brunt of the storm. But the storm moved up and across the country, hitting inland areas like Immokalee. . Damage is still being assessed but seems to be less than feared, as the hurricane lost power on its way up the peninsula. However, cities like Miami and Jacksonville suffered flooding, and some 60% of homes across Florida were left without power. The storm also brought torrential rain to Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama.	The most powerful Atlantic storm in a decade has left a trail of destruction in the Caribbean, affecting an estimated 1.2 million people.
+text: The discovery by Ness District Fishery Board followed an angler coming across two Central American species of fish in the river. The board said the fish found on Tuesday could be a piranha or a silver dollar, a relative of piranha and pacu. The other exotic fish found were thought to be Jaguar cichlids. It is suspected the fish were kept as pets before being dumped. The warm water species would not have survived long in the Ness. But the fishery board said the fish could have had diseases or parasites that posed a risk to native fish. Two cichlids were found by a member of Inverness Angling Club, and a third by the fishery board after director Chris Conroy and a colleague investigated whether other exotic fish had been dumped. Mr Conroy said: "Any release of non-native species into the wild is extremely irresponsible and could have significant negative impacts on our native fish stocks. "The species found to date are all native to a warm climate and so had little to no chance of surviving in the cold waters of the River Ness. They could however pose a significant disease risk." The River Ness flows from Loch Ness to the sea at Inverness. The Ness river system's native species include salmon, trout and European eels, a creature suggested to be behind the legend of the Loch Ness Monster.	What is thought to be a piranha or a close relative of the fish has been found dead in the River Ness at Inverness.
+text: The man was employed by contractors extending an underground roadway when he became trapped by machinery. The 58-year-old has not yet been formally identified. A post-mortem examination is being carried out. An investigation is under way by the Health and Safety Executive's Mines Inspectorate and West Yorkshire Police. The museum was closed on Tuesday and Wednesday "as a mark of respect" and is due to reopen on Thursday. 'Stringent regulations' The museum said the underground tour "would remain closed up to and including Sunday 30th January at the earliest". The tours are a popular attraction at the museum, with visitors able to go 450ft down one of the oldest working mines in England. In a statement, the former Caphouse Colliery at Overton said the man had been working on a project to extend the museum's underground tour when it is understood he became trapped by the machinery being used. The accident happened before the museum was open to the public and the museum said "at no time was there any danger to visitors". The statement said: "Although no longer a working coal mine, the museum still operates under the stringent regulations of Mines and Quarries Health and Safety legislation, regulated by HM Inspectorate of Mining." It added: "The museum would like to extend its deepest sympathy to his family, friends and colleagues." Related Internet Links National Coal Mining Museum Health and Safety Executive West Yorkshire Police	Underground tours at the National Coal Mining Museum in Wakefield have been temporarily suspended after a mineworker was killed there.
+text: All elected politicians have to be paid the same rate regardless of office or responsibility under law. Treasury Minister Senator Philip Ozouf said the system was unfair and brought an amendment to wider proposals for government change. Deputy Sam Mezec, chairman of Reform Jersey, described the proposed change as "legalised bribery". Politicians voted 23 in favour to 20 against the proposal. Deputy Mezec said: "What this amendment does is make a bad situation worse. Just imagine what it will be like if this form of legalised bribery is accepted. "Not only will ministers lose their title and position if they don't toe the line, they will also lose a large part of their salary." Senator Ozouf said the change would not mean ministers suddenly got more pay, it would be down to the remuneration body to decide if they deserved more money. Politicians in the island are paid £42,600 a year and are able to claim up to £4,000 in expenses. Their salary is set by an independent remuneration body. As of last month UK MPs were paid a basic salary of £67,060 plus expenses.	All Jersey politicians will continue to be paid the same regardless of office, after calls for a change were rejected.
+text: By Gareth MitchellPresenter, Click on BBC World Service The worry is that we are cosseted in an information cocoon based on personalised results from search engines, automated recommendations from online bookstores and social networks that feed us gossip and news only from our innermost circle of friends. On Click radio a few weeks ago, we interviewed Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. He told us "People don't use Google as a tool which is personalised; they don't expect it to deliver a subjective version of the world. Google has this whole mythology around page rank, this algorithm that collects the truth from all of these different web sites and democratically arrives at the right answer and that's not really how the search engine works any more." Mr Pariser is concerned that there is an illusion of objectivity in Google search results, when in fact they are filtered according to what we are most likely to click on when we browse the all important front page of results. He cites the hypothetical conspiracy theorist who searches for '9/11 bombings' and only sees other conspiracy websites rather than articles that debunk the crackpots. Before we spoke to Eli Pariser, we asked Click listeners to put his theory to the test by Googling the same word whatever their location, browser, platform, device or language. After much consideration in the office, we came up with the word 'platform'. It is a widely used word, largely politically neutral and with multiple meanings whether pertaining to computing, railway stations, oil drilling or outlandish shoes from the 1970s. We suggested that listeners try the same search with the personalisation settings on or off and also logged in and out of Google. To share their results, we invited our volunteers to post screen grabs to our Facebook listeners group. Our Facebook group was soon deluged with screen grabs. As I write this, three weeks on, they are still coming in. To date, over 150 Click listeners have taken part from 29 countries across Europe, Asia, Africa, the USA, South America and Oceania. With nearly 300 individual screen grabs to pore over, Click team member Nelida Pohl was enlisted to try and make sense of them. If Eli Pariser is correct then one might expect significant variations in search results, based on each user's own interests. However Nelida says "the same websites showed up over and over again, especially within countries. In an individual country, most had the same seven or eight websites in the first five hits and most of the differences I found were between countries". Results In all countries, the Wikipedia entry for 'computing platform' came up. This was mostly in English, but also in other languages depending on the country. In the UK, most of the top five searches included an intermediary of the Co-operative Bank called 'Platform'. There was a software company called 'Platform' in the US. The listings also included the electoral platform of the American Libertarian Party. Google Canada listed the equivalent pages for country's Green party. In Australia, a common return was a modelling agency. We were surprised to find that it did not make much difference whether users were logged in or out of Google or whether they had disabled the personalisation settings. When we put these initial results to Eli Pariser on our Click programme a few weeks ago, he suggested that the apparent lack of personalisation may have been down to the word we chose. "Google handles different queries quite differently from each other and there are some queries that mostly seem to return similar types of results and others that you'll see different results depending on different people." This experiment was part of a series on openness we have been making in association with the Open University. In a specially recorded podcast on the subject, Tony Hirst of the University's Department of Communication and Systems joined me to discuss the results and provide expert analysis. Even though within countries the same links tended to appear in the top few results, Tony Hirst believes the changes in rankings, however subtle, should not be understated and that they are evidence of personalisation. "If you have just a slight change in the ordering, particularly something that might bubble up from eighth to third or fourth on the screen where you're far more likely to see it, then just that simple change in ordering might have a huge influence on what you click on". The Filter Bubble suggests paternalism to Google's search algorithms; that we are always fed just what we want to read. Tony Hirst says that relevance is a key part of Google's offering but equally it is not good for business to overdo the filtering. "It's in Google's interest to keep people engaged and to spend time looking at the results page where they have adverts. So if they can give results that are of interest to you whilst not necessarily directly reinforcing your opinion, you may go back to that results page and click on one of those links". On Click, we like to put theories to the test, no matter how persuasive they appear at face value. With the help of our listeners we've done that with The Filter Bubble. Of course our survey is far from scientific; the sample size is relatively small and is only based on one search term. It does not refute Eli Pariser's hypothesis. In fact his book serves a valuable purpose by reminding us that the services we use online are becoming increasingly personalised and that there is more to search results than purely objective page rank. I have been blown away by the enthusiasm of Click listeners to go to the trouble of taking all those screen grabs and posting them on Facebook. Thanks to some impressive Click-style crowd-sourcing, we have a slightly better idea of whether or not we really are all living in the filter bubble.	How personalised is the web? That's the question that Click listeners all over the world have been helping us answer.
+text: About 6,000 people went to raves at Daisy Nook Country Park, Failsworth, and Carrington, Greater Manchester. A 20-year-old man died of a suspected drug overdose at the Daisy Nook rave while a woman was raped and three people stabbed in Carrington. Greater Manchester Police's Ian Hopkins said some behaviour was "appalling". Both events late on Saturday were illegal under coronavirus restrictions but Greater Manchester Police restricted its involvement to what they called "careful monitoring". An 18-year-old woman was raped and there were three separate stabbings at the Carrington site - one of which left an 18-year-old man with life-threatening injuries. The chief constable said: "The location was changed and that made it very difficult [to stop]. "Once these things start it is almost impossible to stop them given the number of people that were there and the number of officers available. "It would have been very serious situation and many people, including my officers, would have been badly injured I believe." He said that was why officers on the ground made the decision not to try to stop the gatherings. "Some of the behaviour was appalling; some of this was not partying - this was people going out of their way to commit crime," he added. 'Not scared of virus' A raver at the Daisy Nook park event told BBC 5 Live he went after "listening to guidelines for three months". Matt, who did not give his surname, said: "I've not been around a group of people in a long time so I thought I might as well this week. "I just went for a good time." When asked about the Covid-19 pandemic, the 22-year-old said: "I'm not really scared of the virus but I don't know anyone who has had it so I didn't think of that." Under current government guidelines for England, groups of up to six people from different households can gather outside in parks or private gardens. Paul Carroll, who lives near the Failsworth site, said: "Police were passively driving up and down and occasionally moving people on but when you have 4,000 people and 20 to 30 police it was never going to be enforcement. "I was still awake at three o'clock in the morning with people sniffing nitrous oxide gas on the garden wall, urinating and taxis coming and going." DJ Judge Jules called for nightclubs to be reopened so people can go out in a safe environment. "The fact is people are going to go out - let's just get the clubs and the nightlife industry open as soon as its possible because the industry is suffering immensely and the pent up demand is clearly there." Kate Green MP for Stretford and Urmston condemned those who attended the two "unsafe and irresponsible" illegal raves saying it brought "huge disruption" to the local community, some serious injuries and was "in complete contravention of social distancing rules".	Two illegal "quarantine raves" at the weekend were "almost impossible" to stop after venues were changed at the last minute, a chief constable said.
+text: By Peter MwaiBBC Reality Check Flowers are big business in Kenya and earnings from exports have doubled in the past five years. A key export destination is the UK, which most of the flowers enter after being auctioned in the Netherlands. Growers and exporters in Kenya are asking the same question - what impact will Brexit have on the flower trade? What is the current situation? Kenyan flower exporters currently enjoy zero tariffs on cut flowers sold to the EU. This is set by an interim arrangement, which Kenya secured through signing and ratifying the Economic Partnership Agreement between the EU and the East African Community. The deal is temporary until the three other members in the regional group sign up so it can come into full effect. Other major Kenyan exports such as tea, fruit and vegetables enjoy the same terms. Why does the UK flower trade matter to Kenya? Britain is the second largest export destination for Kenya's cut flowers after the Netherlands, taking almost 18% of the flowers produced in the country. The industry accounts for about 1.06% to Kenya's gross domestic product (GDP) - the total value of all the goods and services produced - according to the Flower Council. It is also one of the largest employers in the country, providing jobs to more than 100,000 people directly and an estimated two million indirectly. And although Britain remains a major trading partner for Kenya, overall trade between the two countries has been falling over the past few years. Why worry about Brexit? Kenya Flower Council chief executive Clement Tulezi said the infrastructure for handling flowers flown directly to the UK was not well developed, which left Amsterdam and Liege, in Belgium, as the most important entry points for flowers into Europe, So, Kenyan flower-sellers are hoping the UK signs a deal with the EU before officially leaving on 29 March. The deal proposed by the UK government would trigger a transition period that extends until 2020. And during the transition period, Kenya would continue accessing the UK market as it does now while a future trade deal was negotiated. This is what the Kenyan government is banking on. Kenya's principal secretary in charge of trade, Chris Kiptoo, told BBC News: "We have all along got that assurance of no market disruption because of the fact that there will be an interim period up to 2020 December in which the UK will be operating under the EU law. "Without a deal, it will not be just us, it will be everybody who has been trading with the UK. Everybody must find a way of trading with them." A UK government official said: "The EU has temporary trade arrangements for Kenya and we intend to maintain the same level of access to retain Kenya's duty-free, quota-free access to the UK market." During her visit to Kenya last year, Prime Minister Theresa May also said it would continue enjoying access to UK markets through the current duty free arrangement even after Brexit, before a new framework of trade is in place. "Once we are outside the EU, we will have the opportunity to negotiate these trade deals on behalf of the UK rather than as part of the EU," she added. What about a no-deal Brexit? Despite these assurances, there are concerns inside Kenya about what happens if the UK leaves without a deal. The British government says it wants to replicate all the existing trade deals the EU has, with more than 70 countries, which the UK would lose in the event of leaving without a deal. But in Africa, the UK government had by 21 February signed continuity deals only with member countries of the Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) region, which covers Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles and Zimbabwe. Without a trade deal in place for Kenya, the UK would have to set tariffs according to rules set by the World Trade Organization (WTO). And Traidcraft Exchange and the Fairtrade Foundation say Kenya could face WTO tariffs of 8.5-12%, costing its flower exporters up to £3.6m annually. This, say the charities in a joint report, "would undermine competitiveness in an already stressed supply chain" and would greatly affect revenue and workers' livelihoods. There are also concerns over potential customs delays between the EU and UK for a product with critical delivery schedules. Kenyan-based development economist Anzetse Were said a no-deal Brexit could see traders having to establish new distribution channels or use agents to sell the flowers in the UK. "It will be work and money that they will have to spend figuring out how to reconfigure those supply chains that used to work seamlessly when everybody was united in one common market," she said. Longer term, charities fear the UK may give priority to striking free trade agreements (FTAs) with richer countries, because of higher trade volumes. But economically vulnerable countries, say the charities, need to know they will continue to be supported in trading their way out of poverty. Read more from Reality Check Send us your questions Follow us on Twitter	As Britain prepares to leave the European Union, workers in Kenya's flower industry are closely monitoring developments.
+text: Vivacity has been running 10 libraries, a theatre, swimming pools, gyms and a museum in Peterborough since 2010. All services ceased with the lockdown, with a loss of £8m a year, and 98% of its 500 staff were furloughed. Peterborough City Council leader John Holdich said it was committed to continuing the services. Vivacity's chair of trustees Stewart Francis said the decision to hand back services to the council was "extremely difficult and painful" and "a direct result of the financial impact of Covid-19". The trust, which also runs arts and cultural festivals, said its main funding comes from gym and swimming sales, theatre ticket sales and its management fee. It is predicting a loss of income of £8m this year - last year its income was £10.8m - because of social distancing and reduce capacities. Mr Holditch said: "We are sad that our 10-year relationship with Vivacity is to end, just one more casualty of the global pandemic. "But we are committed to continuing and even building upon the excellent services it has provided for the city." Mr Francis confirmed the trust is not insolvent and has sufficient financial reserves to manage the transfer of the contract to the council and to honour all outstanding financial commitments. The transfer will take place within the next 90 days. Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk	A "perfect financial storm" caused by the lockdown has led a leisure charity to hand back its council contract, its chair of trustees has said.
+text: Nestle Waters has acquired a majority stake in Princes Gate which is the UK'S eighth biggest producer of bottled water, employing 49 people. The company was founded by brothers David and Glyn Jones on their family farm near Narberth 27 years ago. Nestle said the company would operate as a separate entity and no jobs would be affected. It added it would be run by its current management team in its current location. David Jones will retain a minority stake in the company. In a statement the Jones brothers said they hoped the sale would "supercharge" the business. Nestle Waters, which is based near Buxton, Derbyshire, said it had bought the Pembrokeshire company amid growing demand for bottled water and the acquisition would allow it to "effectively respond to customer demands".	A Pembrokeshire-based bottled water company has been bought by food giant Nestle.
+text: Operation Pallial was set up in November 2012 amid concerns previous investigations into alleged abuse in the care system had not been thorough. The BBC's The Wales Report has been given access behind the scenes to the National Crime Agency's inquiry. A senior official is "confident" more arrests and charges will follow. National Crime Agency director general Keith Bristow said: "We will pursue the truth and we will ensure through the evidence we collect we put the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) in the best position possible to make proper judgments. "I'm confident there will be further charges and I'm confident there will be further arrests." So far, 255 people have come forward with claims relating to 28 public and private sector homes. Operation Pallial is currently looking at offences alleged to have been committed against alleged victims aged between six and 19 from 1953 to 1995. A total of 37 people have been identified as potential suspects and there have been 19 arrests. The investigation began at the request of North Wales Police's chief constable, who wanted to re-examine claims of crimes and to look again at the original police investigations. In 2000, the Waterhouse inquiry was established to study allegations linked to homes in the former council areas of Gwynedd and Clwyd since 1974. 'Impact' Following Waterhouse, eight people were prosecuted, with seven of them convicted. The current inquiry is being coordinated from the National Crime Agency's office in Warrington, Cheshire. A team of 26 officers are working on the investigation and dealing with people coming forward with allegations. The inquiry also involves other agencies including the Office of the Children's Commissioner for Wales as well as councils' social services departments. Jenny Williams, director of Conwy social services, said: "I think we're much better these days at recognising what we need to do to ensure that we support people where they've suffered abuse and the impact on their lives." Elaine Coulter, deputy senior investigating officer, explained why some people were now coming forward. She said: "Some people were asked, maybe in the 90s, have they been a victim of crime in a care home and they might have said no, but that time they might have been in a good place with their life. Their partner might not have known, they might have had children and hadn't wanted to talk about it. "As their lives have gone on - now they have wanted to talk about it." Keith Gregory, who alleges he was abused as a child while in care in north Wales, said: "I don't want to be sitting here in another 10 years' time like we've been doing for the past 10, 20 years. "This time it's got to be right and I just hope everyone does their proper job which I think they are doing to be honest with you. " I just hope we get it sorted and we can all move on with our lives," he said. The Wales Report is on BBC One Wales on Wednesday at 22:40 GMT.	An inquiry into allegations of historical child abuse in north Wales care homes has now identified 37 suspects, say detectives.
+text: The incident is said to have taken place when Sussex Police were called to the Conquest Hospital, in St Leonards, to deal with a drunk patient. The male officer, 35, did not discharge his Taser but has been suspended while the incident is investigated. The patient, a 31-year-old man from Hastings, was arrested on suspicion of assaulting a police officer. He has been released on bail until 26 April. A police spokesman said its professional standards department is investigating the incident, which is alleged to have taken place on 21 March at 23:30 GMT. He said: "A 35-year-old male police constable, based in East Sussex, has been suspended while the investigation is ongoing. "Officers who carry Tasers outside of the firearms unit must pass suitability checks before undergoing a thorough four-day training programme. "This includes tactical and handling assessments and is designed to test decision-making under pressure."	A police officer who allegedly threatened to Taser a hospital patient has been suspended.
+text: On display at Aerospace Bristol is Concorde Alpha Foxtrot. which made its final flight into Filton Airfield in November 2003. The aircraft is on show in a purpose-built hangar at the £19m attraction. Other items in the collection are housed in a 100-year-old Grade II listed building, where aircraft were built in World War One. Live: Concorde museum opens to the public Exhibits include historic aeroplanes, replica aircraft, engines and aircraft memorabilia. The museum's Lloyd Burnell said: "Concorde, as always, has the power to amaze and looks just stunning in her new home. "We have created a first-class exhibition to tell the story of Bristol's aerospace achievements from 1910 to the modern day." Filton was where all 10 UK-built Concordes were assembled. Concorde Alpha Foxtrot was the last to be built, and first flew in 1979. Until the new museum opened it had been kept outside at Filton.	A new museum, which is home to the last Concorde aircraft to fly, has opened to the public for the first time.
+text: Mr Morales, who was a comedian before becoming president in 2016, claimed for luxury goods such as a pair of designer sunglasses and whisky. Guatemala has one of the highest inequality rates in Latin America. At $20,000 per month, Mr Morales receives one of the highest salaries of any president in the region. He campaigned on a promise to root out corruption using the campaign slogan "Neither corrupt, nor a thief". Breath mints and running socks The president reacted angrily when he was questioned about his expenses during a news conference on Monday. Asked why he had not paid for a pair of sunglasses by designer Carolina Herrera worth almost $3,000 himself, he said: "Because I don't have to pay for them out of my salary. (...) I was handed that pair of glasses, do you think I go asking for those kind of purchases?" Goods worth a total of $40,000 were paid for by the presidential office of administrative affairs in 2017. In a statement, the office said that part of its duties was to offer administrative and logistical support to the president and his family. But details of the cost of the purchases made by the office have caused outrage in Guatemala, which has some of the worst poverty, malnutrition and maternal and child mortality rates in the region. Among them are vitamins, bottles of rum, shampoo and sports items such as running socks, a golf cap, T-shirts and shorts. Presidential spokesman Heinz Heimann defended the purchase of a tennis outfit for the president saying it was "for an official activity with the US ambassador". "The president needed that gear to attend that invitation and it was last minute," Mr Heimann said. The office also paid for a bottle of whisky worth more than $400 and paid out more than $4,000 for dry cleaning, according to an investigation by newspaper Nuevo Diario. Anti-corruption group Justicia Ya (Justice Now) called the expenses "unjustifiable". "Jimmy Morales even bought mints with public money," the group said. An investigation is under way to determine if the purchases were legal.	Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales has shrugged off criticism levelled against him for claiming $40,000 (£29,000) in expenses in 2017.
+text: The corporation has partially upheld complaints about the quip made by the comedian on Radio 4's Heresy in June. Referring to political figures who had been hit by milkshakes, she said: "I'm thinking, why bother with a milkshake when you could get some battery acid?" But the BBC dismissed complaints that her remark amounted to incitement. Following the broadcast, Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage, who had a milkshake thrown at him by protesters several weeks earlier, accused Brand of "inciting violence". The corporation's Executive Complaints Unit [ECU] said it disagreed because "it has considered the context in which the words were spoken". A summary of the findings continued: "Whilst the ECU recognised that the wider message from this episode is an argument for more civility in political discourse, not less, and Ms Brand's contribution is not intended to be taken as face value, the ECU felt that it went beyond what was appropriate for the show. "So it was partially upheld against generally accepted standards of BBC output. The ECU also noted that in the right context and with the right treatment, there is no subject matter which should be beyond the scope of comedy." Media regulator Ofcom only considers complaints about BBC programmes if they have been through the BBC complaints process first. On Thursday, Ofcom said it had received 444 complaints about Brand's joke, including one that had been through the BBC process. "We are assessing the complaint against our broadcasting rules, but are yet to decide whether or not to investigate," an Ofcom spokesperson added. In the programme, after making the battery acid remark, Brand continued: "I'm not going to do it, it's purely a fantasy. But I think milkshakes are pathetic." At the time, the BBC said panellists on Heresy - a long-running comedy programme - often said things which were "deliberately provocative and go against societal norms but are not intended to be taken seriously." However, after the broadcast, the corporation removed the joke from the catch-up version of the show and said "comedy will always push boundaries" but that it regretted "any offence we have caused". The comic later reportedly admitted that it was "a somewhat crass and an ill-judged joke". Then-Prime Minister Theresa May's spokesman said the BBC should explain why the joke was "appropriate content" for broadcast. The Metropolitan Police said it would not take action. Following the complaints unit's ruling, a BBC spokesperson said: "We note the findings and that the BBC's ECU concluded the comments did not condone violence and that no subject matter should be beyond the scope of comedy." Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	Jo Brand's controversial joke about throwing battery acid "went beyond what was appropriate" for a Radio 4 comedy show, the BBC has ruled.
+text: The NHS Confederation warned of "severe" consequences to staff and patients if the right system was not established quickly. It said lockdown measures should not be eased until a clear plan was in place. It follows the PM's pledge to introduce a "world-beating" contact tracing system in England from June. Contact tracing identifies those who may have come into contact with an infected person - either through an app or by phone and email - so they can avoid potentially passing the disease on. Niall Dickson, chief executive of the confederation, which represents health and care leaders, welcomed Boris Johnson's pledge made at Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday. But in a letter to Health Secretary Matt Hancock, Mr Dickson said without a clear strategy the UK was at greater risk of a second peak of the virus and emphasised the importance of involving local health organisations in the plan. He said a test, track and trace strategy should have been in place sooner and if the right system was not instigated rapidly the ramifications for the NHS "could be severe". Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Mr Dickson said: "We are absolutely clear that contact tracing is the right thing to do, it is absolutely critical, it has got to be in place to prevent any notion of a second surge if the lockdown is being further released." He added the government was acting "quite late in the day [and] we haven't yet seen the detail". Meanwhile, a further 338 people have died of coronavirus in the UK as of 17:00 BST on Wednesday, the Department of Health said, taking the total to 36,042. Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers - a membership group for England's NHS trusts - told BBC Breakfast his members have "not had clear information and instructions about what their role will be" in the system. Security minister James Brokenshire said Mr Hopson's comments "will not be lost on anyone" at the Department of Health - and will be followed up on "at pace". Downing Street has confirmed that 24,000 manual contact tracers have been hired, with plans to employ an additional 1,000 people before the test, track and trace scheme starts on 1 June. The prime minister's official spokesman said "test and trace" would start shortly. On Wednesday, Mr Johnson said 25,000 contact tracers, able to track 10,000 new cases a day, would be in place by 1 June. It coincides with the earliest possible date for the gradual reopening of schools and non-essential shops in England. Northern Ireland already has a telephone contact tracing system in place, while the Scottish government is currently trialling one. The Welsh government wants its programme operational by the end of May. One of the government's most senior scientific advisers previously said an effective tracing system needed to be in place before lockdown restrictions could be changed. Health leaders not yet reassured What this letter indicates is that, for all the rhetoric, the NHS Confederation does not yet believe that the government has a robust plan for virus testing and tracking of contacts of those who are infected. And that comes even after the prime minister's statement that such a programme will be in place by 1 June with 25,000 contact tracers appointed. A widespread testing and tracing system is seen as a necessity if lockdown restrictions are to be further eased, including the reopening of schools. The confederation, which represents health leaders and organisations in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, does welcome Mr Johnson's commitment to a testing and tracing programme. But tellingly it notes that its members are not yet reassured, and that if there is not rapid action there could be a second wave of infections and serious consequences for NHS patients and staff. Mr Brokenshire said the contact tracing system will be in place on 1 June - with or without an NHS tracing app which will be rolled out "in the coming weeks". The University of Nottingham's Prof Keith Neal said the app would be most useful if people were out in public at places such as supermarkets. "That's where the app comes in because it will allow later on to identify who you've been in contact with but don't know their name or phone number," he said. "We can do contact tracing even without the app because that is a matter of finding the most high-risk contacts in close and prolonged contact, and you tend to only have close and prolonged contact with people you actually know." 'Just sitting on Netflix' One newly-hired contact tracer, a graduate who wished to remain anonymous, told the BBC at the moment "it's not very productive at all". He applied for a job as a "work at home customer service agent", he says - "nothing to do with the NHS". A few days later he passed the application process and joined an online training session. "Whenever we asked questions he would try but the main answer was 'wait for the coming days, you'll get an email or something'," he says. He adds the work is "quite boring" as "we're just kind of sat there doing absolutely nothing for the majority of the day". "Right now, I'm just sat scrolling through Netflix. A lot of people are chilling on games. "People say we can't complain, we're getting paid, which is very true, but at the same time it's like why would they set us up doing this if we're just sat around waiting." Contact tracing for coronavirus began when the UK identified its first two cases at the end of January. But it was stopped in mid-March after England's chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty, said it was "no longer necessary for us to identify every case". On Wednesday, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer challenged Mr Johnson over that decision, describing it as a "huge hole in our defences". In response, the prime minister said he was "confident" that England would have a track and trace operation which would allow the country to make "progress". Contact tracing is already being used in Hong Kong, Singapore and Germany. On Thursday, the government also announced it had agreed a deal to make antibody tests for the virus available on the NHS. These tests check if a person has had coronavirus and would be prioritised for NHS and care workers. The government's surveillance programme shows the number of coronavirus cases in the community has stayed relatively stable with one in 400 people in England infected. The Office for National Statistics surveyed nearly 15,000 people between 4 and 17 May, finding 0.25% of the participants tested positive for Covid-19 - down from the 0.27% figure last week. It suggests about 137,000 people in England could currently be infected. Content available only in the UK In other developments: Have you applied for contact-tracing jobs? Do you live on the Isle of Wight and use the NHS contact tracing app? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk. Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also contact us in the following ways:	Time is running out to finalise a test, track and trace strategy to avoid a possible second surge in coronavirus cases, NHS bosses have said.
+text: By Del CrookesNewsbeat reporter Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler and singer Jennifer Lopez left the show at the end of the 11th series in May. "I am so excited to be joining 'Idol," said Carey. "I can't wait to get started in the fall and I will see you in January." Mariah Carey, 42, joins long-serving Randy Jackson on the judging panel, who is her joint manager. According to one report, the Grammy-winning pop star will get $18 million (£11.5m) for her one-year contract with the option of renewing it. Third judge American Idol is increasingly under pressure in the ratings from rival shows like Simon Cowell's X Factor USA and The Voice. Last season's finale was the least watched in its history and the show is seeing its young, adult audience shrink. Several former winners have also failed to find success. "Not being the only game in town now, we need to keep things fresh," said Fox entertainment chief Kevin Reilly. No announcement has been made on a third judge. Kevin Reilly added: "We have the biggest names in the business, like Mariah Carey, interested in doing this. "So for the next couple of weeks it will be a matter of picking the right one, with the right chemistry, making the deal and finalising this." Ryan Seacrest will be back as the show's host. Previous judges include Paula Abdul, Kara DioGuardi and Ellen DeGeneres. Former head judge Simon Cowell was asked about Mariah Carey joining American Idol. "I'm happy for her, actually," he said. "I like Mariah. I think she's going to find it difficult to say no. "You've got to say no to people and she's sweet. No, I think she'll be great."	Mariah Carey will join American Idol as a judge for the show's next series, TV network Fox has announced.
+text: The Grammy-winning performer told fans he currently could not walk but had been told by doctors he would recover. "I will get past this," the 68-year-old pledged in a message on Twitter. Cross won five Grammy Awards for his eponymous 1979 debut album. He went on to win an Oscar in 1982 for Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do), featured in the Dudley Moore comedy Arthur. Only Billie Eilish has thus far equalled his 1981 triumph in all of the Grammys' "big four" categories - song of the year, record of the year, album of the year and best new artist. Cross revealed earlier this month he had tested positive for Covid-19, calling it "possibly the worst illness" he had ever had. In his latest update, he said he had been "very ill" but had not developed any respiratory complications. "Unfortunately as a consequence of Covid-19 other problems were caused," he continued. "At present I am suffering intense muscle weakness and a temporary paralysis of my legs - I am unable to walk. "However, physicians have assured me I will recover," he went on. "I have already begun physical therapy and am optimistic about improving." The singer thanked his fans for their support and paid tribute to his girlfriend, whom he said had been his "angel throughout all of this". Cross's update on his condition follows that of Rita Wilson, who was diagnosed with coronavirus last month along with her husband Tom Hanks. Earlier this week the actress told US network CBS the illness had made her "very tired" and "extremely achy" and given her "chills like she'd never had before". In an interview with The Guardian, the 63-year-old said she was "thankful to be back to normal again" and was now "staying inside" with Hanks at their Los Angeles home. Follow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	US singer Christopher Cross has said he is "optimistic about improving" having been "sick for weeks" with coronavirus.
+text: The discovery was made by renowned Indian biologist Sathyabhama Das Biju and a team of scientists, in the jungles of north-eastern India. It is hoped the frogs might now be found across a wide area, from China to Thailand. Studies of the frog have also led scientists to reclassify it as an entirely new genus. Tuneful song reveals new species of Himalayan thrush The golf ball-sized frog lives in tree holes up to 6m (19ft) above ground, which may have helped it stay undiscovered. Although other scientists have suggested it may have gone unnoticed simply because there are so few scientists working in the remote region. The height at which they live is not their only quirk, with females laying their fertilised eggs in tree holes filled with water, only to return after the tadpoles hatch, to feed them with unfertilised eggs. Unlike most frogs, adults also eat vegetation rather than insects and larvae. The newly uncovered frogs were first found by accident in 2007, during a search for other animals. Mr Biju, of the University of Delhi, is known as The Frog Man in India, for discovering 89 of the country's 350 or so frog species. "We heard a full musical orchestra coming from the tree tops. It was magical. Of course we had to investigate," Mr Biju said. Using DNA analysis, Mr Biju and his colleagues have now identified the frogs as part of a new genus, meaning it has a new name. It has changed from Polypedates jerdonii - named after Thomas Jerdon, the British zoologist that collected the previously only known specimens in 1870 - to Frankixalus jerdonii, after herpetologist Franky Bossuyt - Mr Biju's adviser when he studied at Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, Belgium. Although the frogs have since been found in significant numbers, they are far from safe, Mr Biju warned, with tropical forests being cut down at alarming rates to make way for agriculture and human settlements.	An extraordinary tree frog thought to have died out more than a century ago has been rediscovered in India.
+text: Thomas Fulton, 28, was stationed at barracks in Sennelager, Germany, at the time of the alleged attack on Anne-Marie Ellement, from Bournemouth, in November 2009. Ms Ellement died two years after reporting she had been raped. Mr Fulton and ex-corporal Jeremy Jones, 28, both deny rape. Cpl Ellement, who was 28 at the time, was found nearly naked and crying outside her accommodation in the early hours of 20 November 2009. Mr Fulton told the court he and Mr Jones had been drinking with Cpl Ellement. He said: "We went back to the room with the intention to have sex. She kissed us, she instigated things." He told the court he awoke later to find Cpl Ellement had left wearing his lightweight trousers. When he found her nearby, an argument ensued when she refused to return them. He said: "She pulled the lightweights down in front of me and she threw them to my chest." He admitted hurling insults at the corporal, adding: "I was frustrated that she had spoiled a really good night for us all." He said: "I was 21. It is the biggest regret of my life that I never walked Anne-Marie back that night." Mr Fulton said he and Mr Jones then took a taxi to a nightclub but received a call informing them that Cpl Ellement was upset. When they returned, they were arrested on suspicion of rape but the case was dismissed in January 2010. The panel of civil servants and senior military officers at the trial had not been told the circumstances of Cpl Ellement's death in 2011, when she was aged 30. But in an interview read to the court, Mr Fulton told officers: "I am really sorry she killed herself. I wish something had been done to help her." Cpl Fulton, formerly of 174 Provost Company 3 Royal Military Police, and Cpl Jones, formerly of Close Protection Unit Royal Military Police Operations Wing, each deny two charges of rape. The trial continues.	A former Army corporal accused of raping a colleague with another ex-soldier told a military court the alleged victim consented to sex.
+text: The East of England Ambulance Service said only a fifth of calls it received related to people in life-threatening conditions. The trust said it had set up a "Right Call" campaign to help educate people about its "finite resources". On Monday, it agreed to give monthly updates to MPs on its response times. It followed concerns over the length of time the trust took to answer some call-outs, particularly in rural areas. 'Thousands of calls' Six MPs from Cambridgeshire, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk met the trust's chairman in Westminster. The trust said many people believed all call-outs had an eight-minute response target. But it said the requirement only related to patients in life threatening conditions - who make up a fifth of 999 calls to the trust. Other calls nationally are graded for different response times ranging from 20 minutes to an hour. The trust has written a guide on its website advising people about when to dial 999. Neil Storey, the trust's director of operations, said: "Our staff deal with thousands of calls each week, but for one person it might be the only 999 call they make in their lifetime. "We want to make it clear to them about what to expect, why a call is being handled in a certain way, and to even think about alternatives to 999. "The ambulance service has to work with finite resources and within certain parameters to ensure help is given how and when it is needed." The ambulance service covers Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk.	An ambulance service criticised by MPs for its response times has urged people to consider "alternatives" before dialling 999.
+text: Ministers had been due to meet on Thursday, but that has been postponed due to two family funerals. Changes to restrictions due to come into play on Friday and guidance on transfer tests are set to be discussed. Mr Swann said confusion on outdoor gatherings would be "tidied up" on Thursday. A further 17 coronavirus-related deaths were reported on Thursday in Northern Ireland, bringing the Department of Health's death toll to 1,417. Another 1,410 people have tested positive for Covid-19. Ministers were seeking to clarify detail of the new lockdown restrictions being introduced at midnight amid a surge in coronavirus cases. A stay-at-home order will become legally enforceable, meaning the PSNI will have powers to direct people home if they are engaged in prohibited activity. Anyone caught being away from home without a reasonable excuse can be issued with a £200 fixed penalty notice or a fine of up to £5,000 if the case goes to court. Mr Swann said public messaging about the rules was not being helped by leaks from executive meetings. Northern Ireland's Chief Scientific Advisor, Prof Ian Young, said it was likely that in some areas as many as one person in 40 may currently have Covid-19. Testing figures gave an under-representation of the true number of cases, he added, because many people with Covid were asymptomatic and not diagnosed. Meeting delayed There was some confusion on Wednesday night about the reasons for delaying an executive meeting scheduled for Thursday. The justice and infrastructure ministers said they only became aware of the reasons for the postponement after the meeting was rescheduled. On Wednesday evening Infrastructure Minister Nichola Mallon tweeted that she had written to the first and deputy first ministers asking them to reconsider, as parents and children "were waiting on clarity on the transfer test". Justice Minister Naomi Long also suggested there had been little communication about why the meeting was delayed. "Maybe if the First and Deputy First Minister had the courtesy to give other ministers a reason for the delay, this wouldn't have happened," she tweeted. On Wednesday night, Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill said her condolences were with the two executive colleagues who were attending relatives' funerals on Thursday. Sinn Féin said it would put the matter to a vote unless the DUP's education minister cancelled the test, but he insisted this was out of his remit. Peter Weir said this was in the hands of private bodies responsible for the tests. First Minister Arlene Foster said: "Colleagues in other parties who want to use covid as an excuse to damage grammar schools and end academic selection. "They are trying to use the executive to give them a platform to do that, and I simply am not going to allow that to happen." Hybrid system On Wednesday, all this year's GCSE, AS and A-level examinations in Northern Ireland were cancelled, although there is still confusion about transfer tests for primary school pupils. On Tuesday news came initially that all transfer tests were cancelled in Northern Ireland. Hours later a single Association for Quality Education (AQE) transfer test was scheduled for 27 February. The issue has split the main political parties at Stormont, who already take different views about the use of academic selection for grammar schools in Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin, the SDLP and Alliance believe the process should be scrapped, but the DUP supports the current system. Ulster Unionist MLA Robbie Butler has proposed a "hybrid system" for this year, suggesting pupils' scores from their best two mock papers and previous attainment records should be used as criteria by grammar schools. Sinn Féin wants Mr Weir to use existing legislation to intervene and ensure the tests do not go ahead this year, but the minister has insisted he will not do that. Mr Weir argued that without the test, there is no other "obvious solution" for ensuring academic selection continues this year, and accused those criticising him of trying to "scrap academic selection entirely".	Confusion around Northern Ireland's coronavirus restrictions will be clarified on Thursday, Health Minister Robin Swann has said.
+text: Scores of people were evacuated shortly after midday when a "box with wires" was found by a bus driver at Lincoln Central Bus Station. Roads were closed and a 100 m (328 ft) cordon was in place until 16:00 BST. Ch Insp Stewart Brinn said the package contained "shopping with some electronic equipment" that a shopper had left on the bus by mistake. He said the bus driver took it to the security office, and as a result "an assessment was made to treat the package as a viable device". Police later said it was not a hoax but a "genuine mistake" and the person who left the shopping had come forward to apologise. The incident caused wide-spread disruption in the city, with road closures and cancellations on the rail network. Ch Insp Brinn praised the bus driver for "taking the time to report it". Speaking earlier, bus driver Roger Patterson said: "Somebody told me someone had found a box with wires on the Nettleham bus. "That's what people were saying but obviously I haven't heard anything official."	An Army bomb disposal team were called to "a suspicious package" that was found on a bus.
+text: The country's Privacy Protection Commission accused Facebook of dodging questions from European regulators. Internet users were also urged to install privacy software to stop Facebook tracking them, regardless of whether they had accounts with it. The social network said it complied with data protection law and questioned the Belgian watchdog's authority. The commission attacked Facebook after trying to find out more about its practices. "Facebook tramples on European and Belgian privacy laws," it said after publishing a report analysing changes that the company made to its privacy policies in January. In a statement, it said that Facebook has refused to recognise Belgian and other EU national jurisdictions, insisting it was subject only to the law in Ireland, the site of its European headquarters. "Facebook has shown itself particularly miserly in giving precise answers," the watchdog said, adding that the results of its study were "disconcerting". The body, which was working with its German, Dutch, French and Spanish counterparts, said that Facebook would not explain in detail how it used data it collected. 'Control' A Facebook spokeswoman questioned the Belgians' authority but said it would review the study's recommendations with the Irish data protection commissioner. "We work hard to make sure people have control over what they share and with whom. "Facebook is already regulated in Europe and complies with European data protection law, so the applicability of the [commission's] efforts is unclear," she said. This is the second damning report this year on Facebook's use of data from the Belgian Privacy Commission. In February, it said it placed "too much burden" on users to navigate its complex settings.	Facebook "tramples" on European privacy law by tracking people without consent, Belgium's privacy watchdog has said.
+text: By Paul RinconScience editor, BBC News website Talking via video link to a roundtable discussion at the UN in New York, he said the country held "extraordinary potential" for wind energy. He said the UK should embrace a range of new technologies to achieve its goal of net zero emissions by 2050. The UK holds the presidency of the UN climate conference, known as the COP. But because of the coronavirus crisis, the annual gathering will not take place this year. It has instead been postponed until November 2021. The prime minister said the UK had an ambitious agenda for the meeting and called on other countries to show similar ambition. He praised the recent pledge by China to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. Mr Johnson reiterated his government's pledge to "build back greener" after the Covid-19 pandemic, through a green industrial revolution. He promised to deliver thousands of new jobs in the process. As regards wind power, Mr Johnson said: "We've got huge, huge gusts of wind going around the north of our country - Scotland. Quite extraordinary potential we have for wind." On the question of new technologies, the prime minister also said he wanted the UK to take the lead in carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, in which greenhouse gas emissions are captured from sources such as power stations and then stored underground. Mr Johnson said this was a technology he "barely believed was possible, but I am now a complete evangelist for". He said the country would also be investing in renewable hydrogen fuel technology to provide what he called "grunt" for "trucks, for trains, even perhaps for planes - for vehicles that aren't readily capable of being moved by electric batteries". Like many other countries, he said the UK government was also thinking of bringing forward the date for phasing out new petrol and diesel cars. It's thought that date will be 2030, with 2035 for plug-in hybrids - but this has not yet been confirmed. This would help accelerate the take-up of electric vehicles (EVs). The government would be continuing its ongoing investments in solar power and nuclear energy: "I do think nuclear has to be part of the mix," the prime minister said. Something that might have got a bit lost amongst Mr Johnsons references to the UK not "lagging on lagging" or the need to get hydrogen "grunt" to power the nation's trucks was just how important the Glasgow conference is. It was only at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015 that the world actually agreed that all nations needed to do their bit to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Even as the Paris conference closed, the participants knew the commitments made were not sufficient to meet the UN's stated goal of keeping temperature rises well below 2C. That is why they agreed to review their ambitions every five years. The idea is that they will keep raising the bar, doubling down on the efforts to moderate climate change. Mr Johnson's goal today was to urge them to bring the boldest possible carbon cuts at a new meeting marking the anniversary of the Paris agreement on 12 December. What they bring to that meeting will kick off a year of negotiations designed to get them to go even further eleven months later at Glasgow. So Mr Johnson was beginning a process that will determine how successful the conference will be and - much more important - will also determine the future direction of global climate. In addition, homes would have to be improved so that they emit far fewer emissions. "Putting in lagging, changing the way the windows are configured, all kinds of things - changing the boilers. You can do so much to make a home less carbon-emitting. "The UK may sometimes be accused of lagging in some things my friends, but we will never be lagging in lagging." Mr Johnson said the UK's greenhouse gases were 8-10% down in 2020 on previous years. But added: "The bad news is we've achieved that by sustaining an appalling economic shock in the form of coronavirus. "The only way we've done - or we're going to do it - is as you can imagine because our planes aren't flying, our people aren't moving, our cars aren't travelling and our industry isn't producing emissions in the way that it normally would." At the roundtable, Ursula Van der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said that keeping global temperature rise under 1.5C - considered the gateway to dangerous global warming - was still possible "if we act quickly and if we act together". Follow Paul on Twitter.	Prime Minister Boris Johnson says he wants to make a "big bet" on renewables, turning the UK into the "Saudi Arabia" of wind power.
+text: By Dominic HughesHealth correspondent, BBC News Poor parental supervision also raises the likelihood of teenage drinking, said the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The Ipsos MORI survey found the behaviour of friends is also a powerful factor in predicting drinking habits. The more time teenagers spend with friends, the more likely they are to drink alcohol, it suggested. In a survey of 5,700 children aged 13 to 16, carried out for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, researchers found one in five claimed to have been drunk by the time they were 14. By the age of 16, half of those questioned said they had been drunk. Influences But the study also looked at what influences excessive teen drinking - and the habits of parents seem to be particularly powerful. The odds of a teenager getting drunk repeatedly is twice as great if they have seen their parents under the influence, even if only a few times. And the authors say that parental supervision is also important - if parents don't know where their children are on a Saturday night, or let them watch 18 certificate films unsupervised, they are more likely to have had an alcoholic drink. Teenagers' friends also have a significant impact on drinking behaviour. The odds of a teenager drinking to excess more than double if they spend more than two evenings a week with friends. Spending every evening with friends multiplies the odds of excessive drinking more than four times. Pamela Bremner from Ipsos MORI, the lead author of the report, said: "For the first time in the UK, this study ranks what most influences young people's drinking behaviour. "It found that the behaviour of friends and family is the most common influential factor in determining how likely and how often a young person will drink alcohol." Conflicting evidence But there is conflicting evidence on how to introduce young people to alcohol - leaving parents with some difficult questions unanswered. Researchers found mixed messages about the ideal age and ways of introducing teenagers to alcohol. Generally, those introduced to alcohol at a very young age had greater odds of being a regular drinker and of having been drunk multiple times. But there were differences in the pattern for young people of different ages. "This research shows that parents can have more influence on their teenagers' behaviour than perhaps many assumed," said Claire Turner, Programme Manager for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. "Both what parents say, and how they behave, have a strong impact on their teenagers' drinking, drinking regularly, and drinking to excess. "Being introduced to alcohol at a very young age - for example, under 10 years old - makes it more likely that they will drink and drink to excess as teenagers. "But there are differences in patterns across the group. So for the older teenagers, if they are introduced to alcohol later in life via friends, away from adult supervision, they are also more likely to drink to excess." Don Shenker, Chief Executive of Alcohol Concern, said the report confirms that from the beginning of a child's life parents have a strong influence on their children's future drinking patterns. "Parents have to realise and accept that whether intended or not, their own attitudes towards drinking, their own rate of drinking and any drunkenness are clear signals to children that this is acceptable and standard behaviour. "In addition, parents must accept that allowing children to drink unsupervised can increase the risk of their children being drunk and this can have harmful consequences. "Government ministers must also look at some of the causes of why it is so easy for children to obtain alcohol, usually from the home. "Government should look to see if they've done everything they can to stop the large supermarkets from continuing to heavily promote cheap alcohol which incentivises more alcohol purchases and therefore results in more alcohol being stored in the home." The Royal College of Physicians also said it was not surprised that being able to access alcohol easily was an important influencing factor on current drinking patterns and drunken-ness of teenagers. A statement said: "This shows that the government needs to concentrate on increasing the price per unit of alcohol and reducing its availability as their main priorities, and in addition to increase education and national campaigns for both young people and their families on the dangers of alcohol."	Children who see their parents drunk are twice as likely to regularly get drunk themselves, a survey of young teenagers has suggested.
+text: Wimpole Estate in Cambridgeshire will use the battery-powered prototype from Salisbury four times during the growing season. It is fitted with downward-facing cameras which monitor the field, mapping every square centimetre. Farm manager Callum Weir said Tom helped save on fuel and fertiliser, as well as benefiting the environment. Wimpole Estate is a 1,500-acre (600 hectare) organic farm, growing wheat, rye, oats and barley. Tom is one of three robots being developed by the Hampshire-based Small Robot Company. It gathers data which it downloads for analysis, and the fields are then hand-hoed to remove the weeds. Dick, which the National Trust plans to trial next year, destroys weeds using an electrical charge, while Harry is used for precision planting. Mr Weir said: "The beauty of the robot is that it gives me absolute precision. "This robot can map every centimetre of the field and give me recommendations for different parts of the field." It can map 50 acres (20 hectares) a day and has a four-hour battery life. The National Trust has demonstrated it to some of its 1,700 tenant farmers. Rob Macklin, the trust's head of farming and soils, said: "Technology needs to play a big part in solving many of the issues we currently face in farming, particularly improving soil health and carbon sequestration, reducing our reliance on fossil fuel power and fertilisers and avoiding the adverse impacts of synthetic chemicals on the environment." The Small Robot Company hopes to make Tom and Dick available commercially in 2021.	A robot called Tom that maps weeds with "absolute precision" is being trialled on a National Trust farm.
+text: Advocates of the move say it would increase global vaccine production, but drugs manufacturers argue it will not have the desired effect. Critics say it strips financial rewards from cutting-edge drug developers. The decision by US President Joe Biden comes amid pressure from Democrats in his party to remove patent protections. In announcing the new policy, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai said that "extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures". Ms Tai said the US would now embark on negotiations at the WTO to try to secure the waiver, but warned this could take time. India and South Africa were the leading voices in a group of about 60 countries which for the last six months has been trying to get the patents on vaccines set aside. One hundred of the WTO's 164 states are said to be in favour, and a panel on intellectual property is expected to discuss the issue next month. If approved, supporters say, the waiver would allow production of vaccines to be ramped up and provide more affordable doses for less wealthy countries. The countries in favour of the move met with strong opposition from the previous US administration of Donald Trump, the UK and the EU. Mr Biden had proposed a waiver during the 2020 presidential election campaign. What is intellectual property? Intellectual property describes creations, such as inventions, which are protected by patents, copyrights and trademarks. These prevent copying and allow the originator to be financially rewarded. Patents give innovating firms a short-term monopoly on production to cover the costs of development and encourage investment. Biotech firms argue that such protection has provided incentives to produce Covid vaccines in record times. What would the waiver mean? Many developing countries have argued that rules requiring countries to protect patents and other forms of intellectual property are an obstacle to increasing the production of vaccines and other products needed to tackle the pandemic. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the WHO, called the US decision "historic" and said it marked "a monumental moment in the fight against Covid-19". The medical NGO, MSF - Doctors Without Borders - said the move would "increase sufficient and timely access to these lifesaving medical tools as Covid-19 continues to ravage countries across the globe." Calls for a vaccine patent waiver come as lower income countries face acute vaccine shortages. MSF points out that many of the low-income states where it operates "only received 0.3 percent of global Covid-19 vaccine supply while the US has secured enough doses to protect its entire population". India, which was shipping vaccines to other countries, has now had to cancel exports as it grapples with surging coronavirus cases and falls behind on its vaccination targets. But pharmaceutical companies have voiced their opposition to a waiver, insisting that patents are not the primary obstacle, and cautioned that the move could stifle innovation. The head of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, Thomas Cueni, told the BBC's Today programme that technology transfer should not be enforced. "I'm deeply concerned if you hand this over and allow companies to try to get it done the right way, safe and high quality, you could compromise the quality and safety of vaccines which we see now and it would be disruptive." He said Western pharmaceutical companies were already sharing technology on a voluntary basis. "The bottlenecks right now are trade barriers, preventing companies from moving their goods from one country to another. It is shortages and scarcity in the supply chains, which need to be addressed. And it is also right now the disappointing unwillingness of rich countries to early share doses with the poor countries. "None of this is addressed with the patent waiver." Dr Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told the Reuters news agency that the waiver "amounts to the expropriation of the property of the pharmaceutical companies whose innovation and financial investments made the development of Covid-19 vaccines possible in the first place". Nobody is protected until everyone's protected: on that world and business leaders are agreed. But pharmaceutical companies have called the decision by the US to back the sharing of secret recipes for vaccinations short-sighted, claiming it is understanding the production process that is the real challenge, particularly when it comes to the new breed of mRNA vaccines - such as Pfizer and Moderna - as well as the availability of raw materials. It is, they say, akin to handing out a recipe without sharing the method or the ingredients, and could lead to quality issues and less efficient production. Instead, the UK and the EU have favoured a system of licensing, whereby know-how is shared and there is more oversight. It is already being done on some cases on a voluntary basis - such as the tie up between Oxford AstraZeneca and the Serum Institute of India. And that licensing can be made compulsory, although the pharmaceutical companies could then be eligible for compensation. Some trade specialists have speculated that the US might be hoping that, by backing a lifting of patents, manufacturers might be more open to sharing expertise voluntarily - or at least, for a reduced charge. What has the reaction been? European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said "the EU is also ready to discuss any proposals that address the crisis in an effective and pragmatic manner". French President Emmanuel Macron has changed his position, now saying he is "absolutely in favour". A UK government spokesperson said the UK was "working with WTO members to resolve this issue" and was "in discussions with the US and WTO members to facilitate increased production and supply of Covid-19 vaccines". The head of the World Health Organization called the US announcement a "monumental moment" in the fight against Covid-19. The prospect of a waiver hit shares in the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax. Some experts say pharmaceutical companies would also need to share know-how, such as production techniques, with poorer countries to have any real beneficial effect. Licensing agreements are another way of boosting production. One of the largest Covid vaccine producers is the Serum Institute of India which manufactures the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab under a licensing agreement with the Anglo-Swedish company.	The US has thrown its support behind a move at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to temporarily lift patent protections for coronavirus vaccines.
+text: By Reality Check teamBBC News This will not be the first attempt to tackle the problem - at least a dozen policies or white papers have been announced on the topic since 1997. So, have 20 years of targets and policies had an impact? Obesity reduction targets In 2008, a wide-ranging report on obesity aimed to improve diets, increase exercise and form personalised help for tackling the problem. It also introduced two key targets: The World Health Organization (WHO) has a measurement of obesity that it works out by taking a sample of people from most countries and looking at their body mass index - or BMI - to see if they were a healthy weight for their height. In 2008, 59.5% of adults in the UK aged over 18 were overweight or obese. By 2016, the figure was 63.7%. This means that, at that point, the UK had the 30th highest proportion of overweight people of the 191 countries listed. Looking at England only, the annual Health Survey for England suggests 63% of adults over 16 are overweight or obese. But it suggests that while obesity rates have increased significantly from 1993, they have stabilised in recent years. The second target was to reduce childhood obesity. Using the Health Survey for England we can estimate that the proportion of obese or overweight two to 10-year-olds was the same in 2018 is it was in 2000 - a total of 25%. Over the same period, the proportion of overweight 11 to 15-year-olds increased from 31% to 34%. All of these results are based on surveys, so there is a margin of error in the data. In 2008, the Labour government attempted to create a more accurate picture of childhood obesity by measuring almost all children in Reception and Year 6. This data shows a more sustained increase in childhood obesity than the Health Survey for England. The Conservative-led coalition produced their own targets in 2011, hoping to see a sustained decrease in child obesity by 2020. We do not yet have data for 2020, but it doesn't seem there has been a long-term decrease. Increasing PE in schools In 2002, the Labour government launched a physical education (PE) policy aimed at linking local schools with specialist sports colleges in their area. The scheme came with the target to get 85% of kids doing at least two hours a week of PE or sport by 2008. The government said they surpassed the target - reaching 86% - up from an estimated 25% when the scheme was launched. The scheme was ended in 2010 by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. They also removed the requirement to record how much exercise was done in schools, although they said they expected schools to maintain the current levels. There is some evidence that the amount of time spent doing PE dropped in the subsequent years - that came from teacher surveys and also figures on the number of hours taught by trained PE teachers. In 2016, the Conservatives announced that - using money from the sugar tax - there would be an increase in sports or PE funding. In the same year, their childhood obesity plan also recommended that children should do at least an hour of exercise a day, with at least half an hour in school and half an hour supported by parents and carers outside of school. For 2018-19, it was estimated that just under half of children met that target. Eating your 5-a-day The 5-a-day slogan became government policy in 2003. Since then, the proportion of adults eating five portions of fruit and vegetables a day has increased from about 24% to about 28%, according to the NHS's Health Survey for England. On average, adults ate 3.7 portions of fruit and vegetables a day compared with 3.4 in 2003. However, the proportion eating fewer than two portions a day has remained roughly the same at 27%. Reducing obesity inequality The Conservative government's child obesity strategy opened by saying "the burden is falling hardest on those children from low-income backgrounds". Over the past decade the gap in childhood obesity levels between the poorest and wealthiest had increased from 8.5 percentage points to 13.5 percentage points. No specific targets were given. Across England, obesity rates vary considerably - ranging from over 75% of all adults in Rotherham, Hartlepool and Thurrock to under 45% in Camden and the City of London. Sugar tax The UK introduced a tax on drinks that were high in sugar in April 2018. Companies have to pay: The policy was declared a success before it was even launched as manufacturers changed the recipes of their drinks to avoid paying the tax. Between 2015 and 2018 the total quantity of soft drinks sold containing at least 5g of sugar per 100ml fell 50% while sales of drinks containing less than 5g per 100ml rose by 40%. The amount of tax paid in each quarter since the levy was launched has been higher than it was in the first, suggesting the reductions in sugary drinks being sold have not continued. What claims do you want BBC Reality Check to investigate? Get in touch Read more from Reality Check Follow us on Twitter Did you take part in a previous scheme where doctors prescribed exercise, such as vouchers for free gym sessions or similar? Did it help you? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk. Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also contact us in the following ways:	The prime minister has launched a new policy on obesity in England.
+text: A review ruled earlier this year that his family could take the bid forward. The Libyan was found guilty in 2001 of the terrorist attack which claimed the lives of 270 people in 1988. Aamer Anwar, who represents Megrahi's family, said he expected five senior appeal court judges would hear the case later this year. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) referred the case to the High Court in March. It said at the time that it had considered six grounds of review and concluded that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred by reason of "unreasonable verdict" and "non-disclosure". It rejected the four other possible grounds of review. Megrahi - found guilty in 2001 and jailed for life with a minimum term of 27 years - was the only person ever convicted of the bombing. He died in 2012 after being released from prison early on compassionate grounds as he had terminal cancer. Mr Anwar confirmed that the posthumous appeal against his conviction had now been officially lodged. He said the only place to determine whether a miscarriage of justice had occurred was in the appeal court where the evidence could be subjected to "rigorous scrutiny". Related Internet Links SCCRC	An appeal against the conviction of the late Abdelbaset al-Megrahi for the Lockerbie bombing has been formally lodged at the High Court.
+text: The proportion of people from middle-class backgrounds with degrees has increased twice as fast as among less well-off groups, says the report. The study found just a 5% increase in degrees among children of routine and manual workers. Co-author Professor Peter Elias from, Warwick University, said some groups felt higher education was not relevant. Researchers from the Institute of Social and Economic Research, analysed the social backgrounds of almost 34,000 adults, aged between 22 and 49. The researchers divided them into two age groups. They found that among the older group about a quarter had a degree. This proportion increased to about a third in the younger group. But analysis of parents' occupations at age 14 showed that the increase in higher education was not evenly distributed among the social classes. The research concluded that the increase in people going to university was largely due to rising numbers of students with parents who held white collar jobs. The increase in degrees among those with parents in managerial or professional jobs was 10%, while among those with parents in teaching, nursing, administration or sales, it was 11%. Professor Elias said: "The findings reflect in part the restructuring of the UK economy over the last 40 years, which has seen a decline in manual occupations and an increase in white-collar jobs." The researchers also pointed out that some occupations that did not require a degree 20 or 30 years ago are now largely graduate jobs. Cultural divide The authors suggested a number of reasons why the numbers of working-class pupils going to university had failed to grow. Professor Elias said the need for good A-levels deterred working-class pupils from trying for university. He also said: "It's being unable to bridge a cultural divide between those people who feel it's not relevant and not something they want their child to get into, versus groups where there's been a real pickup in interest - the middle class, white collar workers. "People, particularly parents, who are in jobs where they can see if they want them to get in, they're going to have to have a degree." A spokeswoman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said changes to university funding placed a premium on widening access. "Institutions wanting to charge more than £6,000 will have to demonstrate annually the progress they are making to recruit more bright students from disadvantaged backgrounds. "By 2015-16 there will be a 50% increase in the investment universities make under their access agreements. "This includes investment in school and college outreach programmes, bursaries and scholarships, fee waivers, summer schools and other activities to widen participation," said the spokeswoman.	Attempts to encourage children from poorer homes to go to university have failed, according to a study.
+text: The chief executive of Titanic Quarter Limited, David Gavaghan, is to leave his post, along with two other senior figures. But the company - owned by Dublin-based Harcourt Developments - says it remains committed to Northern Ireland. Its owner Pat Doherty said the "cost base was not proportionate to the business". The company was behind the construction of the £97m Titanic Belfast visitor attraction, as well as other waterfront projects. In a statement, Titanic Quarter said 13 staff would remain "to progress major developments, including projects in the film production, hotel and office sectors". It added: "We are dedicated to ensuring that Titanic Quarter Limited remains a key driver for Northern Ireland's economy." Mr Doherty said: "David Gavaghan and two other senior personnel have made a valuable contribution to growth at Titanic Quarter and we wish them well for the future. "In particular I would like to thank David for his leadership and wish him every success."	The developers behind Belfast's Titanic Quarter are to restructure the business "following a review of costs."
+text: Thames Water is proposing the development, which would cover four square miles of land south west of Abingdon and cost £1bn. The water company says the reservoir is necessary to meet future demand for water in the South East. It will finish making its case on Wednesday. Campaigners say it is not needed and would damage the environment. The Cotswold Canal Trust, the Group Against Reservoir Development (GARD) and the Environment Agency have all submitted their closing statements this week. The inquiry began in June at the Oxford Conference Centre in Park End Street. The result is expected later this year.	A public inquiry into plans for a massive reservoir in Oxfordshire is due to come to an end this week.
+text: By Mark KinverEnvironment reporter, BBC News An international team of researchers said their work, which uses satellite data and field measurements, provides the "most accurate estimates to date". Protecting these landscapes is vital if efforts to curb climate change are to be successful, they added. The findings appear in the journal Environmental Research Letters. Writing in the paper, the scientists observed: "This investigation provides the most accurate estimates to date of the carbon stock of an area that is the largest peatland complex in the Neotropics." They said it also confirmed "the status of the [Pastaza-Marañón foreland basin in north-west Peru] as the most carbon-dense landscape in Amanozia". "We expected to find these peatlands but what was more of surprise was how extensive they were, and how much this relatively small area contributed to Peru's carbon stock," explained co-author Freddie Draper from the University of Leeds. The 120,000 sq km basin accounts for just about 3% of the Peruvian Amazon, yet it stores almost 50% of its carbon stock, which equates to about three billion tonnes. Deep peat Mr Draper told BBC News that the team used a new approach to produce their figures: "We used quite a novel method, combining a lot of field data - for about 24 months, we measured how deep the peat was, how dense it was and how much of it was carbon. "That measured how much carbon was in the ground, and then we estimated how much carbon was in the trees. "Probably the most novel part, because the study covered such a large area, we used different satellite products (radar and images) to identify where these peatlands were." The team said that the basin remains "almost entirely intact", but threats are increasing. "Maintaining intact peatlands is crucial for them to continue to act as a carbon sink by continuing to form peat and contribute fully to regional habitat and species diversity," explained co-author Katy Roucoux from the University of St Andrews. Dr Roucoux told BBC News that scientists are still learning about the contribution these landscapes make to the global carbon cycle. "An important issue is the extent to which the peatland ecosystems are continuing to lock up and store carbon as peat today. It certainly looks as though they are as the environmental conditions are right, ie water-logged." She added: "Our ongoing work in this area also concerns the processes of peat accumulation: what controls the species make up of the peatland ecosystems and under what vegetational, environmental and climatic conditions peat forms, in order to identify their sensitivity to future environmental changes resulting from climatic and/or land use change." The findings have been published shortly after the conclusion of international climate negotiations in Peru's capital city, Lima. The talks - scheduled to concluded on Friday - continued into the weekend, as delegates struggled to reach agreement over a framework for setting national carbon budget pledges to be submitted to the next UN climate summit in Paris next year. "Following the recently agreed Lima Call for Climate Action at COP20 and in the run-up to COP21 in Paris next year, there is a strong onus on countries to produce ambitious plans to reduce carbon emissions," explained fellow co-author Tim Baker from the University of Leeds. "For a carbon-rich country such as Peru, understanding where carbon is stored and developing policies to protect those ecosystems is an important part of this process." The paper's findings, Dr Baker added, suggest that the peatlands must become a conservation and research priority. "Undoubtedly more work needs to be done to protect these areas effectively, as the major national park in the region - Pacaya Samiria - does not cover the most carbon dense vegetation, nor the broad diversity of forest types in this area."	The most dense store of carbon in Amazonia is not above ground in trees but below ground in peatlands, a study has calculated.
+text: Dear prime minister, The last 24 hours have been very difficult and distressing for me, and I have been thinking carefully about what action I should take in the interests of the government, my constituents and - most important of all - those whom I love. I am grateful for the strong support which I have received from my friends, family, and from you, the deputy prime minister and the chancellor. This support has been incredibly important, but nonetheless, I have decided that it is right to tender my resignation as chief secretary to the Treasury. I have done so for three reasons. Firstly, I do not see how I can carry on my crucial work on the Budget and Spending Review while I have to deal with the private and public implications of recent revelations. At this important time the chancellor needs, in my own view, a chief secretary who is not distracted by personal troubles. I hardly need say how much I regret having to leave such vital work, which I feel all my life has prepared me for. Secondly, while my recent problems were caused by my desire to keep my sexuality secret, the public is entitled to expect politicians to act with a sense of responsibility. I cannot now escape the conclusion that what I have done was in some way wrong, even though I did not gain any financial benefit from keeping my relationship secret in this way. Finally, and most importantly, I have an overriding responsibility to those I love most, and who I feel I have exposed to scrutiny in this way. I have pursued a political career because of my sense of public duty, but I have too often put this before the interests of those I love most. It is time to redress the balance. I want to apologise to my constituents for falling below the standards that they are entitled to expect from me. The job of being a constituency MP is no less important to me than my Cabinet responsibilities. I shall ensure that I co-operate fully with the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner in the review that I have requested. I intend to consider carefully over the period ahead how I can best serve the interests of my Yeovil constituency, which I care so passionately about. It has been a great honour to serve however briefly in your government and I will remain its strong supporter. Yours sincerely, David Laws	The Treasury Chief Secretary David Laws has resigned over expenses abuse allegations - the new government's first casualty. This is his resignation letter to David Cameron.
+text: The 35-year-old wing played his last game for Wales in December, running in his record 58th try for his country. Earlier this week he signed a one-year deal to play in Japan. He will also be honoured this summer at the National Eisteddfod, where he will become a member of the Gorsedd of the Bards. Responding to his MBE, the former Ospreys star said: "I have been lucky enough to have had a fantastic career and what a great way to finish. "I am very humbled by the fact I am being regarded in this way - I never thought I would receive an honour such as this and it is a fantastic end to my career." Named the 2008 International Rugby Board player of the year, he notched up 58 tries in 87 games for Wales, and two in four Tests for the British and Irish Lions. His final appearance in Europe was for the Barbarians in their defeat to Wales in Cardiff on 2 June. He had been expected to continue his association with the Ospreys next season in an ambassadorial role, but sprung a surprise with the news that he would playing a season with Mitsubishi Dynaboars in Division Two of the Japanese League. "It was a last-minute offer that I had to give great thought to in a short space of time," he revealed on Twitter.	Wales' record try-scorer Shane Williams says he is humbled to be appointed an MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List.
+text: The workers, along with the trade union, Unite, displayed a large banner stating "#BackBombardier". Bombardier, a Canadian aerospace company, is in a trade dispute with rival firm Boeing over alleged below-cost selling of its C-Series jet. The Bombardier workers held an hour-long meeting with Business Secretary Greg Clark on Wednesday evening. Coming after a day of meetings with MPs, a union official told BBC News NI that Mr Clark "listened, but we now expect action". The row threatens jobs at Bombardier's Belfast plant, where parts of the C-Series jet, including the wings, are made. Bombardier employs more than 4,000 people in Northern Ireland - and is one of its biggest private sector employers. Last week, the US government imposed an import tax of 80% on the jets, on top of a 220% tariff that had already been set. The ruling, which could triple the cost of a C-Series aircraft sold into the US, could potentially jeopardise a major order placed last year from US airline Delta - a $5.6bn (£4.15bn) deal for up to 125 of the jets. Delta's Chief Executive Ed Bastian said on Tuesday the carrier would not foot the bill of the proposed tariff. The company still intends to take the C-Series but there may be a delay as it works through the issues with Bombardier, he said, adding that Delta would get the planes "at the agreed contractual price". Prime Minister Theresa May spoke to US President Donald Trump on Tuesday night and discussed the importance of Bombardier jobs to Northern Ireland. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, speaking during Prime Minister's Question Time and sporting a 'back Bombardier' badge, said "Bombardier workers facing redundancy" was one of the government's failings. Analysis: Julian O'Neill, BBC News NI business correspondent Wednesday's round of London meetings is all about keeping the Bombardier issue on the national agenda. The government has already taken the side of the Canadian firm in its dispute with Boeing. The DUP, whose support Theresa May relies on, is also ensuring it gets high-level attention. But is this something which has the potential to threaten the supply and confidence deal? Highly unlikely. The DUP is clear the real villains of the piece are Boeing and President Trump's Commerce Department, not the government it props up. Speaking at the Westminster protest, Bombardier employee Dougie Jamison said it was important to remind MPs "how it is going to affect people on the ground". "It is not just people in Canada or in Belfast - it is throughout Northern Ireland that this is going to affect people," he added. Unite's regional secretary Jimmy Kelly said the intention was to "impress on the government" that it must do more on the issue. "It is not good enough to just phone Donald Trump," said Mr Kelly. "We need the government to speak to Boeing in a way that makes them realise their contracts with them are under threat." The group will call on the prime minister to summon Boeing to a summit with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. On Tuesday, the government accused of "inaction" over the potential job losses. But Mr Clark told the House of Commons that he understood the worry felt by the workforce, adding that the government would "vigorously and robustly defend" Bombardier's interests.	MPs have joined Bombardier workers outside the Houses of Parliament in a campaign to protect jobs in Belfast.
+text: The first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery have hit streaming services. They featured Starfleet first officer Michael Burnham, played by The Walking Dead's Sonequa Martin-Green - the first woman of colour to play the lead character in a Star Trek story. She's deputy to Michelle Yeoh's character, captain Philippa Georgiou. Fans were largely pleased by the pairing - with one describing them as "amazing women kicking Klingon butt". The last TV series, Star Trek: Enterprise, ended in 2005. This new series is available on CBS All Access in the US and on Netflix in 188 other countries - with Netflix offering subtitles in the Klingon language. Made by Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman, the show is set a decade or so before the original Star Trek. Former Star Trek star George Takei gave it the thumbs up, writing on Twitter: "Congratulations to @StarTrekCBS on last night's incredibly successful launch, great to have you on board as part of the Star Trek family." Critics also weighed in. The Guardian reviewer wasn't exactly overwhelmed by the new series, but said it was "not bad at all" and "has a genuine star on its hands" in Martin-Green. She is the adoptive sister of Mr Spock and is a "homage" to the character played by Leonard Nimoy, wrote Sam Thielman. Overall, he decided, the show was "laden with eye-popping special effects but rather short on high concepts". Slate also praised Martin-Green, saying she "carries the show" - and noted that the Klingons have been given a "sexy" redesign. "'Sexy' here apparently means hairless, with massive forehead ridges and purple-tinged skin that glows as though it's been professionally buffed at some kind of Klingon spa," wrote Marissa Martinelli. She said it was the darkest and most action-heavy Star Trek to date, telling a "gritty war story". 'Dramatic shift' Melanie McFarland, writing for Salon, said the first two episodes "unveiled a slick, provocative, frustrating and moving drama that desires to dazzle as much as to be intellectually unpacked". It's got enough politics to respect the original vision of the franchise "while appeasing viewers who are only in it for the action", she explained. Meanwhile The Atlantic's David Sims declared it a "radical departure". He noted: "The show probably needed to make such a dramatic shift in order to return to the air, but it's likely to distress some veteran fans." Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.	Star Trek is back, with the new Discovery series continuing the sci-fi franchise that was first seen on screens 50 years ago.
+text: The shows tied for best comedy series for their portrayal of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues. Project Runway won the reality TV award after featuring a contestant who publicly revealed he was HIV positive. I Love You, Phillip Morris, starring Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor, was named outstanding film on limited release. Former Will and Grace star Sean Hayes presented Broadway and TV actress Kristin Chenoweth with the Vanguard award. According to Glaad, the prize is handed out to those who increase visibility and understanding of the LGBT community. NBC Entertainment president Robert Greenblatt received the Stephen F Folzak award, an accolade presented to an openly LGBT media professional who, in Glaad's eyes, has made a difference in promoting equality for the community. Winners were announced in 25 of this year's 32 media categories last month. Singer Ricky Martin and the TV shows True Blood and 30 Rock were among those recognised.	US comedies Modern Family and Glee have been honoured by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (Glaad) at a Los Angeles ceremony.
+text: In a written statement, Saraj Miah said one of the men had pointed a gun at him when he appealed to them to spare the soldier. Michael Adebolajo, 28, and Michael Adebowale, 22, are accused of murdering Fusilier Rigby in Woolwich, south-east London, on 22 May. They both deny the charge. They both also deny attempting to murder a police officer and conspiracy to murder a police officer. Defendant 'bought knives' Earlier, the jury was shown CCTV images of Mr Adebolajo buying a five-knife block and a knife sharpener from an Argos store in Lewisham, south-east London, on the day before the attack. The court was also shown CCTV images of Mr Adebolajo driving his Vauxhall Tigra with Mr Adebowale as passenger on the day of the killing. The court heard that Mr Miah had been talking with a local shopkeeper just yards from where Fusilier Rigby was hit by a car from behind. Mr Miah said he had seen two armed men get out of the car, adding that one of them had pointed a gun at him and told him to stay back when he urged them not to kill the injured soldier. He said he had thought the "men with knives were going to kill him. I told them not to kill him. They did not listen to me". One of the men then slashed Fusilier Rigby's throat, while the other stabbed him "six times in his chest", Mr Miah said in his statement. He also described the man who had been driving the car walking around "as if nothing had happened". 'Sit and stare' A witness statement from Amanda Bailey was later read to the court, in which she described seeing the car crash into Fusilier Rigby. She said she had thought the soldier was dead and was so shocked that she dialled the number nine too many times on her phone when trying to contact the emergency services. She thought one of the men who had hit Fusilier Rigby with the car was reaching for a phone to call the emergency services, but was shocked when she saw he actually had a knife, she said. Ms Bailey then described in graphic detail her account of seeing one of the men attacking Fusilier Rigby with a cleaver. "I was so shocked all I could do was sit there and stare and what happened, I couldn't believe what was going on," she said. "He was determined and he wasn't going to stop. He didn't care. It was broad daylight and this man didn't care." The court heard from a number of witnesses during the afternoon, who also gave details of the knife attack on Fusilier Rigby. Gill Hucks said in her statement that she had been "shaking and very upset" at what she had witnessed. She said she had seen one of the accused men "playing to the cameras" in the aftermath of the attack. That view was echoed by Cheralee Armstrong, who told the court one of the accused men - who the prosecution say was Mr Adebolajo - had been "almost showing off" following the attack. Members of Fusilier Rigby's family have been in court for both days of the trial. The soldier's widow, Rebecca, left the court in tears as the witness statements were read out on Monday. The prosecution opened the trial on Friday, giving a detailed and, at times, graphic description of what they say happened when Fusilier Rigby, 25, of Middleton, Greater Manchester, was killed as he walked back to Woolwich Barracks. The prosecutor, Richard Whittam QC, told the court that the defendants had driven a car at Fusilier Rigby at 30-40mph, before trying to decapitate him in the middle of a busy street in a "cowardly and callous murder". The trial continues.	A witness pleaded with two men not to kill soldier Lee Rigby shortly before they allegedly attacked him with knives, the Old Bailey has heard.
+text: By Martin BarberBBC News Heidi Agan, 32, now has a "bump made in various sizes", she said. The single mother-of-two from Corby, Northamptonshire quit her job at a Kettering restaurant last May after customers repeatedly said she looked like Kate Middleton. She now travels across the UK and around the world to make appearances as a royal doppelganger. "To have done 12 years of something you know and then to leap into an industry that gives with one hand and takes with another is difficult, but I'm just really happy and feel blessed that I did," she said. 'Pinch yourself' Since the Duchess and Duke of Cambridge announced their forthcoming baby, lookalike Ms Agan has now prepared to appear with child. "As Kate grows I will too - to be authentic I thought it was important," she said. "It's difficult at the moment as she's not big enough yet to change her entire wardrobe so it's difficult to see how she's' going to dress it." Since taking the showbiz plunge Ms Agan has made regular television, radio, corporate and newspaper appearances as the duchess. "I did the Alan Titchmarsh Show and everywhere you turned there was another celebrity, " she said. "You just have to pinch yourself as I can't believe it's happened. "It was the same in New York. I went to Times Square with Good Morning America and was ferried around with security. "It's just something I never thought would happen to me, but has turned out to be the most wonderful thing ever." Ms Agan follows social media news about Kate Middleton to ensure her own wardrobe matches the duchess', and practices "her look" daily. Family 'proud' "The most expensive shoes I've bought as Kate were about £200, the dress was about £300 - which I don't think is that bad considering her original evening wedding dress by Alexander McQueen would have cost ten of thousands of pounds. "I have to get the clothes, the mannerisms, the way she stands and interacts with William right. Things like that are all very important if I want to be the best." Ms Agan said her children, aged 11 and four, are "proud" of what she's doing. "It's just been incredible and I feel so blessed with it and without the support of my family I just couldn't do it," she said. "Appearing as Kate has given me the opportunity to spend more time with my own children than if I was doing my waitressing job and that's priceless." But she refused to be drawn on who she found most attractive between the royal brothers. "I don't think either William or Harry are my type, they are too tall... is that diplomatic enough?," she said. People in Corby were treated to a "royal appearance" on Saturday when Ms Agan appeared for an event in the town's Corporation Street.	A former waitress who swapped her £6-per-hour job to become a £650-per-appearance Duchess of Cambridge lookalike has "become pregnant" to maintain accuracy.
+text: The Edinburgh-based company announced that the £390m deal had been cleared by the Financial Conduct Authority. Ignis was bought from life assurer Phoenix Group. Standard Life Investments is now one of the UK's biggest investment managers, with 81% of its revenues coming from fund management. Chief executive Keith Skeoch said: "The acquisition of Ignis is another step in Standard Life Investments' growth story, reinforcing our strong foundations, broadening our third-party client base and increasing the range of investment solutions we offer. "We look forward to working with our new colleagues and welcoming new clients to Standard Life Investments. "Our priority remains the continued delivery of strong investment performance and the highest level of client service."	Pensions and insurance firm Standard Life Investments has completed its purchase of fund managers Ignis Asset Management.
+text: It was one of 50 doors from the hotel, where a host of stars stayed over the years, to be sold. The door to a room used by singers Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen during an affair, as well as the singer Joni Mitchell, fetched $85,000. A former tenant acquired the doors after renovation work began in 2011. The hotel, built in the 1880s, became a long-term residence for generations of singers, bohemians and writers. Jack Kerouac wrote his classic book On the Road while staying there in the 1950s. The door to his room sold at auction for $30,000. The hotel also served as a residence for writers Mark Twain and Tom Wolfe, and science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke wrote the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey there. The most infamous incident to take place in the building came in 1978, when Sid Vicious from the UK punk band the Sex Pistols was charged with murder after Nancy Spungen was found stabbed to death in the room they shared. Vicious died of a heroin overdose before the case came to trial. Other doors to go under the hammer at Guernsey's auction house included that of actress Edie Sedgwick's room, where artist Andy Warhol filmed Chelsea Girls. It sold for $52,500. The door to guitarist Jimi Hendrix's room went for $13,000. The door to a room used by singer Madonna, actress Isabella Rosselini and filmmaker Shirley Clarke sold for $13,000. The doors were rescued by a former tenant, Jim Georgiou, who saw them being thrown away and arranged to take possession of them. "For me they were history and beauty and connected to my heart. They're precious because there are so many people who've been through them," he told the New York Times. The building was designated a city landmark in 1966 and was sold in 2016 to a group of investors. It stopped taking new bookings in 2011 but a small group of long-term residents are still living on the upper floors while the renovation work continues. You may also like:	The door to US singer Bob Dylan's room at the iconic Chelsea Hotel in New York has sold at auction for $100,000 (£70,000).
+text: Shops were looted and government buildings attacked in the capital, Tegucigalpa. Some roads were blocked with barricades and burning tyres. Protests against President Juan Orlando Hernández have been building in recent weeks, sparked by proposed health and education reforms. The conservative leader is also accused of becoming increasingly authoritarian. The president, who enjoys the staunch support of the US administration, was re-elected in 2017 after changing the constitution to stand for a second four-year term. The election was heavily criticised by opponents and international observers. Thousands of people have fled Honduras - as well as its neighbours El Salvador and Guatemala - to the US in recent years because of violence and economic instability. Speaking at the presidential palace after meeting senior security officials, President Hernández said the army and the military police would keep roads open and protect private property and the public. At least 17 people suffered bullet wounds as a result of violence, and two of them died at the HEU university hospital in Tegucigalpa, according to a hospital spokeswoman. Several people have been detained, Efe news agency reports. There was widespread unrest on Wednesday evening, after members of a riot police force withdrew to their quarters to pressure the government for improved benefits. Protests continued on Thursday even after the announcement of a deal between the government and truck drivers, whose strikes in pursuit of higher rates for moving freight had affected fuel distribution. Anger has been building in recent weeks over proposals to restructure the ministries of education and health. Opponents say that the changes are the first step towards the privatisation of education and health services. The government denies that the reform will lead to privatisation and layoffs, and says the changes will provide savings of more than $300m (£231m) which will be invested in primary education, the construction of two hospitals and the improvement of neonatal care.	Honduras has deployed the military across the country after violent anti-government protests left two dead.
+text: By Jessica BownTechnology of Business reporter Mr Zollner has been working on light emitting diodes (LEDs), the long-lasting technology in modern lightbulbs. They are probably in the lightbulbs in your house, or the headlamps of your car. Because they are tough and energy efficient, researchers are always trying to find new ways of using them. Mr Zollner and his team have been working on LEDs that emit ultraviolet light, in particular UV-C light, which is deadly to bacteria and viruses, including the coronavirus. His goal is to make those LEDs more powerful, robust and cheaper. "Right now, UV LEDs are capable of a few milliwatts of power. Our aim is to make them 10 to 20 times more powerful. "Our focus previously was mainly on using them for water sterilisation, but the Covid-19 pandemic has made us realise there is also a big market for sanitising surfaces and equipment. If there is another virus situation in say five or 10 years, this technology could be very useful." At the moment his lights are powerful enough to cleanse a closed cabinet, but need to be 20 times more powerful to zap a whole room. The light can also damage human skin and eyes, so the commercial applications are limited. But one firm has found a use. Californian firm LARQ makes what it says is the world's first self-cleaning water bottle. Its solution to prevent exposure to UV-C light is to ensure the tiny UV LEDs in the lids of its bottles only come on when the bottles are screwed shut. Users must then push down on the lid to activate the technology, which the company claims eradicates more or less all bacteria and viruses in 60 seconds. LEDs have come a long way since the first were produced in the 1960s. Back then, the only light the semiconductor devices could generate was an infrared light invisible to the human eye. Now, they cover the entire visible spectrum, as well as infrared and UV light and come in a dazzling array of forms. Micro-LEDs that measure less than 1mm across are another of the latest variants. Designed for use in high-end screens, micro-LEDs promise blacker blacks, brighter blues. Samsung has been showing off its massive screen made of micro-LEDs at consumer electronics shows. "Micro-LED display technology offers a huge improvement to standard LED panels due to its optimum brightness and image definition," says Damon Crowhurst, head of display at Samsung UK. But the engineering involved is mind-boggling. The screens need millions of micro-LEDs, which means they are expensive - a 75-inch TV costs tens of thousands of pounds. "Micro-LED screens cost about £1,000 per inch to make, so a 75-inch micro-LED television could easily cost the same as a new Porsche Cayenne," says Paul Gray, an analyst at global technology researcher Omdia. "You have to ask yourself how many people will be prepared to pay that to get better contrast when they watch TV." The crushingly high cost of micro-LEDs is one reason a number of manufacturers currently prefer mini-LEDs, which though still tiny measure more than 1mm across. Apple, for example, is rumoured to be developing six new products with mini-LED displays, including both iPads and MacBooks. In the short term, small-screen devices such as smartwatches are expected to be the biggest growth area for micro-LEDs. "Small screens are a much easier proposition, as a 1cm micro-LED screen can be made on a single silicon chip," Mr Gray says. "They are already being used in camera viewfinders. So for products such as smartwatches, we are looking at a much shorter timeframe." Researchers are finding ever more exotic ways to make the perfect LED - more light with less power. UK-based start-up Kubos Semiconductors is developing LEDs based on a form of Gallium Nitride (GaN) with a crystal structure that is cubic rather than hexagonal, an approach it believes could solve long-term problems creating more efficient micro-LEDs. At the moment, green and amber LEDs are up to three times less efficient than blue and red ones. Known as the Green Gap, the phenomenon reduces the performance and increases the cost of lighting and displays. "This will be very important in applications such as mobile phones and smartwatches where displays need to run off a battery," says Kubos chief executive Caroline O'Brien. More Technology of Business Elsewhere, researchers are working to reduce LED production costs and environmental impact. An EU-funded study is experimenting with using naturally occurring fluorescent protein structures to create bio-LEDs. Based in Austria, Spain, and Italy, the multi-university project began in January and is due to run for four years. "The goal is to find a cheaper and more environmentally friendly way of producing LEDs by avoiding the need for inorganic phosphates that have to be mined in specific locations," says Gustav Oberdorfer, who is leading research at Graz University of Technology in Austria. "We hope our LEDs will be used commercially in devices within the next 10 years, and believe they could both lower the cost of LED devices and make them much more sustainable." So next time you turn on a light, think of the humble LED, which has come a long way since the 1960s and has a bright future.	"The tech we are working on could transform water sanitisation techniques and offer access to clean drinking water to even remote developing regions via portable systems," says Christian Zollner from the University of California in Santa Barbara.
+text: Players can buy an "authenticator" from Blizzard which helps to secure accounts on its Battle.net gaming service. The authenticator is electronically tied to an account and regularly generates random numbers that must be typed in to play. Forcing players to use Battle.net and the authenticators is "deceptive and unfair", alleges the lawsuit. Blizzard said it would "vigorously defend" itself against the legal claims. In 2009, Blizzard revamped Battle.net to make it the over-arching system people must use when playing any of the company's games. It lets players manage payments and subscriptions for games such as Diablo 3, Starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft. The class action lawsuit filed by Benjamin Bell said it was "unfair" of Blizzard to force people to use Battle.net to play its games. Mr Bell alleges that it has made millions of dollars in profit by selling authenticators to players after they have bought its games. In Europe, the authenticator costs £8.99 (9.99 euros). It also produces a free software app version for smartphones. 'False information' Instead of making gamers buy extras to improve security, he said Blizzard should do more to protect accounts itself. The court papers mention several incidents in which the personal details of players were stolen from Battle.net. Blizzard had not taken the "legally required steps" to tell players about these problems, the lawsuit alleges. Mr Bell seeks damages from Blizzard, an injunction to stop the company charging extra for its security gadgets and wants it to drop the requirement to use Battle.net. The lawsuit was "without merit and filled with patently false information", Blizzard said in a statement given to game news site IGN. It denied that it did not do enough to let players know about attacks on Battle.net. It said the allegation that an authenticator was mandatory to use Battle.net was "completely untrue" and stemmed from a misunderstanding about the gadget's purpose. Blizzard branded the lawsuit's claims "frivolous" and said it would take appropriate legal action to defend itself.	Diablo creator Blizzard is being sued over the security tools it sells to players worried about hack attacks.
+text: The news comes as the festival announced it saw admissions of just over 40,000 across the 12-day event. Fujiwara oversaw the return of the Michael Powell and International Awards and red carpet premieres. The 66th EIFF, Fujiwara's first festival as artistic director, hosted a programme with 120 new feature films. 'Superb reinvention' Mr Fujiwara said: "Working on this year's EIFF has been one of the most challenging and fulfilling experiences of my career. "The interest and enthusiasm of the festival audience and the dedication and professionalism of the festival staff and volunteers have transformed my view of the importance cinema can hold in people's lives. "I'm deeply grateful to the board for their confidence in me, and I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to expand our relationships with our audiences and with international filmmakers, distributors and sales agents." Leslie Hills, of the EIFF Board, said: "EIFF is an institution with a reputation for reinvention over decades. "Chris Fujiwara gave us a superb reinvention in EIFF 2012. "Chris, along with the excellent support of staff and volunteers delivered, with his signature intelligence, knowledge and humour, a multi-faceted programme which engaged filmgoers and professionals, students and critics alike. "We are utterly delighted that he has accepted our offer to build on this very promising first edition."	Edinburgh International Film Festival's artistic director Chris Fujiwara has had his contract extended for a further three years.
+text: Argentina argues that the seizure violates maritime law. The ship was prevented from leaving Ghana last month, after a local court ruled in favour of a financial fund backed by an American billionaire. The fund says it is owed $370m (£233m) by the Argentine government as a result of its debt default a decade ago. It is seeking $20m in return for the release of the ship, a three-masted training vessel. International dispute Argentine Foreign Minister Hector Timerman said Argentina had approached the International Sea Tribunal, based in Germany, to request the "immediate and unconditional release of the frigate ARA Libertad and its restocking so it can leave the port of Temar [in Ghana] with the utmost urgency". On Monday, Mr Timerman had given Ghana one day to release the ship or face legal action. The government said it saw itself forced to take the case to the International Sea Tribunal after the Ghanaian government failed to meet its deadline. Argentina argues that the ship is a military vessel and was on an official visit to Ghana and should therefore not have been impounded. It says the seizure violates the immunity of military vessels under international maritime law. The Libertad has been detained in the Tema since 2 October. Only a skeleton crew remain after more than 300 sailors flew home about three weeks later. Sailors on board the Libertad reportedly pulled guns on Ghanaian officials last week after they tried to board the vessel to move it to another berth. Water and electricity had reportedly been shut off to the ship a few days earlier in response to Argentina's refusal to let officials move the ship to a less busy part of the port. NML Capital is a subsidiary of US hedge fund Elliot Capital Management, one of Argentina's former creditors. In 2001 and 2002, Argentina defaulted on more than $100bn of debt. Most of these loans were subsequently restructured, giving creditors about 30% of their money back. However, some creditors including Elliot chose to hold out, pursuing the Argentine government through the courts.	Argentina has asked a United Nations court to order the release of one of its navy ships impounded in Ghana because of a debt dispute.
+text: Turner, which is a division of Time Warner, said the reductions were part of a reorganisation meant to refocus resources and prioritise growth. The job cuts will apply to Turner's global properties, which include US cable channels such as TNT, TBS, and Cartoon Network. It employs 14,000 people worldwide. "Employees whose positions are directly impacted will be advised over the next two weeks and will be offered severance pay for transition," the company wrote in a statement. Turner has operations in 18 locations, including Hong Kong, Mumbai and Santiago, but its headquarters in Atlanta will be the hardest hit by the cuts, with nearly 1,000 jobs set to be shed there. Shares of Turner's owner, Time Warner, fell 1.2% in New York following the news. Falling ratings Turner has been trying to cope with how the digital revolution has changed how people watch television, and plans to invest in new technology and more lucrative areas, such as live sports. Its chief executive John Martin unveiled a restructuring plan called "Turner 2020" in June, that could see the company change significantly over the next six years. Mr Martin was appointed in January to oversee Turner, which is Time Warner's most profitable unit. Turner's operating income rose by nearly 10% to $1.8bn (£1.1bn) in the first half, compared with the same period a year before. But CNN, one of Turner's most famous brands, has been struggling to maintain ratings, with viewing figures at near two-decade lows. Over the summer, Turner's owner Time Warner spurned a $17bn takeover offer from Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox. Time Warner said the offer significantly undervalued the company, and Mr Murdoch eventually withdrew his bid.	Turner Broadcasting, the parent company of CNN, is planning to cut 1,475 jobs, about 10% of its total workforce, amid declining television ratings.