Will Boris Johnson make us give up Uber?

Summary: What's the future for Uber? As the controversial car-sharing service becomes increasingly popular with consumers, regulators seem to be busy putting up roadblocks. So will that put the brakes on the company's expansion?

By Lucy HookerBusiness reporter, BBC News In the past few years, Uber has turned the process of booking a taxi on its head in many cities around the world. A mobile phone app, it allows you to check for cars in your area, book one with a click, and have it charged - usually at a cheaper price than a traditional taxi - to your credit card. But while Uber's user numbers have soared, it's far from universally welcome. In Paris, Uber has already had to withdraw the cheapest service it provides, after violent attacks on some of its drivers earlier this year. And last week two of the company's senior executives were hauled before a French court, accused of deceptive commercial practices and complicity in illegal activities. In Amsterdam, Uber's European headquarters was raided as part of a criminal investigation into whether the company is offering illegal taxi services. And in the last few days London's transport authority has proposed regulations that, if implemented, could seriously undermine the way Uber operates in the UK capital. The list of travails goes on and on. Uber has seen its services banned around the world in cities from Seoul, and New Delhi, to next year's Olympic hosts Rio de Janeiro. On top of all that, the European Commission is examining whether Uber is violating competition rules, and the European Court of Justice is deciding whether it's a transport company or a digital service, which could prompt changes to how it operates. Meanwhile, a court on Monday in London is due to decide whether the app used to track the driver's route is a taximeter or not, a definition, which again, will determine the path ahead. Plenty of fight It makes you wonder that Uber isn't thinking of innovating a cut-price legal service for its own purposes, as it doggedly argues its corner on point after point. A company with less self-belief and shallower pockets might be deterred by all this. What is Uber? But Uber is famous for its shoot first, argue later approach, and accustomed to brazening out criticism. The company started out with a small investment by its original founders, Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, who is now the company's chief executive, and has since raised billions of dollars in venture capital from the likes of Baidu, Google and Goldman Sachs. Now, with a market valuation of $50bn (£33bn), the firm has good reason to feel invincible. Stuart Miles, founder of the tech media website, Pocket Lint, says it would take a lot to derail Uber's ambitious plans. "They have enough fight in them, enough resources to keep pushing and pushing, because they have so much money," he says. "Their ultimate goal is [that consumers think] - why would you need a car in a city when there's always an Uber a few feet away? They want to stop people buying cars altogether." London rules But that vision is some way off. In the meantime the terrain ahead is rough. Following a sharp rise in the numbers of cabs crowding London roads, Mayor Boris Johnson has been calling for a cap on the numbers. Yet Uber can only work if there are plenty of its cars available at all times. All the candidates to replace him as mayor, from Sian Berry of the Greens, to Labour's Sadiq Khan, and Mr Johnson's fellow conservative Zac Goldsmith, agree there's a need to curtail the city's taxi free-for-all. And Transport for London's new proposals, including rules that would mean all cab bookings must be confirmed five minutes before pick up, and would ban the visualisation on the app of available cabs for current hire, are a direct challenge to the company's business model. TfL says all it wants to do is raise standards across the industry, ensuring drivers are properly insured and their rights protected. And make sure the system is resilient to illegal touting, and unregistered drivers masquerading as licensed cabbies. Gareth Mead, Uber Europe's spokesperson, says the proposals reflect resistance to change, and vested interests from the black cab industry, and aren't in consumers' interests. But he is undaunted. "If these regulations were imposed, clearly we'd have to find a way to adapt, and we're very confident in our ability to do so," he says. "On a European level there's movement to help define this market, put parameters in that would give us, and the public, clear certainty of how to operate. There is a momentum and it's something that is taking time, but the future is a positive one." A Luddite solution? Uber users are not impressed either. Since the TfL proposals were published customers have taken to Twitter to demand their service be left alone. More than 120,000 disgruntled users have signed a petition. And the Institute of Directors boss, Simon Walker, called the measures "a Luddite solution to a problem that doesn't exist", warning they would "damage London's reputation for innovation". Uber's critics say the company has set up a model which circumvents rules protecting both employees and customers. There's concern that Uber's service amounts to predatory pricing, designed to drive out the competition, and that the company is sidestepping corporation tax by routing business through the Netherlands. One of the main sticking points across Europe is that some Uber services, rather than providing cars with licensed professional drivers, send you an ordinary car owner - often students or part-time workers with no specific qualifications - who add a bit of cab-driving in to their normal day. Time for change Few people would argue that Uber should be blocked altogether however. "We'd all be driving horse-drawn hansom cabs if we didn't move on," says Professor Tony Travers of the London School of Economics. Even if legal challenges delay Uber's rollout he believes the change is inevitable. "The truth is, one way or another, these changes will happen because younger, more affluent service buyers are not going to accept not changing their lives, just as tech has changed their lives in other ways." In the meantime, the delays provided by drawn-out legal challenges do at least allow traditional taxi services to look hard at their own services and see if they can adapt in turn to the lessons Uber is forcing on them.

उबर के लिए भविष्य क्या है? जैसे-जैसे विवादास्पद कार-साझाकरण सेवा उपभोक्ताओं के बीच तेजी से लोकप्रिय होती जा रही है, नियामक बाधाओं को दूर करने में व्यस्त प्रतीत होते हैं। तो क्या यह कंपनी के विस्तार पर ब्रेक लगाएगा?


US storms: What is it like to live in 'tornado alley'?

Summary: As the death toll continues to rise in the deadliest outbreak of storms the US has seen in 40 years, two community leaders who have experienced devastating twisters told the BBC what it is like to live in "tornado alley", and offer some advice to those hit by the recent storms.

In May 2007, Greensburg, in Kansas, was struck by a massive tornado. The town was almost entirely demolished and 12 people lost their lives. One year later, Parkersburg, in Iowa, met a similar fate. Seven residents were killed and more than half the town was destroyed when extremely high speed winds tore a path right through the town. Mayor Bob Dixson, Greensburg, Kansas Warning sirens sounded on the evening of 4 May, just 20 minutes before the small town of Greensburg, Kansas, was hit by a devastating storm. The twister's estimated 205mph (330km/h) winds demolished 95% of the city, levelling nearly every structure in its path. Mr Dixson's home was among the wreckage but instead of cutting his losses, he says he knew right away he would stay and start over. "This is my home. This is my lot. This is where I will rebuild. You can't live in fear or you'd never live anywhere," he says. After the storm, Mr Dixon - who was elected mayor the following year - says he and his wife came up from their basement to find the roof, the walls and the doors had been pulled right off the house. "My first thought," he says, "was: are we the only ones left?" In the hours that followed, as they assessed the extent of the damage, he says it became clear that the whole town had been devastated, and that its residents had lost everything. "But we still had each other and those relationships of faith, family and friends are what sustained us." Having lived through it, he says he knows people in Alabama, and elsewhere in the US, just want to get back to normality. But, he says: "The old normal is gone. You'll never get it back. You have to find what we call here, the 'new-normal'." Four years later, Greensburg, Kansas, is rebuilding as a "green city". The city council passed a law saying that all city buildings would have to be up to standards developed by the US Green Building Council, the first city in the US to do so. So his advice to those people who will be making big decisions as they put their lives back together, is "take your time". He says: "Don't make life decisions quickly. Think of the long-term ramifications as an individual or a community. "What is the legacy you want to leave? Make sure as you rebuild you are building a better, stronger community." Chris Luhring, former police chief, Parkersburg, Iowa Parkersburg's city hall, high school, only grocery store, and gas station were flattened on 25 May 2008 when the small town in north-east Iowa was hit by the most powerful storm the state had seen in 32 years. Chris Luhring, currently a city administrator in Parkersburg, was the police chief when the tornado struck. Even as someone with the job of protecting the community and responding to disaster, he says, "nobody can anticipate this type of storm". "We were aware of Greensburg," he says, "but we still couldn't imagine what would happen." He has been watching events unfold across the south of the country this week, and he says even in the face of such awful devastation, it is important to hold on to one's strength. "Our tornado had the ability to slow us down and to make us depressed. It's like being attacked by a bull, you can be killed by that bull or grab it by the horns and fight it off." The advice he'd give to the communities and individuals affected by recent storms, is that "recovery is possible, never allow the doubt to sink into your mind that it's not possible". "I've talked to communities who have been hit who say 'I don't know if we'll ever recover'," he says. "Well, if you think that you have already been beat." As the city coped with the storm, Mr Luhring says, its "incident command system" was key. The structure it organised to guide the response made sure "everybody is working towards the same goal, on the same page, from the firemen to the police to residents to the first responders". Three years later, Parkersburg has largely been able to rebuild and recover from the catastrophe. Mr Luhring, who lost his aunt in the storm, says the emotion does not go away. "You always think what else could I have done? But you have to remember, everybody has limitations. You are not God. Neither am I." Beyond the physical loss, what the storm took from the residents of Parkersburg, Mr Luhring says, is peace of mind. "That feeling of safety is what has been taken away from people going through this right now," he says. "But they can do things to feel safe again." After the storm, Mr Luhring adds: "We saw it as an opportunity to do things better and to show the world that recovery is possible. "What I would say to community leaders today is that recovery is an option and you have to grasp it."

जैसा कि अमेरिका में 40 वर्षों में देखे गए तूफानों के सबसे घातक प्रकोप में मरने वालों की संख्या में वृद्धि जारी है, विनाशकारी मोड़ का अनुभव करने वाले दो सामुदायिक नेताओं ने बीबीसी को बताया कि "बवंडर गली" में रहना कैसा होता है, और हाल के तूफानों से प्रभावित लोगों को कुछ सलाह देते हैं।


Essex Police off-duty officer killed in crash with lorry

Summary: An off-duty police officer has died after the motorbike he was riding was in collision with a lorry.

Essex Police said he was riding along the A414 at Writtle, near Chelmsford, at 13:55 GMT on Thursday when the crash took place. No arrests have been made and anyone with information is asked to contact police. "Our thoughts are with his family and friends at this incredibly difficult time," a spokesman said.

एक ऑफ-ड्यूटी पुलिस अधिकारी की मौत हो गई है क्योंकि वह जिस मोटरसाइकिल पर सवार था, वह एक लॉरी से टकरा गई थी।


FGM: A child abuse 'out of the ordinary'

Summary: London is hosting an international summit to discuss putting a stop to female genital mutilation. In the UK as many as 170,000 women and girls have been cut but why does the practice persist and what does it mean for the victims?

By Lauren Turner & Sean ClareBBC News "They love their children a lot," Jay Kamara-Frederick says of the parents who have their daughters cut. "They just want their child to be part of an out-dated, ancient tradition." As a young teenager Jay, now in her thirties, was taken by her family from the UK back to Sierra Leone. She was told she was going to join a woman's society and that it would "empower me as a woman". But it was not until she was an adult that she realised what had been done to her 10 years earlier. And where that memory should have been, she says, there was instead a void. "They say when people are traumatised that happens to them," Jay says. "That part of me was totally gone." There are various types of female genital mutilation, or cutting. Among them is the partial or total removal of the clitoris. Now a marketing consultant and some-time campaigner against the practice, Jay says what happened to her is not a subject easily discussed in her "very traditional" family. "I really respect my mum's view, to be quiet on the issue," she says, smiling. "But what I love about my mum is that she respects my view to keep talking." 'Loving and caring' Jay's story is far from unique - the Home Affairs Select Committee has estimated there could be 170,000 victims in the UK alone. It is is a form of child abuse that is "out of the ordinary", says John Cameron, head of child protection at the NSPCC. "Speaking out is a real problem," he adds, warning victims within families can "go under the radar". An NSPCC helpline introduced a year ago has already had almost 300 calls, prompting nearly 130 referrals to the police and children's services. The following cases were among those calls (identifying details have been removed): Female genital mutilation Source: World Health Organization Mr Cameron says, for some, FGM is still shrouded in mystery. "I don't think people understand in terms of the anatomical details of what is happening to girls - and the trauma behind that," he says. "It is still underplayed." He likens the reluctance to talk about FGM to the way smacking was silently accepted for years. "It's not a case of being able to put in a solution straight away and getting a shift overnight," he says. "It's a very complex issue." Types of FGM •Clitoridectomy - partial or total removal of the clitoris •Excision - removal of the clitoris and inner labia (lips), with or without the outer labia •Infibulation - cutting, removing and sewing up the genitalia •Any other type of intentional damage to the female genitalia (burning, scraping et cetera) Comfort Momoh runs the African Well Women's Clinic at Guy's Hospital in London which treats FGM victims. "The problem is big in the UK," she admits. The clinic sees between 300 and 350 women every year. The UK problem includes girls being cut here but also being taken overseas - sometimes in school holidays - to be cut before returning home. Dr Momoh believes numbers are increasing because of migration and because more people are speaking out and seeking help. She wants to see FGM become part of the core training curriculum for all health professionals to tackle what she says is a complicated problem. Sexually obedient Different reasons are given in different cultures for carrying out FGM - including preserving a girl's virginity and keeping her "clean". It is a kind of child abuse that has been both "normalised" and mythologised in some cultures, says the NSPCC's John Cameron. Some of the cultural beliefs around it, that women are better cooks if they have been cut - for example - may seem unbelievable but still persist today. Kanwal Ahluwalia, gender adviser at children's charity Plan UK, is clear what the practice really means. "It is about gender discrimination," she says. "It is about controlling women and their roles in society." Victim Jay says reasons vary from initiating girls "into womanhood" to "keeping women obedient sexually". Many of the women who take their daughters to be cut "don't see anything wrong with it," Kawal Ahluwalia says. "They're doing what they think is right for their children." And sometimes laws do not hold much weight in rural communities overseas where FGM is committed, she adds, so legal changes alone will not end the practice. "There is no silver bullet. There has to be a multi-pronged attack. But we have to make sure it is handled delicately to make sure there is no backlash from the community." Some women choose to be cut, Jay says, seeing as part of staying true to their cultural background. But she is clear where she stands: "I would never want anybody to go through what I've been through." FGM and child marriage 130m have undergone FGM 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East practise FGM 33% less chance a girl will be cut today than 30 years ago But rising birth rate means more girls in total are affected 250m women worldwide were married before age of 15

लंदन महिला जननांग विकृति पर रोक लगाने पर चर्चा करने के लिए एक अंतरराष्ट्रीय शिखर सम्मेलन की मेजबानी कर रहा है। ब्रिटेन में लगभग 170,000 महिलाओं और लड़कियों को काट दिया गया है लेकिन यह प्रथा क्यों बनी हुई है और पीड़ितों के लिए इसका क्या मतलब है?


Departures show: Why Britons make the great escape overseas

Summary: Since London's Migration Museum opened its focus has mainly been migrants to Britain and what happened after they arrived. But its latest exhibition looks at something less familiar - how and why over the years huge numbers of Britons have emigrated permanently.

By Vincent DowdArts correspondent, BBC News The exhibition Departures, which runs until June next year, has had to close for now due to the latest coronavirus restrictions in England. However, there will hopefully still be ample opportunity for the public to explore what Britons were keen to discover in the rest of the world, or perhaps so desperate to escape at home. When the museum opened in 2017 it was tucked away in former London Fire Brigade engineering workshops. Shortly before the first lockdown it moved to what used to be an H&M fashion store inside the shopping centre in Lewisham, south London. Those behind the museum hope the new location will make it more part of a community, one whose bustle and mixed ethnicity reflect the story the Migration Museum wants to tell of people arriving in the UK. Departures explores human traffic in the opposite direction. By some estimates there are around 75 million people in the world directly descended from people who left Britain to start their lives anew elsewhere. Some went willingly, others did not. The exhibition layout mimics an airport departure lounge, leading to various Gates. Each Gate deals with one of the main reasons for people leaving Britain over the centuries. But the curator Aditi Anand says motivations for going have often been complex. "Historically our starting point, almost inevitably, is the story of the Mayflower which in 1620 took people fleeing religious intolerance from England to the new colonies in north America. "We've labelled the first Gate you come to Escape/Dream. Sometimes people don't realise that many of the passengers 400 years ago in fact had already left Britain to go to Holland where their Puritan form of religion was accepted. "But soon they worried that their children would grow up too Dutch and aspired to find a better and more English life across the Atlantic. It's an example of how people who left sometimes weren't only thinking of escape. They also imagined a better life far away. "We chose the airport as a device to get a modern audience into the shoes of people who set off on an extraordinary range of journeys. If you think of the intense debate that has existed over immigration to the UK it may be odd that emigration is seldom discussed in the media or elsewhere. Yet the two are linked. "I think most people will conclude that often the motivations are similar in whichever direction people are travelling." Anand says an obvious reason for leaving Britain has always been to look for better economic opportunities. She mentions the so-called "Ten Pound Poms", who were given financial support to move permanently to Australia or New Zealand, beginning in the late 1940s. (Most passengers paid only a subsidised fare of £10 to sail from Britain.) "But we also use a much later example of a young man leaving Northern Ireland in the 1980s to go to work in America. He wanted to escape the violence of the Troubles but also he saw no chance of economic advancement where he was. There are obvious parallels with people today who come to Europe to escape political and economic instability at home." The new exhibition uses a mixture of artwork, audio recordings and visual displays to invite visitors to think about why people quit homes in Britain. One Gate is called Forced to Leave. It recounts Britain's long and inglorious history of getting rid of unwanted citizens by forcibly transporting them thousands of miles across the world. Dr Michaela Benson of Goldsmiths, University of London, has curated a modern section called Greetings from Europe. Her idea was simple: to ask Brits who've gone to live in Europe to send her a postcard explaining what their original motivation was. Dr Benson says it's designed to give exhibition visitors more of an insight into individual lives. Reasons given for moving elsewhere range from falling for a future spouse on a school exchange trip decades ago to finding a partner while studying recently in Finland. Some people just wanted a better job or more sunshine. "It shows the random way big decisions can sometimes come in life. The exhibition has big themes like the growth of the British Empire but the postcards give human detail which I think can be touching." Anand says a growing trend is re-pats, usually young people born in Britain who choose to "return home" to nations where their parents or grandparents were born. The re-pats may barely know their adopted country but feel they will be at home there and that they may have something to offer in return. "It's something which only recently would have been uncommon. But I think it reflects a new era of movement that we're living in. "People go back to, say, Ghana and may not even know if they plan to stay long-term. But they want to find new opportunities… and perhaps to find themselves. It's a modern thing to connect with another culture but they have feet in both worlds. It's a new imagining of migration." Departures will be at the Migration Museum, ,south London until June 2021.

लंदन के प्रवासन संग्रहालय के खुलने के बाद से इसका ध्यान मुख्य रूप से ब्रिटेन के प्रवासियों पर रहा है और उनके आने के बाद क्या हुआ। लेकिन इसकी नवीनतम प्रदर्शनी कुछ कम परिचित चीज़ों को देखती है-वर्षों से बड़ी संख्या में ब्रिटिश स्थायी रूप से कैसे और क्यों चले गए हैं।


Snow warning for parts of Wales issued by Met Office

Summary: Snow has been forecast to hit parts of Wales overnight on Sunday which may cause travel disruption on Monday morning.

The Met Office has issued a yellow "be aware" warning for snow, particularly on high ground, for Wrexham, Powys and Monmouthshire. It says a mixture of rain, hail and sleet will turn into snow during the night. Untreated roads and pavements could also be icy. Related Internet Links Warnings - Met Office

रविवार को रात भर वेल्स के कुछ हिस्सों में बर्फबारी होने का अनुमान है जिससे सोमवार की सुबह यात्रा में व्यवधान पैदा हो सकता है।


Bruce McArthur: Toronto serial killer destroyed gay safe space

Summary: For years, there were whispers in Toronto's gay community about a serial killer stalking the community. Now that one of their own has pleaded guilty to the murders of eight missing men, they wonder why the police didn't act sooner.

By Robin Levinson-KingBBC News, Toronto In a small park in the heart of Toronto's Gay Village, about 200 people assembled in the snow to mourn the victims of an alleged serial killer. Many wore armbands painted with the words "love", "heal", "rise", "grieve". The words were later used in a call-and-response between organisers and the large crowd. "Today we grieve," they said, and the word echoed back from the crowd. "Today we resist. Today we heal. Today we rise. Today, of all days, we love." A year later, those names were read aloud in a different kind of call-and-response, as Bruce McArthur, 67, pled guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder. Who is the accused? McArthur had grown up in rural Ontario and married a woman in the 1980s. He knew he was gay from a young age, but tried to ignore it, court documents for an assault charge would later reveal. The grandfather and father of two came out in his 40s after abruptly leaving his family in Oshawa and moving to Toronto, where he became a regular in the Gay Village. At Zipperz, one of the bars frequented by many of his alleged victims, he could often be found sitting at the bar, having a drink or chatting up a fellow patron. "I used to refer to him as 'Santa'," Zipperz owner Harry Singh told the BBC. With a white beard, a hefty belly and a twinkle in his eyes, McArthur even worked as a mall Santa one Christmas. Few people knew of his dark side. In 2003 he was given a two-year conditional sentence for assaulting a male prostitute with a metal pipe. As part of his sentence, he was required to stay away from male prostitutes, the Gay Village and refrain from using amyl nitrite, also known as poppers. He was close with several of his landscaping clients. Karen Fraser even let him store tools in her shed on her property on Mallory Crescent. Police later discovered the remains of several bodies in plant pots on the property and in a nearby ravine. Fraser said he gave no hint as to what kind of man he really was. He was energetic and joyful, loved plants and doted on his grandchildren. "As I see it, the man I knew didn't exist," she says. The shock of discovering that her cherished home had been turned into a serial killer's graveyard has worn off. Now, preparing for his sentencing, Fraser says she has nothing to say to him. "I'm not big on forgiveness, I'm not big on closure. Terrible things were done," she says matter-of-factly. Who are the victims? McArthur's arrest last January had confirmed the worst fears of many in the Village, who for years had whispered that a serial killer might be targeting their community. "Too many people for too long in our community have been lost," said Troy Jackson, who hosted the community vigil. Located at the intersection of Church Street and Wellesley Street, Toronto's Gay Village has been the city's enclave for the LGBT community since the 1960s. But it's been more than a neighbourhood - a home away from home for many who may feel marginalised because of their sexuality. Many of McArthur's victims were immigrants from South Asia or the Middle East who were not out to their families. The Village was supposed to be their safe place. Instead, it became a hunting ground. According to his guilty plea, McArthur killed: Unanswered questions Police have not said how Bruce McArthur became a suspect in the killings. He was known to have been in a sexual relationship with Kinsman, and there was video surveillance footage of Kinsman getting in his car on the day he went missing. Rumours about someone targeting the community began when Skandaraj Navaratnam disappeared from Zipperz on Labour Day weekend in 2010. Known as Skanda to his friends, the 40-year-old had moved to Canada from Sri Lanka in the 1990s and quickly settled into a comfortable routine in the Village, where he easily made friends. "His laugh was just ridiculous," Jodi Becker, a bartender at Zipperz and close friend of Navaratnam's, told the Toronto Star after he went missing. "If Skanda started laughing, everybody started laughing, even if nothing was funny." More victims went missing, and in 2012 police launched a task force to investigate, only to shut it down 18 months later. Then in June 2017, Kinsman's disappearance sparked a community-wide search and rekindled rumours of a serial killer in the gay village. Soon after, police launched a second task force, to look into both Kinsman and Esen's disappearances. But as late as December that year, Toronto police were publicly saying there was "no evidence" of a serial killer. The denial has damaged an already fragile relationship between the Toronto LGBT community and the police. Unanswered questions still haunt Haran Vijayanathan, executive director of the Alliance for South Asian Aids Prevention, who has been speaking on behalf of many of the victims. He successfully called for an independent inquiry - which is still ongoing - into how police handle missing person investigations. If police had paid more attention, Vijayanathan told the BBC last February, "you can't help but wonder if the lives of the other men who passed or are missing could have been potentially saved". "Those are the 'what ifs', and 'ands' we have to contend with." With additional reporting from Jessica Murphy

वर्षों से, टोरंटो के समलैंगिक समुदाय में एक सीरियल किलर द्वारा समुदाय का पीछा करने के बारे में फुसफुसाया जा रहा था। अब जब उनमें से एक ने आठ लापता पुरुषों की हत्या का दोषी ठहराया है, तो वे आश्चर्य करते हैं कि पुलिस ने जल्दी कार्रवाई क्यों नहीं की।


The non-stop problem solver who loves to invent

Summary: "I like to solve problems," says Uddhab Bharali.

By Carolyn RiceInnovators, BBC World Service "I like to make [people] a little more comfortable with themselves, or a little independent." This is what drives Uddhab Bharali to keep inventing. He started making things to sell more than 30 years ago in order to help pay off a large family debt. Today it is his life's passion. He has created more than 140 inventions, many of which are sold commercially with some winning international awards. He says his main motivation has always been to help people. Across India he is already well-known for his agricultural inventions but his new ideas are helping those with disabilities. He explains that because there is limited government support in India for people with physical disabilities it is up to people like him to come up with solutions. Raj Rehman is 15-years-old and was born with congenital amputations and cerebral palsy. The simple device that Mr Bharali has made for him attaches to his forearm and is made from everyday items like Velcro fasteners and a spoon. It helps him to eat and to write. Mr Bharali has also adapted some footwear which means Raj is able to move around much more comfortably. "I used to worry about myself before but now I feel stress free. I don't have to worry how I will cross the railway line to reach school as now I can walk without difficulty," he says. "I am happy that I can take care of myself." Human ingenuity Initially, Mr Bharali recalls that people thought he was "worthless" and it took him 18 years to establish himself as "an innovator with class". Most of his innovations are low cost and use locally available raw materials. This type of frugal innovation is known as "jugaad". It is a Hindi term which can also translate as "ingenious improvisation". Jaideep Prabhu is from Cambridge University's Judge Business School and has written a book about jugaad. He thinks it has a huge role to play in inspiring people to innovate: "This is mainly because it doesn't require much more than your innate human ingenuity. "The whole approach is designed for you to find problems that surround you in your community - problems that affect you and people like you, and then to take resources that you have access to and solve those problems," he says. The BBC's Innovators series reveals innovative solutions to major challenges across South Asia. Ever heard of the concept of "jugaad"? It's a Hindi term meaning cheap innovation. If you have created a life hack or innovation that you are proud of, or spotted one while out and about on your travels, then share your picture with us by emailing yourpics@bbc.co.uk, use the hashtags #Jugaad and #BBCInnovators and share your picture with @BBCWorldService, or upload your submission here. Learn more about BBC Innovators. Mr Bharali makes an income from selling his inventions as well as designing technical solutions for businesses and government. But he is keen to help others make money and improve their own financial situation. He has set up a couple of centres to give people access to his machines. At one of these centres women from the local villages are able to come and use a rice-grinding machine that he has designed. The rice flour is then made into cakes and other edible items that can be sold. No shortcut According to the World Bank only 27% of women in India over the age of 15 are economically active. "We have no facilities or employment to earn our livelihood in the villages," says Porbitta Dhutta, one of the women who comes to the centre. "Here we can use innovations to change our lives to become self-sufficient and make respectable money for ourselves and our families." Men in rural areas have also benefitted from Mr Bharali's ingenuity. He has developed and sold over 200 cement-brick making machines. Each one requires five people to operate it and he estimates that over one thousand men are now employed because of it. Although Mr Bharali says there is no shortcut to success, his hard work means his life is now comfortable and he is able to support 25 other families with the proceeds from his business. His engineering background has certainly helped Mr Bharali but he thinks that the fundamentals of innovation cannot be taught: "Any person with a restless mind, who is uncomfortable with things in the world, is an innovator. "Innovation comes from inside you. No-one can make you an innovator, you have to feel it." Originally he would design his machines and then hope that they were commercially successful but such is his reputation now that people are commissioning him to make bespoke solutions and he has no intention of slowing down. For him the excitement of innovating continues: "I just enjoy the challenge. Always something fresh. And the joy of being the first person to do something new." Additional research and reporting by Priti Gupta.

उद्धब भराली कहते हैं, "मुझे समस्याओं को हल करना पसंद है।"


Election 2021: What about parish councils?

Summary: They control millions of pounds in public funds, influence our day-to-day lives and had a brief moment in the spotlight, thanks to Jackie Weaver and a viral Zoom meeting. But what do parish councils actually do?

By Rob England and Jacob TomlinsonBBC News On 6 May, people across England will vote in local authority elections. But some live in areas where seats on parish and town councils - the most local of local authorities - will also be up for grabs. Ms Weaver, who shot to fame earlier this year when a video of the chaotic parish council meeting she was in went viral, describes these authorities as having "enormous potential". But despite their influence and sometimes fairly sizeable budgets, many people don't know much about how they work or what they're responsible for. BBC News has found the answers to these questions. Now, in the immortal words shouted at Jackie during that infamous meeting, "read them and understand them". What are they? Parish and town councils are the smallest local authorities in the UK, but operate in a similar way to larger councils. They have elected councillors and raise money through council tax and other means to run public services. There are about 10,000 of these councils in England, covering about 40% of the population. Places with large urban centres such as London or Greater Manchester tend not to have parish or town councils, and cities are usually administered by a single larger council with greater responsibilities. What do they do? Ms Weaver says what they do varies across the country, but these are the councils where you "can make a difference" for your local community. Some parish and town councils are small operations that manage things such as local allotments, while others have million-pound budgets and manage everyday services. In 2019, a BBC investigation found some were also taking on extra services that larger local authorities have been unable to fund due to budget cuts. Parish councils are also consulted when someone makes a planning applications in their area, which is where Ms Weaver says most people will probably come across them first. "What they can do is so varied," she said, adding that as well as the more traditional public services some areas choose to do "innovative things like buying their local pubs" or providing free milk to schoolchildren. "If you're going to come back to me to say 'what's the point in getting involved in our council, it's very sleepy, it doesn't do anything' that's the very council you want to get involved with because they have enormous potential," she says. How much money do they have? The National Association of Local Councils (NALC) estimates about £2bn is invested in communities covered by parish and town councils - in council tax, external fund raising and through the time spent by councillors on their duties. Some have budgets that run into seven figures, while others don't take any money from council tax. For example, Weymouth Town Council in Dorset collected the most from council tax in 2020-21, at £3.4m, and had an overall budget for the year of just under £5m. Meanwhile, Wharton Parish Council in Cumbria collected just £10 and about 1,300 councils did not take any money from council tax at all in the last financial year. An estimated £618m of council tax funding is thought to be used by parish and town councils in 2021-22, a sum which has increased year on year. Are they holding elections? Yes. About 2,000 parish and town councils are thought to be holding elections this year, according to research by the NALC. These ballots will be alongside those for the local authority, PCC and mayoral elections. However in recent years it has not been unusual for these elections to be uncontested, resulting in unelected members being 'co-opted' into roles where necessary. This means an unelected person is chosen by the council to fill a position and can be given an allowance for doing so. Are councillors paid? Parish and town councillors can be given allowances in the same way other local councillors are, to cover the cost of the time they put into their duties and other expenses. In some areas this is based on a percentage of the allowance given to councillors in larger authorities. For example, in Surrey Heath, it was recently recommended parish councillors receive £1,586 per year, about 30% of the amount given to borough councillors. In other places no allowances are given. Do they represent political parties? The NALC says parish councils tend to be run by independent candidates, with no party affiliation. However in larger councils, such as those covering an entire town, it is more common for people to run as a candidate for a political party. Search below to find to see which council, PCC and mayoral elections you can vote in. A modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. More information about these elections Who can I vote for in my area? Enter your postcode, or the name of your English council or Scottish or Welsh constituency to find out. Eg 'W1A 1AA' or 'Westminster' Related Internet Links National Association of Local Councils

वे सार्वजनिक धन में लाखों पाउंड को नियंत्रित करते हैं, हमारे दिन-प्रतिदिन के जीवन को प्रभावित करते हैं और जैकी वीवर और एक वायरल ज़ूम बैठक की बदौलत सुर्खियों में एक संक्षिप्त क्षण था। लेकिन पैरिश परिषदें वास्तव में क्या करती हैं?


Radio silence: The Syrian broadcasters in exile

Summary: Until recently, a small, politically neutral Syrian radio station was broadcasting in exile from Istanbul, but then, last year, the US administration withdrew funding for Syrian stabilisation projects. Radio Alwan is now off air, and - as Emma Jane Kirby discovered - its journalists no longer feel welcome in Turkey.

It's when Rahaf, Radio Alwan's former social media reporter tells me that she's abandoned her dream of motherhood that I begin to understand. We're sitting in my minimalist-chic Istanbul hotel room - with dusk falling and the desk light spilling a wan, sickly light on our faces, the room feels sparse and sterile. Thirty-five-year old Rahaf and her husband have always imagined having a son together. They even talked about names, she says, smiling shyly. But when you don't belong anywhere, when you might be kicked out of one country at a moment's notice and sent back to another that's completely broken and wild, and where you cannot guarantee a child's safety... well, you have to ask yourself, is it really fair to insist on realising your dream? She swallows and smiles at me bravely. "So," she says, "I have decided I must not become a mother." It's been seven years since most of the Radio Alwan team left Syria. Seven years since they last closed the door of that house or that flat which they had always unthinkingly called "home". Now that word has floated free of its meaning - has blurred, been scrambled into some unfathomable code. Just as Radio Alwan has vanished from the airwaves, so the word "home" has disappeared from its former employees' lexicon. "When you ask me do I miss home," asks Sami, Radio Alwan's former manager gently, pulling on his black beard. "What do you mean by 'home'?" Sami and Rahaf were at university together in Damascus. When they speak of those days, their language becomes romantic, poetic, as they talk faster and faster about the architecture, the smells, the sounds, the vibrant soul of their homeland. But when they recently revisited their former town, they no longer recognised it. It was blackened by hatred, says Sami, by militias, by murder. "You see, home," he explains tentatively, as if tasting the strange word, "a place you call home has to feel safe. And I don't feel safe in Syria." Sami no longer feels at home in Turkey either. Earlier reports on Radio Alwan: The hard-hitting soap for a country at war (April 2016) The radio station giving hope to listeners in Syria (December 2016) The radio station that wishes it could bring back laughter (September 2018) If the recent Turkish invasion of Kurdish-held territory in northern Syria has complicated an already chaotic war, it's also made things much more difficult for Syrian asylum seekers, like the Radio Alwan journalists. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's rhetoric has recently become more abrasive. Sami argues this is legitimising what he believes is an ugly racism in parts of Turkish society. On his way to meet me this evening, Sami was stopped by transport police on the metro who checked his papers. When they saw he was Syrian, the officer told him ominously, "Syria? Syria's dead." Sami makes a point of no longer speaking Arabic in public places and only sends texts in English. Like all the Alwan team, he has a Turkish tourist visa which has to be renewed annually and which could be revoked at any time. Sometimes he dreams of getting asylum in Canada. "Or settlement status anywhere in the world that's safe," he muses. "Somewhere I am not seen as a disease but as a human being. Maybe then I'll have a new understanding of the word 'home'." Mariam listens curled up in her chair like a child but her face is contorted with suppressed emotions. She's learned not to give way to her feelings, she explains, because it's wiser these days, as a Syrian refugee in Erdogan's Turkey, to keep one's "tracks light" - to put up a neutral facade. Likewise, she reminds me, when she was Radio Alwan's youth programmes presenter she always used a pseudonym to broadcast - because you never knew who was listening back in Syria either. She curls up smaller in her chair, as if to minimise her presence, as if to make her imprint on life imperceptible. Then suddenly she springs up like a cat. "Yeah, I'm frightened here," she agrees. "But if things get really tight, I'll just pick up my stuff and go - I won't wait for them to kick me out." I recognise her feisty spirit as pure Radio Alwan. How Radio Alwan began And that's when Sami shows us the photograph on his phone - it's of the station's former engineer, who is defiantly building a tiny radio station in his own sitting room, in the hope of resurrecting Radio Alwan - albeit a much reduced service - from the ashes of silence. "I'm in!" shouts Rahaf. "Me too!" yells Mariam. They both look at Sami expectantly. "If it happens, of course I'm in," he grins. "I so miss the listeners," Mariam tells me wistfully, studying the picture on Sami's phone. "I got so attached to them. You know every day they'd hear my voice - every day we talked." Sami is nodding. "They weren't just listeners," he says. "They were, well, family." And then it clicks why Radio Alwan matters quite so much to its former staff. The station wasn't just about providing listeners in war-torn Syria with innovative dramas, debate and distraction - it was about offering them refuge, comfort, familiarity. Equally, when listeners selected the Radio Alwan frequency, they were opening their door to the Alwan exiles, inviting them in, saying, "You're welcome here." And in these fractured, brutal times of war, perhaps that counts at least as some sort of home. Listen to Emma Jane Kirby's report from Istanbul on From Our Own Correspondent, on Radio 4, on 28 December

हाल तक, एक छोटा, राजनीतिक रूप से तटस्थ सीरियाई रेडियो स्टेशन इस्तांबुल से निर्वासन में प्रसारण कर रहा था, लेकिन फिर, पिछले साल, अमेरिकी प्रशासन ने सीरियाई स्थिरीकरण परियोजनाओं के लिए धन वापस ले लिया। रेडियो अलवान अब बंद है, और-जैसा कि एम्मा जेन किर्बी ने पाया-इसके पत्रकार अब तुर्की में स्वागत महसूस नहीं करते हैं।


'I survived 28 hours lost in the Indian Ocean'

Summary: When Brett Archibald fell overboard in the middle of a stormy night in the Indian Ocean he thought he was going to die. For more than 28 hours he was alone at sea, encountering a shark and being attacked by gulls for his eyeballs. Here is his story.

"I just watched the lights of the boat disappear. I screamed, I screamed with everything I had in my lungs, but I realised very quickly that they were never going to hear me." Brett Archibald relives the moment he thought his life was over. At 02:30 local time on 17 April 2013, in the middle of a storm in the Indian Ocean, he had fallen overboard after passing out on the top deck of a hired boat off the coast of Indonesia. It was dark and pouring with rain. He was on a surfing holiday with nine friends, but had fallen ill from food poisoning during a 10-hour journey along a stretch of water known as the Mentawai Strait in Indonesia's West Sumatra province. He had gone to the side of the boat - the Naga Laut - to be ill overboard, when he became dizzy and blacked out. When he woke, he was in the water - the boat already 10 or 15 metres ahead of him. "I swam with everything I could, but there was no way I was going to catch a boat," he tells the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme. Brett - then aged 50 - from Cape Town, South Africa, remembers being in complete shock. He had never imagined he would be susceptible to falling overboard. As the boat continued into the distance he remembers staring at the sky, his ears pricking up at the sound of an animalistic cry - that was coming from within. "I thought there was a hyena in the water - it was a manic, crazy laugh. I looked around me and it was me. It was this crazy noise coming out of my throat, like hysterical laughter." For the next 28 hours Brett was alone in the water, but determined not to succumb to the elements. As a surfer, and strong swimmer, he knew that he needed to take a deep breath and swim through any oncoming waves. He went through his book and CD collections, title by title, in his head to try to forget the unbearable cramp in his limbs - before singing to himself. He became exhausted, and started to hallucinate, but a series of events gave him the adrenalin, and the fight, to stay alive. Brett - who has written a book about the ordeal - says he invented his own form of breaststroke to keep his head above water. But as his energy dwindled, he fell asleep - only to be woken by gulls. "This thing smacked me on the back of the head," he says. "I lifted my head up to see what on earth it was and out of the blue this bird just exploded into my face. "I felt the bridge of my nose, blood started flowing. I didn't know what had happened - I felt like someone had hit me with a baseball bat. Find out more The Victoria Derbyshire programme is broadcast on weekdays between 09:00 and 11:00 on BBC Two and the BBC News channel. "These two gulls were just dive-bombing me, they were coming from nowhere, squawking and screaming." Brett believes the gulls were intent on plucking out his eyeballs, but in his crazed state of mind, his main thought was to turn the tables. "Suddenly I thought, 'I can catch one of them and I can eat him'. "I thought I could actually pluck one of them out of the air, bite its head off and eat him. I would have eaten that thing feathers and all at that stage." It was, of course, a plan that went unfulfilled, but it was not Brett's only encounter with life out in the ocean. 'It's a shark' Around 15 hours after first falling overboard - by Brett's best estimate - he felt a bump to the back of his left kidney. "I thought it was a barracuda initially, this big fish. Then the thing nudged me again and actually turned me in the water and I thought 'oh it's a shark, I know it's a shark'." As he was flipped around, he caught a glimpse of what at the time seemed like "the size of a red bus in London". "It's weird the human mind. My first thought was 'oh he's going to eat me'. I remember lifting my throat and saying 'buddy, just rip my throat out'." Then he noticed the black edgings of its vertical fin - it was a blacktip reef shark. As a keen surfer in South Africa, where the shark also resides, he knew it did not pose a threat to humans. His mind quickly turned to a new survival hope. "I thought 'I could catch this guy and he could tow me to a reef'. "I started in my mind plotting. I even used the words 'Bear Grylls, take off your mask, here comes Archie. I'm going to catch you [shark] and I'm going to tow you to land'." But then, something very simple happened. It should have brought Brett utter relief, but instead left him distraught and bereft of hope. The shark swam away. "I've never been so devastated in my life. It was the closest I came to crying, because it was the first time I'd found something that I thought could save my life." Looking back, he can only describe the mentality as "absolutely crazy". It was a further 13 hours before he was discovered, around 20 kilometres from where he had fallen overboard the previous day. After his friends saw he had not arrived for breakfast they had contacted the Indonesian coastguard, who co-ordinated a search and rescue effort. Other nearby vessels joined in, and at around 6.30am local time, a Sydney couple aboard a boat known as the Barrenjoey spotted him in the water, miraculously still alive. Shaking and in pain - his eyes swollen and his feet, lips and hands nearly bloodless - he was rescued and taken for a medical assessment nearby. He had lost nearly 13lb (6kg) in weight in the water. Thoughts of his family - his wife and children aged six and nine at the time - had pulled him through, he says. He remembers at one point saying out loud: "I'm fighting, I'm hanging in there for you" from the water. Three years on, he says he still shudders each time he goes to the water's edge, but - quite remarkably - still calls the sea his "happy place". The very next day after his ordeal Brett was back on his surfboard to ride the waves, which he still enjoys to this day. "I knew I just had to get back in the ocean. If I hadn't, I never would have gone back in again."

जब ब्रेट आर्चीबाल्ड हिंद महासागर में एक तूफानी रात के बीच में गिर गया तो उसने सोचा कि वह मरने वाला है। 28 घंटे से अधिक समय तक वह समुद्र में अकेला था, एक शार्क का सामना कर रहा था और उसकी आँखों के लिए गुलों द्वारा हमला किया जा रहा था। यहाँ उसकी कहानी है।


Pudding Mill Lane DLR station moved for Crossrail

Summary: Docklands Light Railway's (DLR) Pudding Mill Lane stop has shut to make way for a much larger station after Easter.

The station is being moved about 100m (330ft) to make way for Crossrail. Transport for London said the new facility, opening on 28 April, would be the largest on the DLR and increase capacity by 1,100 people per hour. There will be no services between Stratford and Bow Church until 25 April and Stratford and Poplar for the following three days. Replacement buses will be in operation while Pudding Mill Lane station is closed. The first Crossrail services through central London will start in late 2018.

डॉकलैंड लाइट रेलवे (डी. एल. आर.) का पुडिंग मिल लेन स्टॉप ईस्टर के बाद एक बहुत बड़े स्टेशन के लिए रास्ता बनाने के लिए बंद कर दिया गया है।


Man charged with murder over Huddersfield street stabbing

Summary: A man has been charged with murder after a fatal stabbing on a road in West Yorkshire.

Richard Astin, 42, was found "unresponsive" on New Hey Road in Huddersfield in the early hours of Tuesday. Police said he was taken to hospital where he was pronounced dead. Shaun Anthony Waterhouse, 39, of Buckden Court, Huddersfield, will appear before Leeds Magistrates Court on Saturday. Follow BBC Yorkshire on Facebook, on Twitter, and Instagram send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk.

वेस्ट यॉर्कशायर में सड़क पर छुरा घोंपने के बाद एक व्यक्ति पर हत्या का आरोप लगाया गया है।


Murder charge after death of man in Leicester

Summary: A 23-year-old woman has been charged with murder after the death of a man who was found fatally stabbed.

Emergency services were called to an address in Sylvan Street early on Sunday morning following reports that a man had been seriously injured. The 26-year-old man, identified as James Knight, was taken to hospital where he later died. Emma Magson, of Sylvan Street, has been charged with murder and will appear later at Leicester Magistrates' Court.

एक व्यक्ति की मौत के बाद एक 23 वर्षीय महिला पर हत्या का आरोप लगाया गया है, जिसे घातक रूप से चाकू मारा गया था।


'I was told painting is for lazy people': Cameroon's Ajarb Bernard Ategwa

Summary: "Painting is for lazy people," Ajarb Bernard Ategwa's father would tell him as a child. Daydreaming and doodling in his school books would often get him scolded as a boy. But the Cameroonian artist, now 30, tells the BBC he got the last laugh.

Ategwa says his vivid paintings of life in Cameroon's biggest city, Douala, sell for up to £20,000 ($26,000). He jokes that family members educated to a higher level than him "now respect me a lot... because I am the most successful". "It's the only thing I know how to do. So painting is my life," Ategwa told the BBC. "At times when I'm angry, painting calms me down." He never formally trained as an artist, and says he has used the same bold approach to colour since the age of seven. Although his works feel like immediate portraits of bustling city life, Ategwa told BBC Focus on Africa that they're filtered to an extent by memory and imagination. "All of them are inside my head, because they're things that I see every day going to my workshop." "I do a sketch first before I start painting," Ategwa says of his technique. Many are imposing in size - one of his recent works is more than 2 metres tall and 4 metres wide. Walking around Douala, "you see many things like markets, shops, hairdressing salons," Ategwa says. There are lots of sounds too, including "influences from Congolese music and Ivory Coast. You hear that everywhere." An exhibition of Ajarb Bernard Ategwa's work at London's Jack Bell Gallery has just ended, while new works will be presented at New York's Armory Show in March. "I've not been to school, but I am a successful man today. My paintings are shown all over the world," Ategwa says. "Not everything is just about education, education, education. If you have a child and they love drawing, please allow them to do their drawing. "Allow [young people] to follow their passion." All images courtesy of Jack Bell Gallery

"पेंटिंग आलसी लोगों के लिए है", अजरब बर्नार्ड एटेगवा के पिता उन्हें बचपन में बताते थे। उनके स्कूल की किताबों में दिवास्वप्न देखना और डूडल करना अक्सर उन्हें एक लड़के के रूप में डांटा जाता था। लेकिन कैमरून के कलाकार, अब 30, बीबीसी को बताते हैं कि उन्हें आखिरी हंसी मिली।


Creating Cold

Summary: The story of the men who changed our lives forever by cooling us down.

This is an immersive story told through text, images and video, best viewed on an up-to-date browser. BBC News App users click here. Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox.

उन लोगों की कहानी जिन्होंने हमें ठंडा करके हमारे जीवन को हमेशा के लिए बदल दिया।


World's largest working water wheel gets £250k makeover

Summary: A maintenance project on the world's largest working water wheel in the Isle of Man has been completed, Manx National Heritage (MNH) has said.

The works on the 72ft (22m) diameter Laxey wheel, also called the Lady Isabella, included painting, masonry and timber repairs and cleaning. Director Edmund Southworth said it will "ensure the integrity of the national landmark for future generations." Designed by Victorian engineer Robert Casement, it was completed in 1854. It was used to run pumping machinery to bail water from the local mine and used water from Glen Mooar to power the wheel. It was last painted in 2004 for its 150th anniversary. The site, owned by the Isle of Man government and maintained by MNH, will reopen to the public on 28 March.

मैनक्स नेशनल हेरिटेज (एम. एन. एच.) ने कहा है कि आइल ऑफ मैन में दुनिया के सबसे बड़े कार्यशील जल चक्र पर एक रखरखाव परियोजना पूरी हो गई है।


End of QE is whimper not bang

Summary: As the Fed Reserve ends quantitative easing, those who prophesied that these trillions of dollars of debt purchases would spark uncontrollable inflation have been proved wrong. But QE could still prove toxic.

Robert PestonEconomics editor The most striking thing about quantitative easing (QE), the unprecedented massive purchases of debt by the central banks of the big rich developed countries, and especially by the US Federal Reserve, is how anti-climactic it has all been. When QE started at the end of 2008, many were the voices warning that the economy of the world was heading into dangerous uncharted territory. Confidence in the credibility of the dollar and sterling would surely be shattered. Inflation would take off - and, whisper it softly, we could even find ourselves facing 1920s-style hyperinflation. Well, on the day the US Federal Reserve brings to a close this intriguing chapter in the long and not always distinguished history of central banking, by ceasing its exceptional purchases of bonds, it may be fair to say that QE has all been a bit dull - or 50 shades of grey, without any sex. The proponents of QE will say that without QE, the US and UK economies would have been even weaker than they would otherwise have been - and we might have experienced pernicious deflation, or intractable falling prices that would have provided businesses and households with a powerful incentive to defer purchases, and thus would have turned recession into vicious depression. Boosted assets And in encouraging investors to take the cash they received from central banks in the rich stagnating West and pump it into higher-return bonds and assets in emerging economies, maybe global growth received a bit of a fillip. But proving any counterfactual in the complex system that is the global economy is well nigh impossible. We simply don't know the precise impact of the Fed having bought, since the end of 2008, about $3.5 trillion of US government debt and bonds created out of home loans or mortgages. That said. we have probably learned two things. First, that if there has been inflation, it has been in asset prices, rather than in items of everyday consumer expenditure. The market price of the purchased bonds has been increased. And investors who received all those hundreds of billions of dollars from the Fed, pumped that money into shares and property and even the bonds of other countries, from India to Canada. Now some of that effect was wanted and desired by the Fed. By increasing demand for bonds created out of mortgages, for example, the Fed encouraged the supply of homeloans and cut their prices - thus sparking a revival in the US housing market, a market so desperately important to consumer confidence and the strength of the American economy. And by boosting share prices, the cost of capital was cut for businesses, and should have stimulated investment by them - although what has been profoundly depressing, some would say, is the extent to which businesses have continued to buy and cancel their own shares, even when capital is so cheap, rather than investing in expanded productive capacity. So some of this rise in asset prices was probably not benign. A part of it may be a bubble, waiting to be pricked - as and when, hypothetically speaking, investors started to fear that governments or households would struggle to ever repay debts, if economic growth in the long term turned out to be very anaemic. Because what has been really striking about QE is that it was popularly dubbed as money creation, but it hasn't really been that. If it had been proper money creation, with cash going into the pockets of people or the coffers of businesses, it might have sparked serious and substantial increases in economic activity, which would have led to much bigger investment in real productive capital. And in those circumstances, the underlying growth rate of the UK and US economies might have increased meaningfully. But in today's economy, especially in the UK and Europe, money creation is much more about how much commercial banks lend than how many bonds are bought from investors by central banks. The connection between QE and either the supply of bank credit or the demand for bank credit is tenuous. That is not to say there is no connection. But the evidence of the UK, for example, is that £375bn of quantitative easing did nothing to stop banks shrinking their balance sheets: banks had a too-powerful incentive to shrink and strengthen themselves after the great crash of 2008; businesses and consumers were too fed up to borrow, even with the stimulus of cheap credit. The rebuilding of the credit-creation machinery may have been helped in the US by QE - which provided a more benign markets backdrop for the painful process of consumers writing off excessive debts and banks taking the associated huge losses. That is one important reason why the US economy has grown more strongly since the debacle of 2008 than the UK's - where there has been no comparable reduction in the absolute size of household debts. But the fundamental problem with QE is that the money created by central banks leaked out all over the place, and ended up having all sorts of unexpected and unwanted effects. When launched it was billed as a big, bold and imaginative way of restarting the global economy after the 2008 crash. It probably helped prevent the Great Recession being deeper and longer. But by inflating the price of assets beyond what could be justified by the underlying strength of the economy, it may sown the seeds of the next great markets disaster.

जैसा कि फेड रिजर्व ने मात्रात्मक सहजता को समाप्त कर दिया है, जिन लोगों ने भविष्यवाणी की थी कि इन खरबों डॉलर की ऋण खरीद से अनियंत्रित मुद्रास्फीति बढ़ेगी, वे गलत साबित हुए हैं। लेकिन क्यूई अभी भी विषाक्त साबित हो सकता है।


Hendon stabbing: Man charged with Elize Stevens murder

Summary: A man has been accused of murdering a woman who was stabbed to death at a home in north-west London.

Elize Linda Stevens, 50, was found at the home off the Great North Way, Hendon at about 10:20 GMT on Saturday and died at the scene. Ian Levy, 54 of Lime Court, Great North Way, has been charged with her murder. He will appear at Willesden Magistrates' Court later. Detectives said they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the death.

उत्तर-पश्चिम लंदन में एक व्यक्ति पर एक महिला की हत्या का आरोप लगाया गया है, जिसकी चाकू मारकर हत्या कर दी गई थी।


The Bangladesh poor selling organs to pay debts

Summary: Kalai, like many other villages in Bangladesh, appears a rural idyll at first sight. But several villagers here have resorted to selling organs to pay back microcredit loans that were meant to lift them out of poverty. Journalist Sophie Cousins reports on an alarming consequence of the microfinance revolution.

Green rice paddies surround the dusty, narrow road to the heart of Kalai, a village six hours north of Dhaka, in Bangladesh's Jotpurhat district. Children play naked, hanging off stringy bits of bamboo that hold up the makeshift hut they live in. They, like millions of other rural Bangladeshis, grow up facing a life of hardship. In an attempt to alleviate poverty, countless numbers take on debt with microcredit lenders, only to find themselves in a difficult situation when they are unable to repay the loan. Some have even turned to selling their organs as a last resort to repay the loans and escape the vicious cycle of poverty. The idea of selling organs is not new and those in poverty throughout South Asia have resorted to it for years. But what is less known, is that more people are turning to the trade because of feeling under pressure to pay back microcredit lenders. These lenders were originally set up to help lift people out of poverty by offering small loans to people who do not qualify for traditional banking credit, to encourage entrepreneurship and empower women. Selling a kidney Mohammad Akhtar Alam, 33, bears a 15-inch scar on his stomach where he had a kidney removed. The organ removal - which is illegal in Bangladesh unless the organ is being given to a spouse or family member - combined with the inadequate post-operative care he received, has left him partially paralysed, with only one eye working and unable to do any heavy lifting. To earn money, he runs a small shop in the village that sells rice, flour and the occasional sweet treat. A couple of years ago Mr Alam's income from driving a van was not enough to make the weekly loan repayments he was required to make from up to eight different non-governmental organisations (NGOs) which lend microcredit. "One day [a man] rode in my van and asked me why I was doing this," he recalls. "I told him that I was very poor and that I had loans from seven or eight NGOs. I owed about 100,000 taka [$1,442; £900] and I could not return the money to the NGOs. I used to try and sell furniture and things for cooking to try to repay the money." Mr Alam had got caught in a web of loans in which he first borrowed money from one NGO and, when he was unable to pay it off, he borrowed from other NGOs. His passenger worked as a middleman between organ seller and recipient and persuaded him to sell a kidney, promising 400,000 taka ($6,360; £4,000). Seventeen days later, Mr Alam says he returned home from a private hospital in Dhaka, barely alive and carrying only a fraction of the money he was promised. "I agreed to sell my kidney because I couldn't return the money to the NGOs. As we are poor and helpless, that is why we are bound to do this. I regret it," he says. Mohammad Moqarram Hossen, also from Kalai, is another victim. "I took the decision to return the money I borrowed from NGOs," he says as he reveals the scar he has been left following an operation in India to remove his kidney. "The doctor told me there was no risk but now I can't do any heavy work. I can't work." How many loans? Microcredit, hailed as a saviour for millions, aims to break the cycle of poverty by stimulating income-generating activities through providing collateral-free loans. But its repayment structure and the apparent inability of microfinance institutions to determine whether borrowers have multiple loans with other institutions rarely come under scrutiny. Consequently, it can create a vicious cycle in which borrowers borrow money from other NGOs to repay existing loans, leaving many unable to repay and some to take extreme measures such as selling organs to make repayments. Professor Monir Moniruzzaman from the Department of Anthropology at Michigan State University has been researching the organ trade in Bangladesh for 12 years and says some people feel they are left with no choice but to sell a body part. "A lot of people's debt from NGOs has spiralled out of control. Because they cannot repay the loans, there is only one way for people to get out and that is to sell their kidney," he says. His research into Bangladesh's organ trade reveals that of the 33 kidney sellers he interviewed, some had sold their organs due to feeling under pressure to repay loans. He alleges that NGO officials, from organisations such as Grameen Bank and BRAC, among others, pressure people into repaying loans by sitting all day long at the defaulter's house, verbal harassment and threatening to file a police case. "One of the sellers mentioned that he left his village for about a year for not being able to face the NGO officials," Professor Moniruzzaman says. "The social and economic pressures from NGOs was unbearable so he decided to sell his kidney to pay off his loan." Grameen Bank denies harassment or applying any such pressure. It points out that it has never lodged a case against a borrower for failing to pay a loan. "Our approach does not require that," Mohammed Shahjahan, the bank's acting managing director, told the BBC. He says that because Grameen does not impose any penalty for failure to repay debts and because borrowers are free to reschedule their loans at any point there is no pressure. "Most borrowers have savings in their accounts more than or equivalent to at least 75% of their loan amount. As a result they are not in a 'distress' situation at any point for payment of their instalments," he says. And Mohammad Ariful Hoq, an analyst at BRAC, one of the largest development organisations in the world, says repayments for their clients are "not a very big issue" - their interest rate is 27%; Grameen's maximum interest rate is 20%. BRAC denies pressuring borrowers or that there could be any link between microcredit and organ trafficking. "In our work that doesn't happen because we don't create any extra pressure on our borrowers," Mr Hoq says. Throughout the microfinance sector, interest is calculated on the declining balance - which means that rather than charging interest on the original loan amount it is charged only on the amount of money that remains in the borrower's hands as the loan is repaid. Mr Hoq does admit that one-third of their 4.3 million borrowers have multiple loans: "You'll find people who are taking three loans from different organisations. There is a 30% overlap for micro-finance institutes in Bangladesh." However he says there is no systematic way to check if borrowers have loans with other institutions so lenders are unable to determine a borrower's risk or their level of debt. BRAC says that one method they use is to knock on a neighbour's door and ask them about their friend's economic situation. Grameen Bank says that it also has checks to see if borrowers have multiple loans. But analysts maintain that in practice such checks are very difficult to carry out and it is far from certain that banks are always able to get an accurate assessment of a borrower's credit history. Liver removed And recent research says the industry's loan repayment structure combined with the infrequent incomes of rural Bangladeshis can cause problems. The Institute of Developing Economies in Japan showed that some households were taking risky measures such as selling assets and borrowing from loan sharks in order to maintain a clean record of repayment to be assured future access to microcredit. Research from one body which loans money to microcredit agencies in Bangladesh found in studies between 2006-2007 that only 7% of micro-borrowers were able to rise about the poverty line. Nevertheless, a study earlier this year by the World Bank found that the benefits of borrowing outweighed the accumulated debt. And the Microcredit Summit Campaign believes microcredit lifted 10 million Bangladeshis out of poverty between 1990 and 2008. But as the demand for human organs continues to facilitate an illegal black market in Bangladesh, members of poor rural communities will continue to be lured by false promises of a better life. Mohammad Mehedi Hasan, 24, from Molamgari village, not far from Kalai, didn't know what a liver was when he was manipulated into believing that removing part of it for 700,000 taka ($9,690; £6,000) would be a "noble act" that would save the life of a Singaporean man. "I have been left without knowing how much of my liver was taken out," he says as he explains how he was transported to Dhaka for an underground operation at a private clinic. "After the operation I raced home and after two days I got the news that the patient had died. "I thought that I would be OK after I had part of my liver removed but sometimes I have pain in my chest and I have to urinate more than 50 or 60 times a day." Mr Hasan received 150,000 taka ($2,046; £1,280) and says he was forced to sell his family home. Prof Moniruzzaman says the implications of organ trafficking are devastating. "There is no safeguard as to where the organs are coming from and how safe they are, and on the other hand, the seller's health deteriorates after the operation. That has a huge impact on their earning capacity because they cannot go back to their old physically demanding jobs." There is no doubt that microcredit has empowered millions around the world. But as the polarisation between rich and poor increases, experts say those most impoverished will take on more debt - sometimes resorting to measures as desperate as selling their organs. The men of Kalai wish they had known better.

बांग्लादेश के कई अन्य गाँवों की तरह कलाई भी पहली नजर में एक ग्रामीण कहानी लगती है। लेकिन यहाँ के कई ग्रामीणों ने उन्हें गरीबी से बाहर निकालने के लिए दिए गए लघु ऋण का भुगतान करने के लिए अंगों को बेचने का सहारा लिया है। पत्रकार सोफी कजिन्स ने लघु वित्त क्रांति के एक खतरनाक परिणाम के बारे में बताया।


London Mayoral candidate Boris Johnson: Medics for Tube

Summary: Plans to deploy medics on the Tube network have been announced.

Conservative London mayor Boris Johnson, who is standing for re-election in May, said he hoped this would mean reduced delays if passengers were taken ill. It is part of a £20m scheme Mr Johnson says will make the Tube 30% more reliable if he is re-elected. A spokesman for Labour mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone said it was " too little, too late". A trial will see dedicated medical officers and extra first aid training for British Transport Police on the network. Mr Johnson is proposing a £20m investment fund to improve the network's reliability. It would cover the cost of advanced signal monitoring technology to predict when maintenance on the lines is needed. Mr Johnson said: "Millions of Londoners use the Underground every day and we need to harness every single method we can to run the slickest possible operation on the Tube. "I believe that by doing so we could cut Tube delays by 30% by 2015. "Without the long-term investment we are making, there would be a real danger that the Tube would have taken one step forward then five steps backwards." A spokesman for Ken Livingstone said: "Londoners long ago gave up on the mayor's ability to get a grip of the Tube. "Boris Johnson has redefined the definition of what constitutes delays on the Tube in order to fiddle the figures on tube performance." Jenny Jones, the Green Party mayoral candidate, said: "There are some good ideas here, but they shouldn't be implemented at the cost of basic passenger welfare. "People using public transport in London want security and help on a daily basis, not just for extreme emergencies." Liberal Democrat candidate Brian Paddick is yet to comment.

ट्यूब नेटवर्क पर चिकित्साकर्मियों को तैनात करने की योजना की घोषणा की गई है।


Are Scotland's dairy farmers getting a fair deal yet?

Summary: Milk is something that most of us drink or consume in some form. Yet dairy farmers have long complained that they have not always got a fair deal when it comes to price. So what is the reality of life as a Scottish dairy farmer at the moment? This is one farmer's view.

By Gillian SharpeBBC Scotland Light filters through wooden-slatted walls into a shed housing bull calves which are now nearing six months old. Some are munching busily on straw, others are drinking with great gusto. This is Nether Affleck Farm, near Lanark. It has 320 cows split between two units. Although it is a dairy farm these calves will be sold for beef. It is a useful sideline. Outdoor living "This is the farm I was brought up on and we've another farm nearby," says Jim Baird, the farmer here. "I enjoy the outdoor life, enjoy working with animals and that was always where I wanted to be." This has been a family farm. The capital costs involved in setting up a dairy farm mean that it is a difficult business to be able to afford to buy into. The need for economies of scale have also led to changes, with most farms now specialising in a particular area instead of having a bit of beef or cereal as well. Mr Baird thinks back to a time last year when dairy farmers staged a series of protests and blockades against declining payments. "We had a situation where we had two really big price cuts in quick succession," he recalls. "At a time when farmers were feeling the pinch with the weather and they were feeling the pinch with a lot of costs coming on to their businesses and I think that whole frustration just boiled over." "Most dairy farmers did take part," he continues, "and there were protests at Lanark near here and there was a huge turnout at these demonstrations." 'Early days' The end result was an agreement between dairy farmers and processing firms on a voluntary code of practice for future contracts for milk supplies. Mr Baird says it is "early days" but if the code brings a "bit more transparency and trust to the supply chain that's got to be good". A muddy walk across the farm yard, tailed by a very dirty but enthusiastic farm dog, brings us to the cubicle shed. At this time of day, mid-morning, it is full of cows eating their fill. There are about 190 cubicles in all. Each animal has their own cubicle, their own place where they can lie on a foam mattress. The infrastructure in this shed has represented a major investment over the past five years. The more time the cows can spend lying down, chewing the cud, the more productive they are likely to be. "It's like every other business," says Mr Baird, "some people are able to drive their businesses forwards and other people are struggling." "I think because of the impact of the weather, because feed costs have gone up by something like 25-30%, at the moment I think, probably across the board, most businesses are feeling the pressure on margins more than they've ever done. "I hear that there are more businesses really feeling the pinch and now's not a good time to be going to your bank manager to be looking for an extension to your overdraft because they're not as easy to deal with as they once were." Business first His daughter has expressed an interest in the farm and has already started working in the business. In general he feels the sector needs to attract more young people. He may enjoy the life but it has to make business sense. "My alarm goes at 4 o'clock every morning so you have to be turning a quid at the end of the day. "The whole supply chain's got to work better. "At the moment everyone's taking too short term a perspective, the processors, the retailers and the farmers and we need to realise that this industry's got to be there for the long term and everyone's got to be able to get a reasonable share and a reasonable profit out of it and be able to reinvest in their businesses and that's where a lot of farmers are struggling at the moment." You can hear more about the wider milk industry in Business Scotland on Saturday 9 March at 06:00 and repeated on Sunday 10 March at 10:00. It is also available on BBC iplayer.

दूध एक ऐसी चीज है जिसे हम में से ज्यादातर लोग किसी न किसी रूप में पीते या खाते हैं। फिर भी डेयरी किसानों ने लंबे समय से शिकायत की है कि जब कीमत की बात आती है तो उन्हें हमेशा उचित सौदा नहीं मिलता है। तो इस समय एक स्कॉटिश डेयरी किसान के रूप में जीवन की वास्तविकता क्या है? यह एक किसान का विचार है।


How did this massive Lotto rollover happen?

Summary: The jackpot in Saturday's Lotto is expected to rise to almost £60m - the biggest figure since it started 21 years ago. Changes to the number of balls in the draw have made a win statistically less likely, but what's actually happened since they were brought in?

By Justin ParkinsonBBC News Magazine It could be you, but most likely it won't be. If anyone's lucky enough to guess six correct numbers in this Saturday's Lotto draw, their personal wealth could instantly increase by £60m - on a par with the fortune of Bee Gees singer Barry Gibb, according to the Sunday Times Rich List. But hitting the jackpot's less likely than it once was. In October last year, Lotto operator Camelot added 10 extra balls to the draws taking place on Wednesdays and Saturdays, taking the number from 49 to 59. This pushed out the odds of picking six correct numbers from one in 14 million to one in 45 million. So naturally, the layman's assumption would be that they would be less likely to become a millionaire. One national newspaper called the change a "rip-off", but Camelot said it was making the game "more exciting". It also made the promise that it would create at least one millionaire per draw - something not guaranteed before. It started the Lotto Millionaire Raffle. This assigned everyone buying a £2 Lotto ticket a separate raffle ticket, consisting of a colour and eight numbers - chosen by a computer, rather than the customer - to be entered in a separate draw. So, how have the changes worked in practice? Since the first amended-format draw took place on 10 October last year, there have been just four winners of the jackpot. That's over the course of 26 draws. The jackpot prizes were £14.6m on 21 October, £4.3m on 24 October, £15.8m on 11 November and £4.3m on 14 November. None of these were shared. These winners, in addition to the 26 raffle winners, mean 30 people - or syndicates - have won at least £1m each in the draws since the October changes. Camelot also notes there have been 37 other £1m winners thanks to a number of one-off draws. How does this compare with the equivalent period a year earlier? In the 26 draws that took place from 11 October 2014 to 7 January 2015, there were 24 winners - some taking the full jackpot, some a share. The highest jackpot was £15m, shared five ways between contestants who had guessed five main balls plus the bonus ball correctly. This happened because, under the old system, the jackpot could only be rolled over a maximum of four times. So, in this equivalent period the Lotto gave out 26 prizes worth £1m or more. Therefore, four more millionaires have been created under the new system, but there have been 20 fewer jackpot wins. Camelot says its combined changes - the extra balls and the Millionaire Raffle - mean the overall chance of becoming a millionaire have gone from one in 14 million to one in 10 million for every ticket you buy. But, if you're now more likely to win a million pounds because of the raffle rather than the numbers you choose for Lotto itself, isn't the whole thing now very different? "I don't think the lottery has changed in nature because of this," says Katie Chicot, a mathematics lecturer at the Open University. "I think a good chunk of players use the Lucky Dip numbers anyway (random numbers selected for you)." "I said when these changes came in that they'd increase the chance of rollovers, and that's happened," says Rob Mastrodomenico, of the Royal Statistical Society. He argues that the introduction of the raffle will be largely for the benefit of regular Lotto players, rather than those who buy tickets only when the jackpot inflates to huge proportions. The odds of winning the raffle will vary from draw to draw based on the number of people buying tickets and therefore being in the raffle. If five million people buy tickets, each ticket has a one in five million chance of winning the £1m raffle prize - if 10 million do, the odds are one in 10 million. "We don't ever really know the number of people entering, but it's likely to be lower when the prize is smaller," says Mastrodomenico. "I expect that, after the £60m jackpot is given away, the odds of winning the raffle will be far better next week, simply due to the fact fewer people will buy tickets and hence fewer will be in the raffle." The current rollover stops on Saturday, with the jackpot having to be won by someone or shared. This is because, under Camelot's amended rules, once the jackpot passes £50m - which it did for Wednesday's draw - it can only be rolled over one more time. If there is no winner, the prize goes to the person/people who have chosen five balls and the bonus ball. If no one gets this, the jackpot is shared among those who get five balls - and so on until the money is given out. So Lotto winnings are effectively capped at a lower level than, say, EuroMillions (capped at 190 million euros), in which Colin and Chris Weir from Largs won £161m in 2011. The estimated jackpot for the US Powerball lottery is currently $675m (£464m). Still, the Lotto prize - the largest in the National Lottery's 21-year history - has created huge interest. Its website crashed a couple of hours before Wednesday's draw, such was the demand for tickets. "It's a PR dream for Camelot," says Pete Davies, director of RMS public relations. "It's word of mouth which is driving sales of tickets and this is the cheapest and most effective form of marketing there is. "The fact there's been a huge decrease in the chance of winning the jackpot from about 14 million to one to 45 million, which has led to negative PR, makes no difference. The bigger the jackpot gets, the more people want to enter. This exponential growth drives people into a frenzy." For those not winning or sharing the jackpot on Saturday, it's comforting to remember the words of grandfather John Baxter, who won £1m on EuroMillions in 2013. "I went to the supermarket and splashed out a tenner on new slippers," he said. "I couldn't think of anything else I really needed." And anyone who guesses two numbers correctly under the reformed Lotto system gets to enter the next draw for free, and experience the excitement all over again. Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox.

शनिवार के लोट्टो में जैकपॉट के लगभग 60 मिलियन पाउंड तक बढ़ने की उम्मीद है-21 साल पहले शुरू होने के बाद से यह सबसे बड़ा आंकड़ा है। ड्रॉ में गेंदों की संख्या में बदलाव ने सांख्यिकीय रूप से जीत की संभावना को कम कर दिया है, लेकिन जब से उन्हें लाया गया है तब से वास्तव में क्या हुआ है?


The village aiming to create a white utopia

Summary: A village in Hungary has banned the wearing of Muslim dress and the call to prayer. By leading what it calls "the war against Muslim culture", it hopes to attract other Christian Europeans who object to multiculturalism in their own countries.

By Erika BenkeBBC Victoria Derbyshire programme "We primarily welcome people from western Europe - people who wouldn't like to live in a multicultural society," Laszlo Toroczkai tells the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme. "We wouldn't like to attract Muslims to the village." Mr Toroczkai is mayor of Asotthalom, a remote village in the southern Hungarian plains, situated around two hours from the capital Budapest. "It's very important for the village to preserve its traditions. If large numbers of Muslims arrived here, they would not be able to integrate into the Christian community. "We can see large Muslim communities in western Europe that haven't been able to integrate - and we don't want to have the same experience here," he says. "I'd like Europe to belong to Europeans, Asia to belong to Asians and Africa to belong to Africans. Simple as that." The refugee crisis has contributed to a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment across large parts of Europe and Hungary is no exception. At the height of the migrant crisis, as many as 10,000 people crossed the border - just minutes from Asotthalom - from Serbia into Hungary each day. The mayor has capitalised on the anxiety about such an influx and introduced by-laws of questionable legality. The new local legislation bans the wearing of Muslim dress like the hijab and the call to prayer and also outlaws public displays of affection by gay people. Changes are also being brought in to prevent the building of mosques, despite there being only two Muslims living there currently. Many lawyers think the laws contravene the Hungarian constitution and, as part of a general review of new local legislation, the government will rule on them in mid-February. The laws, however, have support among many members of the community. One resident, Eniko Undreiner, said it was "really scary" to see "masses of migrants walking through the village" last year as they crossed into the country. "I spend a lot of time at home alone with my young kids - yes, there were times when I was scared," she says. The two Muslims living in the village did not want to speak to the BBC for fear of attracting attention to themselves. However, one member of the village said they were "fully integrated" within the community. "They don't provoke anyone. They don't wear the niqab, they don't harass people... I know them personally. We get on just fine." The mayor hopes the village can be at the forefront of what he calls "the war against Muslim culture". He has employed round-the-clock border patrols, which he thinks will attract white Europeans to live there. The Knights Templar International has been advertising homes in Asotthalom on its Facebook page. Its members include Nick Griffin, former leader of the British National Party, and the party's former treasurer Jim Dowson. "I have been contacted by Jim Dowson," Mr Toroczkai explains. "He came to Asotthalom a few times as a private individual, just to have a look. Nick Griffin also came with him." Mr Griffin has previously described Hungary as "a place to get away from the hell that is about to break loose in western Europe". "When it all goes terribly wrong in the West, more will move to Hungary and Hungary needs those people." We have asked Knights Templar International and Nick Griffin for an interview, but neither responded. Mr Toroczkai says he would be happy to welcome people from England. Asked if he is trying to establish a white supremacist village, Mr Toroczkai replies: "I didn't use the word white. But because we are a white, European, Christian population, we want to stay [like] this. "If we were black we'd want to stay a black village. "But this is a fact and we want to preserve this fact." The Victoria Derbyshire programme is broadcast on weekdays between 09:00 and 11:00 on BBC Two and the BBC News channel.

हंगरी के एक गाँव ने मुस्लिम पोशाक पहनने और प्रार्थना के आह्वान पर प्रतिबंध लगा दिया है। इसे "मुस्लिम संस्कृति के खिलाफ युद्ध" कहते हुए, यह अन्य ईसाई यूरोपीय लोगों को आकर्षित करने की उम्मीद करता है जो अपने ही देशों में बहुसंस्कृतिवाद का विरोध करते हैं।


HP Lovecraft: The man who haunted horror fans

Summary: Fans have been marking the death of horror writer HP Lovecraft 75 years ago. Unrecognised in his own lifetime, he has gone on to influence figures as diverse as Stephen King and Alan Moore, explains British horror writer Ramsey Campbell.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft brought the 20th Century horror story up to date, out of Victorian occultism into the realm of contemporary science without losing its sense of mystery. His earliest stories have their roots in the Gothic novel and in the short fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. Dagon, from 1917, is typical Lovecraft. The narrator is cast ashore on an island raised by an underwater earthquake and glimpses a giant survivor of the race which built a monolith there - froglike and fishlike, yet "damnably human". Lovecraft developed his own invented mythology, at least as influential on fantastic fiction as Tolkien's work. Most of it is set in a New England steeped in history and in hidden occult influences, although the monstrous creatures glimpsed by his characters are frequently from outer space rather than from any conventional hell. His fans have been adding to this body of myth for many years, and its central book of occult lore, the Necronomicon, has taken on a life of its own. Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1890, and died there in 1937. Except for a short-lived marriage which took him to New York, he always made Providence his home. In some ways he was a lonely figure, convinced of his own physical ugliness, but he corresponded with numerous friends, many of them writers of weird fiction - Robert Bloch of Psycho fame and Fritz Leiber were among them. He signed himself "Grandfather" to his younger correspondents, and as teenagers, Bloch and August Derleth benefited from his criticism when they began to sell stories to Weird Tales, the pulp magazine which published most of Lovecraft's work in the field. His criticism of his own work was harsher, and during the last years of his life he believed that almost all his tales were failures, not even worth preserving in book form. But since then he has emerged as the most influential horror writer of the 20th Century. In 1935 he wrote "Nothing is really typical of my efforts . . . I'm simply casting about for better ways to crystallise and capture certain strong impressions (involving the elements of time, the unknown, cause and effect, fear, scenic and architectural beauty, and other seemingly ill-assorted things) which persist in clamouring for expression." In the same letter he advised his correspondent to "avoid actually recognised myths such as vampirism, reincarnation, etc.", and praises writers he himself admires for creating "a sort of distinctive awe of their own". Much of his work seeks to convey a sense of breathless anticipation and of "dread suspense". The Call of Cthulhu (1926) blends science fiction and an invented occultism to communicate a sense of awe and terror and in particular the enormity of the unknown universe. It is wholly original and yet rooted in the work of authors Lovecraft admired, particularly the hints of other dimensions which English writer Algernon Blackwood conveys in The Willows (Lovecraft's favourite weird tale) and the complicated suggestive structure of Welsh author Arthur Machen's "Great God Pan". The Call of Cthulhu is the most famous tale of his invented mythos, which is itself a stage in Lovecraft's attempts to create a perfect form for his preoccupations and for the weird tale. The mythos was also meant to counteract the over-explanation and lack of imaginative suggestiveness he found in conventional occult fiction. The following year Lovecraft wrote The Colour out of Space, which he later regarded as his best work. It tells the story of a strange meteorite that blights a farming community. "It was just a colour out of space", but it is Lovecraft's purest symbol, the strongest expression of his sense that the universe, and anything living out there in the dark of space or time, is indifferent to man. The Dunwich Horror (1928) is probably his most substantial fusion of science fiction and the occult, while The Whisperer in Darkness (1930) and At the Mountains of Madness (1931) show him to be moving closer to science fiction. In the latter pair, in fact, curiosity and exploration are overcoming terror. Even the aliens in Mountains of Madness are scientists, no longer incomprehensibly monstrous. In the last years of his life he wrote several fine tales of terror - The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Thing on the Doorstep, The Haunter of the Dark - but his best late story, the awe-inspiring "Shadow out of Time", displeased him so much that he posted the handwritten manuscript to colleague August Derleth without even keeping a copy. "My work dissatisfies me extremely," he wrote to a correspondent, "& of late I have destroyed much more than I have saved." In March 1937 he died of intestinal cancer after a winter of agony. The last things he wrote were a long unfinished letter and, a scientist to the end, observations on his own symptoms. Perhaps few people other than readers of Weird Tales would ever have heard of him if it hadn't been for Derleth and Donald Wandrei, who created Arkham House to publish his collected works and showed the world that there was a market for horror in hardback. Lovecraft has many imitators - I was one myself in my teens - but his more lasting influence is on writers who have adopted his methods to their own very individual ends. Stephen King has written Lovecraftian tales, but they're unmistakably King - Jerusalem's Lot gives his famous fictitious town a Lovecraftian history, and Crouch End even transforms that area of London into a lair of mythos monsters. Works by Thomas Ligotti and TED Klein, Poppy Z Brite and Alan Moore are equally personal, but still inspired by Lovecraft. In striving to write fiction which would make positive use both of his talents and of his limitations, in particular his difficulties with creating characters, Lovecraft developed near-perfect structures for the horror story. His determination to convey awe gives his tales a quality too seldom found. His work unites the British and American traditions of horror fiction - it unites the realistic and the fantastic, the personal and the cosmic, the occult and the scientific.

प्रशंसक 75 साल पहले हॉरर लेखक एच. पी. लवक्राफ्ट की मृत्यु को चिह्नित कर रहे हैं। अपने जीवनकाल में अपरिचित, उन्होंने स्टीफन किंग और एलन मूर जैसी विविध हस्तियों को प्रभावित किया है, ब्रिटिश हॉरर लेखक रैमसे कैंपबेल बताते हैं।