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http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/teams/s/st_mirren/8116975.stm | St Mirren have signed striker Michael Higdon on a two-year deal.
The 25-year-old was out of contract after two seasons with Scottish Premier League rivals Falkirk.
He scored 17 goals during his stay with the Bairns, including the winning goal at Inverness on the final day of last season to avoid relegation.
The Liverpool-born forward was used as a substitute that day, and came off the bench again as Falkirk lost the Scottish Cup final against Rangers.
Higdon started his career at Crewe Alexandra, scoring 10 goals in four seasons with The Railwaymen.
A powerful centre forward who provides an aerial threat, his time at Falkirk began with a bang and two goals in the opening league win of the season against Gretna. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3052433.stm | A man from the US state of Arkansas has regained consciousness after spending 19 years in a coma.
Terry Wallis, 39, had been at the centre of an accident in July 1984 when a car he was travelling in plunged into a creek.
The driver of the vehicle, Mr Wallis' friend, died.
Mr Wallis was discovered by rescuers a day later, but was comatose.
He has many historic events to catch up with, including the election of his state governor, Bill Clinton, to the presidency of the United States, his time in office and his handover to George W Bush.
He startled his family by speaking suddenly almost a month ago.
"He started out with 'Mom' and surprised her and then it was 'Pepsi' and then it was 'milk,'" Alesha Badgley, Stone County Nursing and Rehabilitation Centre social director, said.
"And now it's anything he wants to say."
Mr Wallis' father, Jerry Wallis, said his son uttered his first word. "He has improved every day since," he said.
Terry Wallis' wife, Sandi, said the whole family had missed his company.
"It's been hard dealing with it. It's been hard realising the man I married can't be there," she said.
Mr Wallis also has a daughter, Amber, who was born shortly before the accident took place.
She is now 19 and Mr Wallis - who was left a quadriplegic as a result of the crash - has said he wants to walk again, for her.
His mother, Angilee Wallis, called her son's return to consciousness "a miracle".
"I couldn't tell you my first thought, I just fell over on the floor," she said.
Doctors at the rehabilitation centre said Mr Wallis' recovery might be due in part to his family taking him out at weekends and special occasions.
"The doctor said that's why he remembers things; we might have kept his mind going," Sandi Wallis said. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-41714898 | A 17-year-old man has died in a single-vehicle collision in Neath Port Talbot.
The passenger of a red Mini died in the incident at 03:45 BST on Saturday at the junction of Church Road and Church Place in Seven Sisters.
South Wales Police are investigating and have appealed for "anyone who may have seen the collision or who saw the vehicle being driven" before the crash.
Two fire crews attended the scene and Church Road was closed in both directions while officers investigated. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8046491.stm | Some air transport firms used to fly aid to African conflict zones are also involved in arms shipments and drug trafficking, according to a study.
The Swedish-based research found 90% of air carriers it identified involved in arms-trafficking were also used by aid groups and peacekeepers.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) said the worst case was Sudan.
All air firms there listed for illicit arms transfers were also used for aid.
Carriers identified by Sipri had also been used by UN agencies, the EU, Nato member states and non-governmental organisations.
The report singled out a number of African carriers as being named in arms trafficking reports.
Sipri said air transportation had played a key role in destabilising parts of Africa through the transfer of small arms and had helped smuggle drugs.
Some of the relief groups mentioned in the report, including the International Committee of the Red Cross and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), said it was difficult to know what goods have previously been transported in planes.
Gerald Massis, director-general for logistics at MSF, told AP news agency: "It's like you hire a taxi. After your trip you don't know what they do afterwards."
Sipri's report called for agencies to deny contracts to air transport firms engaged in arms flights.
But it also admitted that sometimes the only companies willing to fly aid to conflict zones were the same ones that also transported arms shipments. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/scot_cups/8494466.stm | Rangers booked their place in the Co-operative Insurance Cup final against St Mirren with victory over St Johnstone at snow-covered Hampden Park.
Steven Davis put the Ibrox side in front with a close-range shot after his initial effort was blocked.
Experienced midfielder Lee McCulloch doubled Rangers' advantage through a low drive from the edge of the box.
Saints keeper Graeme Smith saved Steven Naismith's penalty as Rangers carved out late opportunities on the break.
Both sides took to the field wearing their change strip in front of a disappointing crowd at Hampden Park - perhaps affected by the snow that continued to fall heavily throughout the first half.
Rangers switched goalkeepers with Neil Alexander coming in for Allan McGregor, while Steven Smith replaced Sasa Papac at left-back.
St Johnstone manager Derek McInnes changed tactics and personnel for the match, with Kenny Deuchar relegated to the bench and on-loan Cillian Sheridan operating as a lone striker.
Nacho Novo, often a thorn in St Johnstone's side, carved out the first opportunity but shot straight at Smith from the inside-right channel.
Dave Mackay spared Smith's blushes after Novo sprang the offside trap and raced past the onrushing keeper, only to see his net-bound shot cleared off the line by the former Livingston man.
Murray Davidson passed up a golden chance for St Johnstone when he flashed a header wide from five yards following a Gary Irvine cross.
Davis should have put Rangers ahead after working a brilliant one-two with John Fleck before prodding the ball past Smith, but Irvine scrambled the ball off the line.
The Northern Ireland international made amends moments later, latching on to Novo's cross and lashing the ball home at the second attempt from close range.
David Weir almost put the ball into his own net as Liam Craig's free-kick flew into the Rangers box and the Ibrox captain looked a relieved man as the ball went just over the bar.
However, Rangers were getting a grip of the game in the midfield and McCulloch doubled their advantage following fine build-up play with a low, driven shot from the edge of the box that slipped under the body of Smith.
McInnes brought on Steven Milne at half-time and the move almost paid instant dividends as the ball cannoned off the forward in the Rangers box and fell to Sheridan, but his effort was saved easily by Neil Alexander.
The Perth side were showing more in the way of attacking intent. But, despite plenty of possession in the Rangers half, they were finding it hard to create any clear opportunities.
Rangers replaced Kyle Lafferty and Novo with Andrew Little and Steven Naismith and the former Kilmarnock forward almost scored with his first touch, but his close-range shot flew over the bar.
Naismith was handed another chance to score when he went down under a challenge from Irvine and referee Dougie McDonald pointed to the spot, but Smith dived low to his left to save the penalty.
Rangers looked dangerous and John Fleck should really have put the tie beyond doubt but left himself too tight an angle after taking it past Smith.
Naismith burst through the Saints rearguard once again as Rangers took control. But, after going down in the box again, his low effort was cleared off the line again by Irvine.
90:00+4:03 The referee brings the game to a close.
90:00+0:51 Gary Irvine delivers the ball, Danny Wilson makes a clearance.
89:37 Steven Davis delivers the ball from the free kick right-footed from left wing, Graham Gartland manages to make a clearance.
89:37 Booking The referee cautions Gary Irvine for unsporting behaviour.
89:28 Free kick awarded for an unfair challenge on Steven Naismith by Gary Irvine.
88:46 Free kick awarded for a foul by Graham Gartland on Steven Naismith. Lee McCulloch takes the direct free kick.
87:23 Andrew Little challenges Kevin Moon unfairly and gives away a free kick. Free kick taken by Daniel Grainger.
85:04 The ball is swung over by David MacKay, clearance by Danny Wilson.
84:16 Corner taken left-footed by Daniel Grainger from the right by-line, save made by Neil Alexander.
82:43 Shot from just outside the penalty box by Steven Milne misses to the left of the target.
81:55 Centre by Daniel Grainger, clearance made by David Weir.
81:33 Centre by Peter MacDonald, Jody Morris takes a shot. Clearance by David Weir.
81:15 Free kick awarded for a foul by Steven Smith on Chris Millar. Direct free kick taken by David MacKay.
80:39 Corner taken by Steven Davis from the left by-line to the near post, Kevin Moon manages to make a clearance.
79:21 John Fleck crosses the ball, Daniel Grainger manages to make a clearance.
79:02 Short corner taken by Steven Davis, Kevin Thomson produces a cross, David MacKay makes a clearance.
78:48 Shot by John Fleck. David MacKay gets a block in.
78:07 Steven Davis takes a shot. Graham Gartland gets a block in.
77:58 John Fleck sends in a cross.
77:19 Chris Millar sends in a cross.
76:03 Steven Smith takes a shot. Blocked by David MacKay.
75:15 Free kick awarded for an unfair challenge on Steven Smith by Chris Millar. Steven Whittaker restarts play with the free kick.
74:38 Substitution Kevin Moon comes on in place of Liam Craig.
72:10 Steven Davis produces a cross, Headed effort from inside the penalty area by Andrew Little misses to the right of the target.
71:48 A cross is delivered by John Fleck.
71:31 Centre by John Fleck, David MacKay manages to make a clearance.
70:49 David MacKay produces a cross, save made by Neil Alexander.
69:47 Steven Davis takes the inswinging corner, clearance made by David MacKay.
68:47 Penalty taken by Steven Naismith saved by Graeme Smith. Rangers 2-0 St Johnstone.
68:47 Steven Whittaker sends in a cross, Gary Irvine challenges Steven Naismith unfairly and gives away a Penalty.
68:05 Free kick awarded for an unfair challenge on Neil Alexander by Graham Gartland. Neil Alexander takes the free kick.
67:47 Centre by Daniel Grainger.
66:36 Substitution Peter MacDonald replaces Cillian Sheridan.
65:36 The ball is crossed by Steven Naismith.
65:13 A cross is delivered by Gary Irvine, clearance made by Steven Whittaker.
64:17 Liam Craig takes a shot from 20 yards. Save by Neil Alexander.
63:47 Steven Milne fouled by John Fleck, the ref awards a free kick. Gary Irvine takes the free kick.
62:35 Steven Whittaker produces a cross, Close range effort by Steven Naismith goes over the bar.
61:46 Substitution (Rangers) makes a substitution, with Steven Naismith coming on for Nacho Novo.
61:39 The ball is crossed by Steven Davis, blocked by Daniel Grainger.
59:53 Substitution Andrew Little is brought on as a substitute for Kyle Lafferty.
59:53 Booking Kevin Thomson booked for unsporting behaviour.
57:43 The ball is crossed by Daniel Grainger, clearance by David Weir.
57:35 Murray Davidson produces a cross, clearance by Steven Whittaker.
56:53 The ball is crossed by Daniel Grainger.
56:43 The ball is delivered by Jody Morris.
56:04 Free kick awarded for an unfair challenge on Chris Millar by John Fleck. The free kick is swung in left-footed by Liam Craig, David Weir manages to make a clearance.
55:22 Daniel Grainger crosses the ball, Header from deep inside the area by Cillian Sheridan goes harmlessly over the crossbar.
54:08 The ball is swung over by Jody Morris.
53:01 Chris Millar crosses the ball, David Weir makes a clearance.
52:50 Chris Millar crosses the ball, Danny Wilson makes a clearance.
51:12 Kyle Lafferty gives away a free kick for an unfair challenge on David MacKay. The free kick is delivered left-footed by Liam Craig from right wing, David Weir makes a clearance.
48:12 Steven Smith concedes a free kick for a foul on Chris Millar. Free kick crossed left-footed by Liam Craig, Danny Wilson manages to make a clearance.
47:46 Kyle Lafferty challenges Graham Gartland unfairly and gives away a free kick. Daniel Grainger takes the free kick.
46:37 Nacho Novo fouled by Liam Craig, the ref awards a free kick. Free kick taken by Steven Whittaker.
46:04 Free kick awarded for a foul by Lee McCulloch on Murray Davidson. The free kick is delivered right-footed by Gary Irvine from right channel, Kyle Lafferty makes a clearance.
45:35 Cillian Sheridan takes a shot. Save by Neil Alexander.
45:01 Substitution Filipe Morais goes off and Steven Milne comes on.
45:00+0:07 It is the end of the first-half.
42:11 Gary Irvine challenges John Fleck unfairly and gives away a free kick. John Fleck takes the direct free kick.
40:54 The assistant referee flags for offside against Kyle Lafferty. Graeme Smith takes the indirect free kick.
40:05 Centre by Steven Davis, save by Graeme Smith.
38:54 Nacho Novo is ruled offside. Daniel Grainger takes the indirect free kick.
38:37 The assistant referee flags for offside against Nacho Novo. Graeme Smith restarts play with the free kick.
38:00 Liam Craig takes a inswinging corner from the left by-line played to the near post, Murray Davidson takes a shot. Save by Neil Alexander.
36:57 Steven Whittaker provided the assist for the goal.
36:57 GOAL - Lee McCulloch:Rangers 2 - 0 St Johnstone Lee McCulloch fires in a goal from long range low into the middle of the goal. Rangers 2-0 St Johnstone.
35:37 Jody Morris has an effort at goal from outside the box which goes wide right of the goal.
35:10 Filipe Morais takes the inswinging corner, clearance made by Steven Smith.
34:36 Unfair challenge on Liam Craig by Steven Davis results in a free kick. The free kick is delivered right-footed by Filipe Morais from left wing, David Weir manages to make a clearance.
32:46 Filipe Morais takes a shot. Save made by Neil Alexander.
32:33 Chris Millar fouled by Lee McCulloch, the ref awards a free kick. Chris Millar takes the free kick.
32:21 The ball is crossed by Gary Irvine, clearance made by Kevin Thomson.
32:10 The ball is swung over by Daniel Grainger, clearance made by David Weir.
31:46 Centre by Liam Craig, blocked by Danny Wilson.
31:14 The ball is delivered by Steven Davis, clearance made by Graham Gartland.
30:43 David MacKay challenges Kyle Lafferty unfairly and gives away a free kick. Steven Davis restarts play with the free kick.
29:16 Jody Morris produces a cross, Murray Davidson concedes a free kick for a foul on Lee McCulloch. Free kick taken by Neil Alexander.
28:47 Corner taken by Liam Craig from the right by-line to the near post, clearance by John Fleck.
28:41 Filipe Morais produces a cross, blocked by Steven Smith.
25:34 The assist for the goal came from Nacho Novo.
25:34 GOAL - Steven Davis:Rangers 1 - 0 St Johnstone Steven Davis gets on the score sheet with a goal from close in to the top left corner of the goal. Rangers 1-0 St Johnstone.
24:40 Steven Davis takes a shot. Clearance by Chris Millar.
23:07 The ball is swung over by Kevin Thomson.
22:53 Shot by Kyle Lafferty. Blocked by Graham Gartland.
22:28 Filipe Morais takes a shot. Kevin Thomson gets a block in.
22:06 Corner taken left-footed by Liam Craig, Neil Alexander makes a save.
21:58 The ball is swung over by Liam Craig, Steven Whittaker gets a block in.
21:42 Filipe Morais crosses the ball, clearance made by Lee McCulloch.
19:22 Free kick awarded for a foul by Kyle Lafferty on Graham Gartland. Graeme Smith takes the direct free kick.
17:59 Cillian Sheridan has a lobbed shot. Save made by Neil Alexander.
16:04 Gary Irvine delivers the ball, Murray Davidson produces a header from deep inside the six-yard box which goes wide of the right-hand upright.
14:47 The ball is crossed by Liam Craig, Neil Alexander makes a save.
14:07 Liam Craig challenges Nacho Novo unfairly and gives away a free kick. Steven Davis crosses the ball from the free kick right-footed from right wing, David MacKay manages to make a clearance.
11:46 The ball is swung over by Nacho Novo, clearance by Gary Irvine.
8:36 Centre by Gary Irvine, Foul by Cillian Sheridan on Neil Alexander, free kick awarded. Free kick taken by Neil Alexander.
8:07 Drilled right-footed shot by Filipe Morais. Clearance by Lee McCulloch.
7:41 Jody Morris decides to take a short corner.
6:56 Free kick awarded for an unfair challenge on Cillian Sheridan by Danny Wilson. Liam Craig delivers the ball from the free kick left-footed from right channel.
5:03 John Fleck fouled by Gary Irvine, the ref awards a free kick. Danny Wilson takes the free kick.
4:36 Nacho Novo takes a shot. David MacKay makes a clearance.
4:21 The ball is sent over by Filipe Morais, clearance made by David Weir.
2:45 Shot by Jody Morris from just outside the area goes over the net.
0:45 Nacho Novo produces a cross, save made by Graeme Smith. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-23618743 | Zimbabwe's Electoral Commission has said that nearly 305,000 voters were turned away during last week's elections, which the opposition has said were rigged.
These are the first such official figures - the number of rejected voters has been a major complaint.
It also said 207,000 voters were "assisted" to cast their ballot - another alleged source of fraud.
President Robert Mugabe gained 938,085 more votes than his main rival.
Morgan Tsvangirai, who took 34% of the vote, has alleged massive fraud.
His Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party is planning to file court applications against the results of the presidential and parliamentary votes.
Mr Mugabe, 89, won with 61% of the presidential vote and his Zanu-PF gained a two-thirds majority in parliament, with 160 seats compared to 49 for the MDC.
African and regional monitors praised the poll for being peaceful but noted some irregularities. Western observers were not invited to witness the 31 July vote.
But a local observer group, the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (Zesn) and its network of 7,000 observers, has said that about one million voters were "systematically disenfranchised" by being omitted from the voters' roll or turned away.
The electoral roll has come in for criticism for having duplicate names and the names of dead Zimbabweans - the MDC says it has found 838,000 entries with the same name, address and date of birth but different ID number, 350,000 people who are more than 85 years old and 109,000 aged over 100.
The BBC's Brian Hungwe in the capital, Harare, says the figures of those turned away from polling station represents 8.7% of votes cast.
According to the electoral commission's statistics, the largest number of turned away voters - 64,483 - were in Harare.
The MDC has stronger support in towns and cities and Zesn says voters had most trouble registering in urban areas.
In its assessment of the election, the African Union observer mission noted that it was concerned by the high number of assisted voters nationwide.
The MDC says that "assisted voters" - supposedly the illiterate or infirm - were made to vote for Zanu-PF.
The Zec figures show that assisted voting happened more in the rural areas, Zanu-PF's stronghold, where, according to Zesn, 99.97% of voters were registered.
Our reporter says such figures are shocking as the UN regards Zimbabwe as the most literate country in Africa and the number of assisted voters represents 5.9% of votes cast.
An MDC lawyer told the BBC on Thursday that the party's headquarters in Harare were surrounded by police and there were fears the office would be raided.
The party, which had been in a coalition with Zanu-PF for four years following disputed elections in 2008, is expected file its appeals within the seven days of the results, which were announced on Saturday 3 August. This could be as late as next Wednesday as the MDC's legal team says weekends are not counted and next Monday and Tuesday are public holidays.
The court then has 14 days to deliver a judgement. If the court upholds the results, Mr Mugabe must be sworn in within 48 hours of the ruling.
A week after the election, Mr Mugabe dismissed criticism of the polls and lashed out at Western countries for their concerns about the vote.
"We are very happy that we have dealt the enemy a blow, and the enemy is not Tsvangirai," AFP news agency quoted the president as saying.
"Tsvangirai is a mere part of the enemy. The enemy is he who is behind Tsvangirai. Who is behind the MDC? The British and their allies. Those are the ones who were the real enemies."
Mr Mugabe has long accused the British of trying to oust him from power in its former colony because of his policy of seizing white-owned land. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-20068465 | Blackta is a new play at the Young Vic Theatre in London investigating what it is to be a black actor in modern Britain. In a tough profession, do black performers face an even harder time finding work on screen and on stage than white actors and actresses?
It's six years since the actor Nathaniel Martello-White graduated from The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada) - one of the most highly regarded drama schools anywhere.
Since then he's done well enough, getting roles on TV in programmes such as Law & Order: UK and appearing on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company. But like many actors a few years out from training, he knows how hard his chosen career can be.
Having begun writing screenplays, his first work is now being put on at the Young Vic in London in its 140-seat studio space.
Blackta has an all-black cast and focuses on the high and lows of being a black actor. It's partly a satire on an audition process familiar to all performers, but the playwright thinks black people face specific problems.
"I was having a coffee with another black actor," he says. "He had a supporting role in a big series on TV but he kept saying to me he felt like a glorified production driver as opposed to a properly developed character.
"Hearing that term got me thinking and it's how the play started."
Controversially, the four main characters have names based on their complexion - Brown, Black, Yellow and Dull Brown.
It's a sensitive area, seldom addressed on stage or screen: how are someone's life chances influenced by exactly how black they are?
Martello-White knows audiences may feel uncomfortable with the question whatever their colour, but it's one he was keen to address.
"It links back heavily to slavery: they call it post-colonial syndrome," he says. "Sometimes in the black community the whiter your features are, the more attractive you're seen to be.
"At my secondary school there was a dark-skinned black guy who had green eyes so he was hailed as a god. Not everyone thinks that way but some people do."
Film companies won't take a gamble on casting a black lead because they think white people won't go and see it.
The actor loosely based the play on himself and three other black actors he graduated from Rada with.
"One was mixed-race, one was a very dark-skinned Nigerian guy and so on. And we all had different views as to how we were perceived by casting directors and others in the industry," he says.
"The dark-skinned guy said if there was an African project or something about slavery he'd get a call. And the mixed-race guy said if there's an inter-racial relationship on TV he'd get called in.
"But a brown-skinned actor might get more work in America because over there that's who the leading-men tend to be - look at Denzel Washington or Will Smith. I'm not saying all this is 100% true but these were the conversations we were having."
Martello-White believes one of the problems is British television's fondness for period drama: "If you're black you're crossed off the list straight away. But why couldn't there be a major black character in Downton Abbey?
"If there was a famous writer of colour who turned up looking great in a tux, someone like Adrian Lester could be terrific in the role. Film companies won't take a gamble on casting a black lead because they think white people won't go and see it - we need to press the boundaries."
The actor thinks the US is way ahead of the UK in casting black performers - with many black British actors left wondering if they'd be better off going to Los Angeles and trying for a career in a culture which appears to offer richer pickings.
"People [in the UK] who were doing pretty well - actors like Idris Elba (Prometheus), David Harewood (Homeland) and Lennie James (Colombiana)- went over to the US and did amazingly. The irony is they came back and were hailed by the British industry."
Martello-White says he's also considered going to LA for the pilot season, like so many British actors before him.
However there are also many white Brits who've fought for roles in the States, which has a TV and movie industry hugely bigger than Britain's.
Jack Davenport and Andrew Lincoln are two recent examples who found success in hit shows Smash and The Walking Dead respectively.
"Being an actor can be tough in Britain whoever you are," he says. "It's a small world and I'm not claiming the frustrations only apply to black people."
"But I don't want to give up the fight over here. I want to create my own genre as a writer. Blackta is only a start: I'm a firm believer that if something is good and original and provocative, then people will go and see it."
Blackta is at the Young Vic from 26 October - 17 November.
Is it ever OK for TV dramas to be all-white? |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/health-12576596/cut-back-on-red-meat-government-advisers-warn | Eating less red meat to reduce the risk of bowel cancer is the latest advice from the Department of Health.
Scientists are recommending we consume no more than 70g per day, the equivalent of two slices of roast meat.
Alison Tedstone is the Director of Nutrition at the Department of Health, she discussed the health risks with BBC Breakfast. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/6084262.stm | "I vividly remember the Stanley knife and the blood pouring on to the floor. Come to think of it, I remember the au pair's screams too."
With alcoholism threatening to ruin his football career and marriage, Paul McGrath slashed his wrists as he sat in his bedroom with his young son in November 1989.
McGrath says it was a "cry for help", unlike later suicide attempts, and a few days later he played in midfield for Aston Villa against Everton.
He wore large sweatbands to cover the scars on his wrists and starred in a 6-2 win.
This stark contrast between his assurance and confidence on the pitch and his insecurity off it recurs throughout McGrath's recently published autobiography Back From The Brink.
"I always felt comfortable on a football pitch," McGrath, looking impeccable in a navy suit and crisp white shirt, says.
"That was the time I wanted to shine. It is wonderful to hear your name being chanted in the stadium, you cannot buy that.
"I didn't have a nerve in my body when I played football. The nervousness came in when I wasn't playing football, that was when I had problems.
"I always shied away from the publicity. I didn't like microphones, I didn't like TV, I didn't like any of the hassles. I just didn't like the hype that surrounded football. The drinking seemed to ease the pressures that I felt."
McGrath is often described as the Republic of Ireland's most popular sportsman and is still adored by fans of Manchester United and Villa.
The defender was renowned for having what his United and Republic team-mate Kevin Moran describes as "an overdrive".
"It is what very few players have - the ability to be running at high pace with someone and, all of a sudden, it's like a fifth gear kicks in," says Moran.
McGrath won 83 caps for the Republic of Ireland, played in two World Cups and was the Professional Footballers' Association's player of the year in 1993.
Yet he has revealed that he was racked by feelings of insecurity and inferiority throughout his football career.
He grew up in an orphanage in Dublin because his mother had been afraid to take a black child back home to her father.
It was a tough and unforgiving environment and the 46-year-old says many of his problems stem from this time.
"If you are told you are no good often enough as a kid, you start to believe it," he states. "And I was growing up in Dublin when there weren't a lot of black kids around. It meant I had this awful shyness."
A football club was not the best environment in which to discuss such issues.
"If you are out for a session with the boys, you are not going to talk to them about these underlying problems," he adds.
"And you are not going to say 'I am feeling a little bit insecure and shy and frightened and on edge'. You would get a good slapping off one of them.
"You would be loath to discuss it with footballers, I will tell you that."
Instead, he sought solace in the bottle. McGrath says Manchester United manager Ron Atkinson did not mind players drinking as long as they performed on a Saturday and the centre-half quickly became a fixture in the first team.
But Alex Ferguson replaced Big Ron at Old Trafford in 1986 and quickly made it clear he wanted a "football club and not a drinking club".
McGrath was subsequently sold to Villa in 1989 and it was shortly after this that he slashed his wrists.
Yet he says he harbours no ill feeling towards Ferguson and came to greatly like and respect him after leaving United.
"I hated Fergie at the time but I have come to understand what he did," says McGrath.
"In fact, I wish I had listened to him and changed my lifestyle. He has been nothing but kind to me since I left the club and has shown himself to be a really decent human being."
McGrath played the best football of his career during his seven years at Villa Park and was the club's player of the season for four straight years.
Yet alcoholism meant his private life continued to be torrid and troubled.
McGrath, who is still an athletic and imposing figure, says he has been sober for the last couple of months and is trying to rebuild his life.
Speaking softly but with purpose, he says: "I had been in Ireland wallowing in self-pity. Now it is a case of starting again and winning back the trust of people I have hurt along the way.
"I am far more confident that I can do something now. I am nearly 47 now and it is time to let that stuff from my childhood go and live my life."
He says he might even consider a career in coaching.
"People's ears would prick up because they would think I could never make a coach," he says.
"At the moment, it is just a matter of keeping my feet on the ground but after that I would not rule out anything." |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-25429242/schaft-robot-practices-its-paces-ahead-of-darpa-challenge | Schaft robot practices its paces Jump to media player Japanese start-up Schaft has developed a new kind of motor technology to help its effort to win the Darpa Robotics Challenge.
Robots run wild in London Jump to media player A robot inspired by a salamander and a cheetah cub are among the exhibits in a three-day festival of robots inspired by nature at London's Science Museum.
Robot cow-herder a hit with farmers Jump to media player Researchers at the University of Sydney are testing a robot to herd cows. Early results show that cattle have adapted to it well and farmers are keen on the idea.
Schaft is a humanoid robot developed by a spin-off from the University of Tokyo's Jouhou System Kougaku lab.
It makes use of a new high-voltage liquid-cooled motor technology that uses a capacitor, rather a battery, for power. Its engineers say this lets its arms move and pivot at higher speeds than would otherwise be possible, in effect giving it stronger "muscles".
The Japanese team has been tipped to be the "one to beat" in the Pentagon's Darpa Robotics Challenge by one of its rivals, Virginia Tech. Seventeen teams have entered robots into the competition in which they will face a series of challenges to see how they could help tackle a disaster scenario.
But whatever the outcome of the contest, the start-up's future looks secure as it was recently taken over by Google to form part of the search firm's new robotics division. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7824255.stm | Chinese intellectuals have signed an open letter calling for a boycott of state television news programmes.
The letter says China's Central Television (CCTV) has turned its news and historical drama series into propaganda to brainwash its audience.
The author of the damning letter told the BBC that the action should at least serve as a health warning to the susceptible public.
The authorities have been alarmed by the latest development.
They tend to accuse the Western media of biased coverage of China.
But this open letter accuses CCTV of systematic bias in its news coverage.
The letter - signed by more than 20 academics and lawyers - lists six broad categories of bias and brainwashing.
It says the state TV monopoly has ignored many stories of social unrest and riots, and whitewashed serious events like the recent milk contamination scandal.
The letter's author, Ling Cangzhou, told the BBC that its signatories were fed up with the positive spin on domestic news from the central TV station and the negative tone on international events.
He said that the letter should at least alert the public to the problem, though the state TV broadcaster is too pervasive to be boycotted effectively.
Media controls meant the letter had to be published on a US-based website, but it has been picked up widely by Chinese websites. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/north_yorkshire/4734994.stm | Campaigners have won a battle against plans to increase quarrying near an ancient monument in North Yorkshire.
They argued the area is of national archaeological importance. Councillors agreed and rejected the plans.
Tarmac said it would appeal against a decision to refuse its plans to quarry tonnes of sand and gravel at Ladybridge Farm, near Thornborough Henges.
The land could cope with the quarrying said Tarmac, adding it hoped factual evidence would prevail at its appeal.
North Yorkshire County councillors voted 6 to 3 to reject the application at a planning meeting on Tuesday.
Tarmac's estate manager Bob Nicholson said the decision threatened the livelihoods of more than 50 people and had serious implications for the supply of sand and gravel to the construction industry.
He said excavations on the site had found limited evidence of prehistoric activity and it did not meet the criteria to qualify as being of national importance.
"Our proposal for Ladybridge, which actually moves quarrying further away from the henges than our current operation, poses absolutely no threat to the ancient monument, which is protected by law.
"Yet throughout this anti-quarrying campaign, protestors have, through misleading statements and images, claimed that the monument is threatened.
"We maintain that our application is both justified and reasonable and we will mount a robust case for its approval at appeal, when we hope that factual evidence will prevail over mythical invention."
The henges are believed to be one of Britain's largest ritual gathering places from the Neolithic period.
Local campaign group Timewatch collected more than 10,000 signatures for a petition against the scheme, which it said would contribute to the permanent loss of nationally important archaeology.
US-based conservation group the Landmarks Foundation also voiced its concern at the quarry proposals, describing them as a tragedy.
Councillor John Fletcher, who chaired the planning meeting, said: "Because of the well articulated arguments from all sides it was a very hard decision to make.
"However, the right decision was made."
Tarmac already has a quarry at Nosterfield, close to the ancient henges which consist of three earthworks built in a line running north-south for about a mile.
Workers at the Nosterfield Quarry and local building firms sent in 80 letters and a 350-signature petition arguing that their livelihoods depended on the application's approval. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6225070.stm | Photographic retailer Jessops plans to close 81 High Street stores, about a quarter in total, and cut 550 jobs.
It said that 47 of the stores overlap with other Jessops shops in the same area, and three will be relocated, leaving the retailer with 234 stores.
It is part of a strategic review which aims to save the Leicester firm £15m.
The company has been suffering from strong internet and supermarket competition in the digital camera and equipment markets.
Jessops' shares gained 7% to 19.25 pence in London on the news.
In March shares plunged almost 70% after the photographic retailer issued its second profits warning in a month.
Commenting on latest moves, executive chairman David Adams, said: "The strategy allows us to re-position Jessops as a true multi-channel retailer, building on our core strengths in the digital imaging market place."
He continued: "The board is confident that Jessops will deliver a significant turnaround in its financial performance."
The company said that its pre-tax loss was £8.5m in the 26 weeks to 1 April, compared with a profit of £5.1m a year earlier.
Like-for-like sales fell 12.9% in the 12 weeks to 17 June, while total sales dipped 9.8%.
Jessops, which also annouced that it had extended a loan agreement, expects its full-year pretax loss, before refinancing and restructuring, to be close to £6.5m. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/mid_/4610138.stm | The widow of former Plaid Cymru leader Gwynfor Evans has died at the age of 86, nine months after her husband.
Rhiannon Evans, who had Parkinson's Disease, died on Friday at her home in Pencarreg, Carmarthenshire.
Her family said she had worked tirelessly to support her husband during his years in politics and Plaid president Dafydd Iwan called her "a tower of strength".
Mr Evans, who was also Plaid Cymru's first MP, died last April, aged 92.
One of Mr and Mrs Evans' seven grown-up children, the Reverend Guto Prys ap Gwynfor, said his mother was not just a supportive wife, but a caring mother with a "wonderful sense of humour".
He added: "She was a member of Plaid Cymru before my father and was regarded by him as the embodiment of Welshness."
Mrs Evans was born in Liverpool, although her family was originally from Meirionnydd and Anglesey.
"She supported my father in everything he did and was a person of great conviction," said Reverend ap Gwynfor.
"My mother also had a wonderful sense of humour and she would use it to bring my father back down to earth when he was in one of his idealistic modes."
Mr Iwan said: "Rhiannon Evans was a tower of strength in Gwynfor Evans' life, as well as a great woman in her own right, and it is with great sadness we learn of her passing, after suffering a long illness bravely and without complaint.
"The great love that was so evident between Rhiannon and Gwynfor and their children and grand-children was a constant inspiration to all who knew them, and the dignified manner with which she bore her long illness was beyond words.
"Wales has lost one of her bravest and most dedicated women, and our sympathy extends to all the family in their hiraeth." |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23054641 | The art industry is one of the last creative industries to make the digital move - but, with more people buying art online without ever seeing it in real life, it could be that times are already changing.
If visitors to London want to see contemporary art, the first port of call has traditionally been the Tate Modern. In 2012, a record 5.3 million visitors journeyed through its doors.
More people in the UK visit art galleries and museums than attend Premier League football matches but record numbers are flocking to the internet too. And buying art is the becoming an industry norm.
Media captionArtists "like nothing better than manipulating reality so we can't tell the difference between real and fake"
In an industry worth an estimated £40bn, that's quite a big business to tap into.
The online art market is already estimated to be growing by 20% each year.
"We sell more art in a month online than most bricks-and-mortar galleries do in a year," says Rebecca Wilson, a director of Saatchi Gallery.
"It's because of a huge international audience, a lot of work and a team of curators making sure very good work rises to the fore."
More art is now being viewed online than as originals and, with more and more galleries showcasing online rather than on walls, is the importance of a physical gallery being lost?
"Even before online, a majority of their sales, even in the high-end galleries happened at art fairs, not in the galleries," says Jonas Almgren, chief executive of art website Artfinder.
"The physical space is diminishing in importance.
"Contrary to looking at the White Cubes of the world - that all start opening more gallery spaces - many of the next tier of galleries actually shut down or shrunk down their gallery space."
Yet it's not only the middle-market that is using the web to attract buyers, and Artfinder is by no means the only way to find art.
Website Artsy is currently exclusively promoting original Andy Warhol pieces, an idea very unlikely a few years ago.
While to some, $20,000 (£13,000) may seem a snip for a Polaroid photo, it's certainly a move away from traditional ways of art being displayed and the idea that only cheap posters can be sold online.
The big surprise is the amount of art sold "sight unseen". This means the art is sold from a traditional gallery without the buyer ever having seen the art in real life.
According to analysis from insurers Hiscox, about 90% of galleries regularly sell art to clients on the basis of a digital image only.
"Art is so much better live than online which is, of course, something we struggle to overcome," says Mr Almgren.
"Once you buy it though, art collection is addictive. The magic moment happens when you unwrap it and see it rather than in a gallery."
And the stereotype of younger people being more tech-savvy is, according to Hiscox, simply not true. Most collectors aged over 65 had bought art directly online.
"There's a long-standing elitist idea in the art world," says Ms Wilson.
"When online art started, people were unsure about buying shoes online, so the idea that you could buy art online was unheard of. That's totally shifted.
"I feel it's a parallel universe to the very traditional gallery and museum structure which has dominated the art world. It is causing a big shift but I don't think that one will eradicate the other."
And the upper echelons of the art world still do not seem to be willing to embrace change as quickly.
"The high-end is 200 galleries, 2,000 artists and maybe 2,000 buyers," says Mr Almgren.
"That's a large part of the market because it's very top heavy but it's not the largest part. It's much broader."
But art is an industry not always filled with success stories.
US art site 20x200 is currently offline and trying to secure new funding. Keen to point out they are "not gone, just resting", the risks for the hundreds of online art ventures started in recent years is clear to see.
With all this competition from online, big retailers and even the increasing number of restaurants and cafes selling art, could it be the case that the physical gallery ever vanishes?
"I don't think so," says Mr Almgren.
"There's going to be even more need for people to explain what really is good."
And with the volume of art now available to browse, curating is a difficult challenge. As an example, Saatchi Online currently has about 200,000 different works for sale.
"We really want to make online like a proper gallery, it's just online," says Ms Wilson.
"I look at every single piece of art uploaded every day. It's a major job but incredibly exciting and we work with other curators to bridge that gap between the online and gallery world."
If that gap is to be bridged, the art community must be happier moving even further away from the physical gallery towards high-resolution images.
"Art is still way behind fashion, where the change has largely already happened," says Mr Almgren.
"I think it will move online faster. Of the people that bought in April , 14% have already bought again in a month and a half. It's just remarkable and I can't quite explain it." |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-47332684 | The police and crime commissioner for North Yorkshire has said she may not stand for re-election after failing to be selected as the Tory candidate.
Julia Mulligan received less than half of the party vote in Tadcaster on Thursday to be automatically selected for the 2020 elections.
Mrs Mulligan said she was disappointed with the outcome.
She said she had always done what was "right for the public", but had "ruffled feathers".
Mrs Mulligan, who is automatically entitled to be on the shortlist, said she "didn't know" whether she would stand.
"There is a new process starting in May, and we will see where that gets us," she said.
"It doesn't matter about me at the end of the day - I can pick myself up and move on."
Mrs Mulligan, who has been police and crime commissioner (PCC) since 2012, took over North Yorkshire's fire and rescue service last year.
"In this job you have to make really difficult decisions and there are things I have done which have been really unpopular," Mrs Mulligan said.
"Taking on the governance of the fire service - a lot of local councillors did not like that."
According to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, some suggested there would be nothing to stop another candidate from running with a pledge to remove the fire service governance from the commissioner's role.
Others said Mrs Mulligan had failed to communicate with them.
Some also said they did not feel the vote was representative of North Yorkshire Conservatives as only about 100 people voted - about 1% of the party's membership. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-41445101/labour-and-conservative-party-merchandise-for-sale | Who would buy a Corbyn toby jug? Jump to media player Corbyn fans have bought record amounts of scarves, mugs, t-shirts, and shaving foam.
'For the many, not the few' - Corbyn Jump to media player Highlights of Jeremy Corbyn's speech at the Labour Party conference.
Ed Miliband gets new job... as quizmaster Jump to media player What does a former party leader do after their turn in the political spotlight?
Can Labour supporters have Tory friends? Jump to media player Can Labour delegates reach across the political divide and be friends with a Tory?
Labour year: Images of Jeremy Corbyn Jump to media player BBC archive looks back over some of highlights for Jeremy Corbyn and his party in the last 12 months.
Corbyn's full speech to conference Jump to media player Giving his third conference speech as leader, Jeremy Corbyn spoke tor nearly 75 minutes at the Brighton gathering.
At Labour's conference, Corbyn-mania was everywhere including the shop where the party claimed there had been record-breaking sales of goods, such scarves, mugs, t-shirts, and shaving foam.
And Conservatives are getting ready to sell Theresa May badges and Rees-Mogg mugs at their Manchester venue.
Daily Politics presenter Sarah Smith heard from Timothy Chattell, who runs the Conservative Cavalier website, and Alexander Kirk who runs the Corbyn Jug website, asking why are people buying these souvenirs. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/special_report/1999/09/99/china_50/chiang.htm | Chiang Kai Shek took part in the 1911 Kuomintang revolution against the imperial Qing Dynasty. He became military leader of the nationalists in 1917, gaining political prominence after the death of leader Sun Yat Sen. Kuomintang policies of co-operation with the Chinese Communists went on until 1927, when Chiang initiated civil war. Becoming nationalist leader from 1928, he re-joined forces with the Communists to fight Japan in World War II and was briefly elected the first president under a liberalised constitution in 1948. But the Red Army eventually drove him and the Kuomintang from the mainland to the island of Taiwan when Mao Zedong consolidated his power in 1950. There, he became president of a nationalist government and continued to promise re-conquest of the Chinese mainland until his death in 1975. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-middle-east-23339788/coptic-christian-church-destroyed-by-egypt-looters | Egypt looters destroy church Jump to media player Ahmed Maher reports from the village of Dalga, near the central Egyptian city of Minya, where Coptic Christians say they are victims of a backlash by pro-Morsi supporters.
Christians attacked in Egypt Jump to media player There have been a number of attacks on Christians in Egypt reported since Mohammed Morsi was forced from office. One Christian man told BBC News about his experience.
Egypt: interim government sworn in Jump to media player A new interim Egyptian government has been sworn in, with army chief Gen Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who led the ousting of Mohammed Morsi, becoming deputy PM as well as defence minister.
There has been a string of attacks on Christians in different provinces in Egypt since Mohammed Morsi was forced from office, with Coptic Christians saying they have been singled out for campaigning against him.
In the village of Dalga, near the central Egyptian city of Minya, a church was looted and destroyed and the priest, Father Ayoub Youssef, had to flee for his life.
He said Muslim neighbours helped his escape from the roof of his house.
''Had it not been for them, I would have been lynched," he said.
Ahmed Maher reports from Egypt. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-middle-east-41951237/saudi-arabia-and-iran-will-they-go-to-war | Saudi Crown Prince: Five things to know Jump to media player Here's how the heir to the throne in Saudi Arabia is shaping the ultra-conservative kingdom.
Tillerson: 'No Qatar-Saudi talks yet' Jump to media player US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson plays down Saudi Arabia-Qatar talks, saying they are not ready.
Saudi Arabia and Iran: Will they go to war?
The BBC's Paul Adams examines the fragile relationship between the two regional rivals. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-latin-america-39079979/ex-inmate-returns-to-bolivian-prison-that-welcomed-tourists | Two decades ago, high-living inmates at Bolivia's chaotic San Pedro Prison ran tours for foreign backpackers.
The story was told in a best-selling book, Marching Powder.
Now the book's protagonist - a former inmate - and its author have reunited to film a documentary there, Wildlands. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/rugby_union/9181295.stm | Scotland's wait for a first win over New Zealand continues after the All Blacks inflicted a record defeat at Murrayfield on the hosts.
The home side took the lead through a Dan Parks penalty, but the visitors replied with seven converted tries.
Hosea Gear and Mils Muliaina scored twice, while Dan Carter, Conrad Smith and Andy Ellis also crossed the line.
Carter converted five tries to finish with 15 points, while replacement Stephen Donald kicked four points.
Scotland went into the match full of confidence after beating Ireland in Dublin and securing a 2-0 series win in Argentina this year.
However, not many expected Andy Robinson's men to extend their four-match unbeaten run with a victory over the world's number one-ranked side and so it proved, although the ease with which southern hemisphere behemoths secured the win was surprising.
The All Blacks selected a strong line-up in anticipation of a closely-fought encounter, but such was their total dominance they could allow the faultless Carter and captain Richie McCaw to leave the field before an hour had elapsed on the clock.
New Zealand were devastating on the counter-attack but were never really tested as Scotland disappointed in defence and created little during a match which, after the break, stagnated into a series of training-ground drills.
Robinson's men took an early lead as Parks earned three points with a 10m kick after the visitors were penalised for not releasing, but that was as good as it got for a team hoping for a first win in 28 matches against their opponents.
New Zealand went on to score 14 points in two ruthless minutes as the home side's defence wilted in the face of a direct and powerful backline.
Sonny Bill Williams impressed and the league convert's cute off-load put Gear under the sticks for the winger's first try of the evening.
The visitors then counter-attacked to devastating effect to put the supporting Carter through for a try which he converted.
Muliaina then scored under the post, with a Carter conversion making it 21-3.
The result was left in no doubt when the outside-half put Gear into space and the winger ghosted through an absent defence for his third try in as many Tests.
The Murrayfield crowd were dumbstruck as New Zealand went into the break 28-3 ahead without seeming to have broken sweat and their misery was compounded by an injury to Mike Blair.
Another lovely Williams flick from the back of his hand released Muliaina to glide into the corner for a simple try - his 31st in a joint-record 92nd Test.
Carter converted from the touchline and that proved to be the outside-half's final act as he left his stage, presumably to keep him fresh for next weekend's match against Ireland in Dublin as the All Blacks chase a third Grand Slam in five years.
McCaw soon followed as New Zealand made six changes before the hour.
I was very impressed with how Sonny Bill played - when pace and skilful offloads are injected into the attacking formula, there's not an awful lot that can be done!
The All Blacks went 42-3 ahead as they worked the ball wide for Smith to stroll over for another easy touchdown, converted by replacement Stephen Donald.
Andy Ellis scored the final try of the game but, in truth, it could have been any number of a swarming All Blacks.
Scotland's Max Evans, whose brother Thom suffered a career-ending broken neck against Wales last season, left the field on the stretcher and that seemed to encourage referee Dave Pearson to blow his whistle even though there was still time remaining on the clock.
Scotland: Southwell, R. Lamont, Evans, Morrison, S. Lamont, Parks, Blair, Jacobsen, Ford, Murray, Gray, Hamilton, Brown, Vernon, Barclay.
Replacements: Walker for R. Lamont (40), Jackson for Parks (67), Laidlaw for Blair (38), S. Lawson for Ford (65), Dickinson for Murray (65), Hines for Hamilton (40), Rennie for Brown (65).
New Zealand: Muliaina, Toeava, Smith, Williams, Gear, Carter, Cowan, Woodcock, Elliot, O. Franks, Thorn, Whitelock, Messam, McCaw, Read.
Replacements: Donald for Carter (51), Ellis for Cowan (58), Hore for Elliot (61), Afoa for O. Franks (54), Boric for Thorn (57), Braid for McCaw (57). |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4639731.stm | A religious protester has stabbed three people taking part in an annual gay pride parade in Jerusalem.
The attack happened as hundreds of scantily-clad revellers danced and kissed their way through the city.
Israeli police arrested a suspect, and the victims - a man and two women - were taken to hospital.
A Jerusalem court lifted a ban on the parade by the city council, which warned the event would be "provocative" and set off unrest.
Jewish, Muslim and Christian leaders in the city had protested against the march.
At the entrance to the city, protesters erected a banner that read "Welcome to Sodom", while opponents set off a stink bomb at the parade's starting point.
The march continued despite the violence.
"It took many years for Jerusalem to have the gay pride parade," participant Moshik Toledano, 39, told AP news agency, "but once it happens it makes no difference if the ultra-Orthodox come here and try to stop it." |
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40592247 | There are places where the surge of global tourism is starting to feel like a tidal wave.
Ancient cities around the shores of the Mediterranean and Adriatic are on the front line, their stone streets squeezed full of summer visitors as budget airlines and giant cruise ships unload ever-growing armies of tourists.
Take the Croatian city of Dubrovnik: a perfectly preserved historical miniature, carved from honey-coloured stone set in a sea of postcard blue.
Around 1,500 people live within the walls of its Old City, custodians of cultural treasures left by everyone from the Romans and the Ostrogoths to the Venetians and the Habsburgs.
On a busy day three modern cruise ships, each one the size of a floating apartment building, can disgorge five or six times that number of people into the city.
They join the throngs of tourists staying in local hotels and in rooms rented over the internet, in streets where almost every elegant stone house has been converted into a B&B.
Will Venice be loved to death?
The overall effect is Disneylandish - a sense that you meet no-one but other tourists or ice-cream sellers, tour guides, waiters, reception clerks and buskers who are there to keep the tourist wheels turning.
Mark Thomas, who edits The Dubrovnik Times, explains the phenomenon like this. "When I first got here, I'd stand back if I saw that people were taking photographs of each other. Now there are so many people that I know if I did that, I'd never get anywhere here."
Dubrovnik has a particular problem because its ancient appeal has now been bolstered by that most modern of phenomena - the HBO mini-series. The city, unchanged for centuries, provides the main locations for Game of Thrones.
Fans come on pilgrimages to visit the settings. One souvenir shop owner, who told me he doesn't watch the series himself, admitted he had Googled a couple of catchphrases to help attract customers.
"It does seem crazy," he admitted, "to stand here when it's 35 degrees, shouting that 'Winter is Coming'."
Dubrovnik is not alone in struggling to balance its need for tourists' money with the need to ensure that those tourists don't end up destroying the beauty they've come to see.
The tiny Italian island of Capri has warned that it could "explode" under the pressure of the trade that sees as many as 15,000 visitors a day travelling by boat from the mainland, to visit its once-idyllic streets and squares.
One local official told The Daily Telegraph: "You can't fit a litre-and-a-half into a litre pot."
Florence, Barcelona and some Greek islands like Santorini have suffered too, and it was perhaps Venice which experienced the problem first. Its population has been falling since the 1950s, effectively forced out by the hordes of cruise-ship visitors.
Tourism, of course, remains essentially a good thing and in the developed world we nearly all do it.
It means trade and cultural exchange and it's both a symbol of rising prosperity and a generator of future wealth.
Part of the "problem" is that travellers from traditional sources like the UK, Germany and the USA are increasingly being joined by the new middle classes of countries like Russia, China and India.
Add to that the issue of security, which means that many tourists feel safer in Europe than they do in alternative destinations like Tunisia, Turkey or Egypt, and it's hard to see the numbers falling any time soon.
It will fall to local governments in places like Dubrovnik and Capri and Venice to find a way of reducing those growing pressures.
For now, ideas like installing turnstiles on ancient squares and pedestrian traffic lights on crowded streets may sound rather fanciful.
But if that tourist tide keeps rising they might start to seem a little more tempting. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4451950.stm | Building a global information society that is fair, equitable, and accessible to everyone is a daunting challenge that is going to take years to achieve.
It certainly was not going to happen in just three days of discussions at this week's UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis, Tunisia.
Even if half of the world's population is online by 2015, who even knows that the web itself will look like, what kinds if speeds we will have, and even whether keyboards, monitors and grey boxes will exist outside of museums.
But the equalising force of a network which holds an unfathomable wealth of information, knowledge is something that should be as free and ubiquitous as the air we all share.
However, swathes of poorer nations still do not even have running water and electricity. Unesco figures suggest that 784.8 million adults over 15 cannot read or write, and just over two-thirds of those are women.
There are divides within the digital divide that jostle for priority in many countries.
The challenge is designing and making available technologies, not necessarily in the form of grey boxes, which can help everyone in the worlds take advantage of this vast cerebral network.
As the International Telecommunications Union secretary general Yoshio Utsumi put it in his closing remarks at WSIS, the internet is like a "living, breathing creature", still finding its feet.
It is toddling towards puberty, but there is still a long way highway ahead of it. And to many, it is not yet a "super" highway.
Technology is changing at such a rapid rate, that the scenery of the internet may look totally different in five years' time.
For millions of digitally dispossessed global citizens who know what opportunities the net can offer, there is enormous frustration.
This is most evident among young people who are envious of what fortunate digital citizens in the West enjoy.
There still remain vast disparities between developed and developing nations in the cost of connecting to the global net backbone.
In most cases speeds are far too slow and the there is a huge lack of culturally relevant content, let alone material that appears in native languages.
Efforts by non-governmental groups, the private sector, governments and charities are ensuring that projects to provide the infrastructure, both wired and wireless, the hardware and the knowledge are in place, and sustainable.
SchoolNet, the Shuttleworth Foundation, Nokia, and the Wikimedia Foundation are just some of the groups aiming to make a difference.
But while civil liberty and rights campaigners lobby the global community and world leaders, and mobilise the army of bloggers and netizens, developing countries are desperately in need of the basic equipment before they can even think of blogging.
And the UN net summit was marked by a lack of attention by the global mainstream media.
Although the information society is about people and what they do with technologies, there still remain critical technical issues that need to be tackled head on.
Much of the summit, the single biggest thing to happen to Tunisia in recent history, was dominated by whether the US should keep technical control of the net and freedom of speech on the net.
The issue was resolved partially in a compromise solution to set up an international forum to look at issues such as cyber security issues.
China is already setting up its own Chinese net addresses, which are not provided by the US-based Icann group, creating, in effect a regionalised internet over which Chinese authorities have more control.
"The net is not just one internet controlled by one centre, regionalisation has already started and I suspect that in a few years, the scenery of the internet will be a quite different one," commented Mr Utsumi.
This worries many. They fear giving over this type of control at a government level compromises the net's legacy of liberal, loose, grass roots lifeblood that feeds on debate, diversity, opinion and opposition.
Those sitting in booths on the expo floor at the summit were probably more concerned with how they will be able to afford to keep the hardware they have worked so hard to get up-to-date..
Or how their country can take broadband to millions living in rural villages, or how to power the technologies in the first instance.
The four 'em's of e-learning, e-government, e-commerce, e-medicine are old hat to so many in the West. But they are still of paramount importance to developing nations who need the political pressure, and the international spotlight.
So too do the small local projects that have to rely on the likes of Microsoft and Intel's "corporate responsibility" programmes. Civic responsibility needs to have priorities.
Developing nations need a helping hand to join the richer nations online. But it remains to be seen if any of the talk at the UN summit materialises into political action to narrow the technology gap. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/beds/bucks/herts/6627157.stm | The Conservatives made a net gain of 13 seats on Dacorum District Council after taking 12 from Labour and two from the Liberal Democrats in this year's poll.
But boundary changes resulted in one ward disappearing and there was some reorganisation.
The council based around Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire now has a Tory administration 44 members strong.
There are five Liberal Democrats and two Labour members making up the opposition. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6153884.stm | Five men have been convicted of plotting to build a bomb which police say could have killed hundreds of British people. The men were caught after police and MI5 launched a massive surveillance operation.
While it was never going to be as devastating as 9/11, the British plot to build a massive bomb from fertiliser could have resulted in hundreds of deaths, say police.
Smashed three weeks after the 2004 Madrid bombings, in which 191 people were killed, the bomb plot was the British security services' first significant success against a rapidly developing threat from al-Qaeda sympathisers - but also a terrible indication of what was to follow in the London suicide bombings of the following year.
This was a plot devised by British men over a number of years as they travelled down the path of extremism. While the plot was stopped in its tracks, some of the conspirators wanted to bring a similar level of destruction to Britain as to that seen in Spain.
The al-Qaeda sympathisers, led by Crawley man Omar Khyam, began planning their attack in earnest in 2003.
Four of the men were from Pakistani family backgrounds - and it was meetings in Britain over the conflict in Kashmir, a key issue for many Muslims, that led the men to become interested in the mujahideen fighters in the disputed region.
Some of the men were involved during this time with al-Muhajiroun, the now banned Islamist group formerly headed by self-styled cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed.
In time, each of the men travelled to Pakistan to support jihadi groups and their armed campaigns. But the jihad was no longer just Kashmir - it was Afghanistan too.
British and American troops had invaded Afghanistan intent on capturing Osama Bin Laden and ousting his Taleban protectors in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Frustrated with being unable to go to the frontline, and angry over the 2003 invasion of Iraq, they decided that they should bring violence to the streets of the UK.
They agreed that Britain, which had supported the US in Afghanistan, did not deserve to remain unscathed for what they believed was a war against Muslims.
To carry out such an attack, they needed military skills. Khyam had already received some training with Kashmiri fighters. And in July 2003 he helped to organise a special secret training camp where some of the group learnt weapons and explosives skills.
A successful experiment with a small explosive device, comprising 1.5kg of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, convinced the group that a larger device could be used back in Britain.
Fertiliser has long been a key bomb ingredient used by paramilitary militants groups around the world, including the IRA.
The plotters returned to Britain and mulled over several ideas - one of which was to poison the beer at a football stadium. Another proposed targets included trains, pubs or nightclubs in Britain.
They discussed attacking the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent, the Ministry of Sound nightclub in south London and even the National Grid to maximise economic damage.
In November 2003 the group bought 600kg of ammonium nitrate, which was stored at a self-storage unit in Hanwell, west London. On the other side of the Atlantic, another alleged conspirator was designing a remote-control detonator.
But staff at the depot became suspicious and alerted the police. MI5 had already been taking an interest in Khyam because of his suspected links to a key al-Qaeda sympathiser working in both Britain and Pakistan. But it was the call from the storage unit that provided the evidence.
Undercover police officers replaced the ammonium nitrate with an identical, but harmless, substance. Bugging devices were placed in several of the defendants' homes and at least one car.
In late March the security services decided to move in, partly because Khyam had mentioned to staff at Access that he would not need the storage facility after the end of March. Bugged conversations revealed Khyam and others revelling in the destruction caused by the Madrid attacks days earlier.
On 29 March they arranged for Khawaja to be picked up in Ottawa, Canada and within hours they swooped on the British end. He is awaiting trial.
Around 700 police officers from five forces were involved in a series of raids and six of the seven defendants were arrested.
Amin was later detained by the Pakistani authorities and was sent back to Britain a year later, where he was arrested.
But Babar had by this time left Pakistan and was picked up only later in the United States.
He pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide material support to al-Qaeda and has not yet been sentenced. But crucially, he agreed to give evidence against the other conspirators - the first major supergrass in a jihadi terrorism plot. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3322861.stm | The Queen once said she had had an "annus horribilis", a horrible year - a reference to the very public failure of several of her children's marriages.
It will be no wonder if the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, feels exactly the same as 2003 nears its end.
For him, though, it is the plight not of a child that saddens him, but the collapse of the church he now leads.
After 450 years of unity, this is the year that will mark the inescapable end of the worldwide Anglican Communion.
The collapse has already begun: Anglicans in south-east Asia have announced their intention to sever links with the US branch of the church, Ecusa (Episcopal Church in the USA).
The year had begun promisingly with the enthronement as archbishop of Canterbury of Dr Williams.
He was welcomed by many in the Church of England, Anglicanism's parent church, and by many more in the 70-million-strong Anglican Communion, a loose federation of 38 autonomous churches bound by tradition and (to some extent) by doctrine.
Those who applauded Dr Williams' appointment hailed his thoughtful liberalism, not least on sexuality.
Those who thought him too liberal by half on homosexuality were very doubtful that he was the man to lead the communion.
Dr Williams' archiepiscopal honeymoon was shortlived. In June the church of England was embroiled in a row over the nomination as bishop of Reading of a gay man, Canon Jeffrey John.
The row fizzled out when Canon John decided to stand down, though it left a sour residue of distrust.
But that was only the curtain-raiser for the far bigger international battle over the nomination of another gay man, Gene Robinson, to be a bishop in the US church.
On 16 October the archbishops (known as primates) of the communion's 38 separate provinces ended an emergency meeting in London, summoned by Dr Williams to discuss the growing crisis.
"We have had to conclude that the future of the Communion itself will be put in jeopardy."
Despite that, the consecration went ahead. On 2 November Canon Robinson became bishop of New Hampshire, and the unity of the Anglican Communion started unravelling.
The church of England teaches that lay members can be practising lesbians or gays if they must, but clergy cannot.
Despite that, many outstanding parish priests are homosexual, loved by their parishioners for who they are, irrespective of what they get up to in bed.
So in one sense, this was a row that was bound to break out sooner or later, as church members found the split between doctrine and practice increasingly intolerable.
The church did not really tackle it under the last Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, so it was inevitable that Rowan Williams would at some point have to act.
The apparently inevitable consequence, with provinces going their own separate ways, is what every archbishop of Canterbury dreads. Disunity, for the church, is the ultimate failure.
The way Dr Williams has acted has disappointed both camps. Those who think him too easygoing believe he is being borne helplessly along on a tide of liberalism, while many of his supporters say he is failing to stand up to (in their view) medieval bigotry.
Both camps are sincere, and neither has a monopoly of the truth. But in those parts of the world where sexual definitions are increasingly irrelevant, a church which sets such store by them is left more and more with only itself to talk to, and nobody else remotely interested. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-38176592 | Four people arrested in connection with the death of a man stabbed on Father's Day a year ago will face no further action, police have said.
Christian Bagley was knifed twice as he walked under the Hunderton Bridge in Hereford on 21 June, 2015.
Two women, aged 34 and 51, had also been arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
Mr Bagley was stabbed as he returned from seeing his young daughter. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-42328380 | Uber has been banned in a third UK city after councillors in York rejected the firm's bid to renew its operating licence.
Taxi drivers had complained of the city being "overwhelmed" with drivers using the ride-hailing app, which has already been banned in London and Sheffield.
Concerns about a huge data breach also contributed to the decision, the City of York Council said.
An Uber spokesman said competition was good for the local economy.
All vehicles and drivers were checked, he added.
"This is a disappointing vote for the riders and drivers who use our app in the city," he said.
Uber said it would review the decision once it had received the formal notice from the council.
Speaking before Tuesday's council meeting, Saf Din, Chair of York Hackney Carriage Association, said the city was being overwhelmed by out-of-town drivers.
"We must also have every driver from Bradford here at the moment," he added.
Wendy Loveday, chair of the York Private Hire Association, said there was also an issue with passenger safety.
Uber had its licence suspended in Sheffield after it failed to respond to official requests about its management.
Transport for London, which has criticised the firm's record over reporting criminal offences and carrying out driver background checks, decided not to renew Uber's London licence after it deemed the firm "unfit" to run a taxi service.
Earlier this week, Uber was slammed by a nurse who was quoted up to £149 for a 10-mile trip to work in the snow.
What does London’s Uber ban mean? |
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-wiltshire-41673694 | A man has suffered serious burns in an explosion at a flat in Wiltshire.
The blast happened in a third floor property in Chippenham's Market Place just after 18:00 BST.
Nearby buildings were evacuated, and Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service said the property had suffered "significant structural damage".
The cause of the explosion is not yet known and an investigation is under way.
The man was taken to Southmead Hospital in Bristol but later transferred to a specialist burns hospital in Swansea.
Volunteers from the British Red Cross supported those affected and temporary overnight accommodation was arranged for some residents.
Image caption Large amounts of debris can be seen where the explosion took place.
Supt Phil Staynings said the investigation was in the "very early stages".
"We are working with the fire and rescue service and Wiltshire Council to secure the property, which has sustained significant structural damage," he said.
"At this stage, we are unable to determine the cause of the explosion but our investigation will continue throughout the night.
"We would like to thank local businesses who have provided refreshments, shelter and accommodation during the evening as well as volunteers from the British Red Cross who are supporting anyone affected."
The cordon runs between St Mary Street, Market Place and Timber Street. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/7547034.stm | Five London medical centres have joined forces to become Europe's largest academic health science partnership.
The five centres are University College London (UCL), Great Ormond Street Hospital, Moorfields Eye Hospital, Royal Free Hampstead and UCL Hospitals.
It is called UCL Partners and will have more than 3,500 scientists with a combined annual turnover of about £2bn.
It will initially focus on 10 medical research areas, including cancer and children's health.
UCL Partners said that pooling resources and expertise will enable more world-class research in key areas, delivering the benefits more rapidly to patients around the world.
The five partners together treat more than 1.5m patients each year.
Malcolm Grant, President and Provost of UCL, said: "The creation of this partnership is a landmark in the history of medical research in the UK, and particularly relevant in the 60th anniversary year of the NHS.
"The combined skill, expertise and knowledge of our five organisations promise to deliver to patients the benefits of cutting edge research at its best as quickly as possible."
Professor Sir Cyril Chantler, Chairman of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust, said: "London needs to strive to lead in health, a world class city should settle for nothing less.
"UCL Partners has the capacity and potential to work together to make this happen."
UCL Partners will become operational from September. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11437758 | Image caption The US has pledged to defend Taiwan, which China considers a rogue province.
The United States and China are to resume military contacts after a hiatus of more than six months.
US officials said the two sides would hold maritime talks in Hawaii next month, followed by high-level talks in Washington later in the year.
The announcement follows a visit to Beijing by Michael Schiffer, the US deputy assistant secretary of defence.
China froze military ties in January after the US announced plans for a $6.4bn (£4bn) arms deal with Taiwan.
Beijing regards Taiwan as a breakaway province.
It has more than 1,000 missiles pointed at the island and has threatened to use force to bring it under its control if the island moves towards formal independence.
The US is Taiwan's biggest ally and is obliged by the Taiwan Relations Act to help in the island's defence. In February, it said the weapons sale contributed to "security and stability" between Taiwan and China.
The two sides have now agreed that dialogue "is essential to build mutual trust and reduce the chances of misunderstanding and miscalculation", according to Colonel Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman.
Ties between Washington and Beijing have also been strained this year over internet policy, Tibet, the US trade deficit, and Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/138184.stm | Nationwide members have voted by a narrow margin against converting the building society into a bank.
The margin was just 33,000 in favour of mutuality with more than two million members voting. Some 1,135,587 members voted against conversion, while 1,101,887 voted for.
The vote was announced at the Nationwide's annual meeting in London. Under its terms there will not be another vote for three years.
Nationwide chairman Charles Nunneley said that those who wanted a conversion had fallen significantly short of what would be needed for a formal conversion vote. The board had a mandate "to continue with our building society strategy, providing long term value to our members and competition and diversity in the financial marketplace."
Supporters of conversion said it would force the building society to release large sums to its former members and free it to compete on a level playing field against other banks.
Opponents say members would lose out in the long term because a bank would be under pressure to deliver high dividends to share holders, meaning higher mortgage charges and lower interest rates for savers.
Nationwide says that its lower mortgage rate compared to the demutualised former societies is worth �400 a year on �60,000 of borrowing.
The mutual camp won the first round of the campaign on Wednesday when two self-confessed carpetbaggers, Michael Hardern and Andrew Muir, who had pledged to push the move to a bank, failed to make it onto the Nationwide board.
Mr Hardern has now twice failed to make it onto the board but the gap has narrowed from three to one against to three to two.
The result follows a direct ballot of the building society's 4.9 million members, many of whom are considered to be carpetbaggers looking for a windfall.
A payout of �1,000 was predicted if the building society decided to convert to a bank.
Mr Hardern said he did not expect to win the vote because he had been fighting the entire "Nationwide party machine".
Adrian Coles, director general of the Building Societies Association, said: "Tomorrow's generation of consumers shopping for cheap mortgages and high savings rates will be grateful to Nationwide members."
The Nationwide is considered the last of the large building societies and many smaller mutuals would have taken its lead from a decision to convert.
Abbey National was the first to convert and has been followed by other big names such as the Halifax, Alliance & Leicester, Northern Rock and the Woolwich. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47485197 | Keely Deininger loved her job in design at a Marks and Spencer supplier.
But she gave it up to look after her three children: "One day, I called my mother and asked her to look after the children. I took a plane to Vietnam.
Once there, she started designing clothes: "I became an accidental entrepreneur overnight."
Her story is part of a report that suggests the UK economy could be given a £250bn boost if women's start-ups were given the same funding as men.
The government-commissioned report estimates there are 1.1 million "missing" female-run firms and sets out eight ways of boosting the number of female entrepreneurs.
The funding for Keely Deininger's Angel Face business came from a colleague, rather than a formal loan from a bank or venture capital fund.
She had no company name or business plan and had done no research before she started her company.
"I have faced many challenges along my journey; cash flow being one of them, being incredibly time-poor another.
"I ran my business between school runs, karate lessons, shopping, making the dinner and putting three kids to bed. For me, it is now a priority to support other mothers to be successful in the workforce," she says.
The government-commissioned report - the Rose report - suggests that one way to get more women, regardless of whether they are mothers, into the workforce or starting businesses is to create a code asking them to report gender funding.
Alison Rose, who led the review, said the shortfall was hurting the economy.
Ms Rose, the head of Royal Bank of Scotland's corporate, commercial and private banking business, said: "I firmly believe that the disparity that exists between female and male entrepreneurs is unacceptable and holding the UK back."
"The unrealised potential for the UK economy is enormous," said Ms Rose, who is also deputy chief executive of NatWest.
Ms Rose was commissioned in September by Robert Jenrick, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, to examine whether there were unfair obstacles preventing women setting up businesses.
Mr Jenrick said: "Today's striving businesswomen are too often facing barriers to setting up and growing their own enterprise. These barriers don't just hold back women, they hold back every single one of us."
Prime Minister Theresa May said the government would encourage more companies to look at the gender split of the companies they invested in.
NatWest, owned by RBS, is to be the first signatory to the code, which commits financial investors to setting out gender funding, while the Treasury will establish a new "investing in female entrepreneurs code" to show a gender split of the investments they make annually.
Released on International Women's Day, the report said that 6% of UK women run their own businesses compared with 15% in Canada, almost 11% in the US and more than 9% in Australia and the Netherlands.
It calculates that even if the UK achieved the same average share of women entrepreneurs as other countries, some £200bn could be added to the value of the economy.
That rises to £250bn - the equivalent of four years' economic growth - if women were backed to the same extent as men.
According to the report, in the UK, for every 10 male entrepreneurs there are fewer than five female entrepreneurs.
Image caption A survey for the review found access to funding is the number one barrier, mentioned by almost twice as many women as men.
The report said only one in three UK entrepreneurs is female, which it describes as "a gender gap equivalent of 1.1 million missing businesses".
Female-led businesses are also smaller than those run by men and less likely to grow. Small businesses run by men are five times more likely to reach a £1m turnover than female-run small businesses.
The report describes the UK as the "start-up capital of Europe", with a 5.1% growth rate in the number of new businesses between 2013-2017.
But, it said, female-led businesses receive less funding than those headed by men at every stage of their development.
A survey of 1,500 men and women conducted for the review found that access to funding is the number one barrier, mentioned by almost twice as many women as men.
Among the other recommendations is making UK banks and investment funds help their wealthy clients invest in female-run businesses and encourage UK-based entrepreneurs to back female entrepreneurs. This initiative is to be led by Alexandra Daly, founder of fund specialists AA Advisors.
An "expert in resident" programme could be offered to entrepreneurs. The report also suggested banks should design products to help parent entrepreneurs manage family care. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-45143631 | An Egyptian actress who retired for religious reasons and began wearing a hijab, has recently announced her comeback on social media.
Hala Shiha, who starred in films such as El-Selem We El-Teaban (The Ladder and the Snake) and Aris Min Geha Amneya (A Groom From a Security Body), retired in 2005 aged 26.
She created a Twitter account on Thursday, gaining thousands of followers in the first few hours, describing herself online as "an Egyptian actress, shone again," and tweeting she was a "strong independent woman from the beginning".
Shiha shared photos of herself without the veil on her Instagram page, which was also created on Thursday.
Since her first post - which simply read "Back" - she has gained more than 38,000 followers in her first day on the picture-sharing platform.
Shiha's return to social media has prompted many to comment about religious dress.
The Arabic hashtag of her name "Hala Shiha" has been trending in Egypt, attracting more than 12,000 tweets, with very mixed reaction.
Many praised the actress, including one woman, Nada Ashraf, who congratulated her for "returning back to life" and "being resurrected from the caves of darkness and the Middle Ages".
However, some users including @Menna521990121 feel Shiha is now distancing herself from God.
In defence of Shiha, London-based media student Mohamed Magdeldin advised people not to judge the actress.
No one has the right to judge #حلا_شيحة. It was a personal decision when she decided to retire, and it is a personal decision now. We are not God. Leave her alone.
Boris Johnson's burka jibe: Why do some Muslim women wear the veil?
Mekameleen TV presenter Osama Gawish, also based in London, agreed the removal of the veil was a personal matter.
However, he warned those who saw it as a sign of stepping out of "the caves of darkness" or "a slap on the face of the Muslim Brotherhood" were actually expressing "a hateful racism against all veiled women". |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-40498759 | The Scottish government has confirmed the country's NHS is to offer free abortions to women from Northern Ireland.
Abortions are illegal in Northern Ireland except for cases where the woman's health is at risk.
That has led to women travelling to Great Britain, where they have to pay for terminations.
The UK government announced last week that they would be offered free NHS abortions in England in future.
The devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales have now confirmed that their health services will also offer free terminations to women from Northern Ireland.
Scotland's first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, confirmed last year that she was examining the issue after control of abortion law was devolved to the Scottish Parliament.
She told Holyrood that no woman "should ever be stigmatised" for having an abortion, and that it should always be available in a "safe and legal way" for those who chose to have one.
The Scottish government said on Tuesday that it will "set out shortly" measures that would allow a woman from Northern Ireland, who is in Scotland, to access an abortion for free on the same basis as women in Scotland.
The spokesman added: "The Scottish government's view is that abortion should be part of standard healthcare for all women, and available free from stigma."
Anti-abortion group Precious Life has previously claimed that allowing NI women to access NHS terminations would "run roughshod over the law and the democratic process".
It said abortion was a criminal offence in Northern Ireland which "exists to protect both mothers and their unborn children", and predicted offering abortions in Scotland would spark a "public outcry".
Women seeking an abortion can travel to other parts of the UK to have one privately, but had not been allowed to have them free on the NHS - a position that was backed by the UK Supreme Court last month.
More than 50 MPs from the major parties had backed a Labour-led call for the women to have access to NHS abortions in England - leading the UK government to made a concession on the issue rather than risk a possible defeat. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-47948237 | Police investigating the disappearance of a pensioner in the south of Scotland are in talks with officers in the Isle of Man after the discovery of a body.
DNA tests are being carried out on a man's body found washed up on a beach on the north of the island last week.
Officers have informed the family of Gavin Tait, 74, of the discovery but they stressed the body has not yet been identified.
Mr Tait was last seen in a shop near his Wigtown home over four weeks ago.
He was reported missing by a neighbour on 6 April.
In a statement, Police Scotland said: "We are aware of the discovery of a man's body on a beach on the Isle of Man on Wednesday morning.
"As part of our investigation we are liaising with staff from Isle of Man Constabulary as they attempt to establish the man's identity.
"We have informed Gavin's next of kin of this development, however we must stress the identity of the man's body has not yet been established."
The body was discovered on Dog Mills beach on the Isle of Man on Wednesday 10 April.
A spokesman for Isle of Man Constabulary said DNA had been taken from the body and submitted to the missing person's database in a bid to identify him.
Police, search and rescue dogs and Galloway Mountain Rescue Team have been involved in a search for the pensioner, who has been described as "reclusive".
Officers have released CCTV of Mr Tait's last-known movements in a local shop on Thursday 14 March.
A receipt for the goods he bought and his wallet were later found at his home.
Police want to speak to anyone who saw a man walking on the B733 Wigtown to Kirkcowan Road between 19:30 and 20:00 on Friday 15 March.
Mr Tait is described as 5ft 10in tall, has a beard and always wears a cap. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-14990573 | An energy firm which has been test drilling for controversial "shale gas" in Lancashire has said it has found vast gas resources underground.
Cuadrilla Resources began testing for gas on the Fylde Coast in March, using a technique known as "fracking".
It said it had found 200 trillion cubic feet of gas under the ground, which if recovered could provide 5,600 jobs in the UK, 1,700 of those in Lancashire.
Opponents to the process believe it produces damaging carbon emissions.
A small protest, organised by Campaign Against Climate Change, was held outside The Imperial Hotel in Blackpool on Wednesday, where Cuadrilla met to announce its findings.
Fracking involves the hydraulic fracturing of the ground using high-pressure liquid containing chemicals to release the gas.
Campaigners have warned developing the fossil fuel could draw investment away from the UK's potentially huge renewable industry.
The gas is found in shale formed from deposits of mud, silt, clay and organic matter.
The total amount of gas that Cuadrilla estimates to be in the shale formation it's been exploring is huge.
It's more than 10 times the reserves known to exist under the UK's part of the North Sea - more than the total known in all UK fields, in fact.
But total gas isn't the same thing as useable gas; and how much of it can be extracted is another matter, as the company acknowledges.
Before it can extract any of it, it will have to satisfy the government (and local residents, perhaps) that the process is safe, which might not be straightforward given the association that has been mooted between "fracking" and small earthquakes close to the existing exploratory wells.
Then there is the question of whether the economics work out.
If it is extractable at a good price, there is a large chance that this one field will put a major dent in the government's climate change ambitions, which depend most of all on switching electricity generation to low-carbon fuels - which shale gas most definitely is not.
The process has caused controversy in the US on environmental grounds, where there have been claims from some householders that the subsequent release of gas has caused illness and polluted drinking water.
In Lancashire, the tests were halted in June when two earthquakes occurred in the nearby Blackpool area.
Cuadrilla said it was expecting to find out within the next 30 days whether or not its work contributed to the tremors.
Cuadrilla's chief executive, Mark Miller, said the process would not pose a threat to UK groundwater.
He said the company hoped to drill up to 400 wells in Lancashire to extract some of the gas it had found under the ground in the area.
Mr Miller said thousands of highly skilled jobs would be created, with posts paying an average wage of £55,000.
Cuadrilla hopes to drill as many as 400 wells over the next nine years and up to 800 over 16 years if gas extraction is successful.
Mr Miller said they could be grouped in units of 10 on each football pitch-sized site, reducing their impact on the landscape.
He said each well is drilled and then fracking takes place over several weeks, after which the well can potentially produce gas for up to 30 to 50 years.
"When they are done right, someone driving by on a country road or walking their dog, it will be hard for them to see our sites as they will blend in with the Lancashire countryside," he said.
Phil Thornhill, from Campaign Against Climate Change, was one of those protesting outside the meeting.
He said: "Those jobs could and should be in green energy. We need a revolution in the economy to really deal with climate change effectively.
"We need to be moving much quicker than we are to a low carbon economy, that would be a lot of jobs, a lot of development.
"They could create jobs in renewables if they put the investment there."
A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) said it had to ensure any operations which went ahead were properly regulated.
"We welcome the news that Cuadrilla believe there to be good quantities of gas contained in the shale covered by their licence," he said.
"Our priority is to ensure that their operations are properly regulated and they face the same rigorous regime that all oil and gas operators must adhere to.
"The shale gas industry in the UK is in its infancy, and the eventual scale of the recoverable gas from this site is still unclear, but nothing will temper the government's firm and unbending commitment to safety and environmental protection.
"Any development must sit with our plans for a strong portfolio of energy sources as we move to a low carbon economy, including renewables, nuclear and clean coal and gas." |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3159366.stm | The interim report on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has vindicated the UK's decision to join the war, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has said.
A US-led interim report said no banned weapons had so far been found in Iraq, but there was evidence of related research and equipment concealed from inspectors.
Mr Straw said these finds showed the military action taken by the United States and the UK was "justified and essential".
But anti-war critics have seized on the first report from the Iraq Survey Group, led by David Kay, as evidence that the coalition went into the conflict on a false basis.
Shadow defence secretary Bernard Jenkin, who backed the war, renewed Conservative calls for a judicial inquiry into the reasons for going to war.
He said the report showed Saddam Hussein's ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction, but his immediate threat to the UK had been overplayed.
Mr Jenkin said: "This underlines the need for an independent judicial inquiry into the quality of intelligence and how it was communicated to Parliament and the public.
"A much wider question than the present Hutton Inquiry."
Anti-war protesters said the fact no weapons had been found meant the government should apologise for going to war.
Andrew Murray, chairman of the Stop The War Coalition, said: "This confirms that the reasons given to the British people for going to war against Iraq were false.
"The prime minister now owes the nation an apology."
Prime Minister Tony Blair on Friday met Kuwaiti Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah in Downing Street to discuss the post-war situation in Iraq.
Mr Straw said the survey group's report provided "further conclusive and incontrovertible evidence" Saddam Hussein was in breach of UN resolutions, said Mr Straw.
Has the so far fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq affected public opinion?
"Kay's report confirms how dangerous and deceitful the regime was, and how the military action was indeed both justified and essential to remove the dangers," he said.
The foreign secretary told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the fact no weapons of mass destruction had been found did not mean they did not exist.
And he said there was no doubt that Iraq had posed a "current and serious" threat - the claim made by Tony Blair in the government's controversial Iraq weapons dossier.
"If we had decided not to take military action in March or thereabouts, what would have happened is all the pressure on the regime would have died away because we could not have maintained that military readiness," he added.
Head of the CIA-led survey group Mr Kay said it was too early to reach definitive conclusions.
But he said he had found evidence of WMD-related programmes and suggestions that Saddam had been "firmly committed" to acquiring nuclear weapons.
His report said: "We have not yet found stocks of weapons but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitely either that such weapons stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone.
"We are actively engaged in searching for such weapons based on information being supplied to us by Iraqis."
Former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who quit the cabinet in protest at the Iraq war, said: "We always knew that Saddam had ambitions and military pretensions. But what we now know is that our strategy of containment worked."
Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell said: "This report once again puts the government on the defensive and adds weight to the conclusion that we went to war against Iraq on a flawed prospectus.
"It may also undermine the validity of the Attorney General's (Lord Goldsmith) opinion that war was lawful."
Dr Kay's 1,200-strong team has been searching Iraq for the past three months.
But he said this report only provided a "snapshot" of the investigation and not a "final reckoning".
"The fact that they've not found weapons... does not mean that they are not there" |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-46195189 | A location-tracking smartwatch worn by thousands of children has proven relatively easy to hack.
A security researcher found the devices neither encrypted the data they used nor secured each child's account.
As a result, he said, he could track children's movements, surreptitiously listen in to their activities and make spoof calls to the watches that appeared to be from parents.
Experts say the issues are so severe that the product should be discarded.
Both the BBC and the researcher involved tried to contact the makers of the MiSafes Kid's Watcher Plus to alert them to the problem but received no reply.
Likewise, a China-based company listed as the product's supplier did not respond to requests.
The MiSafes watch was first released in 2015.
It uses a global positioning system (GPS) sensor and a 2G mobile data connection to let parents see where their child is, via a smartphone app.
In addition, parents can create a "safe zone" and receive an alert if the child leaves the area.
The adult can also listen in to what their offspring is doing at any time and trigger two-way calls.
Pen Test Partner's Ken Munro and Alan Monie learned of the product's existence when a friend bought one for his son earlier this year.
Out of curiosity, they probed its security measures and found that easy-to-find PC software could be used to mimic the app's communications.
This software could be used to change the assigned ID number, which was all it took to get access to others' accounts.
"It's probably the simplest hack we have ever seen," he told the BBC.
"I wish it was more complicated. It isn't."
Rather than compromise other people's watches, the researchers bought several more units to test.
Pen Test Partners also learned it was possible to bypass a feature supposed to limit the watch to accepting calls from only authorised parties.
The researchers did this by using a online "prank call" service that fools receiving devices into showing another person's caller ID number.
"Once a hacker has the parent's number, they could spoof a call to appear to come from it and the child would now think it's their mum or dad dialling," said Mr Munro.
"So they could leave a voice message or speak to the child to convince them to leave their house and go to a convenient location."
Using a different tool, Mr Munro said his team were able to see that about 14,000 MiSafes were still in active use.
The Norwegian Consumer Council highlighted other cases of child-targeted smartwatches with security flaws last year.
It said the MiSafes products appeared to be "even more problematic" than the examples it had flagged.
"This is another example of unsecure products that should never have reached the market," said Gro Mette Moen, the watchdog's acting director of digital services.
"Our advice is to refrain from buying these smartwatches until the sellers can prove that their features and security standards are satisfactory."
In the UK, Amazon used to sell the watches but has not had stock for some time.
The BBC found three listings for the watches on eBay earlier this week but the online marketplace said it had since removed them on the grounds of an existing ban on equipment that could be used to spy on people's activities without their knowledge.
"We don't allow the sale of these products on our marketplace," said a spokeswoman.
MiSafes previously made headlines in February when an Austrian cyber-security company discovered several flaws with its Mi-Cam baby monitors.
SEC Consult said these meant hackers could spy on footage from owners' homes and hijack accounts.
It too was unable to get a response from the manufacturer. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6962085.stm | Too many teenagers are damaging their health by not getting enough sleep and by falling asleep with electrical gadgets on, researchers say.
A third of 12 to 16-year-olds asked slept for between four to seven hours a night. Experts recommend eight hours.
The Sleep Council, which conducted the poll of 1,000 teenagers, says gadgets in bedrooms such as computers and TVs are fuelling poor quality "junk sleep".
Youngsters need to be taught that sleep is important for their health, it said.
Almost a quarter of the teens surveyed admitted they fell asleep watching TV, listening to music or with other equipment still running, more than once a week.
Nearly all had either a phone, music system or TV in their bedroom, and two thirds had all three.
Among 12 to 14-year-old boys, nearly three in five (58%) had a phone, music player, TV and games console in their bedroom.
While 40% of the teens said they were often tired during the day, just 10% placed much importance on getting a good night's sleep.
Dr Chris Idzikowski of the Edinburgh Sleep Centre said: "This is an incredibly worrying trend.
"What we are seeing is the emergence of 'Junk Sleep' - that is sleep that is of neither the length nor quality that it should be in order to feed the brain with the rest it needs.
"Youngsters need to be taught a healthy lifestyle includes healthy sleep as well as healthy food. The message is simple: switch off the gadgets and get more sleep."
Whatever happened to a fixed bedtime?
Sleep is important for both physical and mental functioning and wellbeing.
Previous studies suggest that people who do not get enough sleep are more likely to be overweight or obese.
UK scientists found sleep deprivation led to hormonal changes which told the body to eat sugary or starchy food to provide an energy boost.
But sleep problems can be a symptom of many other conditions, from problems with the thyroid gland to depression.
Professor Jim Horne, director of Loughborough's Sleep Research Centre, said advising teenagers to get more sleep was "easier said than done".
"I have two teenage kids, and the advice will just fall on deaf ears," he said. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-latin-america-40897352/venezuela-s-leader-on-donald-trump-and-the-bbc | Maduro on Donald Trump... and the BBC Jump to media player The Venezuelan leader says he wants to meet the US president, and had a few choice words for the BBC.
Venezuelan hospitals at breaking point Jump to media player Doctors are worried about the strain the Venezuelan health system is under amid an economic crisis.
Is this Venezuela's most powerful person? Jump to media player Delcy Rodriguez's new powers could make her more influential than President Maduro.
Venezuela crisis: 'We want Maduro out' Jump to media player Venezuelans speak about the crisis they are living in and the difficulties they are facing.
Venezuela's new assembly poses and sings Jump to media player The new body has alarmed the opposition who see it as a power-grab by the president.
Venezuela politician 'knew the risks' Jump to media player Antonio Ledezma's daughter says her father was "kidnapped" in the middle of the night.
On the front line of Caracas protests Jump to media player For months, Gregorio Marrero has been photographing the protests in Venezuela's capital.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has said he wants meet Donald Trump at the UN General Assembly in New York in September.
Addressing the newly elected constituent assembly, Maduro also attacked the BBC, calling it "terrible, horrible". |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8579322.stm | The US House of Representatives has narrowly voted to pass a landmark healthcare reform bill at the heart of President Barack Obama's agenda.
The bill was passed by 219 votes to 212, with no Republican backing, after hours of fierce argument and debate.
It extends coverage to 32 million more Americans, and marks the biggest change to the US healthcare system in decades.
"We proved that we are still a people capable of doing big things," Mr Obama said in remarks after the vote.
"This legislation will not fix everything that ails our healthcare system, but it moves us decisively in the right direction," he said.
Mr Obama is expected to sign the legislation into law shortly.
But a new challenge is expected in the Senate, where Democrats hope amendments to the bill will be enacted by a simple majority. Republicans say the move is unconstitutional and plan to stop it.
This is the most significant victory for the president since he took office 14 months ago, says BBC North America editor Mark Mardell.
Mr Obama has been tough and tenacious - some might say stubborn - in pushing this legislation after so much opposition and so many setbacks, our editor says.
When the vote count hit the magic number of 216 - the minimum needed to pass the bill - Democrats hugged and cheered in celebration and chanted: "Yes, we can!"
Under the legislation, health insurance will be extended to nearly all Americans, new taxes will be imposed on the wealthy, and restrictive insurance practices such as refusing to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions will be outlawed.
However, our editor says healthcare reform has become a rallying point for Republicans, who are convinced the American people do not want the changes and that it will be a vote winner for them come the mid-term elections in November.
They say the measures are unaffordable and represent a government takeover of the health industry.
While many Americans seem to genuinely yearn for the cross-party accord they call bipartisanship, and politicians at least play it pious lip service, this lengthy debate has revealed a gaping ideological chasm.
President Obama identified overhauling the healthcare system as his priority and he's got what he wanted, a victory that eluded Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. But when he threw down the gauntlet the conservatives eagerly picked it up. Healthcare didn't create the tea party movement but it gave it a focus and a cause.
There are dangers to his left as well as his right. He's harmed his reputation with his own power base, for many liberals feel there have been so many compromises the bill is hardly worth it.
"We have failed to listen to America," said Republican party leader John Boehner.
Speaking moments before the vote, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the healthcare reform honoured the nation's traditions.
"We will be joining those who established Social Security, Medicare and now, tonight, healthcare for all Americans," she said, referring to the government's pension programme and health insurance for the elderly, established nearly 50 years ago.
Although Democrats pushed the measure through with three votes to spare, 34 members joined Republicans in voting against the bill, worried about paying a political price in November's elections.
In a last-minute move designed to win the support of a bloc of anti-abortion lawmakers, Mr Obama earlier on Sunday announced plans to issue an executive order assuring that healthcare reform will not change the restrictions barring federal money for abortion.
The BBC's Mark Mardell says Sunday's vote was a pivotal moment, but it is not clear which way the balance will swing in the mid-term vote.
The first opinion polls will make fascinating reading, he adds.
The bill's final approval represented a stunning turnaround from January, when it was considered dead after Democrats lost their 60-seat majority in the Senate, which is required to defeat a filibuster, a method used to delay or block the passage of legislation.
To avoid a second Senate vote, the House also approved on Sunday evening a package of reconciliation "fixes" - agreed beforehand between House and Senate Democrats and the White House - amending the bill that senators adopted in December.
The president is expected to sign the House-approved Senate bill as early as Tuesday, after which it will be officially enacted into law. However, the bill will contain some very unpopular measures that Democratic senators have agreed to amend.
The Senate will be able to make the required changes in a separate bill using a procedure known as reconciliation, which allows budget provisions to be approved with 51 votes - rather than the 60 needed to overcome blocking tactics.
The Republicans say they will seek to repeal the measure, challenge its constitutionality and co-ordinate efforts in state legislatures to block its implementation.
But the president has signalled he will fight back.
The White House plans to launch a campaign this week to persuade sceptical Americans that the reforms offer immediate benefits to them and represent the most significant effort to reduce the federal deficit since the 1990s.
"This only worked well for the Republican Party if it failed to pass," David Axelrod, one of Mr Obama's closest political advisers, told the New York Times after Sunday's vote.
"They wanted to run against a caricature of it rather than the real bill. Now let them tell a child with a pre-existing condition: 'We don't think you should be covered.'"
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the healthcare bill will cut the federal deficit by $138bn (£92bn) over 10 years.
The non-partisan body said last week that the legislation would cost about $940bn (£626bn) over the same period.
The reforms will increase insurance coverage through tax credits for the middle class and an expansion of Medicaid for the poor.
They represent the biggest change in the US healthcare system since the creation in the 1960s of Medicare, the government-run scheme for those aged 65 or over.
Healthcare reform is a priority for Barack Obama. The US spends about $2.2tn a year on its system - which includes private, federal or employer schemes.
US expenditure on healthcare is the equivalent of about 16.2% of GDP - nearly twice that of some other OECD countries.
The US falls behind some OECD countries for life expectancy and has a higher rate of infant mortality. Almost 46m US citizens do not have health insurance. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-47570333/the-tech-that-could-help-clean-polluted-air | Trash Robot collects river rubbish Jump to media player The robot connects to the internet so web users can control it and donate to pay maintenance costs.
Plant captures CO2 out of the air Jump to media player The plants are powered using waste heat and electricity, producing "negative emissions"
Could 'solar roads' help generate power? Jump to media player A stretch of road has been paved with solar PV (photovoltaic) panels in France. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/5202486.stm | Hailed as "the most significant memory invention of the decade", magnetoresistive random-access memory or Mram could one day overthrow hard discs and flash memory.
To understand why Mram is potentially so exciting, let us look at the ways we currently store data.
Take one desktop computer, and carefully disassemble it.
The random access memory (Ram) is short term memory, it handles the data the computer needs right now to do its calculations.
Reading and writing data to Ram can be done extremely quickly. But it is volatile, which means it needs constant power to store data - when you switch the power off, kiss goodbye to your data.
And then there is flash memory, which is great for storing moderate amounts of data, even when the power is off.
It is non-volatile, so it is useful in portable devices like mp3 players and cameras.
It is also robust, so you can sling it around in portable devices. Its main drawbacks are that it is very slow to write data to, and it also wears out.
So depending on our needs, we have two ways of storing data, which both have disadvantages - they are either slow, or lose data when the power is off.
What would be lovely is a type of memory which is both fast to write, and non-volatile.
So, along comes something called magnetoresistive random access memory or Mram.
It's not going to be something you put into a PC for some time.
A couple of weeks ago a company called Freescale announced that it had produced a working Mram chip which can hold four-megabits, that is about half a megabyte.
It is very small compared to the Ram and flash chips on the market, but it is a start.
In fact many companies, including IBM, have been working on the nanotechnology behind Mram for around a decade.
Put simply, Mram stores data magnetically, in the same way a hard drive does. This makes it non-volatile.
It is also very quick, and does not wear out over time. So it seems to have the advantages of both RAM and flash, with none of the disadvantages.
No wonder the tech press got very excited about it. However, according to technology writer Guy Kewney, it is unlikely that Mram will replace every other form of storage anytime soon.
"It's going to be important if it catches on in one or two small areas which let them get into volume first but those aren't going to be PCs.
"It's not going to be something you put into a PC for some time."
As the Mram chip is in a new format, and too small and expensive for home computing, a likely use for it is as a smart chip which are used in applications like travelcards.
"The point about those smart chips is they don't have a battery in them," explained Mr Kewney. "They can't work until they come into the RFID (radio frequency ID) field which energises them and they have to work rapidly before the chip goes out of the RFID field.
"In that time there are several things you've got to do; you've got to fire-up your wireless, you've got to make contact, go through protocols and then you've got to read the data and write it.
"And the more data you can write the more complex the application can be.
"With flash being a lot slower than magnetic ram there's a limit to the amount of magnetic ram before the ticket is out of the way." |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8360105.stm | US President Barack Obama has said his country's commitment to the security of the Asia-Pacific region is "unshakeable".
Speaking at the end of a two-day visit to Japan, he said he welcomed a bigger role for China and called for North Korea to rejoin international talks about its nuclear ambitions.
He later travelled to Singapore for an Asia-Pacific economic summit, and will then visit China and South Korea.
Roland Buerk reports from Tokyo. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-47609356 | The owners of one of Wales' finest Tudor homes have hit out at Natural Resources Wales after it flooded again.
Judy Corbett and her husband Peter Welford have spent about 25 years restoring the Grade I listed 16th Century Gwydir Castle in Conwy.
But the couple have been left "broken hearted" and "do not know where to turn" after Wales was hit by flooding.
Natural Resources Wales (NRW) said it could not "prioritise this property above other communities".
The couple have criticised the environment body previously, claiming nearby flood defence work has made the property more liable to flooding. NRW has denied this is the case.
A sandbag wall in the gardens of Gwydir Castle, near Llanrwst in the Conwy Valley, was breached in six places at the weekend, Ms Corbett said.
"The waters rose incredibly quickly and it was really terrifying to see," she told BBC Radio Wales.
"It was like Niagara [Falls] coming through the gardens. We were inches away from the water coming into the house."
The couple now face "thousands of pounds" in repair bills after the gardens and basement were left under water.
The house had been due to open to the public on 1 April, but Ms Corbett said this would no longer be possible.
She said they had been negotiating with NRW over the Conwy Valley flood defence scheme for 20 years.
"We told the authorities that this was going to happen one day," she added.
In addition, they have lost about 10% of "veteran trees" which are protected by preservation orders, she said.
But NRW said it could not prioritise Gwydir Castle because of its historical significance.
"We have every sympathy for the people who live and maintain Gwydir Castle and have been to meet them many times to discuss the issues they face and provide as much support as we can," said Sian Williams, head of operations in north west Wales.
"The Conwy Valley flood scheme, which has again worked to protect the communities in Llanrwst and Trefriw, does not increase flood risk for Gwydir Castle.
"It reduces the risk and we have shared the data which proves this with the owners of the castle."
Meanwhile, parts of Bangor on Dee Racecourse in Wrexham remain under water after the river burst its banks.
General manager Jeannie Chantler said they were "keeping fingers crossed" that racing will still go ahead on Saturday.
"We have a flood management plan but we can't raise the height of the river bank otherwise it would cause problems further down," she said.
"We just have to sit and wait for the river to drop so the water can drain away and then see what damage has been done." |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1505794.stm | British paratroopers are among the toughest and most highly trained soldiers in the world.
After a gruelling six month training period, during which they undergo basic military and intensive paratroop training, new recruits become fully qualified to join one of The Parachute Regiment's three operational battalions.
It is the regiment's 2nd Battalion (2 Para) which has now been deployed to lead Nato's international force in Macedonia.
Nearly 700 troops from 2 Para will form the backbone of Operation Harvest - a 30-day Nato mission to oversee the collection of weapons from ethnic Albanian rebels.
The battalion became part of 16 Air Assault Brigade - the British Army's newest rapid deployment force - in September 1999.
It is on constant 72-hour alert to deploy to any potential trouble-spot anywhere in the world.
British paratroopers, whose distinctive maroon berets make them easily recognisable, have been a strong presence in the world's military history since 1942.
In recent history, 2 Para has been heavily involved in operations in Northern Ireland, the Falkland Islands, Sierra Leone and Kosovo.
The battalion has spent more time in Northern Ireland over the past 30 years than any other infantry battalion in the Army.
But perhaps the most famous and recent campaign in which 2 Para's troops were involved occurred during the Falklands War.
On 26 May,1982, the battalion was ordered to seize Argentinean positions in the area of Goose Green.
During the early hours of 28 May, the troops attacked with artillery, with the support of Naval gunfire.
In the resulting intense battle, across an area with very little natural cover, they succeeded in defeating a well dug-in and equipped enemy far superior in numbers.
Many members of the battalion were killed and wounded during the mission.
Those who lost their lives included Commanding Officer Lt Col H Jones, who was subsequently awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously.
2 Para, based in Colchester, is currently commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Chip Chapman, who served as a platoon commander in the Falklands campaign.
Since he took command in August 1999, his mission statement has been simply "to succeed in war".
The Parachute Regiment's motto is Utrinque Paratus, which means Ready for Anything.
Captain Peter Flynn, adjutant to the commanding officer of 2 Para, says it is a motto which is proudly upheld by the battalion's soldiers. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24193734 | A twin-suicide bombing outside a church in Peshawar in Pakistan has killed at least 75 people, in one of the worst attacks on Christians in the country.
Two bombers blew themselves up as worshippers were coming out of the city's historic All Saints church after attending Sunday Mass, police say.
Relatives of the victims gathered at the scene to protest against the government's failure to protect them.
Militants linked to Pakistani Taliban have said they carried out the bombing.
The group, Jandullah, said it was in retaliation US drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal northwest.
Sunday's twin attacks targeted Peshawar's historic All Saints Church as hundreds of worshippers were attending Mass.
Witnesses said they heard two blasts, the second more powerful than the first.
Suicide vests were later found outside the church, officials say. More than 120 people were wounded in the bombings.
It is the latest in a series of attacks on Pakistani Christians, who represent about 1.6% of the country's largely Muslim population.
The BBC's Shahzeb Jillani in Pakistan says the attack has outraged many people, but there is also a sense of helplessness about the government's apparent inability to prevent such atrocities.
There were angry scenes outside the church, with friends and relatives denouncing the government.
Demonstrations were held in other cities too.
In Karachi, police fired bullets in air and tear gas to disperse hundreds of protesters. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-40120286 | Children who have TVs in their bedrooms are more likely to be overweight than those who do not, a study by University College London scientists suggests.
For girls in particular, they found the longer spent watching TV, the more likely children were to put on weight.
Researchers say there is now an urgent need to see if similar patterns exist with laptops and mobile phones.
Experts said high levels of screen time exposed children to a damaging combination of risks to health.
Published in the International Journal of Obesity, the study analysed data from more than 12,000 young children in the UK.
Scientists found more than half the children had TVs in their bedrooms at the age of seven.
Parents were also asked to rate how many hours a day children generally spent watching TV.
Later, when the children were 11, researchers plotted their body mass index (a ratio of height and weight) and looked at the percentage of body fat.
Girls who had TVs in their bedrooms at the age of seven were 30% more likely to be overweight when they were 11, compared to children who did not have TVs in their bedrooms.
For boys, the risk was increased by about 20%.
Researcher Dr Anja Heilmann, said: "Our study shows there is clear link between having a TV in the bedroom as a young child and being overweight a few years later."
Researchers say they cannot be sure why the link between TVs and being overweight exists, but suggest it may be down to children getting less sleep when watching TV in their bedrooms or snacking in front of their screens.
And they hypothesise that the stronger link between the hours girls spend watching TV and being overweight could be influenced by girls being less likely to be physically active than boys at this age.
Researchers are calling for strategies designed to prevent childhood obesity to do more to tackle this issue.
Writing in the journal, they say: "While our screens have become flatter, our children have become fatter."
Prof Nick Finer, consultant endocrinologist and bariatric physician at University College London, said the study was "powerful" although it couldn't prove that a bedroom TV directly caused weight gain.
But he added: "It is hard not to think that parents concerned about their child's risk of becoming overweight might appropriately consider not putting a TV in their young children's bedrooms."
Prof Russell Viner, from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) said the findings should be taken seriously.
"With a third of 11-year-old children in England overweight and almost one in five obese, urgently tackling the childhood obesity epidemic is absolutely vital.
"We know that high levels of screen time expose children to increased risks of being overweight on a number of fronts, creating a damaging combination of a more sedentary lifestyle, increased exposure to junk food advertising, disruption to sleep and poorer ability to regulate eating habits when watching TV."
Prof Viner said the study supported their call for a ban on junk food advertising on TV before the 21:00 watershed. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cornwall-47572133 | An MP has been ridiculed on social media after he suggested all knives should be fitted with GPS trackers.
Scott Mann, Conservative MP for North Cornwall, said on Twitter there should be a national database "like we do with guns".
His tweet has attracted more than 3,600 comments, with some saying Mr Mann was "not the sharpest knife in the drawer".
New figures show knife crime in England and Wales is at its highest for nine years.
Media captionJohnny Mercer MP labels Mr Mann's office the "Ministry of Good Ideas", and has a sit down to take in some of the public's suggestions.
Mr Mann's Tweet reads: "Every knife sold in the UK should have a gps tracker fitted in the handle.
"It's time we had a national database like we do with guns.
"If you're carrying it around you had better have a bloody good explanation, obvious exemptions for fishing etc."
But Twitter users were quick to highlight the flaws in the former postal worker's plan.
Comedy writer James Felton commented: "There are 66 million people in the UK. If every one of them owns just one knife that's 66 million knives to keep track of."
Several people pointed out that every knife would require charging.
Hundreds of others poked fun at Mr Mann's suggestion.
Shane Telford suggested that tea spoons should also be tracked to prevent them getting lost.
The MP's comments follow a spate of fatal stabbings in England, including the killings of three 17-year-olds in less than a week earlier this month.
On Wednesday, it was announced the government had pledged an extra £100m to help police tackle knife crime.
The BBC contacted Mr Mann's constituency office, but he did not wish to comment. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47960359 | Petrol stations across Portugal are running dry just days after tanker drivers began a nationwide strike over pay and conditions.
The country declared an energy emergency on Tuesday, and drivers agreed to supply essential services including hospitals and airports.
But widespread shortages have prompted queues at petrol stations across the country, while some have closed.
Among their demands, the drivers are pressing for double the minimum wage.
Before the agreement to supply essential services, airports reported that they were running low on fuel supplies, which could have delayed or cancelled flights.
Tuesday's agreement did not include any possible solution to the strike, officials said, and the union has only agreed to supply minimum quantities.
But the minimum service should guarantee supplies for emergency and rescue services, Prime Minister Antonio Costa said.
At one petrol station in the suburbs of the capital, Lisbon, a queue of at least 50 cars stretched for hundreds of metres, AFP news agency reported. Thousands of other service stations had been completely emptied, it said.
Portugal's Minister of Economy Pedro Siza Vieira asked citizens not to rush to the pumps to help avoid any further shortages.
Portuguese newspaper Diário de Noticias reported that soldiers were on standby ready to drive fuel trucks if necessary. It added that the strike was "threatening to spoil the Easter weekend for many families, and business for many companies".
The newspaper warned that the strike was planned to continue "indefinitely", or until union demands were met.
The union is comprised of drivers who specialise in the transport of hazardous substances. They want to be recognised for their specific skills and to be considered separately from other forms of heavy vehicle drivers. They are also seeking changes to salaries and long working hours. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-47729119 | About 192 million people in Indonesia are eligible to cast their vote in a general election on 17 April.
For the first time, presidential, parliamentary and regional elections are all taking place simultaneously on one day.
It's a massive democratic undertaking which will determine the future identity of a vast and diverse country.
What's going to happen on 17 April?
About 245,000 candidates will be running for more than 20,000 national and local legislative seats across a country made up of around 18,000 islands and covering 1.9 million sq km (735,400 sq miles).
The Lowy Institute, an Australian think-tank, calls it "one of the most complicated single-day elections in global history".
Initial results will emerge within hours but it will take a few weeks for the final results to become clear.
Who is running for the presidency?
It's a battle between current President Joko Widodo and Prabowo Subianto, a former military general. They also went face-to-face in the 2014 elections.
Mr Prabowo is closely associated with the traditional political elite. He was previously married to the daughter of former dictator General Suharto, who ruled Indonesia with an iron fist for three decades.
He has been dogged by allegations of complicity in human rights abuses committed under Gen Suharto, though he has maintained his innocence.
After spending many years overseas, he made his political comeback in 2009. In the 2014 presidential election he campaigned on an anti-poverty platform, saying he wanted to reduce unemployment and create new jobs.
Joko Widodo - known universally as Jokowi - comes from humble beginnings but first came to international prominence by becoming governor of Jakarta in 2012.
In the 2014 presidential election he campaigned on a "man of the people" anti-corruption platform, promising to tackle poverty and to stamp out nepotism and intolerance.
Under his leadership the economy has grown steadily, the poverty rate is falling and some key infrastructure projects have been finalised - including a much-needed mass rapid transit network in the capital, Jakarta.
But he has disappointed some supporters by abandoning campaign promises to resolve human rights violations.
He has also been working to attract foreign investment from places like China, but his critics have accused him of not protecting national interests. His opponent has accused him of selling the country to foreigners.
What are the key issues for Indonesians?
Infrastructure, corruption and the economy will all be on voters' minds.
But the central issue this election will Indonesia's national identity and whether it is taking an increasingly Islamic political path.
Indonesia has no official state religion but more than 80% of its people are Muslim. It is the world's most populous Muslim-majority country.
Conservative religious groups have become increasingly vocal over recent years - rallying over cases like the blasphemy conviction of former Jakarta governor (and Jokowi ally) Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as Ahok.
So the main presidential candidates have been working hard to display their Islamic credentials.
Mr Jokowi, a religious moderate, surprised many by picking Ma'ruf Amin as his running mate. He's a powerful cleric who played a key role in the protests that led to Ahok's downfall. That was seen as an attempt to sway more conservative Muslim voters his way, but may have lost him some support among younger, liberal voters.
Mr Prabowo has promised to protect Islamic leaders and increase funding for religious schools, while respecting the constitution. He has earned endorsements from the Prosperous Justice Party, the largest Islamist party in parliament.
He has picked as his running mate a young, savvy, politician called Sandiaga Uno, who also happens to be one of Indonesia's richest men.
Analysts are predicting a significant number of voters will decide not to vote at all this year, feeling disillusioned with Mr Jokowi but unwilling to back the overt Islamist politics of Mr Prabowo.
Who are the key voters?
According to the Elections Commission, around 40% of eligible voters will be aged 17 to 35 - around 80 million people.
And parties have been trying their best to attract the youth vote - sometimes in innovative ways.
Last year Jokowi's party, the PDIP, launched "fashionable" merchandise including T-shirts, hats and jackets.
Mr Prabowo has been building up relationships with vloggers, YouTubers and influencers, according to a report by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Supporters of both candidates have also created their own music videos, complete with catchy tunes.
Social media is king in Indonesia - it has the fourth-highest number of Facebook users in the world - and the country has been plagued by fake news problems.
Mafindo, an Indonesian organisation fighting fake news, said political fake news and disinformation shot up by 61% between December 2018 and January 2019.
The group's co-founder told Reuters that a large proportion of the misinformation targets Mr Jokowi, making him out to be a Christian, of Chinese ancestry, or a communist.
These may not sound like dramatic claims - but they're big accusations in Muslim-majority Indonesia, where race and ideology are especially sensitive issues.
Who are Indonesia's election rivals? |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7829267.stm | Emmy-winning actor Patrick McGoohan, best known for starring in cult 1960s TV show The Prisoner, has died at the age of 80.
He died in Los Angeles after a short illness, his film producer son-in-law Cleve Landsberg told Associated Press.
McGoohan played the character Six in the surreal 1960s show, filmed in the north Wales village of Portmeirion.
He won two Emmy awards for his work on TV detective series Columbo, playing different characters.
The first came for an episode of the series in 1974, with another 16 years later.
The screen star also won a Bafta award for best television actor in 1959 for his role in The Greatest Man In The World, a one-off drama in ITV's Armchair Theatre series.
In more recent years, McGoohan played King Edward Longshanks in the 1995 Mel Gibson film Braveheart.
The actor, who was born in New York and raised in England and Ireland, came to screen prominence in TV series Danger Man, in which he played a secret service agent. The programme later aired as Secret Agent in the US.
He was later considered for the role of James Bond for the movie Dr No.
But McGoohan was chiefly associated with cult ITV drama The Prisoner, writing some of the episodes himself under a different name.
His character spent the entire time attempting to escape from The Village and finding out the identity of his captor, the elusive Number One.
He repeatedly declared: "I am not a number - I am a free man!"
In 2000, McGoohan reprised his most famous role in an episode of The Simpsons.
Residents of Portemeirion, which has its own The Prisoner shop selling memorabilia from the show, have paid tribute to the star.
Councillor Dewi Lewis said: "It helped to put Portmeirion the village on the map during the 60s and we are still benefiting from that today."
"Mr McGoohan is held in high esteem in the area for the work he did - it still has a loyal following of people who come to Portmeirion annually."
Robin Llywelyn, managing director of the Portmeirion village resort, added: "What he created out of The Prisoner is a lasting piece of TV at its best - it achieved cult status. It's something that we are very proud of."
Last year, ITV confirmed that Passion of the Christ star Jim Caviezel would take the role of Number Six in a remake of The Prisoner, which will also star Sir Ian McKellen.
"His [McGoohan's] creation of The Prisoner made an indelible mark on the sci-fi, fantasy and political thriller genres, creating one of the most iconic characters of all time," AMC, which is co-producing the remake, said in a statement.
"AMC hopes to honour his legacy in our re-imagining of The Prisoner."
McGoohan's last role came in 2002, as a voice artist in animated picture Treasure Planet. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-18352528 | A man found guilty of avoiding tax and national insurance contributions totalling more than £600,000 has been jailed for five years.
Stephen Maxwell, 53, of Dalbeattie, had denied committing the offence between April 1999 and May 2008.
However, he was found guilty by a jury following a six-week trial at Kirkcudbright Sheriff Court.
His jail term was backdated to March and a proceeds of crime hearing was adjourned until August.
Maxwell was originally charged with avoiding payments of more than £1.7m.
However, that amount was subsequently reduced and charges against his wife, Susan, were dropped.
Maxwell, who was said to own offshore companies in the Isle of Man and Gibraltar, was also accused of putting assets beyond the reach of creditors, in particular HMRC, by purchasing Barncailzie Hall at Springholm, near Castle Douglas.
Media captionDavid Odd of HMRC in Scotland explains the investigation which led to Stephen Maxwell's conviction.
Advocate Andrew Murphy said the scheme was not his client's invention, but he had persisted in it for a number of years.
He said Maxwell's accountant and financial advisers had brought him into the offshore scheme which was the basis for the indictment.
"Even to tax experts it is a law which is complex," he said.
"His error was maybe, at an early stage, he did not seek sound advice about the legality of the scheme and this was compounded by not being up front with the income tax and bankruptcy.
"He made no effort whatsoever to make payment, and once into the scheme he did not seek a way of finding a way out."
The tax system depends on people being honest but Maxwell consistently tried to conceal his income.
Mr Murphy said Maxwell had simply "blindly carried on" and hoped not to be discovered.
"He was obsessed with computers and it seems he had a high talent, which was probably wasted," added Mr Murphy.
"He revelled in solving computer problems and worked seven days a week and all his holidays."
Mr Murphy said that the scheme had not brought Maxwell financial rewards and he had lost everything, including his house in England and his house and estate in Dumfries and Galloway.
However, Sheriff Kenneth Robb said he did not agree that nobody had been harmed by the offence.
He said that in an age of financial constraints, £635,000 was a lot of money which could have helped the public purse.
He told Maxwell: "You have enjoyed the fruits of your labour and the tax that you should have paid.
"The tree may be bare, but you used the fruits over many years."
David Odd, HMRC's assistant director of criminal investigation in Scotland, said: "This was a case of deliberate and systematic fraud.
"The tax system depends on people being honest but Maxwell consistently tried to conceal his income.
"Income tax fraud is not a victimless crime and HMRC take a very serious view of anyone who acts in this manner.
"We have robust procedures to identify abuse of our tax systems and are committed to pursuing any such fraud vigorously." |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6731623.stm | The results of genetic tests should be available to insurance companies, a leading medical ethics expert has said.
Professor Soren Holm, of Cardiff Law School, says results of gene tests for serious illnesses are no different to other medical data already disclosed.
He argues in the British Medical Journal there are not any "principled reasons" for objecting to disclosure.
Opponents fear unfair discrimination, arguing a positive test for a "disease" gene does not mean illness is certain.
There are now dozens of genetic "markers" for common serious diseases such as cancer and heart disease.
The Wellcome Trust announced on Wednesday that its own research had pinpointed genetic variants linked to depression, Crohn's disease, high blood pressure, rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes.
However, having the relevant gene or genes may only slightly increase a person's overall risk of developing that disease at some point in their lifetime, and a positive test does not mean that the illness is certain.
Life insurers already use complex calculations based on age, existing illnesses, lifestyle and weight to calculate the expected lifespan, and the risk of disease in someone applying for a policy.
Professor Holm said that the information used to make these calculations was no less private than genetic test results.
He said: "If we allow insurers to obtain some kinds of health information, such as body mass index, cholesterol concentration, or results of a physical examination, we no longer have any principled reasons for excluding genetic information.
"It is not inherently more specific, predictive, sensitive or private than other kinds of health information.
"It is true that many so-called genetic risk factors are not well validated, but the same is true of other risk factors measured by non-genetic means."
However, Professor Richard Ashcroft, a biomedical ethicist from Queen Mary, University of London, said that insurers might use the information for "irrational discrimination".
He said: "It is important to note how genetic information can be misunderstood, or its importance overestimated, and therefore used in discriminatory ways that would not be justified on sound actuarial grounds."
He gave the example of the BRCA1 gene in breast cancer, which actually makes little difference to the life expectancy of the woman.
"A naive insurance salesperson might think she represented a poor risk for life insurance," he said.
There is currently a moratorium until 2011 on the right of companies to ask for disclosure of all but one genetic test.
People who test positive for the gene which causes Huntington's Disease are 100% certain to develop this disabling and ultimately fatal disease, and insurers have been granted the right to ask for results to be revealed to them.
A spokesman for the Association of British Insurers said that it supported the moratorium, though it would be keeping "a close eye" on developments in genetic testing in years to come. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-47720797 | A drug dealer who operated out of a Travelodge hotel has been given a five-year sentence.
Ibrahim Mohamed, 20, looked after a "significant" amount of heroin and cocaine in a room while two associates sold the product on the street.
When police raided the hotel, Cambridge Crown Court heard, Mohamed attempted to throw drugs out of a window.
Mohamed, from east London, was found guilty of possession with intent to supply.
He was arrested when police swooped on the hotel on Chieftain Way in Orchard Park on 7 October 2017.
Mohammed and his accomplices, who have never been traced, were placed there by a London-based gang as part of a so-called county lines operation, the court heard.
It usually involves dealers in large cities using vulnerable people to peddle drugs in other parts of the country.
Naeem Karbhari, defending, said the case was unusual in that county lines gangs usually commandeer the homes of local drug addicts in a practice known as "cuckooing".
Judge David Farrell QC said the use of a hotel room brought an "added sophistication" to the case.
Mr Karbhari said Mohamed of Brading Crescent, Wanstead, had been roped into the operation after running up drugs debts himself.
He told the court that his client had "vulnerabilities" that made him "the ideal candidate... to do the function of cuckoos".
"He is someone that has been brought up [to Cambridge], placed in that room and, to some extent, exploited," Mr Karbhari.
"He fell into drugs debt, particularly cannabis... because of that debt he was exploited by individuals."
Judge Farrell told Mohamed he had been "dealing in misery so you and your friends can make money".
"You knowingly looked after the drugs in the hotel while the other two associates went out selling them," he said. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7581815.stm | Ticket sales at this year's Edinburgh Fringe were down by almost 10% - the first fall in eight years.
Bad weather, the poor global economy, competition from the Olympics and problems at the Fringe box office were all cited as factors in the downturn.
The Fringe sold more than 1.5 million tickets for the third year running but that was down from 1.7 million in 2007.
Fringe director Jon Morgan said he was delighted with the overall figures in what he had been a "difficult year".
He also pointed to the increasing number of free fringe events which are not included in the final tally.
Now the Fringe is over, an inquiry will begin into the box office problems which left many shows overbooked or described as sold out when they were not.
Mr Morgan said: "At the start of the festival many were worried about the loss of venues, impact of the Olympics and the economy.
"In a difficult year, with record rainfall and problems with ticketing, fringe-goers have come out in force and enjoyed the festival."
Fringe 2008 featured 31,320 performances of 2,088 shows in 247 venues.
An estimated 18,792 performers took to the stage.
A total of 350 shows at Fringe 2008 were absolutely free, an increase of 46 on 2007. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11839774 | A scheme aimed at getting more children from poor homes into England's universities has been scrapped.
The Universities Minister, David Willetts, has confirmed the Aimhigher programme will close in July.
He said universities were being given increased responsibility for widening participation, and would need to show they were attracting poor students to be allowed to charge higher fees.
Students say the government is telling them to aim lower.
Mr Willetts made the announcement at a higher education conference in London.
It comes a day after demonstrations were held across the UK in opposition to the government's plans to charge students in England tuition fees of up to £9,000 a year.
As many as 2,500 schools, 300 colleges and 100 universities have been involved in the Aimhigher scheme, which attempts to encourage teenagers or primary school pupils from less-advantaged backgrounds to go to university.
The project received £136m in government funding in 2004, but this had fallen to £78m by the time of the general election.
Mr Willetts said: "Aimhigher has assisted universities and schools to learn a lot about what works in raising the aspirations of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, but we now need to use this knowledge to make much faster progress on social mobility."
Ministers say social mobility stalled under the last government, and that they are giving universities increased responsibilities to widen participation and investing more in improving access for people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
There will now be a £150m National Scholarship programme, they add.
And universities which want to charge more than £6,000 a year in tuition fees will have to show they are involved with outreach work to attract less-advantaged students.
The National Union of Students condemned the decision, saying that the scholarship programme money would be out-weighed by cuts to the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA), which is paid to the poorest students in sixth forms and colleges.
NUS president Aaron Porter said: "Ministers are sending the miserable message to students and their families that rather than aim higher, they should aim lower.
"Attempts to triple tuition fees, slash education budgets, and remove the EMA from poorer college students whilst simultaneously pulling the plug on Aimhigher will give further cause to those who believe this government wishes to restrict education to a narrow elite." |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7682723.stm | The Bank of England governor and an influential think tank have predicted that the UK economy is likely to sink into recession in 2009.
Mervyn King told business leaders in Leeds he was concerned about rising unemployment and falling house prices.
Meanwhile, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research said the UK was on the brink of its first full year of recession since 1991.
Economic fears sent the pound plunging to a five-year low against the dollar.
The Bank of England has also been criticised for being too slow to cut interest rates in response to the UK's worsening economic climate.
Sushil Wadhwani, a former member of its monetary policy committee, told the BBC: "The committee has been too slow to acknowledge the risks of a recession and they have fallen behind the curve.
"The consequence of their relative inactivity so far is that the recession is likely to be deeper and more prolonged than was necessary."
In its forecast, the NIESR predicted that Britain's economy would shrink by 0.9% in 2009, with consumer spending falling by 3.4%, business investment down by 3.8% and private housing investment 17.1% lower.
It also warned that if the government's £50bn banking bail-out did not succeed, the recession could be even deeper and longer.
"The British economy will suffer next year as it experiences the worst setback among the G7 countries," it said.
The NIESR said its forecasts assumed that the Bank of England would cut interest rates to 4% early in 2009, although that would probably not be enough to bring inflation below its 2% target before the end of the year.
Speaking on Tuesday night, Mr King said: "It now seems likely the UK is entering a recession."
He also said the British banking system had been closer to collapse earlier this month than at any time since the start of World War I.
But he did try to inject a note of optimism, saying that the government's rescue package would now lead to a slow resumption of normal lending.
"We are far from the end of the road back to stability, but the plan to recapitalise our banking system, both here and abroad, will, I believe, come to be seen as the moment in the banking crisis of the past year when we turned the corner," he said.
Nevertheless, he said, the "age of innocence" of cheap lending between banks "will not quickly, if ever, return".
Moving on to inflation, the governor said there were welcome signs that it would come down from the "worryingly high rate" of 5.2% in September.
He said this was thanks to recent falls in energy prices back from the record highs of July.
While Mr King said the Bank of England was committed to bringing inflation back towards the government's 2% target, he more than hinted that there would be no rate rises for the foreseeable future.
He said the Bank would continue to set rates "to meet the 2% inflation target, not next month, or the month after, but further ahead, when the impact of recent developments in both credit supply and world commodity prices will have worked their way through the economy".
Concluding his speech, Mr King said he hoped for quieter times ahead.
"I have said many times that successful monetary policy would appear to be rather boring.
"So let me extend an invitation to the banking industry to join me in promoting the idea that a little more boredom would be no bad thing." |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/other_sports/cycling/8556237.stm | New Zealander Greg Henderson delivered Team Sky's first major victory in Europe with a gritty sprint finish in stage one of the Paris-Nice race.
Henderson just beat Slovenian Grega Bole after joining a breakaway that also included Britain's David Millar.
Dutchman Lars Boom retains the overall lead from Jens Voigt, with Millar 13 seconds back and Henderson sixth.
"It was a headwind sprint and it was in slow motion. It was so hard and I was lucky to get it," said Henderson.
"To win here in such a beautiful race, it's a real honour."
Former Commonwealth and world track champion Henderson, 33, won in Team Sky's race debut back in January, in a criterium event in Adelaide.
The team have also put in strong showings in Qatar and Oman but results in Europe are generally considered a better guide to form ahead of major races later in the year.
Juan Antonio Flecha won the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad in Belgium on 27 February for Sky's first victory of any sort on the continent.
On Monday, Henderson joined a group of 15 at the head of the race, with 9km to go in the 201.5 km ride from Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines to Contres after the main group broke up in strong crosswinds.
"It's a credit to the management that put the team together," he added.
"They selected a group of great guys and we wanted to say we're not just here for the show, we want to win bike races."
Two-time Tour de France winner Alberto Contador fell behind over the last 15km, then crashed with 3km to go, although he did not appear injured.
The eight-stage, 800-mile event ends in Nice on Sunday. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-36157059 | North Korea has test fired a mid-range ballistic missile which crashed a few seconds after launch, say South Korean military officials.
It is thought to be the second test of the North's new Musudan missile. An attempt earlier this month also failed.
The tests come amid a recent ramp-up in weapons activity as the country prepares for a rare party congress.
Reports suggest it is planning a fifth nuclear test, despite condemnation of its last test in January.
South Korean officials said the mid-range missile launch took place early Thursday morning near the eastern coastal city of Wonsan but the missile "crashed a few seconds later" in the coastal area, reported Yonhap news agency.
What did each of the North's nuclear tests achieve?
The incident was captured by a US surveillance satellite.
The Musudan missiles are said to be able to travel up to 4,000km (2,485 miles), within the range of US territories in the Pacific.
No confirmation of the attempt or the failure has come from North Korea, but sources in South Korea say that the movement of two so-called Musudan missiles, mounted on trucks, was detected earlier in the month.
One was launched two weeks ago and tracked but failed to go far. The same has now happened to the second, according to South Korea.
Kim Jong-un is building up to a big event in just over a week, a rare meeting of the ruling Workers' Party in Pyongyang.
He has trumpeted a series of announcements about progress towards having a nuclear-tipped missile capable of striking Washington. Failed launches indicate that the reality may not match the rhetoric.
All the same, they indicate determination. A fifth nuclear test coinciding with the congress would not be a surprise.
On Saturday, North Korea's foreign minister Ri Yong-su suggested that it would suspend nuclear tests if the US ended its annual military exercises with the South.
But US President Barack Obama dismissed the proposal, saying it was not serious and that North Korea would "have to do better than that".
Strengthened international sanctions were placed on North Korea after it tested what it claimed was a hydrogen bomb and launched a long-range missile.
Over the weekend it also claimed it fired a submarine ballistic missile.
Observers have speculated that Pyongyang is boosting the development of its weapons programs ahead of its political conference aimed at solidifying the power of its leader Kim Jong-un.
The North announced this week that the congress, which was last held in 1980, would take place on 6 May. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-39026505 | A "youngsters party" which police said went "a little wrong" ended when two officers were hurt breaking up a fight.
Five people were also arrested in the brawl in Melton Mowbray's High Street on Saturday night.
Oakham Police tweeted it had "all gone a little wrong in #Melton youngsters party", adding "cops from all over" had been called in.
A special constable and a full-time officer were both hurt but their injuries were not serious.
Leicestershire Police Chief Constable Simon Cole tweeted that the attack on the officer was "#unacceptable".
Police said a "private under 18s" party had been held nearby.
The special constable injured her shoulder while trying to make an arrest in the fight, which broke out at about 23:10 GMT. The other officer hurt his wrist.
A 19-year-old girl was arrested on suspicion of assaulting an officer, two 17-year-old boys and a 16-year-old were arrested suspicion of breaching public order and a 17-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion of assault.
All have been bailed or dealt with by way of "a community resolution", police said.
Image caption Leicestershire Police Chief Constable Simon Cole called the injury "unacceptable" |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-47442012 | Two men jumped out of a van and tried to steal a pug from its owner in the Borders.
The incident happened at about 19:45 on Friday in Elm Row in Galashiels.
A 24-year-old man was out walking his dog when the two would-be thieves got out of a white Transit van and tried to take the pet.
Police said a struggle then ensued and the men were disturbed by a passing driver. They then got back into their vehicle and drove off.
The suspects have only been described as being white with stocky builds.
Police are keen to speak to the occupants of a Peugeot 206 who disturbed the men.
Det Sgt Callum Peoples said: "At this time, we are working to establish the full circumstances of this incident and would urge anyone who believes they have any relevant information to come forward.
"Similarly, if you were on Elm Row during Friday evening and witnessed what happened, or can help us identify the men responsible then please also contact police immediately.
"In particular, we are keen to speak to the driver, and any other occupants of the Peugeot 206, which passed this incident, but didn't stop."
What is it like to find 'treasure'? |
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-41714346 | A man has been taken to hospital suffering from hypothermia after his car went into Lough Neagh in Antrim.
Police were called to Lough Road at 00:30 BST on Sunday and found the vehicle partially submerged.
Four officers entered the water and pulled the man to safety.
Police said "weather conditions were poor with high winds" at the time.
They added that the car had taken "in a substantial amount of water and was at risk of drifting further from the shore".
PSNI Insp Claire Gilbert said she commended the "brave actions" of the officers in ensuring the man's safety.
"The swift action of the police officers involved who, in treacherous conditions placed themselves at personal risk, were key to saving this man's life," she added. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2022452.stm | An article published in Newsweek magazine on Monday claims that the Central Intelligence Agency knew that two men suspected of links to al-Qaeda were in the United States months before they took part in the suicide attacks of 11 September.
Under the headline, "The terrorists the CIA should have caught", the report argues that the CIA tracked one of the men, Nawaf al-Hazmi, shortly after he attended an al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, but failed to alert other US law enforcement agencies.
CIA agents also discovered that another man, Khalid al-Mihdhar, had already obtained a multiple-entry visa that allowed him to enter and leave the US freely, Newsweek reports.
On the 11 September, the two men boarded one of the four hijacked airliners - American Airlines Flight 77 - and crashed it into the Pentagon.
The Newsweek report alleges that had the FBI had the information, its agents could have uncovered the terrorist plot.
It comes only days after the White House had admitted that President Bush was told a month before 11 September of a plot to hijack American planes by Osama Bin Laden.
Newsweek also says that the CIA did not pass on the intelligence to the Immigration and Naturalisation Service, which could have stopped them entering the US.
Instead, the two men lived openly in the US and used their real names to open bank accounts and take flying lessons.
The report says that the State Department even renewed Mihdhar's visa in July 2001 despite the CIA's having linked him to one of the men believed to be behind the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.
The magazine says the CIA had files on the two men at its Counterterrorism Centre for a year and nine months.
It was only three weeks before the 11 September attacks, when CIA Director George Tenet ordered an urgent review of the files after receiving repeated signals of an imminent terrorist attack.
FBI Director Robert Mueller - whose agency is facing criticism over its handling of intelligence reports prior to last year's attacks - expressed doubts that the attacks could have been detected.
Mueller: acknowledged the FBI's analytical capability was "not where it should be"
"I don't think it is at all likely," Mr Mueller told NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday.
Last week though, Mr Mueller appeared to acknowledged that investigators might have been able to uncover part of the plot that led to the 11 September attacks.
Mr Mueller said if all the clues had been put together, "who is to say" what could have been discovered.
This followed a warning from one of its field agent in Minneapolis who complained that FBI headquarters in Washington ignored information about Zacarias Moussaoui, who is alleged to have been involved in planning the 11 September attacks.
In May, the White House had also admitted that President Bush was told a month before 11 September of a plot to hijack American planes by Osama Bin Laden.
"Part of this goes right to the heart of communication between the various intelligence agencies. It has not been a flow of information when people needed it," Richard Shelby, a Republican Senator, told NBC's Meet the Press.
"It has been called the worst intelligence failure of all" |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cornwall/7853269.stm | A plan to build a wind turbine twice the height of Nelson's Column in Cornwall has been put on hold.
There had been fierce local opposition to proposals to erect the 127m (420ft) high turbine at the Eden Project.
Instead the ecological tourist attraction and a community group will join forces to develop a sustainable energy strategy for the whole area.
Restormel Borough Council had been due to consider planning permission for the turbine on Thursday.
Eden, which is near St Austell, and the Neighbours' Forum hope to come up with a plan to ensure energy security and reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
Tim Smit, Eden's chief executive, said: "If we can make this work, we hope that the model can be replicated elsewhere.
"A wider group from the community will need to be engaged in order to make it happen."
Ron Shapland, chairman of the Neighbours' Forum, said: "We welcome Eden's decision to withdraw the application and look forward to further discussions around how Eden and the neighbouring community can explore an energy solution to benefit everyone." |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41564341 | Kim Jong-un's speech over the weekend to members of his politburo saw his sister being promoted, but he also talked about his priorities for the future. What were they?
I know what you're thinking. It must be nuclear, right?
A few caveats here - it's difficult to find a comprehensive transcript in English of his remarks anywhere so what we do have is excerpts gleaned from the North Korean news service, KCNA.
But the speech is revealing in what it tells you about the "supreme leader's" priorities at the moment.
Just take a look at the number of times the economy pops up in his speech. Twice as often in comparison to how much he mentions nuclear weapons.
And can his focus on the economy shed some light on what he's thinking?
In his speech, Kim Jong-un also said that North Korea's economy is doing well, despite the sanctions put in place by the West.
That may be wishful thinking, given the fact that the sanctions are being enforced relatively stringently.
And that's affecting the economy.
Was your T-shirt made in North Korea?
Although it's hard to get reliable figures on North Korea's economy, some data has shown that gasoline prices have been volatile, and the cost of basic goods have reportedly been rising. That will hurt North Korean households.
"North Korean households are richer than they were before," Byung-Yeon Kim, author of the book Unveiling the North Korean Economy tells me from Seoul.
"Their consumption level has increased since the 1990s. A reduction in consumption levels for both the elites and the households will make them unhappy - and that will create a divide between Kim Jong-un and his people. That's dangerous for his political security."
So when sanctions target foreign trade it does start to bite. And that goes goes back to the central question of Kim Jong-un's political survival.
The fact that Kim Jong-un mentions the economy so often is "quite rational", says Mr Kim.
It is part of his strategy of "Byungjin", the dual development of the economy and the nuclear weapons programme.
Byungjin is also about Kim Jong-un's survival.
The nuclear deterrent is his way of securing his position with the international community, adds Mr Kim. The strategy is to develop nuclear weapons and stay safe - and not end up the way that the Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein regimes did.
But the economic development of North Korea is also Kim Jong-un's way of ensuring that the domestic population stays indebted to him, and that he maintains power amongst the elites.
For all his of talk of "Juche", or the guiding principle of self reliance, the makeup of North Korea's economy has changed dramatically over the past decade or so, says Michael Madden of North Korea Leadership Watch.
Almost half of it comes from foreign trade and the economy has been "growing modestly" over the last few years. The idea that North Korea is a closed "autarky" - able to survive without international trade - is no longer valid. It's more of a hybrid model.
It's biggest trading partner has been China - but now with Beijing enforcing the sanctions more than it has in the past, North Korea has had to look elsewhere to keep growth going.
Enter Russia, says Ankit Panda of The Diplomat.
"I don't want to suggest they [Russia] are substituting China - the figures don't add up," he tells me. "But there are examples of closer co-operation. A couple of weeks ago a Russia telecoms company extended an internet line to North Korea, for instance."
All of this seems to point to the central argument that the economy is key to Kim Jong-un's survival.
The international community focuses far too much on Kim Jong-un's preoccupation with nuclear missiles, points out John Delury of Yonsei University. We should concentrate far more on what he says about the economy.
"When you talk about economic development, Kim Jong-un suddenly becomes not so crazy, and becomes familiar to East Asia, where you have had developmental dictators, who have turned their economies around - but were also brutal."
A controversial view - but one that bears considering.
Some analysts argue that if Kim Jong-un could be persuaded that putting the economy ahead of nuclear development is in his self-interest and could help him with his political survival - it may help to de-escalate tensions on the Korean peninsula. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-47313276 | The papers are dominated by the defection of the three Conservative MPs to the Independent Group.
"Let's get this party started" is the headline in City AM, which pictures the self-styled "three amigos" alongside the eight Labour MPs they have joined forces with.
Some of the other papers come up with less charitable nicknames. The Daily Express calls them "Tory turncoats".
The Sun labels them "the three disagrees", and says their actions have pushed Theresa May's government "close to breaking point".
The Daily Mail suggests they wish to go further than that and destroy the Conservative party entirely.
It highlights Heidi Allen's comment that there won't be a Tory party to go back to if they do their jobs properly.
The Daily Telegraph says the timing of their departure - just before Prime Minister's Questions - was calculated to cause "maximum embarrassment" to Mrs May.
They may have been emboldened, the Guardian suggests, by the failure of the leadership to get in touch with them.
It reports the phones of the three MPs were "melting" with calls in the 24 hours before their departure - but two calls never came: from Downing Street or the Tory Whips' office.
The same was not true of Mrs May's predecessor though, according to the Times. It reports David Cameron made a late - and unusual - intervention to ask the MPs: "Is it too late to persuade you to stay?"
It was too late - and the question has now become: how many more will join them? The Daily Mirror says Mrs May is "braced for a further exodus" with her party in "meltdown."
The i says the same is true of Labour. It has been told by an unnamed backbencher that "lots of MPs" - potentially dozens - are on the point of walking out over Jeremy Corbyn's leadership.
The drone attack that brought Gatwick to a standstill before Christmas is believed to have been an "inside job", according to Whitehall sources who have spoken to the Times.
After collecting 130 witness statements and completing 1,100 door-to-door inquiries, the police think the drone must have been operated by someone who knew the layout of the airport - leading them to conclude the pilot was a current or former Gatwick employee.
The Daily Telegraph has interviewed Sue Gray, who has just been appointed Air Marshall in the RAF.
It makes her the its first ever female "three star" general, and the most senior woman in British military history.
She tells the paper she felt she had to try harder because she was a woman, but then "got over herself", saying she's now confident she's got where she has because of her ability, not her gender.
She now wants to encourage "all women in all services to go for it."
Finally, the mystery of why zebras have stripes may been solved, the Guardian reports.
Academics at Bristol University have concluded the pattern appears to deter biting insects - a hypothesis they tested by dressing up some horses in Somerset in zebra outfits.
It debunks a previous theory - that the markings act as camouflage. As one of the researchers points out: zebras are "preferential prey" for lots of animals, including lions, so clearly the stripes "are not really stopping them." |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/highlands_and_islands/6969017.stm | A "green gulf" has emerged between low income and better off households in the drive towards being environmentally friendly, according to charities.
Organisations contacted by BBC Scotland said there was a willingness across all social groups to "go green".
However, they added that people who were struggling financially found it difficult to make their shopping and homes eco-friendly.
Friends of the Earth said green living was harder for poorer families.
Duncan McLaren, chief executive of the organisation, said many lifestyle changes such as switching lights and appliances off when they were not in use cost nothing.
"However, we need politicians to work together more to make it cheaper and easier for everyone to live a greener lifestyle," he added.
Help the Aged said older people on low incomes were keen to be environmentally-friendly, but more often the priority was spending money on heating their homes.
Lindsay Scott, communications manager, said: "There are people whose circumstances are vastly below the poverty line, living on £46-a-week, and cannot afford to go green.
"They have to buy frozen food from the cheapest places.
"There are others at the other end who drive LPG 4x4s, have energy efficient light bulbs and white goods."
Mr Scott said some utility companies took vulnerable groups, such as older people, into consideration when charging for supplies and services.
Mr Scott added: "When you are struggling to eat and heat your home your last priority is to go green."
Fuel poverty charity Energy Action Scotland said there was support through schemes such as the Central Heating Programme and Warm Deal for low income groups to keep their homes warm efficiently.
However, a spokeswoman said: "For people on a low income choosing to buy clothes for their children, or food, or what bill to pay means buying loft insulation is not going to be top of the list."
The Child Poverty Action Group, like several other charities, said poorer families created a smaller carbon footprint - a measure of energy use and harmful emissions it is calculated to cause - than those who are better off.
A spokesman added: "There is an issue in that poor quality housing can often be quite poor in terms of energy efficiency."
He said help was available to make home improvements, however, this was not available to everyone.
When it comes to recycling household waste there is no difference in uptake across housing types, according to Waste Aware Scotland.
Its studies of 5,002 households found 81% recycled rubbish compared with 50% in 2002.
Also, 75% of households across the country now have access to kerbside recycling collections.
Mhairi Davies, 19, a single mother living in Inverness, said that while she made good use of the kerbside service she often felt a "pang of guilt" at not being able to afford eco-friendly shopping, such as eco-cleaning products.
Ms Davies, who has a four-month-old daughter Bobbi-Louise, said: "I think it is something I need to do rather than wanting to do it, but it's just not possible for the amount of money I get.
"I usually go for what's cheapest."
She added: "I do know a lot of people who want to do more, but don't have the means.
"It is basically taking the country by storm and I do feel a pang of guilt not being able to do everything."
The Scottish Government said everyone can play a part in tackling climate change.
It said its Central Heating and Warm Deal programmes have already helped thousands of Scots save energy and have warmer homes which are more affordable to heat.
A spokesman said: "The programmes have together insulated almost 260,000 homes and have resulted in improved energy efficiency across Scotland's housing stock.
"Although the main aim of these programmes is to help people save on their energy bills, they have an additional benefit of helping to reduce emissions." |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/2662181.stm | Farmer Tony Martin - who has served three years in jail for killing a teenage burglar - has been denied early parole from Highpoint Prison in Suffolk.
Martin, one of 22 prisoners who submitted requests for parole consideration on Thursday, is scheduled for release on 28 July.
James Saunders, Martin's solicitor, said Martin would be "bitterly disappointed and very let down" to hear the ruling from the board, which did not specify why he was turned down.
Mr Saunders said: "He has behaved impeccably whilst inside so it can't be on the basis of his behaviour."
He added: "There has been a suggestion that maybe there is some risk to him if he comes out."
His mother, Hilary Martin, said she was disgusted that her son's early parole had been refused.
She said she believed he would simply keep his head down and serve the remaining months of his sentence.
Henry Bellingham, the MP for North West Norfolk, said he would table an urgent question to Home Secretary Jack Straw.
"I'm staggered, I'm appalled and extremely surprised because Tony Martin was a model prisoner.
"His behaviour was exemplary and I just can't understand for the life of me why the parole board took this decision."
Longtime supporter Malcolm Starr said he believed Martin had not been paroled because he refused to apologise for his actions.
He said: "His pride is at stake and he wasn't prepared to compromise it.
"What sort of country are we living in when you have to apologise for defending your own property?
"It is a shocking and lamentable ruling," Mr Starr said.
The farmer has always claimed he acted in self-defence when he shot dead 16-year-old Fred Barras, from Newark, Nottinghamshire, and injured another man with an illegally-held pump-action shotgun in 1999.
They had broken into his near-derelict farmhouse Bleak House, near Wisbech, where Martin had removed part of a staircase to hinder intruders.
Martin's conviction for murder in 2000 caused massive controversy, and raised issues about rural crime and the rights of householders to protect their property.
On appeal Martin's murder conviction was reduced to manslaughter and his sentence cut to five years.
"He has shown no remorse" |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6903056.stm | Al-Qaeda is intensifying its efforts to put operatives into the US and the nation is at a heightened risk of attack, a US intelligence report says.
Analysts warn the terror group may make use of the skills and contacts of battle-hardened militants from al-Qaeda in Iraq to strike on American soil.
Al-Qaeda's leaders have found a "safe haven" in Pakistani tribal areas which has allowed them to regroup, they add.
Officials say there is no specific terror threat in the US at present.
The release of the National Intelligence Estimate report follows leaks of a classified assessment last week.
That report said al-Qaeda's operating capabilities were at their strongest level since the 11 September 2001 attacks, despite a six-year campaign to dismantle the network.
Questioned by reporters last week, President George W Bush rejected the suggestion that al-Qaeda was back to its pre-9/11 strength, saying that was "simply not the case".
Tuesday's declassified intelligence report warns that there will be a persistent risk to the US from terrorism over the next three years, concluding that the US is in a "heightened threat environment".
"Although we have discovered only a handful of individuals in the United States with ties to al-Qaeda's senior leadership since 9/11, we judge that al-Qaeda will intensify its efforts to put operatives here," the report says.
The group is determined to acquire nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and "would not hesitate to use them if it develops what it deems is sufficient capability", according to the report.
Analysts assess that al-Qaeda "will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qaeda in Iraq, its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland".
This association with militants in Iraq has also helped al-Qaeda to energise the wider Sunni extremist community, raise resources and recruit operatives, the report says.
However, increased efforts by US and international agencies mean militant groups view the US as a "harder target to strike" than at the time of the 9/11 attacks.
Frances Townsend, homeland security adviser to Mr Bush, told reporters that al-Qaeda was weaker than it would have been had it not been for US efforts since 2002.
Questioned on whether the war in Iraq had provided an ideal training ground for terrorists, Ms Townsend conceded that al-Qaeda might try to make use of its contacts in Iraq.
But she said extremists were also gaining experience in other places, such as Pakistan and North Africa.
Intelligence officials say the "safe haven" of Pakistan's tribal areas allows the group to protect and regenerate its attack capability by shielding its top leadership and operational commanders.
Ike Skelton, Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said that with hindsight the US had erred when it turned its attention from Afghanistan and the hunt for Bin Laden to the Iraq war.
The NIE report warns of the risk that international co-operation may wane as the memory of the 9/11 attacks fades.
But Ms Townsend said the US was determined to work together with its allies around the world to combat the danger of extremism.
She added that tracking down al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was still a "huge priority" for the US.
Analysts see a danger that home-grown terrorists, connected by increasingly radical internet sites, may strike in the US. However, they say this threat is not as great as in Europe.
Homeland security officials have urged Congress to pass a new surveillance bill that they say will allow them to monitor terror suspects in the face of huge advances in communications technology. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4920692.stm | Tony Blair has defended higher salaries being earned by GPs news that some family doctors are taking home £250,000 a year after expenses.
GP wages have risen by up to 25% since new contracts were introduced in 2004, according to specialist accounts.
Experts have said the contract was ill devised and is partly responsible for current NHS deficits.
But Mr Blair said he was proud doctors and nurses were being well paid for working hard to improve the NHS.
Do GPs earn their crust?
He told the New Health Network: "When people say why have you spent so much on nurses' and doctors' pay, I say because it's right we make our GPs the best paid in Europe, and boost nurses' pay and conditions, which is why the number of doctors in training is up over 68%, and nurses by 67%."
But Conservative shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley said ministers had got the new contracts badly wrong.
"They didn't know what the GPs were doing and when the costs came through it was a third over their estimate, as well as doubling the costs of out-of-hours services," he said.
Liberal Democrat health spokesman Steve Webb said the contracts were not good value for money as almost all GPs had qualified for large pay rises.
"No-one doubts that doctors should get a good income for a demanding and important job, but top rewards must be reserved for the top performers," he said.
The salary figures come from an annual survey by the Association of Independent Specialist Medical Accountants due out later this month.
They suggest the average annual income for GPs could rise to £120,000 before tax.
But the figures also give evidence that some GPs are earning up to £250,000.
The survey is the first of its kind since the GP contract came into effect between April and December 2004.
Policy experts have said the government miscalculated its sums when it negotiated the deal.
The Department of Health has confirmed the current overspend on GPs is £300m.
Hamish Meldrum, lead GP negotiator for the British Medical Association, told the BBC average GP earnings were a bit below £100,000 a year.
He said the new contract was needed because GPs' earnings had fallen below those of other comparable professionals.
Some GPs were earning more money because they were now running a complex business, said Dr Meldrum.
"There will be a few GPs who are at the top of these and primarily they are getting that sort of money for actually running quite a complex business rather than necessarily providing health care," he said.
Niall Dickson, from the independent health think tank the King's Fund, said patients were unlikely to support huge pay increases for GPs.
"Overall we have not seen a big increase in productivity, indeed we may have seen a down in productivity because of shut surgeries on Saturday mornings, and no responsibility for 24 hour cover.
"It does not look like a terribly good deal at the moment for the taxpayer and the patient."
Are doctors earning their crust?
Is your GP worth it? |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3582758.stm | The body responds much more rapidly to harmful invaders than previously thought, say UK researchers.
The Dundee University team uncovered a rapid phase of the immune response involving dendritic cells.
These cells became activated within minutes of sensing the presence of invaders, alerting other cells that the pathogen is friendly or dangerous.
The authors told Science the discovery could help scientists fine-tune vaccines to make them more powerful.
They respond damn quickly - within minutes.
Scientists have been interested in dendritic cells for many years because they are one of the key cells involved with the body's defence against infection.
These sentinel-like cells are necessary for the body to be able to recognise and react to attack from viruses and bacteria.
Professor Colin Watts and his team looked in the laboratory at what happened when dendritric cells came into contact with microorganisms.
They found the dendritic cells sensed the presence of invading germs like viruses and bacteria with receptors on their surface called Toll Like Receptors (TLR).
Stimulating these receptors causes the dendritric cells to migrate out of the tissues that they have been patrolling to the lymph nodes, carrying with them fragments of the invader as evidence of the attack.
They did this by rapidly reorganising their internal structure, which allowed them to capture the foreign material and make it visible to other immune cells in the lymph nodes, called T cells, which could then attack the intruder.
Professor Watts said: "What amazed us was how quickly dendritic cells can respond to signals from pathogens.
"They respond damn quickly - within minutes," he said.
The whole process lasted only an hour or so, which is very short compared with the two-day time scale that most previous studies have shown.
"I believe we have discovered a new and very early chapter in the life story of these remarkable cells," said Professor Watts.
He said this could lead to new treatment avenues in the future.
This information could be used to enhance the potency of vaccines against germs or even tumours.
"This understanding means we are better placed to manipulate the immune system."
For example, making vaccines more effective and turning off the immune system when it goes wrong and attacks the body in autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, he said.
"We might be able to include in vaccines things that stimulate this dendritic response, something that says 'take this up quickly.'"
He said the next step was to see if the same happened with these cells in living tissue.
Professor Tim Elliott, an expert in immunity and cancer at the University of Southampton, said: "One puzzle in this series of events has been that stimulation of TLR was generally thought to switch off the ability of dendritic cells to acquire pieces of the invading germs to present to T cells which, if true, would make them less effective at raising the alarm.
"This study solves the puzzle," he said.
Very soon after dendritic cells encounter germs via their TLR the process of acquiring pieces of the germ is actually increased before it is switched off by the time the dendritic cell reaches a lymph node, he said.
"This information could be used to enhance the potency of vaccines against germs or even tumours if, for example, we could find a way to deliver them along with molecules that stimulate TLR to dendritic cells in the skin," he said. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/surrey/6273640.stm | Chelsea Football Club has unveiled the first phase of its new multi-million pound training HQ in Surrey.
Owner Roman Abramovich opened the Cobham ground, which has 30 football pitches, a 17m (56ft) hydrotherapy pool and a medical centre.
The club said it had also been designed to fit into its green belt surroundings, with a curved roof planted with growing grasses.
A moat allows light into the basement floor of the three-storey structure.
Because it had been dug into the ground, the HQ was no higher than any of the surrounding buildings.
"Today is a proud day for Chelsea," said chief executive Peter Kenyon.
"We are very near the culmination of many years' hard work to find and build a facility that is key to the future of the club and will be one of the leading centres in the world.
"Developing home-grown players is a vitally important goal for Chelsea.
"Our young players, academy and community coaches will be working closely with the first team - this is very much part of our club philosophy."
The club said the biggest challenge during the two-year construction was not interfering with day-to-day football operations.
The club moved to temporary buildings on the site in January 2005 and work had to be planned round first team training.
Phase two of the development, an overspill academy and community facility, will be completed next year. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/6648849.stm | Home Secretary John Reid has called for human rights laws to be rewritten to protect people against terrorism.
In a speech in Venice to ministers of the six largest EU nations, he said the current situation was unacceptable.
Citizens were not being protected by politicians who followed case law "to the letter", Mr Reid said.
But Shami Chakrabarti, from Liberty, said human rights would be improved by encouraging freedoms, not by destroying legal frameworks already in place.
Ms Chakrabarti, who is the director of the human rights organisation, said: "In this struggle, we have to work with allies around the world to make sure they up their game on human rights because terrorism is being bred in countries which have the worst human rights records.
"We need to up their game - not dilute our great traditions of rights and freedoms."
In his speech, Mr Reid told the summit, that the international legal system needed modernising and that the distinction between armed conflict and criminal acts was out of date.
He said: "We need to work to modernise the law - still protecting human rights and still providing equity and justice - but reflecting the reality of the conflicts and struggles we now face.
"We need leadership to do this. It can't be left solely to the lawyers.
"Politicians must expose these issues and set a lead, so that we can protect the rights of all our citizens, including all those threatened by terrorism."
Mr Reid said neither the law governing war nor civil law was well-suited to dealing with terrorism inspired by al-Qaeda following the September 11 attacks.
"The right to security, to the protection of life and liberty, is and should be the basic right on which all others are based," he said.
"Now, more than ever, it should be the fundamental starting point of all our principles and practices across Europe."
Human rights laws have caused problems for the British government in its attempts to introduce anti-terrorism measures.
These include emergency laws in 2001 which were defeated in the House of Lords, and courts overturning control orders which restrict the movements of terror suspects.
The conference of home affairs and interior ministers is also being attended by US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and EU security chief Franco Frattini.
Mr Reid's speech on the island of San Clemente came three days after the Home Office was split in the UK.
A new Ministry of Justice will leave the Home Office to concentrate on terrorism, security and immigration. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6062700.stm | A teenager who fears being subjected to female circumcision if returned to Sierra Leone has been granted asylum.
Five Law Lords overturned decisions by an Immigration Appeal Tribunal and the Court of Appeal, who ruled asylum laws did not apply to Zainab Fornah, 18.
The Refugee Convention says successful asylum seekers must come from a social group fearing persecution.
The Law Lords ruled female members of tribes where female genital mutilation was almost universal were such a group.
Baroness Hale of Richmond added it was a mystery why the case had reached the House of Lords as it was so "blindingly obvious" that asylum laws applied.
Last year the Court of Appeal ruled young women facing female genital mutilation could not be considered as "a social group fearing persecution" under the terms of the convention.
That was because the custom was so widespread in Sierra Leone and so bound up with its culture and traditions.
But on Wednesday Lord Bingham of Cornhill ruled that women in Sierra Leone were clearly "a group of persons sharing a common characteristic which, without a fundamental change in social mores, is unchangeable - namely a position of social inferiority as compared with men".
He added: "They are perceived by society as inferior. That is true of all women, those who accept or willingly embrace their inferior position and those who do not."
Female genital mutilation was an extreme manifestation of the discrimination to which all women were subjected in Sierra Leone, Lord Bingham added.
The practice had been internationally condemned as cruel, discriminatory and degrading and was against the law in this country, he said.
Women carry out the surgery as part of an initiation rite to adulthood.
Lord Bingham said: "The operation, often very crudely performed, causes excruciating pain.
"It can give rise to serious long-term ill effects, physical and mental, and it is sometimes fatal.
"Even the lower classes of Sierra Leonean society regard uninitiated indigenous women as an abomination fit only for the worst sort of sexual exploitation."
The UN Refugee Agency's UK representative, Bemma Donkoh, told BBC News the agency had "consistently advocated that the refugee definition, if properly interpreted, can encompass women who have been persecuted for gender-related reasons".
"Significantly, all the parties involved in this case accepted the fact that female genital mutilation constitutes a particularly horrendous form of treatment and a violation of human rights that amounts to persecution," she added.
The Law Lords' judgment would provide "invaluable guidance on the interpretation of the refugee definition as set out in the 1951 Refugee Convention", Ms Donkoh said.
What "membership of a social group" meant in the context of the convention's definition of refugees had been the subject of "much consideration and analysis", she added.
"This judgment has greatly assisted in interpreting this part of the refugee convention." |
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-isle-of-man-45452724 | A 31-year-old man has been arrested after drugs with an estimated street value of £150,000 were seized in the Isle of Man.
Police said the suspected cannabis resin and bush was recovered from a property in Douglas following an operation on Thursday evening.
A force spokesman said more than £30,000 in cash was also recovered.
A man has been arrested and is helping police with their inquiries, the spokesman added. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3472533.stm | Rail booking groups Trainline.com and Qjump are to merge, creating a new firm responsible for issuing 10% of all rail tickets.
Up to 190 jobs are expected to go at Qjump with the closure of its Sheffield call centre in an attempt to cut costs.
Call-centre provider Sitel UK has been given the contract to manage calls at its site in Newcastle.
The company, to be called TheTrainline, will be the UK's largest rail retailer with annual sales of about £300m.
The move will not affect existing Trainline employees, who will continue to work from their two centres in Scotland.
Trainline currently employs around 1,000 staff at the centres.
The combined business - handling around eight million customers a year - will provide services to the companies owned by the National Express Group, including Midland Mainline, Greater Anglia, ScotRail and Central Trains.
It will continue to have headquarters in London.
The new business will be 86% owned by Virgin, which has increased its holding through the purchase of a 49% shareholding from Stagecoach for £4m. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7852875.stm | The ashes of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and his actress wife Majel Barrett Roddenberry are to be launched into space.
Some of Gene Roddenberry's remains were aboard the 1997 maiden flight of Celestis Inc, which specialises in space journeys.
His wife, who was the only actor to take part in all five Star Trek TV series, died of leukaemia in December.
The spacecraft carrying the couple's ashes is set to launch in 2012.
Gene Roddenberry came up with the concept for Star Trek in 1964 under the original title of Wagon Train to the Stars.
It was not a great success initially and was cancelled due to low ratings after running for three series in a poor time slot.
However, it found an audience in syndication and carried on for four more series and 10 films so far. The latest in the franchise, directed by Lost creator JJ Abrams, is due out in May.
Majel Barrett, who married Roddenberry in 1969, was involved with Star Trek from the start. She was cast as second in command in a pilot which never aired and later played Nurse Chapel in the original series.
As the voice of the computer in the follow-up shows and films she became an icon to fans and earned the nickname The First Lady of Star Trek.
After her husband's death in 1991 she made sure that two of his unrealised projects Earth: Final Conflict and Andromeda made it to the small screen.
It was Barrett Roddenberry who arranged for some of her husband's ashes to make the first memorial trip into space. The couple's son Eugene says she made it clear at the time that she wanted a joint mission after her own death.
He said she hoped the rocket would "carry their spirits, memories, and the message of their life's work into the cosmos on an infinite journey into deep space".
Celestis offers to launch cremated remains into Earth's orbit, onto the lunar surface or into deep space.
The Roddenberrys are following James Doohan, who played Scotty on Star Trek, into space. His ashes were fired off in 2007 but the space flight lasted only four minutes before the rocket fell back to Earth.
The rockets carrying the ashes usually burn up on re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.
A tribute site has been set up by Celestis so Star Trek fans can leave parting messages which will travel in the space ship along with the Roddenberrys.
One couple from the UK wrote: "As we will look up at the sky and see the two brightest stars we will always think of you and the light you brought to our lives." |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-scotland-47614326/man-cuddled-dog-to-stay-alive-in-blizzard-in-cairngorms | A snowsports enthusiast survived subzero temperatures in blizzard conditions in the Cairngorms by cuddling his dog to keep warm.
The split boarder had become disorientated and cold on Saturday.
The man, who is from the Edinburgh area and raised the alarm on his mobile phone, was well equipped and got inside a survival bag with his Labrador cross.
Members of Cairngorm Mountain Rescue Team found them and escorted them to safety. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-47936172 | An inmate who attacked two prison officers at HMP Norwich has been sent to a psychiatric hospital.
Cairo Adams, 23, originally from March in Cambridgeshire, denied two counts of wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm, but was found guilty by an Old Bailey jury.
On Friday he was detained under the Mental Health Act.
At his trial earlier this year he was cleared of two counts of attempted murder. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3522758.stm | Chancellor Gordon Brown appears on course to meet his projected borrowing requirements for the year.
After 11 months of the fiscal year, Britain's public sector net borrowing (PSNB) reached £30.9bn, compared to £17.2bn in the same period last year.
In his Budget speech on Wednesday, Mr Brown projected that Britain's PSNB this would reach £37.5bn in 2003/04.
The chancellor is confident that the government will meet his golden rule of balancing the budget over the cycle.
Public sector net borrowing (PSNB) in February was £1.06bn, compared with £500m the same month a year ago, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported.
That was broadly in line with expectations, with most economists predicting PSNB of £1bn.
Delayed self-assessment tax receipts helped the government run a sizeable surplus in the month, the ONS said.
That led to an increase in tax receipts in February to £13.9bn, compared to £12.4bn in the same month one year ago.
But spending is also higher than one year ago.
Public sector net debt outstanding at the end of February totalled £361.1bn, equivalent to 31.7% of Britain's GDP - well below the government's 'sustainable investment rule' of 40%.
The news about higher tax receipts will cheer the chancellor, who predicted on Wednesday in the Budget that he will meet his fiscal rules going forward into the next election.
Under the "golden rule", government spending (excluding investment) and tax receipts must balance over the economic cycle as a whole.
So Mr Brown is able to balance his £37bn Budget gap this year against accumulated Budget surpluses in the early years of the Labour government.
The current economic cycle is expected to end by 2005/6, and there is much concern among experts about whether the chancellor will have as much room for manoeuvre in future years.
He predicted that borrowing would decline next year to £33bn, and continue to fall in future years.
But that will depend on economic growth producing more tax receipts to fill the government coffers - something that is still looking less than certain.
This year, despite good news on the economic front, the deficit worsened by £10bn compared to projections one year ago, mainly because of weaker tax receipts.
In particular, the government is counting on a 17% increase in corporation tax to help bridge the Budget gap.
And government spending is set to slow, despite Mr Brown's high-profile announcement about extra money for education.
In future, increases in spending will increasingly have to balanced by savings in the public sector elsewhere. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31555497 | Kew Gardens has announced a new science strategy, outlining where it will focus its research in the coming years.
Plans include digitising its extensive plant and fungi collections, an annual health check of the world's flora, and hosting an MSc course in taxonomy.
However, the London-based botanical centre faces a pared-back future: funding cuts have left it with an annual deficit of £5m.
Just under a quarter of its core science jobs have gone.
Some have raised concerns that the loss of 47 research posts places its world-class reputation under threat.
Prof Kathy Willis, director of science at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, told BBC News: "We've cut back to the bones, and my job is to now rebuild around this new science strategy.
"Kew, over 255 years, has built up this extraordinary collection, both living and dried, of plants.
"But we've never really looked at what can we do with these collections, what global questions, what critical challenges can be addressed using this incredible resource."
The new strategy will focus research on climate change, food and fuel security, poverty, disease and ecological scarcity.
But while there are new initiatives, which also include a children's plant festival, some areas are going.
Work on restoration ecology, the science of repairing damaged habitats, will end. And there has been some criticism that the science jobs were cut before the strategy was unveiled.
Despite the new plans, Kew's financial future remains uncertain.
In 2014, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) announced it was cutting Kew's annual budget by £1.5m.
On top of this, rising overheads and a reduction in funding from the Kew Foundation, the charity that supports the gardens, have left a black hole of £5m a year.
"We have a world-leading institution and it is under threat," said Zac Goldsmith MP, whose Richmond Park constituency includes Kew Gardens.
"When you have something that is a world-beating institution - and it's impossible to exaggerate how much of a gem, how much of a jewel Kew Gardens is - you look after it," he told BBC News.
"And we're talking about tiny figures in the context of Defra's overall budget. It just seems to me to be an act of vandalism to inflict that level of cutbacks on an institution of that sort."
More than 100,000 people signed a petition against the government's decision, and scientists and the public have expressed their concerns to the Science and Technology Select Committee, which is holding an inquiry into Kew's funding. It will release its findings in the coming weeks.
Prof Georgina Mace, from University College London, is a fellow of the Royal Society. She gave evidence to the select committee's hearing in December.
"Building up collections, in libraries, herbaria, museums and so on, are not things you can start and stop," she told BBC News.
Last year, the government said it was giving Kew two one-off payments. In September, it allocated £1.5m of extra money, and a further £2.3m was announced in December to plug the funding gap until 2016.
"Although it is good for them that there have been these short reprieves, that is not the way to fund long-term science. You cannot maintain major facilities, expertise and collections when money is coming and going unpredictably.
"From what I have seen, they are pretty close to minimum critical mass at the moment. More cuts could mean it simply cannot function as an international plant centre with the reputation it has at the moment."
Defra said that it had managed to provide a "relatively good" settlement for Kew in 2015-16, and that the government had committed £6.6m in funding for its Millennium Seed Bank and £10m over four years for Temperate House.
"Kew is a world-leader in plant science and research," a spokesperson said.
"We are proud of the vital work carried out by Kew - that is why we have given it on average more money per year from 2010 than in the preceding three years. Through its restructuring, it will be able to maintain a world-class science facility for future generations."
There is no doubt that this is a turbulent time in Kew's history, but Prof Willis says she is hopeful that Kew will find a way to adapt and survive.
"We are rebuilding around the new science strategy, but also we have to look at alternative ways of raising our own funding as well. It is a global resource - and we have an extraordinary collection here." |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9502000/9502946.stm | Musician Damon Albarn's latest work has been inspired by an Elizabethan mastermind. But who was Dr John Dee?
There are not many people alive who could pull off being an influential political adviser, a mathematician and scientist, and a magician and mystic all at the same time.
But during the reign of Elizabeth I, Dr John Dee was such a man - an influential polymath who got some of his information from a seance and a crystal ball.
Now, the purported inspiration for Shakespeare's enigmatic magician Prospero in The Tempest and Marlowe's devil-dealing Doctor Faustus has taken someone else captive with his mystical charms.
Blur and Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn is writing and performing the music for Dr Dee: An English Opera, which opens in July as part of the Manchester International Festival.
"I'm not walking around in a ruff and tights," he says in an interview with Radio 4's John Wilson, but he admits a profound affinity with the cosmic Elizabethan mastermind.
"I've got a really strange emotional connection - it really gets to me, that haunted, magical England.
"It's something that really stirs me in an irrational way."
Indeed, to the modern mind, many of Dee's ideas could be construed as somewhat irrational.
"He was working at a time when there was considerable uncertainty about what you could know was true," explains Benjamin Woolley, a historian whose biography of Dee has in part inspired Albarn to embark on his musical project.
Following Henry VIII's separation from the Catholic Church, the landscape of ideas in Europe was in a state of flux.
Renaissance men such as Dr Dee were suddenly free to speculate about material and mystical possibilities.
Dee's mission, said the historian, was to find a unifying principle, a theory of everything which united ideas of Arabic algebra - infusing into Europe from the Muslim conquest of Spain - as well as astrology, mysticism and the wisdom of ancient traditions being unearthed by Renaissance scholars.
His belief was that a universal language could be found, the language of God and the builders of the Tower of Babel, "a language that would embody the truth of the Universe", Mr Woolley said.
He designed a hieroglyph, the Monas Hieroglyphica, which embodied this unifying principle - the astrological symbols united in one form.
But in an age where knowledge was not divided into set subjects as it is today, Dee was also influential in the development of cartography, training navigators who set out on voyages of discovery and working on the division of the natural world into species.
In his library he collected Renaissance texts and the histories of Britain, described by Benjamin Woolley as Britain's first national archive, "a cosmos in the cottage", in which texts which may not have survived without him were squirrelled away and studied.
He was a powerful adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, credited by Mr Woolley as coming up with the idea of a British empire after the Spanish conquest of South America, and a spymaster too, setting up a network of informants to crack Catholic codes in the military build-up before the Armada.
"He was one of the last great free thinkers, because science and magic had yet to part company," says Rufus Norris, the opera's director.
But his life was not just one of esoteric and political ideas.
"The man who at the time knew more than anyone else, certainly in Britain, managed to mess up the things closest at home," says Mr Norris.
Perhaps the strangest episode in Dr Dee's life was when, with his reputation under fire over political intrigue and espionage in the English court, he set out across Europe with Edward Kelley, an earless mystic who believed he could talk to angels with the help of a crystal ball.
The relationship fell apart when Dr Dee lost confidence in Edward Kelley's announcement that the angels had told the two they must share everything, including their wives, but not before his wife had become pregnant with what was believed to be Edward Kelley's child.
This concoction of Renaissance ideas and a human story is being brought to life with an eclectic musical composition - featuring medieval instruments, West African drummer Tony Allen, and Damon Albarn's unmistakable vocals.
For Damon Albarn, his performance on stage will echo one of John Dee's own obsessions - a book he unearthed in Europe called the Steganographia, which Dee believed offered a mystical form of instant communication across time and space.
The opera, Albarn says, centres on the period at the end of Elizabeth I's reign and the start of James I's, at the beginning of "the puritanical purge of all of those esoteric ideas in England".
"I exist towards the end of another Elizabeth's reign, her sort of golden twilight years. There is a real connection.
"On stage I am here now, but I am sort of travelling."
So this moment in English history, and the character of John Dee - who Albarn believes has been "whitewashed" out of history - means more than just a useful device for an entertaining evening.
"It's just amazing how much colour there is in his ideas. Just imagine the English now if we had kept that spirit in our hearts."
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/world_have_your_say | BBC NEWS | Have Your Say | World Have Your Say | Our new home online!
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World Have Your Say is visiting five US cities in five days. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6068386.stm | Russian President Vladimir Putin has resisted EU calls to sign an existing international treaty on investment and trade in energy.
But says he thinks Russia and the EU can agree binding rules.
They begin talks on a new strategic partnership in the next few weeks, and Mr Putin says he is confident it would be possible to find common approaches.
At an EU summit in Finland, Mr Putin also hit out at Georgian leaders, accusing them of building up forces.
The EU has been trying for years to get Russia to sign the Energy Charter Treaty without success.
It now wants to enshrine many of the treaty's principles into the new framework agreement with Russia.
The aim is to make it easier for European companies to invest in the Russian energy sector, and to use Russian pipelines to export the oil and gas they produce.
The pact would also be designed to ensure that Russia treated all European countries equally, and to lay the basis for a long-term trade partnership.
Russia supplies a quarter of the oil and gas consumed in the EU, and the proportion is set to rise sharply in coming decades.
Mr Putin suggested that Russia could agree to most of the charter's principles when negotiations begin.
"We are not against the principles that are included in the charter, but we believe that that certain provisions of the charter should be defined better," he said.
"I am quite confident that we will be in a position to develop common approaches."
Mr Putin echoed European leaders by saying that energy co-operation needed to be rooted in the principles of predictability of energy markets and the mutual interdependence of suppliers and consumers.
The BBC's Jonny Dymond in Lahti says Mr Putin was on a charm offensive, but there was no sign of progress on any of the really difficult issues.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said the two sides needed to develop mutual trust.
"That requires transparency, the rule of law, reciprocity, non-discrimination, market opening and market access," he said.
The EU wants European investors to have the same access to the Russian energy market as Russian companies have to Europe's market, and the ability to use Russian pipelines to export any gas and oil they produce in Russia.
European governments have recently raised concerns about the treatment of some European energy investors attempting to develop oil and gas resources in Russia.
Energy security became a major priority for the EU after Russia briefly cut off gas to Ukraine in January, in a dispute over payment.
A paper prepared for the summit by the European Commission stressed the importance of increasing energy imports from the Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caspian, Middle East and Gulf regions.
The EU leaders said before the summit that they would make clear their hopes that Russia would be able to find the killer of the murdered journalist, Anna Politkovskaya.
On Georgia, Mr Putin said that Russia had not started the latest round of tensions between the two countries.
"The issue does not lie between Russia and Georgia, the issue is between Georgia and South Ossetia and Abkhazia," he said, referring to Georgia's two Russian-backed breakaway territories.
He accused Georgian leaders of seeking to take control of the regions by military force, and said a Georgian military build-up was the cause of the latest trouble.
The Georgian government reacted angrily to Mr Putin's comments, calling an immediate press conference. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4563392.stm | A charity is appealing for a celebrity TV chef to do the same for elderly care homes as Jamie Oliver did for school children's meals.
Enquiries by the Liberal Democrats have shown that more than 2,000 homes in England failed to meet government minimum standards for meals last year.
The Lib Dems and charity Counsel and Care called the figures "shocking".
Social Care inspectors failed one in five elderly homes in England on the standard of their food last year.
Parliamentary questions put down by Lib Dem MP Paul Burstow revealed that 250 homes missed the standards by a wide margin, and about 1,800 more narrowly.
Mr Burstow and the charity are calling on a celebrity chef to step forward and campaign for better food for the elderly in the same way Jamie Oliver did in his campaign for improved school meals.
A spokesman for the Department of Health said care home residents should always have nutritious, attractively presented, meals and that social care inspectors were rigorous in ensuring standards were met.
This summer celebrity chef Paul Rankin said he would push for improvements in the quality of food served to the elderly in the UK's residential care homes.
He called for money spent on food in homes to be increased from an average of £18 to £28 a week and for more healthy menus to be introduced.
He became involved after a friend who owns a nursing home in Belfast asked him to help out with the catering. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/4978320.stm | BBC NEWS | Programmes | Panorama | A good time to say goodbye?
Should society allow people to receive medical assistance to die if they are suffering unbearably with terminal illnesses?
Or is physician-assisted suicide a step on a road to euthanasia?
Four years ago, Diane Pretty fought for the right to die on her terms.
Suffering from motor neurone disease, she felt that she was effectively dead.
What right does the state have to deny control over your own death?
Isn't life more than a disposable good to throw away when fed up?
Diane Pretty wanted to change the law on assisted suicide for terminally ill people so that her husband Brian could help her to die.
But the British courts ruled that she did not have the right to determine when and how she died.
When she took her case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg it upheld the British law claiming it protected the weak and the vulnerable.
Since the Diane Pretty case, 43 Britons have travelled to Switzerland to commit suicide with the aid of a Swiss charity called Dignitas.
The House of Lords is due to debate a bill on Friday 12 May which will attempt to change the law on assisted suicide.
Ahead of the bill, some of Britain's foremost lawyers in medical ethics have debated the issue which will be screened on Panorama when it returns to BBC One on Wednesday 10 May at 1930. The programme also contains interviews with people for whom this is a very personal issue.
Gill Gerhardi has cerebral palsy and multiple sclerosis but is a firm opponent of assisted suicide and told Panorama she believes "it encourages people to give up".
Panorama also interviewed Sophie Pandit, the daughter of Dr Anne Turner who was one of the 43 Britons who travelled to Switzerland to commit suicide.
Sophie believes that the current law meant her mother had to choose to die before she was ready and denied her time at the end of her life.
The programme features Baroness Ilora Finlay who is a pioneer of palliative care and opponent of the change in the law.
In the film, Diane's husband Brian is equally forceful in his belief that assisted suicide for the terminally ill who are suffering unbearably should be legalised.
What are your views on assisted suicide for terminally ill people? If Panorama's film does not answer your questions you can send them to BBC News 24 which will hold a debate at 2030bst on Wednesday 10 May. Your questions will be answered by John Wiles from Care Not Killing and Lesley Close, whose brother chose an assisted suicide following his struggle with Motor Neurone Disease.
You will be able to watch the programme and debate again on demand on the website. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29327881 | The announcement that Dairy Crest's last glass milk bottle plant is to close has prompted a flood of nostalgia for a former staple of the British street.
Travel back in time to a British doorstep in 1975 at, say, 7.30am.
There's almost certainly a couple of foil-topped glass milk bottles there. Maybe more. Some of the tops may have been pecked by birds, although if you left a couple of plastic cups out the milkman probably popped those over the top of the bottles to protect them.
Then, 94% of milk was put into glass bottles, according to Dairy Crest. By 2012, this was just 4%.
"I can remember that wonderful clinking sound of the milk bottles arriving," says consumer historian Robert Opie. Then there was the ubiquitous morning whirr of electric floats. Others remember the colour coding on the foil tops. And that weirdly satisfying way of opening them - a push just powerful enough to dent but not break it.
"Birds were attracted to peck away at the caps to get to the cream line," says Paul Luke, editor of Milk Bottle News and the owner of some 12,000-13,000 glass milk bottles.
Cream lines occurred all the time even if it was semi-skimmed, he says, since milk didn't go through the same standardisation process as it does today.
"When you poured out the milk you'd get a big bulk of cream drop on to your cornflakes, rather than your watered down milk [of today]," Luke says. As a nine-year-old, Luke started helping out milkmen on their rounds during the 1980s.
Leaving out the empties represents many people's first understanding of the concept of recycling. But there's been a slow and sure decline, says Opie. The proliferation of fridges in the 1950s, which allowed milk to be kept longer, meant fewer daily deliveries.
By the 1990s, the deregulation of the British milk industry and the decision by supermarkets to sell milk - cheaply - in plastic containers changed everything.
Some still mourn - on taste grounds alone. "I can remember that relatively traumatic moment when I switched from glass to a carton," says Opie. "There was just something innately wrong about pouring milk out of a carton because it didn't have that refreshing coolness of a glass bottle.
"A cold bottle of milk has a certain integrity to it and the glass retains that."
But, of course, Opie - as well as virtually everybody else - went ahead and made the switch. "Nostalgia has a waft which extends into every sphere you can think of," Opie says, "and sometimes it's only when things disappear that you suddenly stand back and think, 'Oh, what a shame'."
Convenience and cost has triumphed. Smaller dairies may continue to provide milk in glass bottles. But Dairy Crest switching to plastic is significant.
In 1970, almost 99% of milk would have been door-delivered, says Tom Phelps, the author of The British Milkman. Last year Dairy UK found that doorstep delivery stands at less than 5% of the liquid dairy market. But there are still about 5,000 milkmen left in the UK, Phelps estimates. About 1,400 of those are employed by Dairy Crest, which stresses that the switch to plastic containers is to "ensure the livelihoods" of its milkmen and women.
Much of this is due to the costs of plastic against glass. Glass bottles are more expensive to make than plastic containers and also weigh 15 times more, says Dairy Crest. This means plastic containers are cheaper to transport, with the company claiming that they're now as environmentally friendly as glass bottles.
The issue is unclear. The Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) published a 2010 paper suggesting that the carbon footprint of glass bottles over the course of a life-cycle is helped by the fact it is recycled.
The era of the glass milk bottle has left a legacy. Not least memories of the way milk used to be advertised. "The best ever promotion to sell milk was done by Unigate," says Luke. He's referring to the series of 1970s adverts in which mysterious creatures called Humphreys attempted to steal milk with long straws. "Watch out, watch out, there's a Humphrey about," was the slogan. Muhammad Ali got involved.
The catchphrase "Gotta lotta bottle" followed. It's hard to imagine a series of more 1980s-style videos - whirlwinds of dazzling neon, innuendo, and the chanted tagline "nice cold, ice cold milk". This was an era when Linford Christie raced a milk float.
But the nostalgia relates as much to the diminished presence of the milkman as the bottles themselves. Their ever-presence in British lives made them ripe for pop culture parody - mainly the faintly ludicrous idea of them having adulterous relationships with lonely women.
Benny Hill's 1970 comedy song Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West) - one of David Cameron's Desert Island Discs - was about the protagonist's love for a lonely widow named Sue. A Monty Python sketch depicted a semi-dressed woman luring Michael Palin's milkman into her house - only to lock him away into a room of other long-lost milkmen.
By 1920s and 1930s glass-bottled milk is the norm, but bottles had cardboard slips at the top, which children used to play "pogs"
1980 - modern version of bottle introduced. Shorter and wider, initially it was nicknamed "dumpy"
It was probably an unfair reputation for most milkmen, but the jokes rested on the centrality of milkmen in daily life.
Milkmen regularly had a career of 30 to 40 years and often became family friends, says Phelps. "The milkman would go around and collect the money and would then be invited in for a cup of tea," adds Luke.
Familiarity meant that customers were happy to leave money in the bottles. Or sometimes just notes like "not this week, thanks". Not that these were always intelligible, recalls Phelps from his brief personal experience as a milkman before he worked for Unigate.
But often there were birthday messages, and sometimes even gifts for milkmen's newborn kids, he says.
Such message-in-a-bottle correspondence seems like a quaint relic today.
And now face-to-face interaction is even sparser. Milkmen sometimes start their shift as early as 23:00 the night before, Luke says. Fewer customers mean that they have to cover larger areas, he adds. Payments are often by debit card.
"Certainly now, when you go into a school and ask a child where milk comes from, the response is always Tesco's," says Luke.
"You show them milk bottles and they don't know what they are." |
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-40389355 | A man has died after a three-vehicle crash in Perth and Kinross.
The incident, which involved two vans and a 4x4 that was towing a caravan, happened on the A91 at Mawcarse at about 15:15.
A 63-year-old van driver died as a result of his injuries. No-one else was injured.
The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service sent two appliances to the scene. A Police Scotland spokesman said investigations were ongoing.
Anyone who witnessed the incident is asked to contact Tayside Police on the 101 number. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15212382 | Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, 72, known as the "Iron Lady" by her supporters, has been named as one of three joint winners of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.
The award comes six years after she became Africa's first elected female head of state following the end of Liberia's 14-year civil war.
It also comes just days before she stands for re-election, despite initially promising she would only seek one term.
While out campaigning, the diminutive grandmother figure is often dwarfed by her party officials and bodyguards but over a political career spanning almost 30 years she has earned her steely nickname.
She was imprisoned in the 1980s for criticising the military regime of Samuel Doe and then backed Charles Taylor's rebellion before falling out with him.
After beat her in the 1997 presidential election, she was charged with treason, prompting her to return to exile.
In 2009, Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended that she be barred from holding public office for 30 years for her role in backing Mr Taylor, who is currently on trial for war crimes in The Hague.
She has ignored the ruling but has apologised for backing Mr Taylor.
One veteran of Liberia's political scene said Mrs Sirleaf's nickname comes from her iron will and determination.
"It would have been much easier for her to quit politics and sit at home like others have done but she has never given up," he said.
She won the 2005 election run-off even though she faced probably the best known Liberian - former football star George Weah.
Despite the popular appeal of her opponent, analysts say she won because of background as a development economist.
Mrs Sirleaf has held a string of international financial positions, from minister of finance in 1979 to Africa director at the United Nations Development Programme.
So many people felt she was well placed to rebuild Liberia's shattered economy.
Since becoming president, she has cancelled and renegotiated a $1bn contract with the world's largest steel company, Arcelor Mittal, which has since started iron ore production in the north east.
Another $2.6bn iron ore concession agreement was entered into between the government and China Union, a consortium of Chinese companies.
But she says that her work has not finished, which is why she changed her mind and decided to seek re-election.
"When the plane hasn't landed yet, don't change the pilots," her posters say.
Some poor Liberians complain that their lives have not changed much since Mrs Sirleaf became president.
Many educated Liberians - and members of the old elite descended from freed American slaves - gave Mrs Sirleaf their backing in 2005.
While men continue to dominate life in rural areas of Liberia, in the cities, some women and some gender-sensitive men felt it was time the country had a female leader - after a succession of men had brought the country to ruins.
Mrs Sirleaf said she wanted to become president in order "to bring motherly sensitivity and emotion to the presidency" as a way of healing the wounds of war.
Throughout her campaign, she has said that if she won, it would encourage women across Africa to seek high political office.
She constantly stresses her commitment to the fight against corruption and after returning from exile, she served as head of the Governance Reform Commission set up as part of the deal to end Liberia's civil war in 2003.
She resigned that post to contest the presidency, criticising the transitional government's inability to fight corruption.
However, her opponents now make the same claims about her administration and even accused her allies of buying votes ahead of Tuesday's re-election - charges they strongly deny.
On her father's side she is descended from a traditional chief, while her mother's father was a German trader.
She was married aged 17 to James Sirleaf but they later divorced.
She is the mother of four sons and has six grandchildren. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tees-47270667 | Health chiefs have backed plans for a hub to be created as part of move to improve a town's maternity services.
The idea has been suggested by Hartlepool Borough Councillors.
Councillors also want increased maternity services at the town's University Hospital, which was changed to "open as required" in 2008.
The North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust said it would "welcome" a hub offering a range of maternity and family services.
The council's audit and governance committee has been investigating maternity services at the hospital.
Councillors said the development of a hub would be positive for the town, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.
They said their preferred option was a full consultant-led maternity unit at the University Hospital of Hartlepool.
The midwife-led unit saw just three births in 2017. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30216638 | More than one million vinyl records have been sold in the UK so far this year - the first time the milestone has been achieved since 1996.
The figures mark a largely unexpected resurgence in an industry now considered to be dominated by digital.
Earlier this month, Pink Floyd's The Endless River became the fastest-selling vinyl release since 1997.
The Official Chart Company told the BBC it will soon launch a weekly vinyl chart.
"In an era when we're all talking about digital music, the fact that these beautiful physical artefacts are still as popular as they are is fantastic," said Martin Talbot, managing director of the Official Charts Company.
Speaking to BBC Radio 5 live's Wake Up To Money, he said: "It's really remarkable. We're seeing it come back as a significant earner for the music industry as well.
"Only five years ago this business was worth around £3m a year. This year it's going to be worth £20m."
However, music industry officials acknowledged that vinyl will likely remain a niche interest.
Pink Floyd's accolade as the fastest-selling vinyl release this century came thanks to just 6,000 sales - a tiny amount in comparison to the numbers amassed by digital formats.
Earlier this week, for instance, One Direction celebrated passing one billion total streams on music service Spotify.
The one million milestone for vinyl sales was reached in the past week, the Official Charts Company said.
Perhaps fittingly, the best selling vinyl in that period was David Bowie's album, Nothing Has Changed.
The total figures are expected to rise to around 1.2 million with Christmas sales, said Gennaro Castaldo from music industry body the BPI.
"Most of us did write off vinyl," he told the BBC.
"Whilst the candle flickered and nearly went out... it didn't entirely go out.
"I think the start of the 2000 period, a few rock bands came along - The Killers, Arctic Monkeys - it's helped made vinyl cool again."
In 1996, it was Oasis' (What's the Story) Morning Glory? providing healthy vinyl sales. Thanks to a re-issue, the same album is one of the best-selling of this year also - the album is 10th in this week's chart.
The market for vinyl appeared to be split into two distinct groups, noted the individuals interviewed by the BBC.
They said one generation, which grew up with vinyl, liked to keep increasing their record collection by continuing to buy music in the format.
Meanwhile, a younger generation has adopted vinyl as an antidote to the own-nothing trend of services like iTunes and Spotify.
"I think it's sort of a hipster thing," remarked one shopper at Rough Trade East, a popular record store off Brick Lane in East London.
"Things that were cool decades ago, but fell out of fashion, are making a comeback."
One survey that seemingly backs up this train of thought was published in April this year, by the ICM Group.
It suggested 15% of physical music - whether vinyl, CD or, less likely, tape - was bought with no intention of ever listening to it.
Nigel House, co-founder of the Rough Trade retail chain, told the BBC he thought that the big record labels were pouncing on vinyl because it has become fashionable.
"The major labels, their albums are so expensive - £25!
"You get someone coming in, they could buy 10 CDs for £100, or four vinyls. Yes, they are expensive. For me, I don't think that's good at all."
But he did welcome the resurgence, even if, as he put it, it was a drop in the ocean of overall sales.
"Certain styles of music, they need that warmth. They need that feeling. Soul, reggae, hip-hop, even punk - they sound so much better on vinyl.
"Some records, I like the way they degrade. It's like a photograph fading, it's part of the whole beauty of vinyl."
Mr Castaldo from the BPI agreed.
"The difference between vinyl and other formats is that it's viewed as an art form, really - the audio quality, the sleevenotes, the cover art.
"Whilst other formats are being superseded every time technology improves, vinyl doesn't really fit into that category because it's more than that." |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-40370691 | The shrinking size of whales over the 20th Century could help scientists detect when wildlife populations are in trouble, a study suggests.
The analysis shows that the average body size of four whale species declined rapidly during the second half of the 20th Century in response to hunting.
But warning signals were visible up to 40 years before whale stocks collapsed.
The work appears in Nature Ecology and Evolution journal.
Christopher Clements, from the University of Zurich in Switzerland, and his colleagues looked at records on the abundance and body size of whales caught by commercial whaling vessels between 1900 and 1985, after which a global whaling moratorium took effect.
"We looked at data on blue, fin, sei and sperm whales and found significant declines in body size, with sperm whales taken in the 1980s four metres shorter on average than those in 1905," said Dr Clements.
This probably occurred as the biggest individuals were selectively removed from the ocean through hunting.
"This means that warning signals were detectable up to 40 years before a population collapse," Dr Clements added.
A similar pattern has previously been reported for many fish populations, and has been interpreted as a response to fishing pressure.
The results suggest that tracking changes in the mean body size might help to predict when populations are at risk of collapsing.
"Our technique could be used to help provide other species of conservation concern. Moreover, it could allow interventions to be put in place to stop this happening," said Christopher Clements. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/6431655.stm | The offence I have obviously caused is deeply regretted.
I had the privilege to command soldiers from across the East Midlands of whom many came from racial minorities.
It was a matter of great pride to me that racial minorities prospered inside the unit, and, indeed at one stage all of my Company Sergeant Majors were black.
What I have said is clearly misjudged and I can only apologise if I have embarrassed in anyway those fine men whom I commanded.
I have no hesitation in resigning my front-bench appointment.
The comments made by Patrick Mercer are completely unacceptable and I regret that they were made.
We should not tolerate racism in the Army or in any walk of life.
Patrick Mercer is no longer a Shadow Minister.
Racist abuse can have no place in any walk of life, and it is appalling and inappropriate for any politician, never mind a senior Tory MP like Patrick Mercer, to suggest that 'this is just the way it is in the Army'.
Our troops and our officers are 21st century people who recognise that there is no place for prejudice in the modern world... Patrick Mercer may have a military background but he no longer speaks for the Armed Forces.
It is an insult to the brave men and women who serve in our armed forces with great distinction, and it does not represent a true picture of today's Army which goes to great lengths to ensure that all those who serve, irrespective of their race or ethnic origin are given the opportunity to fulfil their potential.
These are staggering remarks from a frontbench spokesman. Comments like this undermine all those in the Army who have gone to great lengths to ensure that every soldier is treated fairly.
The comments are breathtaking and dreadful and Mr Mercer's resignation is appropriate.
We are relieved that the leader of the opposition has sacked Patrick Mercer.
This sends a clear signal that racist attitudes and comments are not acceptable. Grown up modern politics has no place for bigots.
I know him quite well and I am sorry to learn that he has decided to step down.
We all say things in the heat of the moment that do not read too well in print but I understand where he's coming from.
He's an ex-Army man and is entitled to his robust views. I think that's all he was doing. There's no racist element to him. He knows his mind.
We are sorry to learn that someone of his integrity, honesty and ability has had to step down but I believe he will be back. He has a lot to offer. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/125941.stm | Women who sat their final exams at Cambridge University more than half a century ago have finally received their full degrees.
Until 1948, women students took the same degree courses and sat the same exams as men, but were not allowed to take part in the graduation ceremonies and only received what were known as a "titular" degrees.
More than 400 former Cambridge women students returned to Newnham College for a celebration and the long-delayed graduation.
They travelled from as far afield as Indonesia, Israel, New Zealand and Zimbabwe to take part.
Professor Sir Alec Broers, the University's vice-chancellor, told the former students: "It is difficult today to understand why previous generations made reform so gradual, no matter how inevitable it now looks in principle, and no matter how such partial change seems to us indefensible intellectually.
"One has only to look at the lives led by the women whom we honour here today to see that they did not let themselves be daunted by recurrent refusals to recognise their academic achievements."
He also said that even today not enough women are reaching senior academic ranks at the university.
Whetham: Cambridge was a "man's club"
Pre-war student Edith Whetham said: "It was a man's university and very much a man's club. They definitely didn't want that atmosphere disturbed."
But such were the prevailing attitudes, she recalls, that women undergraduates were not resentful about the discrimination. "It didn't occur to us," she said.
Helen Fowler, who studied English at Newnham and afterwards became a wartime intelligence officer, said: "At the time there were all kinds of theories saying that women were incapable of learning, that they had different kinds of brains from men."
Such attitudes, she suspected, were prompted by "the fear that if women became too clever they wouldn't become good mothers or mothers at all".
The recognition of the efforts of earlier generations of women students has generated much interest among the current undergraduates at Newnham College. "If it wasn't for their struggles we wouldn't be here," said Flora Gathorne-Hardy.
Women were first admitted to the University of Cambridge in 1869, but without the full rights accorded to male students. Votes in 1897 and 1921 went against proposals to give women the same status as men.
The granting of equal academic status was followed in 1948 by the presenting of the then Queen Elizabeth with the first honorary degree for a woman. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35898116 | Image caption Mr Kim appeared in front of reporters on Friday apologising for conducting "espionage"
A US citizen detained in North Korea says he stole military secrets to aid South Korea, during a press conference organised by Pyongyang.
Kim Dong Chul, 62, made the apparent confession on Friday, apologising for spying and bowing to reporters.
Mr Kim has previously told journalists he is a naturalised US citizen, born in South Korea, and that he was arrested in October for "espionage".
Forced public confessions by foreign prisoners are common in North Korea.
Mr Kim said that he was first approached by South Korean intelligence officers in 2011 to engage in paid espionage, North Korean news agency KCNA said.
He was arrested while receiving a USB stick containing military and nuclear secrets from a source, KCNA said.
According to Chinese state news agency Xinhua, Mr Kim said he was first introduced to South Korean spies by US intelligence officers.
"You could say that my anti-North Korean behaviour was also instigated by the United States," he was quoted as saying.
South Korea's National Intelligence Service told AP news agency Mr Kim's case was not related to the organisation, without providing further details.
In January, Mr Kim said in an interview with CNN in the presence of North Korean guards, that he made frequent trips to the North Korean special economic zone of Rason, where he was caught.
He said he had not worked for the US during any of his spying activities and that he used to live in Fairfax, Virginia.
His interview came weeks after North Korea jailed US student Otto Frederick Warmbier for attempting to steal a propaganda sign.
The US has previously accused North Korea of using its citizens as pawns in a diplomatic game. Pyongyang denies the accusations.
Otto Frederick Warmbier, a US student who was sentenced to 15 years of hard labour in March 2016 for trying to steal a propaganda sign from a hotel and "crimes against the state"
Hyeon Soo Lim, a Canadian Christian pastor of South Korean origin, was sentenced to a life term of hard labour in December, also for "crimes against the state".
Sandra Suh, an American aid worker, was arrested then expelled in April 2015, accused of gathering and producing anti-North propaganda.
Matthew Todd Miller was sentenced to six years' hard labour in September 2014 for what North Korean state media described as "hostile acts", but was released in November the same year.
Kenneth Bae was arrested in November 2012 and accused of using his tourism business to form groups to overthrow the government. Sentenced to 15 years' hard labour in May 2013 but was released along with Mr Miller.
Jeffrey Fowle, held for five months and charged with "anti-state" crimes, was released in October 2014.
Korean War veteran Merrill Newman, held in October 2013 on charges of "hostile acts", was released in December the same year.
North Korea nuclear: What now after H-bomb test claim? |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6209672.stm | Success and struggle seem to be more entrenched than ever in the two local authorities at either end of this year's primary school tables.
A league based on pupils' performances in their Sats tests is headed by Richmond upon Thames - home to royal parks and English rugby.
Bringing up the rear is the inner London borough of Hackney.
Both have held those places for four years - though this year Hackney improved a bit and Richmond slipped.
The table below shows LAs ranked on their aggregate scores.
The second column of figures is the average points score.
The third column shows the average of the value added measure schools achieved.
Click the name of any LA for a complete list of its schools and details of their performances. |