A guide to devolution in the UK

Summary: There have long been important distinctions in the way different parts of the UK work - for example, the separate education and legal systems in Scotland. But in 1997, devolution - the transfer of some powers from central to regional bases - entered a new phase.

That year, referendums were held in Scotland and Wales, with both parts of Ireland following in 1998. These resulted in the creation of the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly. Another major shake-up came in the form of the 2014 Scottish referendum. Although voters said "No" to full independence for Scotland, the period leading up to the vote led to an intense debate over what Scotland should be able to decide for itself. The debate has already resulted in more powers being offered to the Scottish Parliament - and is likely to influence how the process of devolution continues, not just in Scotland, but across the UK. Indeed, since its election in May 2015, the Conservative government has brought forward measures to devolve more powers away from Westminster. The devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales have received extra powers, and a number of "city regions", notably Greater Manchester have been granted extra control over some local spending and decisions. Which powers are devolved? The table below gives an overview of the main powers given to the Northern Irish and Welsh assemblies, and the Scottish Parliament. The UK government's proposals for the devolution of further powers to each constituent nation are discussed further below. * Scotland has always had its own legal system SOURCE: HM Government - Devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland Which powers are not devolved? The UK government, led by the prime minister in Downing Street, is responsible for national policy on all powers which have not been devolved - known usually as "reserved powers". The main areas which are reserved to Westminster are: Scotland The Scottish Parliament sits at Holyrood in Edinburgh and is made up of 129 elected Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs), who scrutinise and pass bills in various areas of its many devolved responsibilities. The Scottish Government is the executive branch and has been led by the SNP since 2007. The Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government were established in 1999 by an Act of the UK Parliament. Under this Act (the Scotland Act 1998) a range of powers were transferred (devolved) to Scotland including agriculture, economic development, education, environment, planning, health, housing, justice, local government and transport. In 2012, following the recommendations of the Calman Commission, a further transfer of powers took place. Under the 2012 Scotland Act the Scottish Parliament gained new powers over borrowing, drink driving alcohol limits, air weapons, stamp duty and a new Scottish rate of income tax. In the wake of the 2014 "No" vote in the Scottish independence referendum, all parties participated in the Smith Commission, a body which undertook to look at the devolution of further powers. Its recommendations formed the basis of the Scotland Act which reached Royal Assent in March 2016. This act devolved substantial new powers to the Scottish Parliament including: The Scottish Government says the proposals fall short of the mark and continues to argue for full independence. Wales The National Assembly for Wales sits at the Senedd in Cardiff Bay, and is made up of 60 elected Assembly Members (AMs). The Welsh government is its executive branch. Since 2011 the Welsh assembly has had primary law-making powers over devolved areas, and in 2014 it gained tax-raising powers including stamp duty and landfill tax. Arrangements are also in place for some powers over income tax. In addition, the assembly can make laws relating to ancient monuments and historic buildings, public administration, sport and recreation, tourism, town and country planning, flood defences, the assembly itself, and the Welsh language. Following the St David's agreement the Wales Bill was passed by the House of Commons in September 2016. It is currently being scrutinised by the House of Lords. The bill would put devolution in Wales on a similar model to that in Scotland. Whereas powers are currently "conferred" on the Welsh Assembly, the UK government wants to move to a "reserved powers framework" whereby everything is devolved to Cardiff unless specifically stated otherwise. The bill also proposes the devolution of some transport and election powers. Northern Ireland The Northern Ireland Assembly sits at Stormont in Belfast, and is made up of 108 elected Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs). The power-sharing agreement between the nationalist and unionist communities in Northern Ireland is critical to the functioning of the assembly; devolution of powers has been suspended and reinstated several times since it started in 1998. Devolution here is slightly different to Scotland and Wales, with government powers divided into three categories: transferred, reserved and excepted. In addition to the main devolved powers, the assembly can also legislate on culture, arts and leisure, learning and employment and regional and social development. As part of the Stormont House agreement, new tax powers were devolved to the Assembly and should allow Northern Ireland to set its own rate of corporation tax from April 2017. England As devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland has gathered pace, many people have argued that England's regions are being left behind. The Conservative government was elected in May 2015 with an agenda to devolve power to English local regions and resolve the so called "West Lothian question", the idea that Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MP's can vote on laws that only apply in England. The government has introduced a set of arrangements called English votes for English laws. Under this system a new stage has been added to the usual law-making process at Westminster allowing MPs for English constituencies to vote on issues only to affect England. These English MPs are able to veto the legislation before it comes before all MPs in the final stage. A guide to devolution in the UK Over the coming years there will be more power devolved to city regions through the implementation of "devolution deals". These deals model themselves on the devolved government in London, which has been in place since 2000. The government says the new deals will give cities and their surrounding areas certain powers and freedom to: The government has concluded deals in areas including Greater Birmingham and Solihull, Bristol and the West of England, Greater Manchester, Leeds City Region, Liverpool City Region, Nottingham, Newcastle and Sheffield City Region. In total, 30 deals have been granted, 26 in England, 3 in Scotland and 1 in Wales. Each model is bespoke, with enhanced powers over housing investment and healthcare budgets given to the Greater Manchester region. Some deals also include the introduction of directly elected mayors who will be elected from May 2017.

ब्रिटेन के विभिन्न हिस्सों के काम करने के तरीके में लंबे समय से महत्वपूर्ण अंतर रहे हैं-उदाहरण के लिए, स्कॉटलैंड में अलग शिक्षा और कानूनी प्रणालियाँ। लेकिन 1997 में, हस्तांतरण-कुछ शक्तियों का केंद्रीय से क्षेत्रीय आधारों में हस्तांतरण-एक नए चरण में प्रवेश किया।


Post-traumatic stress and the hired gun

Summary: Former SAS soldier Bob Paxman - who served in Iraq as well as other hostile environments - is one of a growing number of former servicemen who say they have suffered with the mental health condition Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

After a number of years in the military, Paxman retrained as a private security contractor, on protection contracts in Africa and Iraq. He says as a result of being constantly in a dangerous environment and witnessing colleagues being killed and maimed he was diagnosed with PTSD. The stress disorder is thought to affect up to 20% of military personnel who have served in conflict zones, according to research published by the National Center for PTSD in the US. What is not known is the impact among those who work in the armed private security sector, many of whom are drawn from the military. Yet the condition, says Paxman, led to him having flashbacks and becoming violent and paranoid. "I was a danger to the public, a danger to myself," Paxman says. "A danger to whoever was perceived as being the enemy." Paxman says he would wake up several times a night with severe nightmares about incidents he was involved in through his military history and working in hostile environments. "After a period of time, those nightmares crept into my daily life as well," Paxman says. "I'd be trying to relax and a movie screen would come down and I'd start reliving the feelings and the images of things that had happened; traumatic incidents in the past." As his mental health deteriorated, Paxman turned to drugs and alcohol. But through his own efforts, he says, his health gradually improved. Appalled by what he saw as a lack of specialist help, he set up the charity, Talking2Minds, to help others suffering from PTSD. Now, every year about 200 people come through his door looking for help, and the numbers are increasing. But Paxman says he is now seeing more clients with mental health problems who work within the burgeoning private security sector. Loose cannons He points to the incident involving Danny Fitzsimons - who shot dead Scottish security contractor Paul McGuigan and another colleague in Iraq in 2009 while suffering from PTSD - as evidence that the condition is a very real risk factor for those working as private security contractors. And, in his experience, he says, there are many private security contractors still working in the field who are failing to get the help they need. "There's some people running around that really should not be working in a hostile environment. "There's loads of loose cannons running around. "Now I know that companies have started to close down on some of them. And a lot of people have been sent home. However, it's quite easy to go and jump into another company because there's a need." Paxman predicts that the numbers coming through his doors, both from the military and the private security industry, will rise. "Certainly we're going to see more numbers of people coming through with PTSD and severe stress-related conditions. "We're going to see that because on average it takes around 14 years to come up with a diagnosis of PTSD, post service. And we've only been in Afghanistan for 10 years. "I do believe it is timebomb waiting to go off." In the past few weeks, one of the world's largest private security companies approached Paxman about running a pre-deployment pilot project. It aims to identify and treat employees with severe stress related conditions such as PTSD. "Once we've got these people, they'll be encouraged to come through our programme, and we'll be able to give them a clean bill of health," Paxman says. BBC Scotland Investigates: Britain's Private War, BBC Two Scotland on Monday 1 October at 21:00 and soon after on the BBC iplayer.

पूर्व एसएएस सैनिक बॉब पैक्समैन-जिन्होंने इराक के साथ-साथ अन्य शत्रुतापूर्ण वातावरण में सेवा की-उन पूर्व सैनिकों की बढ़ती संख्या में से एक हैं जो कहते हैं कि वे मानसिक स्वास्थ्य स्थिति पोस्ट ट्रॉमेटिक स्ट्रेस डिसऑर्डर (पीटीएसडी) से पीड़ित हैं।


Attack accused in court after man knocked down by car

Summary: A man charged over an alleged attack in which another man was knocked down by a car has denied charges including grievous bodily harm with intent.

A man was struck by a vehicle in Groat Market, Newcastle, on 27 July. He was traced and had not been seriously hurt. Daniel Walmsley, 28, of Leam Lane in Gateshead, also denied dangerous driving, assault and driving while disqualified, at Newcastle Crown Court. He was remanded in custody before a trial in January. Follow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk Related Internet Links HM Courts Service

एक कथित हमले के लिए आरोपित एक व्यक्ति, जिसमें एक अन्य व्यक्ति को एक कार ने टक्कर मार दी थी, ने इरादे से गंभीर शारीरिक नुकसान सहित आरोपों से इनकार किया है।


If Disney princesses were Filipina

Summary: Once upon a time, Disney's famous princesses were re-imagined as zombies and even as bowls of water . But one of the most intriguing spins on the iconic characters is what is happening among fans in the Philippines.

By Heather ChenBBC News The hashtag #IfDisneyPrincessesWerePinay regularly appears on Twitter, much to the delight of local fans. The fairy tales have taken on a new life, which is poignant but with a bittersweet edge. So princesses were re-imagined singing karaoke, but there were also Disney princesses to reflect the political and social preoccupations of the Philippines. "If Disney princesses were Pinay, then Mulan would definitely be claimed by China," said one user from Cavite province. "They are the faces of fairy tales today and are huge internet favourites," said Rebecca-Anne Rozario, a professor from Monash University who has written on the cultural significance of Disney princesses. "Their happy endings aren't discarded - new stories are being told. Fan artists are "freeing" them, re-imagining them in different styles and ethnicities but what's also interesting is that new stories involving tweets and memes are fleshing out the lives of the princesses themselves." This is the take of Disney-mad Philippine social media on the trials and tribulations of ordinary Filipina women. Cinderella gets stuck in traffic "Cinderella wouldn't make it to the ball because of traffic," read a bemused comment from one Twitter user. She would miss her midnight curfew. Princess Jasmine probably wouldn't be able to escape the Manila traffic either, and would, like many Filipinos in the capital, "arrive at least 30 minutes late to work". She would ride a traditional 'Jeepney', the country's most popular means of cheap public transport, and not a converted pumpkin. Cinderella as a domestic helper She would be an overseas foreign worker, a domestic helper, which is a path that awaits some Filipina women who travel to find better incomes than they would get at home in households in the Middle East, Hong Kong and Singapore. "If Disney princesses were Filipina, Cinderella would be an OFW in Hong Kong," one post read drawing the direct comparison with Cinderella's harsh beginnings. Disney and fairy tales in the news Disney's first Latin princess Fairy tales 'thousands of years old' The link between Frozen and anorexia? Elsa the snow queen would create ash and floods, not blizzards Elsa, one of Disney's newest princesses, is known for her ability to produce or manipulate ice, frost and snow at will. But that didn't stop users talking about her weather powers, the kind of conditions that frequently wreak havoc in the Philippines. "Elsa would not be creating snows but flood," remarked one user. "More fun in the Philippines!" To another user, a Filipina version of Elsa would be more adapted to creating ash, not snow at Mount Pinatubo, near the island of Luzon. Others were more optimistic. Elsa should maintain the ice rinks at mega-malls in Manila. Whitening products...for the fairest of them all Fair-skinned princess Snow White, was another popular focus among many Filipinos discussing the trend. "The evil queen would have given her a poison mango," said one user. Her much vaunted fair complexion would make her the perfect ambassador for whitening products, used by a number of Filipinas, others pointed out. "Snow White would also be on a lot of whitening commercials because she's the fairest of them all." Karaoke microphones and singing competitions would be the obvious choice for a Filipina Ariel: "She and Snow White would be fighting it out in singing battles," said one Twitter user. The princesses imagined in the Filipina context play on both the power and powerlessness of women. This social conversation has cleverly twisted the popular global trend and recreated a Philippine version with humour and ruefulness. But the Philippines already has its own Disney princess World-renowned Filipina singer and actress Lea Salonga, has voiced not one but two Disney icons: Princess Jasmine and Mulan. And while many saw the dark side of Disney in putting her in Philippine scenarios, others remembered her role in one the world's most enduring entertainment phenomena and cite her as a role model for Filipina women. "Idina Menzel and Mandy Moore may be modern and nice but Lea Salonga will always be the reigning 'Disney princess' in the hearts of Filipinos," said a fan on Twitter. Another said: "When I hear Lea Salonga, I get emotional because she sang as my two favourite princesses." Illustrations by Goh Wei Choon.

एक समय की बात है, डिज्नी की प्रसिद्ध राजकुमारियों को लाश और यहां तक कि पानी के कटोरे के रूप में फिर से कल्पना की गई थी। लेकिन प्रतिष्ठित पात्रों पर सबसे दिलचस्प स्पिन में से एक फिलीपींस में प्रशंसकों के बीच क्या हो रहा है।


Adam Chadwick shooting murder: Leeds teenager bailed

Summary: A 19-year-old man arrested over the murder of Adam Chadwick, who was shot at his sister's home in Leeds, has been released on bail.

The teenager from the Leeds area was held on Monday morning on suspicion of murder and robbery. Mr Chadwick, 20, a father of one, was shot when three masked men and a woman burst into the house in Clifton Mount, Harehills, on 24 June 2008. He died in hospital two days later from a single bullet wound to the head. Mr Chadwick had a daughter who was three years old at the time of the shooting.

एडम चैडविक की हत्या के मामले में गिरफ्तार एक 19 वर्षीय व्यक्ति, जिसे लीड्स में उसकी बहन के घर पर गोली मार दी गई थी, को जमानत पर रिहा कर दिया गया है।


Terror charges for trio suspected of National Action membership

Summary: A further three people suspected of being members of banned far-right terrorist group National Action have been charged with terrorism offences.

Garry Jack, 22, and Daniel Ward, 28, both from Birmingham, and a 17-year-old boy from Nottingham, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, were charged with being part of the group. They are due to appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court on Tuesday. Last week a couple were charged with the same offence. Mark Jones, 24, and Alice Cutter, 22, both of Wharf Street, Halifax, appeared at Westminster Magistrates' Court on Friday. All five were arrested on Wednesday by West Midlands Counter Terrorism Unit. National Action was founded in 2013. It was proscribed in December 2016 after it was assessed as being "concerned in terrorism".

प्रतिबंधित अति-दक्षिणपंथी आतंकवादी समूह नेशनल एक्शन के सदस्य होने के संदेह में तीन और लोगों पर आतंकवाद के अपराधों का आरोप लगाया गया है।


Ex-Thomas Cook staff adapting to railway life with GWR

Summary: When Thomas Cook collapsed, thousands of employees suddenly found themselves without a job - but 30 of them have been fast-tracked for new jobs on trains after Great Western Railway (GWR) made a plea for cabin crew and ground staff to get in touch.

Sian Pike, who had been with Thomas Cook for 26 years and was an airline cabin manager, is one of them. "My life had been flying, and suddenly it was ripped away from me, leaving me feeling really numb," said Ms Pike. "I used to tell passengers I'd be flying until they kicked me out. "My uniform is still in my wardrobe, my bags are under the stairs. "It was a way of life. I was literally going to be there with my Zimmer frame going down the aisle." "On the very last day, our flight was sent to the remote stands of the airport," remembers Jamie Iaquaniello from Dartford, who worked on one of the last flights from Antalya in Turkey to Gatwick Airport. "We could see the other Thomas Cook planes so we realised something was happening by then. "We were customs searched when we left the airport because they thought we would steal all the duty-free on the way out once we knew we were redundant." 'Good luck' Mr Iaquaniello joined a conference call with the administrators the following day. "They just said good luck to us all and that was it. "Some of us were retained to bring stranded holidaymakers back, which was hard because the aircraft were still painted with the Thomas Cook livery. "They couldn't start applying for jobs even though they knew they would be redundant." Ms Pike, who lives in Cardiff but was based at Bristol, said: "I applied to several airlines, because my heart said 'I need to keep flying', and it was overruling my head. "I then thought I would try GWR since there were parallels with my flying career - safety, customer service and the irregular hours. "I really loved getting up at 2am for a customer service role so this job is perfect for me." She is currently midway through training to be a customer host for the train operator, alongside several of her former colleagues. "Unfortunately we won't be selling duty-free on the train but you never know," she joked. Mr Iaquaniello rang GWR the morning after he was made redundant, and was in training three weeks after he left Thomas Cook. He now works from London Paddington, travelling across the South West. "At first it was strange but I enjoyed the challenge of learning new things again. "The good bits from aviation are also in rail - the camaraderie, it's all laughs and jokes - and people were really supportive. "I'm one of the lucky ones. So many people are still trying for aviation jobs and they won't start until March - and some airlines don't even pay for training. GWR's human resources director, Ruth Busby, said the company immediately realised an opportunity after the airline's collapse. "We saw the commitment they were making to their customers on that last day, staying out and making sure everyone got home all right. "They were providing great customer service, and a member of our recruitment team thought we should offer them our support. "Our tweet that we put out reached 500,000 people and dramatically increased the traffic to our recruitment website." 'Like a bereavement' Both former cabin staff have found it odd seeing parts of their former work life appear for sale online. "It's funny, you can still see the old chocolate desserts we used to sell being auctioned on eBay", said Mr Iaquaniello. "I know someone who bought a trolley from one of the planes," said Ms Pike. "As a trainer I collected all the mugs, Sindy dolls, everything we were given as branded items and they are all being held on to. "Losing my job was like a bereavement, but we're really lucky to be in work again so soon."

जब थॉमस कुक गिर गया, तो हजारों कर्मचारियों ने अचानक खुद को नौकरी के बिना पाया-लेकिन ग्रेट वेस्टर्न रेलवे (जी. डब्ल्यू. आर.) द्वारा केबिन क्रू और ग्राउंड स्टाफ से संपर्क करने का अनुरोध करने के बाद उनमें से 30 को ट्रेनों में नई नौकरियों के लिए तेजी से ट्रैक किया गया है।


The light fantastic: Harnessing Nature's glow

Summary: Bioluminescence describes the light that some living creatures such as fireflies and jellyfish emit from their cells. Harnessing these reactions has already transformed key areas of clinical diagnosis and medical research. But scientists are now looking at whether this "living light" could help enhance food crops, detect pollution or even illuminate our journeys home.

By Paul RinconScience editor, BBC News website On a night in January 1832, off the coast of Tenerife, a young Charles Darwin wandered up on to the deck of the HMS Beagle. As the young naturalist looked out to sea, he was struck by the unearthly glow emanating from the ocean. "The sea was luminous in specks and in the wake of the vessel, of a uniform, slightly milky colour," he wrote. "When the water was put into a bottle, it gave out sparks for some minutes after having been drawn up." Darwin was almost certainly describing the light emitted by tiny marine organisms called dinoflagellates. His accounts of this phenomenon, known as bioluminescence, were unearthed by Prof Anthony Campbell in hand-written notebooks stored at Cambridge University. While Darwin was one of the first modern scientists to document the phenomenon, it would be more than a century before it was put to practical use. Prof Campbell, from Cardiff University, carried out pioneering research throughout the 1970s and 1980s leading to the discovery that living creatures produce this light using special proteins called luciferases. The proteins take part in a chemical reaction in the cells, which is responsible for the light emission. "When I started researching bioluminescence 40 years ago at the [Cardiff University] medical school, a lot of people raised their eyebrows and said: 'What the devil is this guy doing working on animals in the sea? He was brought from Cambridge to do medical research'," Prof Campbell explains. Huge market But he was able to spot the phenomenon's potential. Having discovered the proteins involved in bioluminescence, he realised that by combining luciferases with other molecules, it was possible to harness this light emission to measure biological processes. This would pave the way for something of a revolution in medical research and clinical diagnosis. For example, by attaching a luminescent protein to an antibody - a protective molecule produced by the body's immune system - it could be used to diagnose disease. This allowed clinicians to dispense with the radioactive markers that had previously been used in such tests. "This market is now worth about £20bn. If you go into a hospital and have a blood test which measures viral proteins, cancer proteins, hormones, vitamins, bacterial proteins, drugs, it will almost certainly use this technique," Prof Campbell told BBC News. Bioluminescent proteins are also tools in drug discovery and have found widespread applications in biomedical research, where they are used to study biological processes in live cells. "If you've got a university department that doesn't use these techniques, they are not at the cutting edge," says Campbell. Contamination problem Other applications are on the horizon. At the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, Prof Jan van der Meer has developed a test for the presence of arsenic in drinking water using genetically modified bacteria. Arsenic contamination of groundwater is a pernicious problem in some parts of the world, especially in Bangladesh, India, Laos and Vietnam. Prof van der Meer's microbes have been engineered to emit light when they come into contact with arsenic-containing compounds. Potentially contaminated water is injected into vials, activating the dormant GM bacteria. The extent to which the microbes emit light is then measured to provide an indication of arsenic concentrations in the water. The work is now being commercialised by the German firm Arsolux. Prof van der Meer says the bacterial-based kits cope well with multiple samples, require fewer materials than standard chemical testing field kits, and are easy to prepare. But regulatory hurdles remain to the take-up of bacteria-based tests in these countries. And, Prof van der Meer adds: "In the end it comes down to market things… things you cannot control as a scientist." So called rainbow proteins (a spin-off from work into bioluminescence), which change colour in response to particular compounds, are also an option for detecting environmental toxins, or the potential agents of terrorism. Plant potential There are already several consumer applications of bioluminescence: one US firm has made use of it to manufacture luminous drinks for sale in nightclubs. And researchers have even modified plants so that they emit light. Bioluminescent crops could indicate when they require water and nutrients, or warn of disease and infestation. However, the controversy surrounding GM foods has so far prevented these ideas from taking hold. A few years ago, a team of undergraduates at Cambridge University researched the idea of luminescent trees that would act as natural "street lamps". "What we achieved in that project was to put together some DNA which allowed bioluminescence, to show that it worked in [the bacterium] E. coli, and to submit it to the 'parts registry' which holds this DNA so anyone else can use it in future," team member Theo Sanderson told BBC News. "We were approached about a year ago and offered funding to continue developing the project, but we have all gone on to other things and so it wasn't really an option." Previous efforts to create light-emitting plants in the lab have made use of a luciferase gene derived from fireflies. But these plants can only glow when supplemented with an expensive chemical called luciferin. The method used by the Cambridge team is attractive because it is based on bacterial systems which produce their own fuels for luminescence and so can be fed normal nutrients. In 2010, a separate team published a study in which they were able to demonstrate that such methods could be used to create plants that glowed without the need for chemical supplements. The US-Israeli team of scientists inserted light-emitting genes from bacteria into the plants' chloroplasts - the structures in their cells which convert light energy from the Sun into chemical fuel. Mr Sanderson, who now works at the Sanger Institute near Cambridge, said this was a good choice because chloroplasts are essentially bacteria that have become incorporated into plant cells, so they can easily express the microbe-derived gene without the need for other modifications. But researchers will need to find ways to boost the light emission from such lab organisms if GM trees are ever to light our way through the urban jungle. Prof Campbell says the potential of luminescent proteins in drug discovery and medical research has not yet been fully exhausted and he is currently collaborating on a project to use luciferases to research Alzheimer's disease. Bioluminescent creatures might also provide a convenient means of studying environmental changes in the sea. Some animals obtain the light-emitting chemicals they need from the organisms they eat. So studying the interactions between these species might allow scientists to detect changes in marine food webs. Despite the impact on clinical diagnosis and research, Prof Campbell points out that he has only ever received one grant to research bioluminescence. Nevertheless, he says it is a "beautiful example of how curiosity - quite unexpectedly - has led to major discoveries in biology and medicine. And it has created several billion dollar markets". Paul.Rincon-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

बायोल्युमिनेसेंस उस प्रकाश का वर्णन करता है जो कुछ जीवित प्राणी जैसे कि फायरफ्लाइज और जेलीफ़िश अपनी कोशिकाओं से उत्सर्जित करते हैं। इन प्रतिक्रियाओं का उपयोग करने से नैदानिक निदान और चिकित्सा अनुसंधान के प्रमुख क्षेत्र पहले ही बदल चुके हैं। लेकिन वैज्ञानिक अब यह देख रहे हैं कि क्या यह "जीवित प्रकाश" खाद्य फसलों को बढ़ाने, प्रदूषण का पता लगाने या यहां तक कि हमारे घर की यात्रा को रोशन करने में मदद कर सकता है।


Fire breaks out in shops and flats on Stratford Road, Birmingham

Summary: Ten crews have been tacking a fire which broke out in a row of shops and flats in Birmingham.

The blaze, on Stratford Road, Sparkbrook, was reported at 13:52 GMT. West Midlands Fire Service said it was not aware of any injuries, but was carrying out a search of the buildings. The road is closed both ways from Bordesley Middleway to Long Street. West Midlands Police said the fire was not currently being treated as suspicious.

बर्मिंघम में दुकानों और फ्लैटों की एक पंक्ति में लगी आग पर दस कर्मचारी काबू पा रहे हैं।


Screens and sanitiser: The High Street's new normal

Summary: Opening times checked ... debit cards primed and ready.

Shoppers in England are contemplating something that would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago - a trip down the high street. As coronavirus restrictions ease, all shops in England selling non-essential goods will be able to open from 15 June. But, as with so many other areas of life, things will look and feel very different. Radio 1 Newsbeat has been hearing from two major retail chains about some of the changes we can expect. For Doug Putman, it's a tense time to be reopening. "Obviously HMV was bankrupt 16 months ago ... so certainly we did not plan a situation like this," he tells Newsbeat The Canadian businessman rescued the chain from bankruptcy last year, and he's been hard at work preparing for what will be a crucial reopening. "We've taken out some fixtures, added some space so there's more ability to have social distancing." And if you're feeling anxious about browsing, you don't even have to go inside. There will be staff at the front of the shop who will go in and grab whatever you need - "basically a personal shopping experience," says Doug. But if you go inside... what about the classic record shop experience of riffling through the vinyl or DVDs? How will that work in a post-pandemic high street? Will someone take away anything you've touched and quarantine it? No, is the short answer. "Returns, obviously, we're going to quarantine for 72 hours," Doug tells Newsbeat. But "as far as the flipping through the bins (goes) ... I think what we all have to remember is people have been going to grocery stores for months now and ... when you touch a box of cereal, they don't isolate that box of cereal for 72 hours. HMV is going to be the same." "So we're going to have (hand) sanitising before you can flip through ... we feel that that gives a clean environment. We're going to continue to clean constantly." Trying on t-shirts is out though: "a lot of people do the old 'lift it up, look at and say, yeah, it's about my size.' So, I think we're going to have that happen a lot more." Trying on clothes - or the lack of it - will be a bigger challenge for other chains. John Young is Regional Sales and Operations Manager for JD Sports and he tells Newsbeat, "obviously the biggest change (in the clothing department) will be, there won't be fitting room facilities. But to combat that we've extended our refund policy to 60 days." "There will be exclusion zones around the benches, and if they want to try the footwear on we've got disinfectant sprays which we'll be using before and after you try the shoes on." "When you get to the cash desks. the queuing systems will be slightly larger than normal ... and you'll have screens at the cash desk." "I've been in the business for 15 years, and this is probably one of the biggest operational challenges we've had. But obviously, the most important thing to do when we welcome people back into the store is giving them confidence that it's a safe environment." Will shoppers feel confident enough to come out and give retail chains the footfall they desperately need? Only time will tell. But in the meantime Doug Putman thinks more government help might be needed. He told us that the furlough scheme, which has paid some staff wages, has been "a massive help." "But," he goes on, "I do struggle to see, without more intervention, what happens ... You know, landlords have to pay their bills as well." "And so yeah, I believe the government's going to have to do a little bit more to make this a viable long term option." A spokesperson for the UK government told us: "Taken in its entirety, the UK's wide-ranging package of support is one of the most generous in the world ... Our job retention scheme has protected 8.9 million jobs and will remain open until October". "We will continue to look at how to adjust our support in a way that ensures people can get back to work." Follow Newsbeat on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.

खुलने के समय की जाँच की गई... डेबिट कार्ड प्राथमिक और तैयार हैं।


Man in court over murder of Arthur Gumbley

Summary: A man has appeared in court charged with the murder of an 87-year-old who was attacked during a break-in at his home.

Arthur "Bob" Gumbley died in hospital three weeks after the burglary in Endwood Drive, Sutton Coldfield, on 21 November 2017. Jason Wilsher, 19, of Barlestone Road, Bagworth, appeared at Newcastle-under-Lyme Magistrates' Court on Wednesday. He was remanded in custody to appear at Stafford Crown Court on Friday.

एक व्यक्ति 87 वर्षीय वृद्ध की हत्या के आरोप में अदालत में पेश हुआ है, जिस पर उसके घर में तोड़फोड़ के दौरान हमला किया गया था।


Eric Roberts: The spy who suffered

Summary: One of the UK's most brilliant wartime spies was poorly treated by colleagues at MI5 in the paranoid years of the Cold War and was left gripped by fear that he was suspected of being a traitor. Now an extraordinary letter and a series of family documents reveal the full story.

By Sanchia BergToday programme In the 1930s, Eric Roberts was a clerk with the Westminster Bank, where he seemed to be an average, unassuming employee. But Roberts's real work was espionage. He had been a field agent for MI5 since the 1920s, recruited by famous spymaster Maxwell Knight, and infiltrating first communist then fascist groups. In 1940, when Churchill became concerned about the activities of potential fifth columnists, Roberts was taken on as a full time agent by MI5. Working under the alias "Jack King", Roberts posed as a Gestapo officer, part of the Einsatzgruppe London. For five years he worked with Nazi sympathisers in Britain, who thought they were part of a "fifth column" ready to help a German invasion. Through his networks Roberts identified nearly 500 people who had some support for Germany. He would meet his key contacts, log information they gathered and convince them they were working for the Nazi war effort. It was a difficult and dangerous role , for which he won the admiration of superiors and colleagues. One official file refers to him as a "genius" spy. "There is no doubt that the information which we obtain from the fifth column organisation is, on the whole accurate. It depends largely on the character of the central agent... he has a very remarkable degree of skill and an equally remarkable memory for details and ability to express himself." After the War, MI5 brought Roberts into the Office, as it was known. But a letter Roberts wrote years later to an old colleague - and supplied by his family to the BBC in response to this piece - shows what a different world postwar espionage proved to be. His work in London, and for a year in Vienna, was overshadowed by anxiety. His letter - from 1969 - recounts how he had tried to warn colleagues about Soviet moles but that his warnings backfired. Roberts believed he was frozen out - mistrusted and even put under surveillance himself after he'd tried to raise the alarm. He took early retirement in 1956 at the age of 49. He had already sent his two teenage sons to live in Canada. He followed them, with his wife and young daughter Crista. They drove west across the country - as far from the attention of the Office as they could get - settling on Salt Spring Island, a beautiful spot near Vancouver. In autumn 1968 a car pulled up outside their modest family home. In eight acres of land it sat high on one of the island's hills - with magnificent views. Two men in suits came to the door. One was a Canadian police officer and the other an Englishman, Barry Russell Jones, from MI5. Jones had come to talk about Roberts's secret past, especially his time in London after the war. He wanted to ask whether Roberts suspected any colleagues, past or present, of being a Soviet spy. The flight of double agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to the Soviet Union in 1951, and then Kim Philby's defection in 1963, deeply unsettled the secret services. The search for double agents continued - even though MI5 had privately identified Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross as belonging to the same spy ring. "By 1964, MI5 had identified all five of the Cambridge spies, Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt and Cairncross," says Calder Walton, author of Empire of Secrets. "But they couldn't be sure that that was the sum total of the Cambridge Spy Ring or that they had actually got the right people. "It was a case of the known unknowns and unknown unknowns. It was only with the defection of Oleg Gordievsky, the former KGB double agent, in the early 1980s that they were able to confirm that they had, in fact, got the right people." Roberts had been warned that he was going to receive a visit. He'd already written a name - "Tony" - on a piece of paper and slipped it into an envelope. He handed it to Barry Russell Jones. Roberts wrote later to a friend that he had originally identified "Tony" as a foreign agent in 1941 - and had tried to warn others about him, only to encounter hostility. Roberts had initially got something wrong - he'd assumed "Tony" was a Nazi agent, given Britain was at war with Germany. MI5 later told Roberts he was right about "Tony" - almost certainly Anthony Blunt. There are no notes of the meeting at the Roberts family home in autumn 1968 - but it clearly took some time. While Jones wrote later that he'd found it helpful - it had a traumatic effect on MI5's former "genius" agent. Roberts wrote to an old friend in MI5 some months later: "For two days after his departure I was OK. Then fear returned in full force. Yes, fear. Barry in the last minutes of our meeting had placed his finger on a most delicate spot. He knew what I knew. Yet I felt at the same time that he had a suspicion I was a Soviet agent." The visit made Roberts physically ill. "I had done my level best to forget the Office. Barry brought it all back again and it hurt like hell." MI5 had asked Roberts to write down anything that might be useful. He sent a long rambling letter - 14 closely typed pages, to Harry Lee, an old friend from his wartime days. "It's the most extraordinary intelligence document I've ever seen," says Prof Christopher Andrew, author of the Official History of MI5. "It's 14 pages long - it will keep conspiracy theorists going for another 14 years. It's a mixture of fact and fiction and the other thought I have is to be desperately sorry for the individual who wrote it." Roberts, a grammar school boy who'd gone to work at 17, felt he'd never been accepted by MI5 officers, many of whom had gone to public school and Oxford or Cambridge. He believed that Dick White, head of MI5 from 1953-56 , had attempted to "blackball my entry into what was in effect a rather exclusive club". But Roberts did have many friends from wartime days - notably Guy Liddell, deputy director of MI5 - whom he confided in. In 1947 Roberts was seconded to Vienna to work with MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service. Before Roberts went, he spoke to Liddell. According to Roberts, Liddell warned him "there was a traitor operating at the highest level" of the SIS. Roberts arrived in the Vienna of The Third Man - a dangerous city, busy with intelligence agents from all sides. Soviet and Western agents could easily mix. But it was unpredictable and dangerous. According to Roberts's letter, he was back as an agent in the field - posing as a disaffected British civil servant and passing low-grade harmless information, to a Communist named Jellinek. Kim Philby and the Cambridge spies Once, the MI6 station chief, George Kennedy Young, wanted Roberts to meet his "star agent" who was "in close contact" with the KGB. "I refused the offer," writes Roberts in his 1969 letter. "Some weeks later George Y told me rather shamefacedly that the star agent had turned out to be a Soviet agent. His unmasking had been purely accidental. I gave private thanks to Guy L. Without his prior advice - I would have met disaster." After he'd returned to London, Roberts picked up the question of the traitor with Liddell, asking if he'd been identified. Liddell evaded the question, according to Roberts. He went on to ask if Roberts had ever thought that MI5 might have been "penetrated" too. Roberts said yes - and went on, when prompted, to describe the "type" of person who might be a Soviet spy. Roberts said it would be "a man who by ability and social acceptability could reach a command position. He must have attended the same schools and universities as the rest of the people in the Office." He thought the spy would be "inspired" by ideology, not financial gain. Roberts recalled he had said it would be "useless" for a man like himself to attempt the assignment - as his background was so different. "It was at that point that I made the biggest blunder of my career," Roberts wrote. "I said that if the Soviet agent became a member of one or two of the most exclusive clubs, I doubted if anybody would be willing to entertain doubts of his loyalty." There is no note in Liddell's diary of such a conversation. According to Roberts's letter, he felt he'd lost Liddell's trust and that others had become suspicious too. He even believed he was followed by a quartet of trainee agents round London. In 1956, Roberts was told that "the DG [director general] had decided to dispense with my services". He was told he'd been found "unsuitable for intelligence work". He moved to Canada and did his best to forget. Harry Lee, at MI5, wrote in response to Roberts's long 1969 letter saying that he was sorry that Jones's visit had caused such a relapse, and that there was no need for him to worry Roberts with any more questions. He assured Roberts that the watchers had never been put on to him - that he had never been under any suspicion. Roberts's children remember he seemed relieved after this. But it was only when they found the letter after his death that they realised how much turmoil he'd been through. His son Max, now 79, says he was treated badly. "He was a grammar school boy from Cornwall and for him to have said the various things he said about those upscale guys - and not to be believed - that created the tremendous amount of stress he was going through." Reviewing Roberts's letter, MI5 historian Calder Walton believes it shows the impact of the climate of doubt during the 1950s and 1960s on a fine agent. "It shows the human tragedy of people not being trusted by their apparently close friends within the services." Andrew believes there's a simpler explanation - that Roberts was ill-suited to a desk job, and was haunted by his wartime glory. "After World War Two he was put on a desk job and it didn't work. And he began to get - obviously - extremely depressed. And when the investigations into Soviet penetration begun he began to think without any reason whatsoever that he was a suspect." Roberts's daughter Crista, now 73, thinks a simple acknowledgement by his colleagues could have saved her father years of unhappiness. "I think some recognition from his peers would have gone a long way. Not an OBE or anything like that - just the Office telling him he'd done a really good job. He was a humble man, an unassuming man, but he was very good at his work." Eric Roberts's story features on Document on Radio 4 at 16:00 BST on Tuesday 14 July or catch up later via iPlayer Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox.

ब्रिटेन के सबसे शानदार युद्धकालीन जासूसों में से एक के साथ शीत युद्ध के भयावह वर्षों में एम. आई. 5 में सहयोगियों द्वारा खराब व्यवहार किया गया था और वह इस डर से घिर गया था कि उस पर गद्दार होने का संदेह था। अब एक असाधारण पत्र और पारिवारिक दस्तावेजों की एक श्रृंखला पूरी कहानी का खुलासा करती है।


Is VAT suffering a mid-life crisis at 40?

Summary: Value-added tax (VAT) is 40 years old on 1 April 2013. To mark the anniversary, VAT expert Colin Corder takes a look at some of the more bizarre rules surrounding VAT and asks if VAT legislation is in need of an overhaul.

Money Talk by Colin Corder VAT expert at Moore and Smalley Chartered Accountants VAT was originally touted as the "simple tax" but it has become one of the most complex and illogical. Legislation and the courts have often struggled to keep up with a changing world and today this middle-aged tax is full of anomalies and inconsistencies. When VAT was introduced, certain goods and services were considered so essential that it was decided they should be subject to no tax. This was done in two ways: zero-rating and exemption. In the eyes of UK law, biscuits and cakes are necessities and are zero-rated. However, chocolate-covered biscuits are regarded as a luxury, which means the full rate of VAT is payable. The great Jaffa Cake debate For reasons that are not entirely clear or logical, no distinction is made between chocolate-covered cake and cake without a chocolate coating. All this might have passed us by as a quaint aspect of British legal thinking if McVities, the makers of Jaffa Cakes, had not gone to court arguing that their product was a cake. To prove its case, McVities baked a special 12-inch Jaffa Cake that persuaded the court of its cake-like properties. As a result, no VAT is charged on Jaffa Cakes or other, more traditional chocolate-covered cakes. An equally eccentric VAT rule applies to gingerbread men. No VAT is charged if the figure has two chocolate spots for its eyes, but any chocolate-based additions, such as buttons or a belt, mean VAT is payable. So it's cheaper to buy no-chocolate gingerbread men. Are you eating in or taking away? Ever been in a cafe ordering a sandwich and wondered why the cashier is so keen to know whether you're eating in or taking away? This is because a takeaway sandwich is zero-rated for VAT, but if you intend to eat it at the premises it is standard-rated. Asking about your intentions helps the retailer calculate the proportion of zero- to standard-rate sales. Some cafes do charge a higher amount to eat in, but most charge the same price and just lose some margin for the eat-ins. Chancellor George Osborne seriously underestimated the public's love of the humble pasty when he announced plans to levy the 20% standard rate of VAT on hot, freshly-baked takeaway food as part of the 2012 Budget. A well documented U-turn followed in which the proposal was amended to allow food that was hot but cooling down to continue to be zero-rated. Hence, pasties, pies and other hot takeaway food are zero-rated unless kept warm in the shop - for example, under a hot plate or in a cabinet, in which case it is standard-rated. Live animals sold for human consumption are zero-rated, but bizarre exceptions to this have arisen over the years as some food sources have gone out of fashion or become more popular in the UK due to immigration and tourism. For example, kangaroos are standard-rated but kangaroo steaks, now more popular as food in some UK restaurants, are zero-rated. Rabbits are zero-rated, even if sold as pets, despite the fact they have waned in popularity as a food source over the last four decades. And, rather topically, HMRC assumes horses are never sold for food, so they are standard rated. Can I have a VAT receipt for that? It's not the sort of question that might be asked by someone buying counterfeit goods, but rather peculiarly, counterfeit perfume is standard-rated for VAT. However, counterfeit money is outside the scope of VAT. Despite both activities being illegal, it has been ruled that counterfeit perfume has unfair advantage over legitimate suppliers if it isn't liable for VAT, whereas counterfeit cash doesn't have competition. There have been a number of cases were UK courts have successfully enforced VAT payments on perfume counterfeiters. Food for working animals is zero-rated. This has led to some quirky court rulings, including a case in 2011 where judges agreed that the standard 20% rate of VAT should be paid on ferret food because most of them are no longer used as working animals. The decision followed detailed consultation with the Ferret Education and Research Trust. Other unusual VAT rules: VAT remains a controversial subject in the UK, recently being used to frame political debate during recent Budget announcements. The standard rate of VAT was lowered to 15% by Alistair Darling in 2008 in a bid to kickstart growth, before being put back to 17.5% by Mr Darling in January 2010 and then being increased to 20% by the current coalition government in June 2010. As a European tax, you could ask if VAT's days are numbered because if the UK were to leave the EU, it will be left up to the UK government to decide its future. However, as the country's third-highest yielding tax it isn't likely that it will be scrapped any time soon. However, we may see it get a 21st century overhaul. It certainly needs one. Colin Corder is a former HMRC VAT inspector and is now a VAT manager at Moore and Smalley Chartered Accountants, where he helps businesses to comply with VAT legislation. The opinions expressed are those of the author and are not held by the BBC unless specifically stated. The material is for general information only and does not constitute investment, tax, legal or other form of advice. You should not rely on this information to make (or refrain from making) any decisions. Links to external sites are for information only and do not constitute endorsement. Always obtain independent professional advice for your own particular situation.

मूल्य वर्धित कर (वैट) 1 अप्रैल 2013 को 40 साल पुराना हो गया है। वर्षगांठ को चिह्नित करने के लिए, वैट विशेषज्ञ कॉलिन कॉडरर वैट के आसपास के कुछ और विचित्र नियमों पर एक नज़र डालते हैं और पूछते हैं कि क्या वैट कानून में बदलाव की आवश्यकता है।


The difference between 'affirmation' and 'oath'

Summary: That most time-consuming of the traditional rituals surrounding the UK Parliament, the swearing in of all the MPs, has become an emblem of the changing shape of British society. A ceremony originally designed for exclusion - to keep out religious and political undesirables - has become a display of diversity, writes Stephen Tomkins.

Where 200 years ago all MPs would swear allegiance to the Crown in English, on the Authorised Version of the Bible, today they swear and affirm, in English, Welsh, Gaelic and Cornish, on (or ignoring) an array of scriptures, including the Koran, the Guru Granth Sahib, the Hebrew Bible, and the Christian scriptures in various languages and in Protestant and Catholic editions. One MP on Tuesday - Kwasi Kwarteng - asked for the Book of Mormon, and the clerk seemed willing to go and have a root around for one, until it turned out he was joking. But there is an actual Mormon MP - Craig Whittaker. He made the same request, this time in seriousness, as Kwarteng, but the clerk did not have the Book of Mormon handy and, rather than hold up his colleagues, Whittaker opted instead for the Bible. MPs are even offered the opportunity to swear on the New Testament alone, an option of which George Osborne availed himself. It is often assumed that the opportunity to "affirm" rather than swear was created so that atheists didn't have to call upon a deity they didn't believe in. On Tuesday, Twitter buzzed with the revelation that Labour's eight most senior shadow cabinet members were atheists, as they all chose to affirm their allegiance. In fact, Parliament first came up with affirmation as an alternative for especially serious Christians. A number of Christian groups from the 16th Century onwards refused to swear oaths on the Bible, the best known being the Quakers. Quakers believed in living in such honesty that an oath could add nothing to what they said. As one of their founders George Fox said, when arrested and asked to swear the oath of allegiance: "Our allegiance [does] not lie in oaths but in truth and faithfulness." When handed a Bible to swear on, Fox opened it at the verse that read, "Swear not, neither by heaven, neither by the earth, neither by any other oath" - a rather awkward text for the book that people are supposed to swear on. It was in law courts that affirmation was introduced as an alternative to swearing. This was in 1695, many years before it reached Parliament, when it emerged that alleged criminals were going free because Quaker witnesses refused to give evidence against them. Quakers, such as John Archdale in 1699, who were elected to Parliament could not take their seat, until the Quakers and Moravians Act of 1833 allowed them to take a version of the oath that did not mention God. Catholics, meanwhile, had been deliberately debarred from Parliament by the oath, which involved recognising that the monarch rather than the Pope was in charge of the Church. A new oath was written in 1829 to allow Catholics to enter Parliament, but it was 400 words long, requiring them to "solemnly abjure any intention to subvert the present Church establishment". Jews were excluded by the oath less deliberately, as it included the words ''on the true faith of a Christian", as well as being sworn on the Christian Bible. The Jewish Liberal David Salomons was elected to Parliament in 1851 and took the oath, taking it upon himself to omit the problematic phrase. He was ejected from his seat a few days later, with a £500 fine for voting illegally in Parliament. Jewish MPs were allowed to swear without the phrase by Jews Relief Act 1858. Affirming, as an alternative to swearing, was introduced by the Parliamentary Oaths Act of 1866, but did not at first apply to atheists or agnostics. The law applied to "the people called Quakers" and anyone else who was already allowed to affirm in a court of law, but atheists were not supposed to affirm in court because the affirmation was made "in the Presence of Almighty God". The right to affirm in Parliament was finally extended to atheists in 1888, after Charles Bradlaugh, founder of the National Secular Society, was thrown out of the Commons four times for atheism, and re-elected each time. He had first of all tried to make the affirmation which was intended for Quakers, and then later tried to take the standard oath (perhaps, like the republican Tony Banks in 1997, with his fingers crossed) but MPs who knew about his beliefs refused to let him. Bradlaugh administered the oath to himself and was expelled anyway. Only on his fifth election to Parliament in 1886 was he allowed to swear and take his seat, and it was his Oaths Act which in 1888 extended the right to affirm to atheists and anyone else who objects to swearing. Today, far from imposing the one true faith in its members, it seems hard to imagine a religious position that Parliament couldn't accommodate. The remaining objections to the oath are political rather than religious. Opponents argue that it overturns the will of the people by preventing democratically elected Sinn Fein members from taking their seats. Other republicans go along with the oath and voice their dissent, as in Tony Benn's version: "As a committed republican, under protest, I take the oath required of me by law." Or Dennis Skinner's inimitable twist: "I solemnly swear that I will bear true and faithful allegiance to the Queen when she pays her income tax". Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox

ब्रिटेन की संसद के आसपास पारंपरिक अनुष्ठानों का सबसे अधिक समय लेने वाला, सभी सांसदों का शपथ ग्रहण, ब्रिटिश समाज के बदलते आकार का प्रतीक बन गया है। मूल रूप से बहिष्कार के लिए बनाया गया एक समारोह-धार्मिक और राजनीतिक अवांछनीय चीजों को बाहर रखने के लिए-विविधता का प्रदर्शन बन गया है, स्टीफन टॉमकिन्स लिखते हैं।


Man charged with murdering woman in Birmingham

Summary: A man has been charged with murdering a woman who was found with serious head injuries last year.

Julie Webb, 44, was found injured at an address in Albert Road, Handsworth, Birmingham, on 23 January and died the next day in hospital, police said. Darren Constantine, 37, who was arrested on suspicion of assault at the address, has been charged with her murder, West Midlands Police added. He is to appear at Birmingham Magistrates' Court on 6 February. Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, on Twitter, and sign up for local news updates direct to your phone

एक आदमी पर एक महिला की हत्या का आरोप लगाया गया है जो पिछले साल सिर पर गंभीर चोटों के साथ पाई गई थी।


'Real concerns' over cracks in A801 carriageway

Summary: The A801 Avon Gorge road will close for five weeks of emergency repairs after "real concerns" over the appearance of significant cracks on the carriageway.

A Falkirk Council roads team found slippage on the adjacent embankment and soft verge causing a potential danger to road users. An eight-mile signposted diversion will be in place after the road is closed from 06:00 on Wednesday. The verge will be strengthened to "stabilise any further movement". Falkirk Council's environment spokesman Paul Garner said: "We do not have any option but to carry out these repairs as a matter of urgency. "Technical staff have real concerns given the appearance of these cracks and the safety of road users is our top priority here." Mr Garner said the cracks in the road appeared on Monday. He said: "We hope road users understand our reasons for taking this decision and the obvious disruption it will cause, however we cannot take any chances with public safety."

A801 एवन गॉर्ज रोड कैरिजवे पर महत्वपूर्ण दरारों की उपस्थिति पर "वास्तविक चिंताओं" के बाद पांच सप्ताह की आपातकालीन मरम्मत के लिए बंद हो जाएगी।


Ignorance of tick-borne Lyme disease 'costing lives'

Summary: When Joanne Drayson regularly walked her dogs in the woodland near her home in Guildford, Surrey, she was unaware that a tick the size of a poppy seed would infect her with a serious and debilitating disease.

"I had this strange symptom, which I can only describe as whole body rigidness. It kept recurring," she says. Her health deteriorated to such an extent that she was unable to lift her legs or arms. The pain in her hips meant she was unable to climb stairs in her own home. In the end, she was retired on health grounds from her job in the civil service. Mrs Drayson now realises what happened to trigger the extreme fatigue, joint pain and stiffness that plagued her for more than four years. In 2003, she remembers finding a tick on her foot, which caused a rash. At the same time she had flu-like symptoms that lasted several weeks. When Mrs Drayson was bitten again two years later, she developed symptoms similar to arthritis, but doctors still did not suspect that the ticks had infected her with Lyme disease. "I had removed ticks from my dogs for over 30 years, but didn't really know much about them. "There are probably thousands of people who could end up like me." Devastating impact It was 2007 before she was given a clinical diagnosis, after her GP prescribed antibiotics for a chest infection and they dramatically improved her symptoms. This weekend, a group of individuals calling themselves Worldwide Lyme Protest UK is highlighting the devastating impact of Lyme and other tick-borne diseases when they are misdiagnosed. Nicola Seal, from Aberdeen, who has co-ordinated the UK protest, says the disease is not understood by the vast majority of medical professionals, leaving thousands of patients without the appropriate treatment. "We wanted to put our personal stories to the Department of Health to make them aware that people are dying because they are not getting diagnosed and treated properly." She adds: "There is a lack of GP experience and knowledge - and when people are diagnosed with Lyme disease, we lack any professionals who understand it." The protest group is also urging the government to re-examine the current NHS test for Lyme, which it says misses as many as two-thirds of genuine cases. Official estimates put the number of new UK cases each year at around 3,000, but Lyme disease charities say the figure could be as high as 15,000 annually because so many people do not have their condition diagnosed. Stella Huyshe-Shires, who chairs the charity Lyme Disease Action, says that patients have not been listened to in the past and this has created a problem. "So many people are going undiagnosed because the tests are not foolproof. The test relies on detecting antibodies which may take weeks to appear in some people. Patients going abroad "They may may not even develop the antibodies which the test looks for." She says it wasn't the NHS's fault that there is not a perfect test - it doesn't exist. The result is that patients go abroad to private clinics to look for a test that will prove they have Lyme disease, spending a lot of money in the process. At the Rare and Imported Pathogens Laboratory in Wiltshire, where tests for Lyme disease are carried out, a two-tier testing system recommended by American and European authorities is used. Public Health England, which runs the lab, says the tests are sensitive enough to detect low levels of antibodies, occasionally producing a false positive result. It also acknowledges that the antibody response takes several weeks to reach a detectable level, so tests in the first few weeks of infection may be negative. Dr Tim Brooks, head of the Rare and Imported Pathogens Laboratory, says they are always looking to improve their diagnostic systems. "The laboratory is evaluating different diagnostic tests, and will be developing a specific set of guidance for the investigation and management of Lyme disease in the UK." Yet there are still many uncertainties surrounding Lyme disease, says Mrs Huyshe-Shires. By bringing clinicians and patients together, the charity has published a list of "unknowns" in the diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease, which it hopes will inform any future research and guidance. One controversial issue concerns the treatment of borreliosis, caused by the Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium, the agent of Lyme disease. While most doctors agree that treatment of this type of infection with oral antibiotics in its early stages is often successful, there is far less agreement regarding the treatment of chronic Lyme disease, which keeps recurring because of a delayed diagnosis. In these cases, a more lengthy course of intravenous antibiotics may be required. There is also the possibility that patients may relapse after a lengthy remission. BADA UK, Borreliosis and Associated Diseases Awareness UK, says a full recovery is not certain. "The length of time a person has been infected before treatment, whether the patient has been given sufficient treatment, and whether there are co-infections present, can all have a big impact on a patient's recovery," it says. Much more study into the nature of the Borrelia bacterium needs to be done before a safe and reliable vaccine for all the strains can be created, BADA UK says. Helpline for doctors The Department of Health has been working closely with Public Health England and NHS England to raise awareness among doctors and nurses. It says it is using the latest world-class diagnostic tests to look for the disease in patients with symptoms. There is now a Lyme disease helpline that doctors can call if they spot symptoms and are unsure about what to do. Six years on from her diagnosis, Mrs Drayson's health has changed for the better after a long course of antibiotics. "I've recovered my health and my life. I can now cycle and run upstairs." But she says no two people react in the same way to Lyme disease. "We have to acknowledge that people react in a different way to different treatments. There is no definitive treatment. We have to give patients the opportunity to have ongoing treatment if they need it."

जब जोआन ड्रेसन नियमित रूप से गिल्डफोर्ड, सरे में अपने घर के पास वुडलैंड में अपने कुत्तों को टहलाती थीं, तो उन्हें इस बात की जानकारी नहीं थी कि खसखस के बीज के आकार का एक टिक उन्हें एक गंभीर और दुर्बल करने वाली बीमारी से संक्रमित कर देगा।


Arrest over Milton Keynes shopping centre 'bomb hoax'

Summary: A man has been arrested on suspicion of a bomb hoax offence after two "suspicious packages" were found at a shopping centre earlier.

Shops at the Centre:MK in Milton Keynes were evacuated and road closures put in place after "two unattended bags" were discovered before lunchtime. The shopping centre said police "confirmed the unattended bags contained clothes" and were safe. Thames Valley Police urged people to "remain vigilant". John Lewis was among the stores evacuated, but the shopping centre reopened mid-afternoon.

इससे पहले एक शॉपिंग सेंटर में दो "संदिग्ध पैकेट" पाए जाने के बाद बम की अफवाह फैलाने के संदेह में एक व्यक्ति को गिरफ्तार किया गया है।


Plane in near miss with drone close to Glasgow Airport

Summary: A plane on approach to Glasgow Airport two months ago almost collided with a drone, it has emerged.

The UK Airprox Board, which deals with near miss incidents, said the pilot of a Boeing 737 reported seeing a drone about 100ft below him. The incident happened while the plane was flying at about 1,200ft, north of Clydebank, at 15:50 on Sunday 6 March. A report said the pilot did not have time to take avoiding action and there was "a definite risk of collision".

दो महीने पहले ग्लासगो हवाई अड्डे की ओर जाते समय एक विमान लगभग एक ड्रोन से टकरा गया था, यह सामने आया है।


My father fought the CIA's secret war in Laos

Summary: Peter Lang-Stanton set out to make a radio documentary about the truth of his father's role in one of the largest clandestine missions in US history, but he didn't realise the emotional minefield of investigating a loved one's past, still shrouded in secrecy.

By Peter Lang-StantonBBC World Service, The Documentary The summer before university, my dad and I went for a drive in the old Volvo - just the two of us, something we never did. We buckled our seatbelts, and kicked up dust on the gravel lane. "Peter, it's time to tell you about the family business," my dad said as he tapped his fingers on the wheel waiting for a red light. The light turned green and we pulled out onto the main road. "Espionage." My father had a deadpan sense of humour, but if this was another dad joke, I thought, it seemed very elaborate and not very funny. As we drove through our town, a suburban huddle of strip malls and telephone poles, he told me he had worked undercover for the CIA for almost 40 years. When he didn't smirk and the silence became dense, it occurred to me that he was serious. "Does mom know?" I asked. "Oh," my father said. "Mom works there, too." People often ask: "Did you suspect anything?" No, my brothers and I never suspected anything. I thought my parents were paper-pushing bureaucrats in the State Department but truthfully, I didn't really know what they did. When you're growing up, everything your parents do is unbearably normal, until you're old enough to realise it's not. In the 1960s, while US Army troops spilled out of C-130s into Vietnam, the CIA fought a secret war in Laos. It was the height of the Cold War, and the CIA sent my father and a group of officers to arm and train the Hmong, a Laotian highland tribe, to fight the Communist Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese. It's hard to determine whether the CIA were empowering the Hmong, or hiring them. Retrospectively, both sides seem to think they were working for the benefit of the other. But many in the CIA knew the resistance was destined to fail; the Hmong were horse flies trying to take down a water buffalo. After the Vietnam War ended, the CIA abruptly pulled out of Laos, leaving thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of Hmong to flee. This was my father's first mission in the Central Intelligence Agency. My father died a few years after our talk in the station wagon. Before he died, he turned to me sitting beside his hospital bed and said: "I'm prouder of what we did in Laos than just about anything, other than you boys." After he passed, I read every book I could find on the CIA's secret war in Laos. I did what we often do when we lose someone. I searched for fragments of him in the world to appease the grief. But many of the books disparaged the CIA's actions in Laos, even calibrating for the perceived existential threat of Communism at the time. They admonished the way the CIA disappeared, resulting in a Hmong exodus to Thailand. And then there were all types of other allegations - drug-trafficking, carpet-bombing and even the use of Hmong children as soldiers in the secret army. Some historians described it as a scar on the agency and on the US. The more I read, the less I understood why this was my father's proudest achievement. As I set out to work on a radio documentary about the CIA's involvement in Laos, I emailed a few of my dad's agency buddies. I remember these men from childhood. They used to come over to the house on Sunday mornings and drink scotch. But now this generation was in their 80s and some were already gone. If I wanted to get first-hand accounts of what happened in Laos, it needed to be now. My call to speak to officers who were in Laos with my father was posted to "the SKYNET", an email forum for ex-CIA in Laos. Men with codenames like Mule and Igor emailed me. One said my father had a great laugh and owed him $18. He also said he would take a cheque. Watts (aka Tom Norton) was one of my father's best friends in the CIA. Tom wrote back and invited me down to South Carolina for a visit. We spent the better part of a week talking, drinking scotch, digging through mountains of old papers, tapes, slides, and video footage. "I do wonder what will happen to all of this when I'm gone," Tom said. "But that's not my concern." We looked through hundreds of pictures, many of my father in Long Tieng, the CIA's secret base for the shadow war in Laos. Then one day, we came to the photo of a Hmong boy in a military uniform. "I think we had sort of an informal rule, " Tom said. "That the boy had to be as tall as an M-1 rifle to become a soldier. Maybe about 10 years old." From my research, I thought allegations of child soldiers in the CIA's secret war were unverified. Or perhaps I simply wanted them to be. Or maybe I assumed it was an isolated incident, occurring elsewhere - wherever my father was not. But this single photo shattered all of that. There is a danger in digging up things about the ones we've lost, because they can't defend themselves. They are frozen in amber and each time we conjure them, we distort them. The photo of the child soldier completely changed the path of the documentary. Many of the disparaging critiques of the CIA in Laos were simpler for me to explain away - some decisions were profoundly out of the control of my father or Tom Norton. But in the case of child soldiers, it seemed like CIA officers like my father could have drawn a line in the sand. I almost booked a ticket to Laos in search of answers, but after a series of phone calls, my coproducer, Nick Farago, and I found the person we needed to speak to in California's Central Valley. Xing Yang was a former child soldier in the secret army. He welcomed us with a soft, warm handshake into his home in Fresno. As half a dozen grandchildren ran around, we sat on the couches in his living room, and Xing told us how he was abducted by Hmong soldiers on his way to school one day. He was taken to a military base, given a gun, and trained to clean, load, and shoot it. He saw his first firefight when he was 12 years old. Then I asked Xing what I had come there to ask. Was he upset with the Americans for what happened? I gave Xing the opportunity to admonish the CIA and the US - a man with as much right as anyone to be upset - but he decidedly did not take it. Throughout production of the radio documentary, there was a muscular social pressure to admonish my father, Tom Norton, and the CIA. But I'm not certain admonishment always has the effect we want it to. More often, it seems to satisfy our own thirst for righteousness, rather than bring about change. If we refuse to identify with actors in history, we will never learn its lessons. "No-one is righteous," Xing Yang told us before we left. "And God also knows what we're thinking in our hearts." I set out to learn what my father did in Laos, but the answers I found were unsatisfying, still shrouded in secrecy. At the end of the documentary, the listener is left grasping at half-truths and flickers of honesty. But this is precisely what it was like to be a spy's son. When all is said and done, the only admonishment I have for my father is that he never discussed his life with me. "Do you think you can still have a genuine relationship with someone when one person is deceiving the other?" I asked Tom Norton at his home in South Carolina. "Yes. You're still the same people," Tom said. "You've just got a different name." Click here to listen to the documentary, The CIA's Secret War in Laos.

पीटर लैंग-स्टैंटन अमेरिकी इतिहास के सबसे बड़े गुप्त मिशनों में से एक में अपने पिता की भूमिका की सच्चाई के बारे में एक रेडियो वृत्तचित्र बनाने के लिए निकले, लेकिन उन्हें किसी प्रियजन के अतीत की जांच करने के भावनात्मक क्षेत्र का एहसास नहीं हुआ, जो अभी भी गोपनीयता में डूबा हुआ है।


Should we fear the robots of the future?

Summary: The world's oldest technology magazine is the MIT Technology Review.

Peter DayGlobal business correspondent Published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2011 it produced a special supplement of original science fiction stories written by top writers from the genre. The Review says its normal mission is to identify important new technologies, and decipher the practical impact they will have on our lives. The sci-fi edition - with contributors such as Cory Doctorow and Elizabeth Bear - was an attempt to do that in an unusual way. The magazine called this "hard" sci-fi. There's a great tradition at work here. When the MIT graduate John Campbell took over the editorship of Astounding Stories Magazine in 1937, he changed the name to Astounding Science Fiction, and insisted that the fiction contained convincing science and characters. This ushered in what people say was the golden age of sci-fi writing, producing a hugely influential magazine. One Astounding story told how to make the atomic bomb one year before Hiroshima. But trying to predict the future is hard, and often wrong; that does not (however) mean it's a futile exercise. If, that is, prediction is what sci-fi is about. There are different critical views about this. Some people argue that far from being far-seeing, most science fiction simply projects current concerns into a fantasy future unhindered by contemporary reality. But futurology it really isn't. Possible futures? The other month at the St Gallen Symposium debates in Switzerland, I had a chat about some of this with the Toronto-based sci-fi author Robert Sawyer. He has written more than 20 acclaimed books, such as Flash Forward, The Terminal Experiment, Hominids, and Mindscan. In 2003 Mr Sawyer won the top sci-fi honour, the Hugo award. His work is not about aliens and rocket ships. Instead he says it is more about social interactions with the future. He thinks the job of sci-fi writers as a whole is to produce "a smorgasbord of plausible futures", not to predict which of them will actually happen. Mr Sawyer points out how popular sci-fi has been in totalitarian societies such as the Soviet Union, as a way of writing about things that cannot openly be talked about. He is the most popular foreign sci-fi writer in China, he says. Fictionalised into the near future, he can write about attempts to control the internet, for example, circumventing conventional here-and-now censorship. We talked about Sir Arthur C Clarke, inventor of the communications satellite. In 1947, 10 years before the first space satellite was launched, Clarke worked out that a satellite 23,000 miles above the equator would stay stationary in the sky. From this idea - published as a working paper in Wireless World - came what is now the global satellite network. And then there is the chilly epic 2001 A Space Odyssey, jointly developed by Clarke and the director Stanley Kubrick. The movie's famous computer Hal 9,000 was a wonderful forerunner of artificial intelligence: Hal could understand speech, beat humans at chess, recognise faces, and attempt moral reasoning. "This is the continuing agenda of the computer revolution," says Mr Sawyer. Too optimistic? Robert Sawyer says his books are optimistic. Today is better that 50 years ago, in 50 years' time things will be better still. They know this in China, he says, at least from the material experience of the past 30 years. But in the West, how many can say they are better off than a few years ago? We are stalled in the old paradigms, unable to see what is happening to the world. Is Robert Sawyer not guilty of techno optimism, I asked him: a sort of over confidence about what science can and will bring about, whatever it is? No he says, it's humano-optimism. In the face of widespread resistance to the idea, you can change human nature, and it's happening, he says. Mr Sawyer gives the example of the way men are now involved with bringing up children in the West in a way undreamed of 60 years ago. And the creation of the European Union after centuries of European strife. "Sci-fi is just as much about social science as technology," he says. Robert Sawyer is also enormously optimistic about something that worries many people: the future of energy. With his sci-fi writer's approach, he foresees a vast expansion of sustainable energy, bringing down the cost of energy to approaching zero. Rapacious robots? Meanwhile, some futurologists - notably the American Ray Kurzweil - are busy predicting that moment out in the 2050s when artificial intelligence might - they argue - at last outstrip its human counterpart, and then go on getting better. It follows the computer power expansion laid down in 40 years ago in Moore's Law: a doubling of the power on a silicon chip every two years. "When we have machines that are as intelligent - and then twice as intelligent as we are," says Mr Sawyer, "there is no reason why that relationship cannot be synergistic rather than antagonistic." He adds that the single biggest flaw with people being fearful of future clever computers or robots "is the idea that a superfast, super powerful intelligence that is not human will share human rapaciousness". Ideas such as this are explored in Robert Sawyer's sci-fi trilogy WWW - Wake, Watch and Wonder. They describe the world wide web gaining consciousness. Fact or fiction? For the moment, I will leave you to decide.

दुनिया की सबसे पुरानी प्रौद्योगिकी पत्रिका एम. आई. टी. प्रौद्योगिकी समीक्षा है।


Suffolk Foundation's cash from winter fuel payments

Summary: A Suffolk charity has raised over £40,000 to help vulnerable people in the county keep warm in the winter.

Suffolk Foundation asked people to donate their government-awarded winter fuel payment of up to £300 if they did not require it. Judy Numan said the Surviving Winter campaign has so far raised £43,300. She said: "A lot of people, particularly in rural Suffolk, struggle when the temperature drops a little so the extra support has been invaluable."

एक सफ़ोक चैरिटी ने काउंटी में कमजोर लोगों को सर्दियों में गर्म रखने में मदद करने के लिए 40,000 पाउंड से अधिक जुटाए हैं।


Man denies sex attacks on St Ives beach

Summary: A man accused of sex attacks on three females in Cornwall, including on a beach where two victims were choked, has denied eight charges.

Clinton Ferreira, 37, from St Ives, is accused of choking two victims in August and September 2019, Truro Crown Court heard. He is also accused of raping a woman in October. Mr Ferreira, of Tregenna Place, was remanded in custody and is due to go on trial at Truro Crown Court in August. The victims of the August and September attacks were assaulted on Porthminster Beach in St Ives. He is charged with: The trial has been listed for eight days.

कॉर्नवॉल में तीन महिलाओं पर यौन हमलों के आरोपी एक व्यक्ति ने आठ आरोपों से इनकार किया है, जिसमें एक समुद्र तट भी शामिल है जहां दो पीड़ितों का दम घुट गया था।


Blogger Jamie Bryson argues to give evidence to Nama inquiry in public

Summary: Loyalist blogger Jamie Bryson has written to Stormont's inquiry into the National Asset Management Agency's (Nama) £1bn Northern Ireland loan sale to argue he should be allowed to give evidence in public session.

Mr Bryson is due to appear before the finance committee on Wednesday. He made claims about the deal online. But the committee has decided witnesses who cannot demonstrate a "direct link" to parties at the centre of the inquiry should be heard behind closed doors. Documentation That evidence would then be published later and could be redacted, subject to legal advice. In his letter, Mr Bryson took issue with the "direct link" criteria arguing that it is "ambiguous, open-ended and sets no clear parameters". But he argued that he meets the criteria as he has "primary documentation" that proves he has a direct link to those involved. Mr Bryson also praised the chair of the committee, Daithí McKay, for his conduct of the inquiry. "I must place on record that I have been heartened and mightily impressed by the diligence of yourself in the chair and your desire to ensure transparency and equality for witnesses," Mr Bryson wrote. Robust Nama sold its Northern Ireland loan book to the Cerberus investment fund for more than £1.2bn in 2014. It has been claimed in the Irish parliament that a Northern Ireland politician was to receive a payment as a result of the deal. US investment fund Cerberus, which bought the Northern Ireland loans from Nama, has denied that any improper or illegal payments were made on its behalf. Nama says the sales process was "robust, competitive and secured the best outcome for the Irish taxpayer".

वफादार ब्लॉगर जेमी ब्रायसन ने राष्ट्रीय संपत्ति प्रबंधन एजेंसी (नामा) की £1 बिलियन उत्तरी आयरलैंड ऋण बिक्री में स्टॉर्मोंट की जांच के लिए लिखा है कि उन्हें सार्वजनिक सत्र में सबूत देने की अनुमति दी जानी चाहिए।


Girl In Red: 'I'm a genre-free artist. Open to everything'

Summary: "I'm having the worst period of artistic doubt right now," declares Norwegian singer-songwriter Girl In Red.

By Mark SavageBBC music reporter The 22-year-old has just received the test pressing of her debut album, If I Could Make It Go Quiet, and she's finding it hard to play it without hearing things she'd like to change. "It's been really hard to let it all go," she says. "At some points I've been like, 'This is the best thing I've ever made!' But the longer I wait for it to come out, the more nervous I get. I'm like, 'Is it really good enough?'" Thankfully, her seven million Spotify fans can relax. Based on the new songs she plays the BBC, the album is an early highlight of 2021: spiky, candid, and packed with indie-pop bangers. The stand-out is Serotonin, which was crowned Annie Mac's "Hottest Record In The World" on BBC Radio 1 on Wednesday. 'I've had intrusive thoughts for 10 years' On the surface, it's a snappy, upbeat pop anthem - but the lyrics plunder the gruesome, unwanted images that haunted her during adolescence. "I get intrusive thoughts like burning my hair off / Like hurting somebody I love... So scared I 'm going to end up doing something stupid." You can hear the panic rising in her voice, as distorted drums and disembodied voices emphasise the terror. Then the chorus sweeps in like serotonin itself, allowing her brain's "chemical imbalance" to stabilise. Lyrically and melodically, it draws on her own experiences. "I've had intrusive thoughts for quite some time, probably for the past 10 years: Thinking I'm going jump out of a window, thinking I'm going to jump in front of the train. It's really intense and you feel like you have to fight with yourself like to not do it. "Like, I don't want to jump in front of trains. I want to be alive but if I'm at a train station and I see that yellow [safety] line, it's like, 'Oh my God.' "I feel like I need to hold myself and go away and lean against the wall to be sure that I'm not going to do anything crazy." Research suggests that the majority of us have intrusive thoughts from time to time. Most people dismiss them and get on with their lives but, for some, they can get out of hand - especially if they suffer from anxiety or OCD. There is often an accompanying fear that the thoughts mean something terrible about them. "People don't talk about them because it makes you sound mad," says the singer, whose real name is Marie Ulven. "It's that scary thing of knowing that you're actually in control of your body." Ulven wrote Serotonin after starting therapy last year, a process that helped her understand her impulsive thoughts and "get [them] out of my system". "I learned that these are not things that I want. This is not who I am. I actually don't want to, like, run into a crowd of people with an axe. A thought is just a thought. "The minute I realised that, then I was OK with talking about it because I have a much more relaxed relationship to it. I can sort of acknowledge that I'm actually OK." Guitar struggles People who fell in love with the lo-fi, home-brew aesthetic of Ulven's early songs will notice a big difference in Serotonin. It's more vibrant, more ambitious, more direct without losing the intimate emotional insight of her previous work. Some of the credit goes to Billie Eilish's brother Finneas O'Connell, who helped sculpt the song's fractured soundscape after meeting Ulven backstage at a festival in 2019. "Serotonin is one of the coolest songs I've ever heard and I am thrilled that I got to be a part of it," says the Grammy-winning producer. But even without him, Ulven's music has outgrown its bedroom pop origins. On the echo-drenched, guitar-driven I'll Call You Mine, she sings a yearning tale of summer romance; while the trenchant Did You Come is a brutal takedown of a cheating partner. "I'm not upset / I'm [expletive] pissed," she spits. "I spelled it out / You're illiterate." "That's my favourite line!" she says. "I wrote it in the beginning of the first lockdown in Norway, when I was just walking on the beach. "It's just a really rude song about someone who screwed you over." The transformation in her songwriting is striking - but Ulven explains it away with a shrug of the shoulders. "All of the music that's been out previously, that's like two years old. This is just sort of where I'm at right now." Ulven's story starts back in 1999 in the seaside town of Horten, about 100km south of Oslo, where her father was a policeman and her mother worked in retail. "I was a quirky little child," she says. "I was really obsessed with fingerboarding and The Simpsons and Minecraft. I even made my own pickaxe!" She got her first guitar as a Christmas present from her grandfather when she was 12, but struggled to get to grips with it. "Learning an instrument is really hard," she recalls. "I think a lot of people want to learn but when it doesn't sound as good as they want, as fast as they want it to, they lose interest." It was only a year later, after she became obsessed with The Smiths, David Bowie and The Ramones that she resolved to conquer the fretboard once and for all. "It took me two years. Even today, anything where you have to stretch your fingers, I'm still like, 'Am I doing it correctly?'" A brief spell in a school band followed - but Ulven decided she was better off making music on her own. Unable to afford studio time, she retreated to her bedroom and taught herself Garageband. "I was selling newspapers and I didn't have a job. But I had a MacBook and I had some very low-end gear and I just wanted to get stuff done. "The first time I ever recorded a song was in 2015 and when I heard my own voice, I literally fell in love!" Unlike many singers, "I like listening to my own voice," she says, "So I've sort of always just been obsessed with recording." Fell In Love With A Girl For two years, she released music in her native tongue under her own name. You can still find a handful of those songs on Spotify, but Ulven wouldn't advise checking them out. "Those songs are an important part of my journey, but the lyrics are really bad," she says. "It feels like I've just gotten a guitar and I'm trying to learn how to write." By 2017, she was experimenting with pseudonyms - first of all Lydia X, then Lyfsuxxx before settling on Girl In Red. The change coincided with her coming out (her stage name is a reference to a former crush, who was wearing red when they first met). Now writing in English, Ulven started making relatable, romantic songs about queer love. The second track she released as Girl In Red was We Fell In Love In October, featuring the chorus: "My girl, my girl, my girl / You will be my world." The next, I Want To Be Your Girlfriend, was a heartfelt plea: "Oh Hannah... I don't wanna be your friend, I wanna kiss your lips." "I had fallen in love with a girl and then school ended and I didn't see her all summer. So it was like eight weeks of heartbreak. Every day, just checking my messages. Did she text me? Did she snap me?" Frustrated, Ulven "started singing all the things I wanted to say" to the object of her affections ("Just look at me the same!") but then she got cold feet: Not about exposing her feelings - but because she hated the song. Two months later, she decided to upload it to Soundcloud anyway. It got 5,000 streams, proving (she thought) her point. "I was like, 'I was right, it wasn't a good song!'" Then something strange happened. In January 2018, I Want To Be Your Girlfriend was reposted by a YouTube channel called Lost Soul, and started to pick up momentum. "I don't even know who that person is," says Ulven, but she owes her career to their patronage. As her views crept up, she began posting more songs, attracting attention from record labels in Oslo. "I started getting emails saying, 'Hey, who are you? Want to go for a coffee?' And I was like, 'Why do these people want to drink coffee?' because I didn't know label language! "But it was just like a way of people being like, 'Hey we want to get to know you.'" 'A warm hug' In the end, she decided to keep ownership of her music, releasing through the distribution service AWAL, while producing and recording everything herself with the £107 microphone she keeps at home. "Taking command is necessary if you want to have your own voice," she says. "Especially now that it's so easy to make your own music. It's like, a lot of people can sing but what's your artistic voice at the end of the day?" The fact that the music comes directly from her, with no filters and no interference, has earned Girl In Red a passionate and growing fanbase. Many of them are LGBT themselves, and have found solace and guidance in her lyrics. On TikTok, the phrase, "Do you listen to Girl In Red?" has become a coded way for young gay women to connect; and fans have frequently sought out Ulven's advice on their sexual identity. "In the beginning I would DM everyone and they would tell me about how they came out and how they needed help. I was like, 'I don't know what to do! I'm 18 and I'm in Norway!' "It was a little bit unhealthy, because it took a lot out of me emotionally." She's since learned to "put up a fence" to protect her own mental health, but there's still a symbiotic relationship with her fans. "My shows are really honest and it just feels like a warm hug," she says wistfully. "I miss my fans so much. It needs to be fixed." She's less enamoured with the press, which has taken to labelling her alternately a "queer artist" or a "bedroom pop star" - classifications that her debut album more or less explodes. "Y'all are trying to put me in a box that I just don't feel at home in," she says. "I am a queer person, who started making music at home. But what does it even mean to be a bedroom pop artist nowadays? Most musicians probably have a low-key setup at their place so they can record their ideas before they take them into a professional studio. "So right now I am denouncing those labels. I'm a genre-free artist. Very open to everything. Follow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.

नॉर्वे की गायिका-गीतकार गर्ल इन रेड घोषणा करती है, "मैं अभी कलात्मक संदेह के सबसे खराब दौर से गुजर रही हूं।"


Paige Chivers murder accused 'tested the water'

Summary: The alleged murderer of a teenage girl was told by police to contact social services when he sought advice about what to do with the "problem child" up to two weeks before he killed her, a court has heard.

Robert Ewing, 60, is accused of killing 15-year-old Paige Chivers, who went missing in Blackpool in 2007. Preston Crown Court has heard he rang police anonymously to say a girl had turned up on his doorstep. Mr Ewing denies murder. It is said that Mr Ewing, of All Hallows Road, Bispham, was "testing the water" to discover what the official reaction would be to Paige turning up on his doorstep after she had been thrown out of her home by her father. 'Left her in limbo' Later that month in August 2007, Mr Ewing is alleged to have murdered Paige at his flat before he disposed of the youngster's body, which has still not been found. The court heard the defendant told a police operator that a 15-year-old girl who he "vaguely knew" had come to his house following a family row. He said he let her in before later sending her home but was concerned he had "left her in limbo" and wanted to know what he should do next. During the recording, which was played to the jury, he said: "She's permanently excluded from school. She's a problem child. Drinks, smokes ...you name it she does it." Mr Ewing revealed he knew her full name but was not asked to disclose either his or her name. After adding he did not know her address, the operator advises him to ring social services. Co-defendant Gareth Dewhurst, 46, of Duncan Avenue, Blackpool, has pleaded not guilty to a serious sexual act, assisting an offender in disposing a body and intending to pervert the course of public justice. Mr Ewing also denies intending to pervert the course of public justice. The trial continues.

एक अदालत ने सुना है कि एक किशोर लड़की के कथित हत्यारे को पुलिस ने सामाजिक सेवाओं से संपर्क करने के लिए कहा था, जब उसने "समस्याग्रस्त बच्चे" की हत्या से दो सप्ताह पहले तक उसके साथ क्या करना है, इस बारे में सलाह मांगी थी।