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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36354742 | Serious allegations have been made about the deaths of civilians at the hands of Turkish security forces in the overwhelmingly Kurdish town of Cizre in south-eastern Turkey earlier this year.
Local people say Turkish security forces killed up to 160 civilians in the town, according to statements made to the BBC and human rights groups.
The worst single incident ended with the deaths of around 100 people who had been sheltering in three cellars.
The UN human rights chief has expressed his concern in unusually strong terms and wants to send in investigators.
The Turkish foreign ministry dismissed the allegations. It said that the Turkish military took all necessary precautions to protect civilians during military operations.
The killings happened during a 78-day curfew imposed on Cizre between 14 December 2015 and 2 March this year. During the curfew, the town of about 100,000 people was sealed off.
The curfew was part of a military campaign in south-eastern Turkey, which is still going on, targeting the PKK, the armed Kurdish group. Turkey, the European Union and the United States classify it as a terrorist organisation.
Since the long-running conflict resumed last year, the PKK has killed hundreds of Turkish soldiers and police. It has also exploded bombs in Ankara, the Turkish capital, killing many civilians.
Most Turks, and some Kurds, condemn the actions of the PKK. But in the Kurdish villages and towns of south-east Turkey, the PKK is often seen as a protector.
Image caption Firat Duymak, whose father died: "In Turkey we have nothing. There is no justice; there is no court"
In Cizre, some of the most serious allegations centre on the area around Bostanci Street, where Turkish security forces are accused of killing as many as 100 civilians who were sheltering in three basements.
Until the curfew, Bostanci Street was part of a district of narrow streets and densely-populated blocks of flats. The buildings were shattered by artillery, tank fire and street fighting, according to local people. When the curfew ended and the fighting stopped, Turkish security forces sent in bulldozers to level the ruins.
Now it's hard to see where Bostanci Street ran. I am shown the site of the cellars by 18-year-old Firat Duymak, whose father, Mahmut, was killed there. All that is left is a pile of rubble, indistinguishable from the rest of the wasteland of concrete fragments that was left behind by the war and then the bulldozers.
Firat denies that his father was a member of the PKK. He says he was in the cellars to look after civilians who were there, including students who had come from elsewhere in Turkey just before the curfew was imposed to show solidarity with Cizre.
Firat condemns the actions of the Turkish state and its police and military.
"They are the terrorists; the ones who commit all these atrocities," he says. "Even if those people were from the PKK, why does the state have to destroy and burn their lives? Even war has rules.
"Can you rip the people up when you catch them? You have courts; you have a justice system. In Turkey we have nothing. There is no justice; there is no court."
The areas of Cizre that were targeted by the Turkish military were known to be centres of PKK activity. Since 2014, a militant PKK Kurdish youth organisation had made parts of Cizre effectively a no-go area for the police, digging trenches and blocking roads.
Some local people resented what looked like preparations for war. Kurdish MPs tried to persuade the PKK militants to fill in the trenches, with limited success.
The question is whether the Turkish state's response to an outright challenge to its authority was proportionate to the threat it faced and in line with the laws of war.
Firat Duymak and many other Kurds in Cizre say it was not. He blames Turkey's President Recip Tayyip Erdogan, whose government is increasingly authoritarian, and produces his father's identity card.
"All these things are coming from Erdogan's head. My father was not a terrorist, he was a civilian; he was a citizen," he says.
"The state should look at his ID card. Let the state look at his identity. The Turkish flag is on his ID card, not the flag of the PKK."
Back at the family home, where war damage is still being patched up, Firat's mother Lutfiye sits with the youngest of her five children, a boy of three.
"All my kids have been hurt psychologically," she says. "We were in the firing line for a month. You cannot sleep; you cannot go to the toilet. They call you a terrorist. They behave as if you are not a human being. No human being could do this to anybody.
"My kids will grow up with a grudge. Do you think you can finish Kurds? You cannot."
She says that soldiers smashed up homes of residents, and defecated on the beds.
"How does a person who does that claim to be a human being?"
Lawyers from the local Bar Association told investigators from Mazlumder, a Turkish human rights group, that "following the deaths in the basements in Cizre, there was no crime scene investigation and no judicial authority was allowed to enter the basements."
Mazlumder also heard allegations that civilians, including children, were targeted and shot dead by government snipers.
A 50-something couple, Mehmet and Murside Balcal, sit in the courtyard of a rented house - their own home was destroyed - mourning Ferhat, their 20-year-old son, who died in the cellar.
His father reads out text messages various members of the family received from their son. He had implored them to organise a demonstration to try to persuade the security forces who ringed the cellars to let them out.
Murside, his mother, was turned back and she says they were arrested when they tried to demonstrate. She sits with two portraits of her son in her arms, hugging them and weeping.
But this is a bitter conflict, and the weeping is on both sides.
Pinar Saglam's hands shake as she lights a cigarette. On 13 March, a female PKK suicide bomber in central Ankara killed Kirim, her 21-year-old brother, and 36 others.
Pinar shows me a photograph she found on the web of a poster the size of a building in a Syrian Kurdish town.
It shows the leader of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan, who is held on a Turkish prison island, next to the photograph of the woman who killed her brother and so many others.
Pinar is incredulous at the way the bomber was glorified. "Like a leader, like an angel," she says. "I mean, when I saw this picture I can't believe my eyes, because it can't be true, it can't be true.
"She was a murderer, murderer of my brother. Now her picture is displayed on the streets of Syria.
"I wrote about my feelings on Twitter. A Kurdish woman said to me that I was a Turkish Nazi. She said I shouldn't speak the way I do. She said Kurdish children are often killed in Kurdistan."
Pinar says she wants peace, not revenge. Plenty of other Kurds and Turks feel the same way.
But this is about more than a succession of personal tragedies, and the grief of parents and children.
The violence between Kurds and the Turkish state is the latest instalment of a long-running conflict. An attempt at a peace process collapsed last year. Both sides blamed each other.
The violence is not happening in a vacuum: the Middle East is gripped by violent change. War in Syria and Iraq is changing the region's balance of power.
Turkey is deeply involved in the war in Syria, backing militias fighting the regime. It is also a member of Nato. It is a big player in Europe and the Middle East.
Kurds in Syria are closely allied with the PKK, and have strengthened their position as the Assad regime retreated.
Ironically, the Syrian Kurds are also allies of the West, as they have fought well against the jihadists who call themselves Islamic State. But the Syrian Kurds' allies and patrons in the PKK are regarded as terrorists.
That adds up to a serious complication.
Turkey's President Erdogan is as worried as any of his predecessors about Kurdish ambitions for self-government. Perhaps more so, as the Kurds, despite their internal differences, have been among the winners so far in Syria and Iraq.
President Erdogan is acting to crush Kurdish ambitions, hoping that the tide will not turn in favour of Turkey's Kurds.
The European Union, meanwhile, wants Turkey to be a big part of the solution to the refugee crisis that has been created by war in Syria and Iraq.
On a pile of rubble in Cizre, next to the cellar where his father was killed along with dozens of others, is Firat Duymak. He blames the Turkish state for his father's death, and the European Union and Turkey's other allies for allowing it to happen.
"Europe blatantly watched all these atrocities, and did nothing, because of the refugees," he says.
"What Europeans do any more is not my concern. We don't need anyone's help. We're not interested in what they do or not do.
"The whole world is responsible for what happened in here." |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-36256137 | In his first policy act as new mayor of London, Sadiq Khan is introducing a one-hour "hopper-fare" for bus users as promised in his election manifesto.
The fare system allows bus passengers to make an extra journey within an hour of touching in when using an Oyster card or contactless payment.
Previously, customers were obliged to pay £1.50 each time they boarded a bus.
The hopper-fare will "help ensure everyone will be able to afford to travel around the city," Mr Khan said.
It is scheduled to be introduced in September.
"The cost of a fare in London has risen for eight years in a row and now that I'm mayor I am determined to prevent the cost of travel from becoming a barrier to work."
Transport for London said it did not have the technology to allow passengers to enjoy unlimited bus transfers within one hour but it was hoping to upgrade its ticketing technology in 2017 and possibly introduce unlimited timed fares by the end of 2018.
A single journey costs £1.50. London buses stopped accepting cash payments for fares in 2014 and it is only possible to buy a single ticket - or use a travelcard which covers multiple journeys in the same day.
"It's Mayor Sadiq Khan's first big transport policy announcement and perhaps there is little surprise - that from the son of a bus driver - it involves buses.
From September, bus passengers who use Oyster and contactless will be able to change buses within one hour and only pay one fare.
Bus passengers - unlike tube passengers - at the moment have to pay every time they use a bus. With tube passengers the fare is decided by the zones. Many have said that is unfair.
The idea of a one hour "hopper" has been around for some time, it was part of the Liberal Democrats Mayoral manifesto in 2012 and Transport for London (Tfl) previously said a one-hour bus ticket will cost £50m a year.
There is also a statement of intent here from Tfl who have a new boss to impress and that is - it will deliver whatever the mayor wants. "
Sadiq Khan: A new broom for South Asian politics in London? |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-32335003 | Computer chips are arguably both the most complex things ever mass produced by humans and the most disruptive to our lives.
So it's remarkable that the extraordinary pace they have evolved at was in large part influenced by a three-page article published 50 years ago this weekend.
It noted that the maximum number of components that manufacturers could "cram" onto a sliver of silicon - before which the rising risk of failure made it uneconomic to add more - was doubling at a regular pace.
Its author, Gordon Moore, suggested this could be extrapolated to forecast the rate at which more complicated chips could be built at affordable costs.
The insight - later referred to as Moore's Law - became the bedrock for the computer processor industry, giving engineers and their managers a target to hit.
Intel - the firm Mr Moore went on to co-found - says the law will have an even more dramatic impact on the next 20 years than the last five decades put together.
But could its time be more limited?
Although dubbed a "law", computing's pace of change has been driven by human ingenuity rather than any fixed rule of physics.
"Moore's observation" would be a more accurate, if less dramatic, term.
In fact, the rule itself has changed over time.
While Moore's 1965 paper talked of the number of "elements" on a circuit doubling every year, he later revised this a couple of times, ultimately stating that the number of transistors in a chip would double approximately every 24 months.
"In the beginning, it was just a way of chronicling the progress," he reflects.
"But gradually, it became something that the various industry participants recognised as something they had to stay on or fall behind technologically.
"So it went from a way of measuring what had happened to something that was kind of driving the industry."
For most people, imagining exponential growth - in which something rapidly increases at a set rate in proportion to its size, for example doubles every time - is much harder than linear growth - in which the same amount is repeatedly added.
To illustrate an example of exponential growth that follows a similar course to Moore's law, imagine that as part of an exercise regime Mary swims the length of a 22m (72ft) pool, the size found in many hotels.
Every two years, Mary doubles her distance, and she is committed to repeating this over the course of 50 years.
So, after two years her regime consists of 44m.
At first, the increasing rate of growth may not seem overly impressive. After 10 years, Mary is swimming 704m - or 32 lengths.
That is nearly the equivalent of travelling the length of a football pitch seven times.
But the two-yearly doubling effect does not take long to dazzle. By 26 years - about half-way into her workout scheme - she would have to travel 180km.
That is the equivalent of swimming five and a half times across the English Channel at its narrowest point or once across the Taiwan Strait, which separates the island from mainland China.
By the time Mary reached 50 years, she would have to swim 738,198km.
That is the equivalent of travelling all the way from the Earth to the Moon and back again, at least for much of our satellite's orbit. Phew!
Moore retired in 1997, but Intel still follows his lead.
"Having Moore's Law as a guide - or as some of us have said, as our guiding north star - has kept us on pace, both in terms of how far we should scale and when we should scale," Mark Bohr, Intel's director of process architecture and integration, tells the BBC.
"Without [it] I think we'd be many generations behind in terms of technology.
"Instead of having all the computing power of a smartphone in your hand today, we'd still be using desktop computers from 10 to 15 years ago."
Mr Bohr acknowledges, however, that progress comes at a price.
Intel has had to spend ever increasing amounts on research and its manufacturing plants to stay on target.
And some question how long it can maintain this trick.
In 2013, the firm's ex-chief architect Bob Colwell made headlines when he predicted Moore's Law would be "dead" by 2022 at the latest.
The issue, he explained, was that it was difficult to shrink transistors beyond a certain point.
Specifically, he said it would be impossible to justify the costs required to reduce the length of a transistor part, known as its gate, to less than 5nm (1nm = one billionth of a metre).
"The amount of effort it's going to take to do anything beyond that is substantial," he said.
"We will play all the little tricks that we still didn't get around to, we'll make better machines for a while, but you can't fix [the loss of] that exponential. A bunch of incremental tweaks isn't going to hack it."
In simple terms, a transistor is a kind of tiny switch that is triggered by an electrical signal.
By turning them on and off at high speeds, computers are able to amplify and switch electronic signals and electrical power, making it possible for them to carry out the calculations needed to run software.
The first transistor - invented in 1947 - was roughly 2.5cm (1in) across.
You can now fit billions into the same space.
Intel has yet to reveal how it intends to overcome the challenge, but Mr Bohr insists progress is being made.
"Over the past 30 years there has been a long string of industry experts who have predicted the end of Moore's Law within five to 10 years," he says.
"Although I have a lot of respect for Bob Colwell, I think he's wrong."
Forthcoming advances in computing power will dwarf previous achievements, Mr Bohr adds, with the consequence that processors will "disappear" into our clothes, accessories and wider surroundings.
British firm ARM - whose rival chip designs are used by Samsung, Apple and many others - agrees that ever smaller transistors should continue to deliver benefits for many years.
But it highlights that in the mobile age, things have moved beyond simply trying to offer more processing power at a reasonable price.
The focus now, it says, is to add functions to tablets and smartphones - such as slow-mo video capture and faster downloads - while ensuring that their batteries are not over-taxed.
"What's important is if you are changing experiences, it's not just about am I providing more compute capability," explains marketing chief Laurence Bryant.
"What appeals to consumers is great battery life and thin devices."
This is why there has been a recent trend towards "multi-core" processors.
These squeeze in more transistors to support complex tasks, but keep many of them powered down much of the time in order to extend battery life.
Even if processors do stop being improved as quickly as we've become accustomed to, computing itself could continue to leap forward.
"It's not quite irrelevant whether the density of transistors per chip continues to increase at the same exponential rate for the next 50 years - it would be great it it did - but our future and progress with all things digital does not depend on that very much," comments Andrew McAfee, cofounder of MIT's initiative on the digital economy.
"It depends more on getting tools out there to more people and improving our approaches with software and algorithms."
He says he frequently speaks to developers who report code-based advances that make Moore's Law look "ridiculous in comparison".
But he acknowledges that that the software industry would benefit from its own equivalent to the rule.
"When we talk to our friends working at the cutting edge of software systems that do artificial intelligence they say: 'Look this terrain is shifting so quickly that we don't even have a rough rule of thumb or a heuristic to use to see where we should be in 12 months, we keep getting surprised."
It's technology's job to supersede the old and leave it on the scrapheap.
So, it's only fitting that this fate will befall Moore's Law, whether it is now or in the decades to come.
Whatever the date, it's indisputable that its creator has left his mark on computing's early years.
"It's amazing how often I run across a reference to Moore's Law," the 86-year-old remarks.
"In fact, I Googled Moore's Law and I Googled Murphy's Law.
"Moore beats Murphy by at least two to one." |
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-30978995 | Too many CCTV cameras are useless, the government's surveillance camera commissioner has warned.
Tony Porter also told BBC Radio 5 live the public did not have a true understanding of the current nature of surveillance.
Local authorities with many CCTV cameras needed to inform the community about the exact number and how effective they were, he said.
He also expressed concern about drones and police officers wearing cameras.
The UK has one of the largest totals CCTV cameras in the world. The British Security Industry Association (BSIA) estimates there are between 4-5.9 million cameras.
Mr Porter, the surveillance camera commissioner for England and Wales, said organisations and local authorities were meant to carry out annual reviews of their CCTV capacity but many failed to do so.
He said when a West Midlands local authority held a review, it reduced the number of ineffective cameras and saved £250,000 in the process.
"You can still maintain the balance of excellent surveillance but not have a propagation of surveillance that is actually useless," he said.
"Surveillance can be an extremely good thing and run well, it's a useful tool for society.
"But to quote a former information commissioner, 'we should not sleepwalk into a surveillance society'."
He told the BBC News website that he regarded cameras as "useless" if they were redundant, having served the purpose they were intended for, such as public safety, crime deterrent or traffic management.
They might also be useless if they were situated in the wrong place, damaged or the old analogue versions with inadequate visibility, he went on.
Mr Porter, a former counter-terrorism officer, said he was concerned about the use of drones and police wearing cameras on their uniforms.
"Technology can support law enforcement and protect society," he said.
"My concern is about the introduction of poor surveillance that doesn't benefit society."
He called for a public debate and greater regulation to ensure cameras "do not proliferate unnecessarily".
"We have millions of cameras in this country and Europeans look at us askance that our society actually accepts the volume of cameras we do," he added.
While some councils have cut their CCTV budgets to save money, there has been a rise in private and domestic cameras.
Meanwhile, Dyfed-Powys police - which covers more than half of Wales - could stop monitoring CCTV after a review found the cameras did not deter crime.
The report found that the removal of Powys Country Council CCTV cameras did not result in a significant rise in crime or anti-social behaviour and there was little evidence the cameras deterred violent or alcohol-related crime.
A Local Government Association spokesman said town halls consult with residents, businesses and police on whether CCTV is appropriate in an area, and operate their systems in accordance with the code of practice, which is overseen by the surveillance camera commissioner.
"In tough financial times, councils are not going to spend money on installing and running CCTV cameras unless they genuinely believe they will work and have local support and many are actually scaling back CCTV operations," he said.
Assistant Chief Constable Mark Bates, national policing lead for CCTV, said the "location and number of cameras should be determined by the potential risk of harm to the public, rather than by a quota approach".
"I have no desire for us to creep towards a surveillance society - that is not in anyone's interests, but the efficient use of CCTV, in the public interest, is a key weapon in our arsenal of evidence which can help us apprehend offenders, reduce crime, protect the public and obtain justice for victims," he added.
The end of the CCTV era? |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-30000809 | A council is considering having larger English and maths classes to help it balance its budget.
The proposal for larger classes in the first and second year of secondary school comes from East Renfrewshire Council.
The council says having bigger classes could help it save nearly £750,000.
Overall, the local authority aims to save £8m from its education budget by 2018.
It currently has an average of 20 students in S1 and S2 English and maths classes - well below the national average.
A relatively prosperous area, East Renfrewshire has some of the most academically successful state schools in Scotland.
In its budget consultation, the council says: "This proposal will bring East Renfrewshire Council in line with many other Scottish councils and will increase class size to 30.
"We are confident that attainment will not be affected by this proposal and will continue to focus on improving the quality of our teaching and learning experiences to maximise pupil attainment and not class size."
A series of proposed cuts and savings to the education budget is detailed in the council's ongoing consultation on ways to save money between now and 2018.
Another option involves using senior pupils to help run school libraries and having fewer dedicated full-time librarians. This could save £131,000.
Reducing the number of classroom assistants in primary schools could save a similar amount.
The council says half of the £8m education savings will come from internal efficiencies, with the rest coming from changes to services.
Can councils save on education budgets? |
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47843843 | Rwanda's president said the country had become "a family once again", while marking the 25th anniversary of the genocide that killed 800,000 people.
Paul Kagame, who led a rebel force that ended the slaughter, lit a remembrance flame in the capital Kigali.
Rwandans will mourn for 100 days, the time it took in 1994 for about a tenth of the country to be massacred.
Most of those who died were minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus, killed by ethnic Hutu extremists.
"In 1994, there was no hope, only darkness," Mr Kagame told a crowd gathered at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, where more than 250,000 victims are thought to be buried.
"Today, light radiates from this place. How did it happen? Rwanda became a family once again."
The commemoration activities began with the flame-lighting ceremony at the memorial. The flame will burn for 100 days.
The 61-year-old president, who has led the country since 2000, then delivered a speech at the Kigali Convention Centre.
He said the resilience and bravery of the genocide survivors represented the "Rwandan character in its purest form".
"The arms of our people, intertwined, constitute the pillars of our nation," he said. "We hold each other up. Our bodies and minds bear amputations and scars, but none of us is alone.
"Together, we have woven the tattered threads of our unity into a new tapestry."
He added: "The fighting spirit is alive in us. What happened here will never happen again."
Mr Kagame then led a vigil at the Amahoro National Stadium, which was used by United Nations officials to try to protect Tutsis during the killings.
About 2,000 people marched together on a walk of remembrance from parliament to the stadium, where candles were lit.
There was a moment - when all the candles were lit, and their lights bobbed around the stadium, when people were taking pictures with their smartphones - when it was almost possible to forget the horror that brought thousands of people together on this warm evening in Kigali.
But then I turned to the man next to me, and asked him what tonight meant to him.
"Well," he said, "it's important." In the understated way which so many people in Rwanda speak he said: "I lost people. I lost my parents. I lost my siblings."
We had already heard the names of entire families wiped off the map read out, accompanied by a promise never to forget. We had watched students march in silence from the parliament to the stadium.
But it was as the final speaker took to the stage, to describe how he survived to grow up and give his children the names of the four siblings he had lost, that the emotion seemed to bubble to the surface, and anguished cries were heard above the crowd.
Sometimes on this day, my neighbour said, it is hard to keep the emotions in.
A number of foreign leaders are in the country for the events. They are mainly African, although Prime Minister Charles Michel represented the former colonial ruler, Belgium.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker also attended.
French President Emmanuel Macron did not go, however. This week he appointed a panel of experts to investigate France's role in the genocide.
France was a close ally of the Hutu-led government prior to the massacres and has been accused of ignoring warning signs and training the militias who carried out the attacks.
France was represented by Herve Berville, a Rwandan-born MP.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni was also absent. He has been accused of backing Rwandan rebels who oppose Mr Kagame.
The vast number of people attending were ordinary Rwandans, including those who lived through the slaughter.
Olive Muhorakeye, 26, told Reuters: "Remembering is necessary because it's only thanks to looking back at what happened [can we] ensure that it never happens again."
How did the genocide unfold?
On 6 April 1994, a plane carrying then-President Juvenal Habyarimana - a Hutu - was shot down, killing all on board.
Hutu extremists blamed the Tutsi rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). It denied the accusation.
In a well-organised campaign of slaughter, militias were given hit lists of Tutsi victims. Many were killed with machetes in acts of appalling brutality.
One of the militias was the ruling party's youth wing, the Interahamwe, which set up road blocks to find Tutsis, incited hatred via radio broadcasts and carried out house to house searches.
Little was done internationally to stop the killings. The UN and Belgium had forces in Rwanda but the UN mission was not given a mandate to act. The Belgians and most UN peacekeepers pulled out.
The RPF, backed by Uganda, started gaining ground and marched on Kigali. Some two million Hutus fled, mainly to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The RPF was accused of killing thousands of Hutus as it took power, although it denies this.
Dozens of Hutus were convicted for their role in the killings by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, based in Tanzania, and hundreds of thousands more faced trial in community courts in Rwanda.
The genocide has cast a long shadow over regeneration and talk of ethnicity remains illegal.
But the country has recovered economically, with President Kagame's policies encouraging rapid growth and technological advancement.
Growth remains good - 7.2% in 2018 according to the African Development Bank.
But Mr Kagame's critics say he is too authoritarian and does not tolerate dissent. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-wales-politics-41706834/rhun-ap-iorwerth-loyal-to-leanne-wood | Rhun ap Iorwerth 'loyal to Leanne Wood' Jump to media player Plaid Cymru's Rhun ap Iorwerth, who sparked leadership talk after an interview in the summer, said he was not seeing 'positioning' at his party's conference.
'Fundamental questions for Plaid' Jump to media player BBC Wales political correspondent Daniel Davies says one Plaid AM wants the party to focus on policies that say more about what the party stands for.
Plaid Cymru's Rhun ap Iorwerth, who sparked leadership talk after an interview in the summer, has said he is loyal to current leader Leanne Wood.
The AM for Ynys Mon told BBC Wales political correspondent Aled ap Dafydd he was not seeing "positioning" at the conference.
Mr ap Iorwerth told Radio Cymru in August that he would consider standing for the party's leadership if Ms Wood were to step down. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-34657257 | U Myint Kyaw Thu says he wanted to make games since he was a five-year-old playing Nintendo.
But growing up in Burma, now Myanmar, there was no internet and precious few mobile phones.
So when he founded Total Gameplay Studio with his brother in 2005, he had to develop games for international buyers, sometimes living nocturnally to capitalise on Myanmar's limited electricity - the domestic market just wasn't developed enough.
But since the recent liberalisation of Myanmar's telecoms market, millions have embraced mobile in a land where SIM cards used to cost $1,000.
Now he can do what he always wanted to do from the start - develop games for mobile about his own culture.
One enables players to guide a bicycle rickshaw driver through soaking-wet streets during Thingyan - Myanmar's New Year celebration; another involves playing chinlone - the country's traditional sport of highly stylised "keepy-uppy".
"When the government announced new telcos were coming, we believed there would be a lot of mobile users. I thought the Myanmar market would become mature enough to support the local game industry, so we decided to be part of it and try to promote it," he says.
Total Gameplay says it now has about 200,000 players on its platform.
Three years ago, less than 10% of Myanmar's population owned a phone, putting it slightly above Eritrea and North Korea. Now the figure is closer to 40%.
Connectivity is spreading like wildfire, opening up new opportunities for start-ups and established businesses alike.
This rapid change has been achieved by inviting foreign telecoms companies, such as Ooredoo and Telenor, to come in and challenge the state-owned incumbent's monopoly.
The sector has been a foreign investment success story, according to the government, and could generate hundreds of thousands of jobs in years to come.
In its June 2015 report, mobile operator Ericsson said it received five million new subscriptions in its first quarter, putting Myanmar's performance just behind that of China and India.
"Basically, as fast as these telcos can roll out towers and switch on locations, they're hitting capacity," says David Madden, the founder of Myanmar innovation lab and community tech hub, Phandeeyar.
"There's massive pent-up demand, and as soon as people get the opportunity to connect, they do."
This technological flowering is going hand-in-hand with the opening up of the country's political system - in just over a week its people head to the polls in an historic election.
Smartphones have dropped steeply in price - basic models can be bought for $20 (£13) - meaning that first-time buyers will often go straight to smart devices and leapfrog onto the mobile internet.
With around 30 million SIM cards now on the market - the population is about 54 million - Myanmar's new mobile users represent a vast audience hungry for data - one with unmet needs that entrepreneurs are eager to serve.
"One of the things that's really exciting about the Myanmar start-up scene is there's so much more work to be done," says Mr Madden.
"There are literally opportunities everywhere, and it's all happening at once."
Ko Dana's year-old software company, Myantel, launched an Uber-inspired app in February.
Called HoHo-DeDe, the taxi app might seem a mismatch for Myanmar's commercial capital, Yangon, where nearly half the cars on the street seem to be cabs and flagging one down is easy.
But transportation is still a huge problem and getting around Yangon frustrates many, says Ko Dana. Cabs trawl for customers and add to the congestion - a search HoHo could help with, he believes.
The app, which links users to drivers and still allows for a bit of bargaining, also establishes accountability, as both driver and passenger information is available in case of legal issues.
Though Ko Dana says drivers who learned about HoHo got excited about it, educating them proved difficult at first. And getting the app onto phones - and then to work perfectly - has been tough for the company.
Indeed, plenty of challenges remain for the country's start-ups, despite the flowering of mobile.
While connectivity has improved somewhat, it's still far from perfect. Ko Dana says connection problems have led his firm's HoHo app to crash, while a complex driver verification system has slowed take-up. He is considering giving out customised smartphones to taxi drivers.
More than 2,000 people had signed up for the app, but for now, it's on hold, he says.
"If the app was in another country, it would be easy. All those little things cause big problems."
Similarly, U Myint Kyaw Thu says that as mobile payment systems are still in their infancy, doing business is difficult for his company.
Total Gameplay makes money from ads and in-game purchases, and has teamed up with others - such as the state-owned telecoms incumbent Myanmar Posts and Telecommunications (MPT) - to facilitate payments.
But he says: "The market is still not ready. We need to wait at least one more year before it develops and matures."
The problems have led Ko Dana to think he should have stayed studying in Australia for a little longer.
"Everyone expects a lot from the foreign companies, especially Telenor and Ooredoo. When we started, it was nowhere near our expectations."
Despite these challenges, the entrepreneur remains hopeful.
"I'm confident that [the technology] is going to get better, but as of right now it's not very much yet. Most professionals say we are progressing very fast, but since we have high expectations, we're thinking it's slow progress."
That said, it is amazing to think that not long ago, Myanmar had no internet at all. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-27101714 | Some 190 Nigerian schoolgirls remain missing after being abducted last week, their head teacher has told the BBC - far more than the official figure.
Asabe Kwambura said the parents of 230 girls had reported them missing but 40 had managed to escape.
Earlier, a local state governor said that about 77 of the teenagers had not been accounted for.
Islamist group Boko Haram is suspected to be behind the kidnapping but has not issued any statement.
Some 1,500 people are believed to have been killed in attacks blamed on Boko Haram this year alone.
What is Nigeria's Boko Haram?
The group, whose name means "Western education is forbidden", is fighting to establish Islamic law in Nigeria. It often targets educational establishments.
According to the AP news agency, parents from the school in the town of Chibok told Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima when he visited on Monday that 234 girls had been abducted.
When news first emerged of the kidnap last Tuesday, initial reports said more than 200 students had been seized but state officials soon downgraded the numbers, saying the correct figure was about 130.
The students were about to sit their final year exam and so are aged 16-18.
Ms Kwambura told the BBC Hausa service that about 43 had fled their captors.
"None of these girls were rescued by the military, they managed to escape on their own from their abductors," she said.
Asked about the conflicting reports on the number of students kidnapped, she said: "Only reports that come from us is the truth and based on the register we have on paper."
She has previously called on the kidnappers to "have mercy on the students".
Before visiting Chibok on Monday, the Borno state governor said that eight more girls had escaped over the weekend, meaning a total 52 had fled.
Mr Shettima did not give details of how the girls had escaped, for security reasons.
The confusion over the numbers comes after the military last week said that all but eight of the students had been rescued before withdrawing its claim a day later.
It is thought that the militants took the girls to the Sambisa forest near the Cameroonian border.
Parents and vigilante group have gone there to help search for the teenage girls.
Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states in north-east Nigeria have been under emergency rule since last May. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-32374031/justin-welby-islamic-state-is-deeply-evil | Welby: 'Islamic State is deeply evil' Jump to media player The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has spoken out against what he called ''atrocious pressure'' on Christians and other minority communities across the Middle East.
Search for migrant boat survivors Jump to media player Hundreds of people are feared to have drowned after a boat carrying up to 700 migrants capsized in the Mediterranean Sea, the Italian coastguard has said.
Welby's plea on migrant boat deaths Jump to media player As a boat carrying up to 700 migrants capsizes in the Mediterranean Sea, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, urges Europe to ''rise up, and seek to do what is right''.
Italian PM condemns 'new slave trade' Jump to media player Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi says the trafficking of migrants across the Med amounts to "a new slave trade".
'Migrants cross vast stretch of sea' Jump to media player Richard Bilton, on a boat south of the Italian island of Lampedusa, explains the scale of the journey that migrants face as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean.
Migrant tells of journey to Sicily Jump to media player Some of the many migrants who are arriving in Italy, having survived the risky journey from Africa and the Middle East, tell their stories.
The plight of migrants reaching Italy Jump to media player James Reynolds reports from Palermo on the plight of migrants making the hazardous journey.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has spoken out against what he called ''atrocious pressure'' on Christians and other minority communities across the Middle East.
He was speaking to the BBC during a visit to Egypt as an Islamic State video emerged, appearing to show the killing of 30 Ethiopian Christians in Libya.
''I believe Islamic State is deeply evil - even to its own supporters,'' he said.
The BBC's Lyse Doucet reports. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3081557.stm | The Malaysian prime minister says Burma could face expulsion from the Asean group of nations if its government continues to ignore calls to free the jailed opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
"We have already informed them that we are very disappointed with the turn of events and we hope that Aung San Suu Kyi will be released as soon as possible," Dr Mahathir said.
He said that ultimately Burma could be expelled from Asean though he stressed this would be done as a last resort.
It was Dr Mahathir who spearheaded moves to bring Burma into Asean - the Association of South East Asian Nations - in 1997.
The Malaysian leader hoped that trade and political engagement would bring change there, says the BBC's Jonathan Kent in Kuala Lumpur.
Suu Kyi and other leaders of her National League for Democracy (NLD) have been detained by the Burmese military government since the end of May.
Dr Mahathir said that Asean nations had been forced to criticise Burma because its leadership had caused problems and embarrassed its neighbours.
Aung San Suu Kyi's arrest had damaged the credibility of the 10-member group and could lead to Burma's expulsion.
"We will have to examine every avenue before we can take such drastic actions," Dr Mahathir told French news agency AFP.
"In the end, it may have to be that way. I don't say that it cannot be but certainly not at this moment."
Earlier this month the BBC obtained the first eyewitness evidence that the Burmese army directed and orchestrated the attack in May on the motorcade of the democracy leader.
The military government says it was forced to act because Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy was plotting an armed uprising, but critics reject this charge.
The attack and subsequent detention of Aung San Suu Kyi sparked international outrage and the US Congress has recently imposed sanctions against Burmese exports.
In a wide ranging interview with AFP, Dr Mahathir also repeated his recent assertion that people of European descent are by nature greedy and warlike.
However, he described French President Jacques Chirac who visits Malaysia on Tuesday as "sane and normal" and said he was the exception that proved the rule.
To support his case, he cited Western wars and the behaviour of white colonists in North America and Australia who he said had committed acts of genocide against the indigenous people of those continents. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35765793 | Images of the Duke of Windsor meeting Adolf Hitler during a 1937 visit remain controversial. As 60 photos showing the duke and his new wife meeting the Nazi leadership sell at auction for £6,830, BBC News examines the story behind the pictures.
The unofficial royal visit to Germany caused much controversy and the former King Edward VIII has since faced numerous accusations of being a Nazi sympathiser.
However, royal historian Carolyn Harris said his motives were "peaceful" and linked to the acceptance of his new wife, the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, for whom he had abdicated as king in 1936.
She said the duke was "eager to carve out a new role for himself and ensure that his wife was treated as a full member of the Royal Family even though she had not received the title of Her Royal Highness - an issue that was of great concern to the duke".
She added: "There was no precedent for an abdicated sovereign assuming an active public role on behalf of the current sovereign and the Duke of Windsor was frustrated that he appeared to be expected to live a quiet life in exile."
So the duke jumped at the chance to go to Germany when invited by its government, even though the British government did not support his decision and would have preferred the couple keep a low profile.
His equerry Sir Dudley Forwood, who compiled the photo album, also said years later the unofficial trip was not a bid to support the Nazi regime, but instead to enable the duchess to experience a state visit.
Timothy Medhurst, of Duke's Auctions in Dorchester, Dorset, said the images showed the couple "in a relaxed environment being shown around by Nazis who are clearly proud of their nation".
"It is a unique piece of history compiled at a time when the Nazi war machine was preparing for European conquest and the systematic slaughter of millions of people," he added.
Image caption Royal historian Carolyn Harris said the duke's motives for visiting members of the Nazi regime were "peaceful"
Ms Harris, who specialises in European monarchy, said: "The Duke of Windsor was familiar with Germany - he had numerous relatives there - and seems to have envisioned a diplomatic role for himself as a mediator between Britain and Germany."
He shared the views of other senior figures in the British government "who thought a lasting peace could be negotiated through diplomacy", she said.
According to royal biographer Andrew Morton, he officially went there to look at housing conditions, an issue that he had been interested in when he was king.
"But the real reason was to show Wallis a good time and see exactly what it was like to enjoy a royal tour, and they were treated like royalty," he said.
"She was treated like a royal princess, not like the Royal Family treated her, like an outcast and an outsider.
"In Germany members of the aristocracy would bow and curtsy towards her, and she was treated with all the dignity and status that the duke always wanted."
Mr Morton added that despite being "thrilled" at the time, the couple later realised they had made a "ghastly mistake" after their actions upset American trade unions and Jewish organisations.
The trip did not mean the duke was a Nazi, he said.
"But he was certainly sympathetic... even after the war he thought Hitler was a good fellow and that he'd done a good job in Germany, and he was also anti-Semitic, before, during and after the war."
Ms Harris told BBC News that in 1939, when war was imminent, the duke contacted Hitler "hoping to negotiate a peaceful solution, attempting to draw upon the rapport they developed during the 1937 visit".
However, she said his ties with Nazi Germany "made him a liability" for Britain during World War Two, which led to his appointment as Governor of the Bahamas "which removed him from Europe for the remainder of the war".
But Edward and Wallis "continued to cause anxiety for the British government" during their time in the Bahamas "as their visits to the United States attracted an enormous amount of public attention and the Duke of Windsor expressed pessimism about an English victory".
What is the context of the royal 'Nazi salute' film? |
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-47657270 | Marguerita Vonral says she grew up on a "rough" Glasgow housing estate but she always knew she was different.
This could be because she was the granddaughter of one of the city's most-feared gangsters, Walter Norval.
Marguerita, who is now 34, admits she comes from a crime family but assures everyone: "I'm not a criminal".
Mags - as she is often known - was brought up in Milton by her mum and two sisters.
She says her "granda" was her father figure.
He was also widely known as Glasgow's original "Godfather".
Norval started his criminal career at a young age working for Glasgow's top crooks.
Throughout the 60s and 70s he created his own gangster empire, including pubs and clubs, with money he made from protection rackets and later armed robbery.
Unlike other gangsters, he is said to have refused to get involved in drug-dealing.
Norval was jailed for 14 years in 1977.
He died in 2014, aged 85.
Marguerita told the BBC News website: "I missed the crux of the crimewave. I wasn't privy to that.
"I would hear the stories my granda would tell us. It was unusual and I knew that what they did was not right.
"They did develop a set of values, though - loyalty, trust and even teamwork, but maybe just going in the wrong direction.
"Obviously I adopted those strong values too but I used them differently and became a schoolteacher."
Image caption Marguerita says she comes from a crime family, but she is not a criminal: "Somewhere along the way we cleaned our act up."
Mags taught art and she says her strong Glaswegian accent was not the norm.
She said: "I do come from a rough area.
"I once had a boyfriend who said I was just a 'scheme burd'. He meant it as an insult but I'm proud of that.
"I wasn't a regular person who would become a teacher. Even when I went to art college, people were terrified when I opened my mouth."
A personal tragedy caused Mags to stop teaching and pursue a different career - as a fitness model.
Four years ago, her fiance Dave Brown died suddenly, on the way home from his first bodybuilding competition, which he'd won.
Mags said: "We were driving back and we were talking and he was so excited - the happiest I had ever seen him.
"I don't remember the last thing he said. It was mid-sentence and he made a funny noise and went pure red.
"He kept slumping forward. We went to Warrington General Hospital and the doctor came in and she said: 'We tried for 45 minutes and we couldn't bring him back'."
"When I first came back here I would sit with his clothes and look at his stuff and go through it and feel that pain every day.
"I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep I couldn't go out without a panic attack. I was living back home with my mum."
Mags went back to the gym and threw herself into training. It changed her life.
She said: "I thought if I was physically stronger I would feel mentally stronger too."
In four years she has reached the top of her career. And she has now taken on a new challenge.
Marguerita is the only female contestant in a new three-part TV show called Rogue to Wrestler.
Would-be wrestlers are put through their paces to see who will be strong enough to make it into the ring for real.
Insane Championship Wrestling founder Mark Dallas and professional fighters Adrian McCallum (aka Lionheart) and Lee Greig, who wrestles under the name of Jack Jester, conduct the elimination process.
The winner will have the chance to become the next star of the Scottish wrestling scene.
Marguerita enjoyed the wrestling challenge and sees it in her future.
She is about to take up her training again.
She said: "I can see myself trying for WWE - that's the ultimate goal.
"But I want to do it properly. The trainers told me they could send my photo to the WWE training school and they would take me now.
"I look the part but I don't want to just look the part. I want to go in there and fight with the best of them." |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-47361854 | Winning an Oscar is all well and good. Like everyone else in the world though, this year's awards recipients had to go back to work the following day.
For Spike Lee, winner of the best adapted screenplay award for his film BlacKkKlansman, that meant heading off to South East Asia at the first opportunity.
"I'm on a plane tomorrow morning to Thailand," the US film-maker told reporters on Sunday.
Thailand will stand in for Vietnam in Da 5 Bloods, which tells of African-American war veterans returning to that country to locate the remains of a fallen comrade.
Chadwick Boseman, Black Panther himself, will star in the project alongside Delroy Lindo and Leon's Jean Reno.
Here's what else this year's Oscar winners have in the pipeline and where we'll be seeing them next.
With the third and fourth series of The Crown shooting back to back, Olivia Colman will not have long to bask in the glory of her best actress triumph.
The Broadchurch star's filming commitments meant she had to miss a number of other awards events in the run-up to this year's awards - the price of landing the plum role of the Queen in Netflix's royal saga.
Colman will be back on our screens next week when Fleabag returns to BBC One on Monday. The second series of Phoebe Waller-Bridge's raunchy sitcom will see her reprise her role as the title character's far-from-beloved godmother.
This year will also see the release of Them That Follow, a drama set in the Appalachian Mountains in which she plays a member of a Pentecostal church that adheres to the religious practice of snake handling.
Best actor winner Rami Malek doesn't just have an Oscar on his mantelpiece for playing Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody. He also has a fourth and final season of Mr Robot in the can that will air at some point this year.
He will also provide the voice of a gorilla called Chee-Chee in The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle, a reboot of the old "talk to the animals" fantasy starring Robert Downey Jr that will arrive in cinemas in early 2020.
Regina King, winner of the best supporting actress statuette for If Beale Street Could Talk, also won't be giving up the small screen anytime soon.
The three-time Emmy recipient has a role in a new TV version of beloved comic book Watchmen that will see her act alongside fellow Oscar winners Jeremy Irons and Louis Gossett Jr.
Mahershala Ali, in contrast, appears to have nothing confirmed in the works, though he is working on a script that he may direct and has a development deal with HBO (Home Box Office).
The Moonlight and Green Book actor can currently be seen in the third season of HBO's True Detective, in which he plays an Arkansas police detective at three different ages.
HBO also seems the likely home for Ascension, a horror series about the creation of a cult that best director winner Alfonso Cuaron is reportedly set to write, direct and executive produce.
Little is known about the project, beyond the fact that Casey Affleck - an Oscar winner himself two years ago for Manchester by the Sea - is also attached to it. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-40466607 | Mexico's government says it plans to use dolphins trained by the US Navy to try to save the world's most endangered marine species, the vaquita porpoise.
Environment Minister Rafael Pacchiano said that the dolphins would be deployed to locate and herd vaquitas into a marine refuge.
Mexico also permanently banned fishing nets blamed for the vaquitas' decline.
Scientists estimate that fewer than 40 of the mammals are still alive in their habitat, in the Gulf of California.
Mr Pacchiano said the dolphin project would begin in September.
"We've spent the past year working alongside the US Navy with a group of dolphins they had trained to search for missing scuba divers," he told Formula radio.
"We've been training them to locate the vaquitas.
"We have to guarantee we capture the largest possible number of vaquitas to have an opportunity to save them."
The Mexican government also said on Friday it was imposing a permanent ban on gillnets, used to catch totaba, which are highly valued in Chinese traditional medicine.
Image caption Could the latest ban on gillnets make a difference?
The nets are designed to trap the heads of fish but not their bodies, but are blamed for trapping and killing the porpoises as well.
Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who has campaigned to save the vaquitas, tweeted that the ban was "great news", thanking President Enrique Pena Nieto and environmental group WWF.
A temporary ban which had previously been in place since 2015 was seen as ineffective, leading the WWF to call for it to be extended and properly enforced. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/africa/8323818.stm | "There are no small teams in Africa" is a well-worn cliché, but like many clichés it has a grain of truth.
And the Comoros are the latest footballing nation to prove it.
They may be 199 out of 207 in Fifa's rankings and have only three year's experience in international football.
But the Indian Ocean islanders have made significant progress at this year's Cosafa Senior Challenge in Zimbabwe.
In 2008 they lost all three games in the competition without scoring a goal.
In this year's tournament they held Botswana to a goalless draw and then beat a well-organised Seychelles side 2-1.
Their hopes of reaching the last eight were dashed by a 3-0 defeat at the hands of Swaziland, but it was still a huge improvement.
"We have players with good technique, but they lack experience," coach Abderamane Chamite told the BBC's African sports programme Fast Track.
"We came here with a completely new squad - our team has been underestimated all along and I think that this marks an improvement for our side."
Captain Mohamed Mouigni is not afraid to take on bigger teams, but he knows that his squad has challenges to overcome.
"The disadvantage we have in Comoros is that there is no youth academy," he told the BBC.
"I started playing when I was 16, in my village team, then I was recruited by a bigger club.
"We are quite aware that we are facing higher-ranked sides with better facilities, youth academies and professional players, when we are just amateurs, but we are not scared."
Comoros are nicknamed the "Coelacanths" - after a rare giant fish that can be found in the Indian Ocean around the islands.
But can they themselves grow from footballing minnows into big fish?
Coach Chamite is hesitant to predict that Comoros will be playing at the Africa Cup of Nations in the near future, especially after a 10-2 aggregate defeat to Madagascar in the preliminary round of 2010 qualifying.
"It's certainly a dream and anyone is allowed to dream, but there are a lot of challenges in front of us," he said.
"For now it's more realistic to aim to be competitive in our region against the likes of Madagascar and Seychelles."
Here in Zimbabwe, the Comoros have started on that long road with admirable style. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-29306392 | Image caption PM Abbott: "The delicate balance between freedom and security may have to shift"
Australian PM Tony Abbott says certain freedoms may have to be forfeited in the name of security, after major anti-terror raids last week.
His government would seek broad powers to fight the rising threat of militant Islamists, he told parliament.
New laws would criminalise travel to conflict areas declared off limits.
Australian authorities believe at least 60 Australians are in the Middle East fighting with Islamic State (also known as Isil) and other militant groups.
Mr Abbott gave the example of an off-limit area as the city of Raqqa in northern Syria.
That is where a photograph was taken earlier this year and posted to social media of a young boy holding the severed head of a Syrian soldier. The boy is believed to be the son of an Australian jihadist.
"My unambiguous message to all Australians who fight with terrorist groups is that you will be arrested, prosecuted and jailed for a very long time; and that our laws are being changed to make it easier to keep potential terrorists off our streets," Mr Abbott said.
Laws to create new terrorism offences and to extend powers to monitor or detain suspects would be introduced to parliament this week, he said.
Legislation that would require telecommunication companies to provide data to police and security agencies would also be introduced soon.
"Regrettably for some time to come, the delicate balance between freedom and security may have to shift," he said.
"There may be more restrictions on some, so that there can be more protection for others."
Last week, police forces in Sydney and Brisbane conducted raids to disrupt alleged plans to publicly behead a randomly-selected Australian.
"An Australian Isil operative instructed his followers to pluck people from the street to demonstrate that they could, in his words, 'kill kaffirs'," Mr Abbott told parliament.
"All that would be needed to conduct such an attack is a knife, a camera-phone and a victim," he said.
One man has been charged with terrorism offences and several others arrested.
Last week, Australia sent 600 troops to join a US-led coalition to combat IS.
Mr Abbott will travel to New York later this week for a UN Security Council meeting where US President Barack Obama is expected to call for more countries to join the coalition.
Meanwhile, in a separate development, the Australian government has agreed to add torture to a list of specific prohibitions on secret service officers when detaining terror suspects.
It came after critics said officers should not be exempt from legal liability for torturing suspected terrorists.
Duncan Lewis, secretary general at Australia's top spy agency ASIO, said the organisation has never practiced torture and it never would. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-41059442/hurricane-harvey-forecast-rain-rain-rain | Hurricane Harvey forecast: Rain, rain, rain Jump to media player BBC Weather forecasts Hurricane Harvey could bring up to a metre of rain to Texas.
World storms Jump to media player Hurricane Harvey impacts the US whilst Tropical Storm Pakhar looks set to bring more rain to South Asia. Simon King explains.
How the BBC covered Hurricane Katrina Jump to media player Ten years ago, Hurricane Katrina damaged much of New Orleans after high winds, heavy rains and floods from levees. Here's some of how the BBC reported from the city.
BBC Weather forecasts Hurricane Harvey could bring up to a metre of rain to Texas. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4266102.stm | How is immigration changing the face of modern Britain? One of the country's leading experts on migration explains what the BBC's Born Abroad project, published this month, reveals about the country - and what it means for integration.
Diversity in the UK is not what it used to be.
This is clear from the BBC's Born Abroad project and the New Immigrant Communities study conducted by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) that the maps and figures draw on.
The maps and data published earlier this month on the BBC News website point to the growth, locations and economic profiles of a wide variety of groups: a much wider variety, in fact, than most policy-makers and members of the general public had ever realized.
The study, based on Census data, focuses on where people were born to chart the development of immigration within Great Britain.
For decades British multicultural policies have mainly centred on fewer communities, mainly Asian and African-Caribbean - in the eyes of policymakers, it was these people who generally comprised Britain's immigrants.
But the new data shows how, compared with these patterns from the 1950s-1970s, immigration to Britain between 1991-2001 involved people from a wide range of countries beyond the New Commonwealth nations that traditionally provided the main sources for migration to the UK.
We can now see the vastly more complicated picture of current immigrant diversity - a 'super-diversity', in fact. It is clearly time to re-think the nature of multiculturalism in the UK as both a condition and set of policies that address that condition.
While highlighting key patterns of diversity, country of birth data alone is rather one-dimensional.
But if we use Census data or other research on ethnicity, religion and language, we can learn a lot more about the many dimensions of this super-diversity.
And it is these criteria that play key roles in determining how immigrants identify and organise themselves - as well as how they interact with people already living here.
We must realise, however, that today's super-diversity is not just about more countries of origin, ethnic identities, languages and religions.
There are yet additional immigrant characteristics that affect everyday social interactions and the processes of integration.
For instance, compared with earlier waves, recent migrants have come for a greater variety of reasons and through a wider set of channels.
An immigrant's channel of migration and subsequent legal status can be crucial because these directly impact on their ability to work, what kind of housing they may find and what public services they use.
These channels and legal categories have themselves multiplied and become more complex over the past ten years.
Some 60% of new migrants who have been in the UK more than five years (the period of eligibility) have become citizens.
Many other recent arrivals are EU nationals who do not need a visa or work permit - including a sizeable influx over the past year since ten new countries have become members of the EU.
Still other recent migrants are work permit holders (including large numbers from the USA and India) or people on special worker schemes in agriculture (from 48 countries) or hotels and restaurants (from 40 countries).
Britain has welcomed highly skilled migrants and entrepreneurs in computing, finance and business from many countries alongside working holidaymakers from more than 30 countries (especially 'Old Commonwealth' ones such as Australia and New Zealand).
There are also special visa holders such as au pairs (mainly from eastern Europe) and students from all over the world, notably the EU and China.
Spouses and family members comprise a category that more than doubled between 1993-2003.
Until recently asylum-seekers and refugees represented one of the largest immigrant categories, including Sri Lankan Tamils, Serbians and Somalis in the late 1990s and Zimbabweans, Iraqis and Afghanis in the early 2000s.
Finally there are 'undocumented' people from all over the world, people generally described in the media as 'illegal immigrants'.
We know that they work in a range of sectors from professional to manual work, most of whom have probably overstayed their originally legal entry visas to Britain.
Legal status, patterns of immigrant integration and social interaction are also importantly related to people's plans for how long they intend to stay.
Many only plan to work for a short time and then return home, others to stay a bit longer. Others wish to settle permanently.
For example, most Slovakians, Filipinos and Thais in the UK are women (70-80%), while most Algerians, Kosovars and Afghans are men (60-70%).
Some groups are more prone to consist of young families, others of single people.
The Born Abroad project has done a great service in revealing characteristics of the new migration.
But in order to effectively deliver services to, and ensure the smooth integration of immigrants we need revitalised multicultural policies, reflecting the new patterns of super-diversity.
Prof. Steven Vertovec is a social anthropologist and Director of the Economic and Social Research Council's Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford. See internet links. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6980188.stm | There are no plans to make it compulsory for everyone in the UK to be on the national DNA database, the government has said.
The comment comes after a senior judge called for all UK residents and visitors to be required to provide a DNA sample to help police solve crimes.
Lord Justice Sedley said this would make the present database in England and Wales fairer and less biased.
The database currently holds details of four million people's DNA.
Each month, some 30,000 more samples from suspects or DNA recovered from crime scenes are added to the database, making it the largest in the world.
It includes some 24,000 samples from young people aged between 10 and 17, who were arrested but never convicted.
It also stores samples from nearly 40% of the black men in England and Wales compared with 9% of the white men, according to Home Office and Census figures.
But the idea of expanding it any further has come in for a barrage of criticism.
DNA database: A step too far?
The Human Genetics Commission said creating such a huge database would be too expensive and prone to mistakes being made.
Civil rights group, Liberty, meanwhile, attacked the proposal as "chilling" and "ripe for abuse".
A spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown said DNA had helped tackle crime, but expanding the database would create "huge logistical and bureaucratic issues" and civil liberty concerns.
He said there were no plans for a voluntary national or compulsory UK database.
Should we all be on it?
Home Office minister Tony McNulty said the database had helped police solve as many as 20,000 crimes a year.
In Scotland, DNA samples taken when people are arrested must be destroyed if the individual is not charged or convicted.
But Lord Justice Sedley, who is one of England's most experienced appeal court judges, insisted the present system was "indefensible" and it was time to move forwards.
He cited a catalogue of problems with the present system in England and Wales.
If you happen to have been in the hands of the police then your DNA is on permanent record while many people who are walking the streets and whose DNA would show them guilty of crimes, go free, he said.
He added that ethnic profiling meant disproportionate numbers of ethnic minorities were on the database.
"Going forwards has very serious but manageable implications. It means that everybody, guilty or innocent, should expect their DNA to be on file for the absolutely rigorously restricted purpose of crime detection and prevention," he said.
Keith Jarrett, president of the Black Police Association, backed his call, saying the current system was "untenable".
"You can't have a system where so many black youths who have done nothing wrong are perhaps going to the police station for elimination from a crime and find that their DNA is on the database," he said.
Shadow home secretary David Davis called for a Parliamentary debate and described the system for adding people to the database as arbitrary and erratic.
Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said there was "no earthly reason" why someone who has committed no crime should be on the database - "yet the government is shoving thousands of innocent people's DNA details on to the database every month". |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-21041102/i-saw-crane-debris-flying-and-the-helicopter-in-flames | 'I saw helicopter in flames' Jump to media player Aaron Rogers has spoken to the BBC about witnessing a helicopter crashing into a crane at a building site in south London.
Eyewitness: 'I thought it was a bomb' Jump to media player Construction worker Andrew Beadle tells the BBC about witnessing a helicopter crash into a crane in central London.
'I heard unusual buzzing sound' Jump to media player A helicopter has crashed into a crane in Vauxhall. Eyewitness Chris Matherson told BBC News what he saw and heard at the scene.
Aaron Rogers, who witnessed a helicopter crashing into a crane at a building site in south London, has described the experience as "surreal".
He told the BBC that he was at Vauxhall bus station when he heard a bang, looked up and "saw bits of helicopter debris flying to the floor".
Police said they first received calls at 08:00 GMT and the London Ambulance Service said it was also at the scene. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1553289.stm | US troops are being deployed ready for military action as the US gears up to respond to last week's attacks on New York and Washington.
US Army Secretary Thomas E White told a briefing at the Pentagon that the deployment order signed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Wednesday included army as well as air force troops.
He said the army was ready to conduct "sustained land combat operations".
Mr White said it was only the first step in a broader military plan that would unfold in the weeks ahead.
"A lot more will come," he said.
Also speaking at the Pentagon, Mr Rumsfeld refused to be drawn on details of the deployment, but said: "We are trying to get ourselves arranged in the world, with our forces, in places that we believe conceivably could be useful in the event the president decided to use them."
The air force is sending more than 100 aircraft to the Gulf, said to include F-16 and F-15 fighters and B-52 bombers and well as tanker aircraft to create an "air bridge" to refuel the combat planes.
Once in the region, the planes will be in striking distance of Afghanistan where America's prime suspect, Osama Bin Laden, is hiding.
Mr Rumsfeld also said they were reconsidering the name given to the military deployment, "Operation Infinite Justice," because in the Islamic faith only Allah can provide infinite justice.
Mr White said "all combat capabilities" would be included in the US deployment.
The aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and the ships in its battle group left their home port at Norfolk, Virginia, on Wednesday for a scheduled six-month deployment to the Mediterranean.
The battle group includes 2,100 Marines aboard a battle-ready unit known as an Amphibious Ready Group, led by the assault ship USS Bataan.
There are also two attack submarines, the USS Hartford and the USS Springfield, which can fire Tomahawk cruise missiles.
The US Navy has a carrier battle group in the Gulf - the USS Carl Vinson - and a second, the USS Enterprise, is in the Arabian Sea to the south.
But BBC defence correspondent Jonathan Marcus says the military dimension will be only part of a much broader effort to disrupt and destroy the shadowy networks behind the US hijackings.
Intelligence agencies and law-enforcement organisations in several countries will have a part to play.
Other secretive preparations - involving intelligence operations using satellites and electronic eavesdropping will also be under way.
Special forces will also have an important role - there could be significant deployments of such units - signalling that for the Americans this is indeed a new sort of war where there is no reluctance to place US soldiers in harm's way.
The diplomatic coalition being forged to back Washington has a practical side as well as the purely rhetorical.
Information exchanges will have to be stepped up; computer and financial experts deployed to track terrorist funds. It is easy to concentrate on the movement of military hardware - aircraft carriers leaving port cannot be hidden.
But much of the real war will be taking place in the shadows and it will not be talked about in the press briefings either.
"We are seeing the preparations of a first attack"
"There has to be a moment when action is taken" |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/south_yorkshire/3920999.stm | A teenager found dead near a reservoir in Sheffield may have been killed with two large scythes, police have said.
Detectives investigating the alleged murder of 17-year-old Terry Hurst said they were found near the spot where his body was discovered on Tuesday.
He had suffered multiple injuries, including stab wounds, slash wounds, fractures and bruising.
Mr Hurst, from Penistone, was last seen in Bolsterstone on Monday at 1700 BST. He was with a group going camping.
South Yorkshire Police believe he was heading to a camping spot near Broomhead Reservoir, just off New Road.
A South Yorkshire Police spokeswoman added: "We are appealing for help from local people, particularly farmers, to trace the origins of the implements."
Police say it is too early to say if there was any motive for the murder or whether the incident happened at the spot where the body was found.
Inquiries were continuing today at the murder scene.
Two 17-year-old boys and a 15-year-old girl, arrested on Thursday, are still being questioned at separate police stations in the city. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-43098921 | A minor earthquake near Swansea which could be felt across parts of the UK was "frightening", residents in Wales have said.
The quake at Cwmllynfell was of 4.4 magnitude and tremors were reported across Wales, in south west England and the Midlands at about 14:30 GMT.
The British Geological Survey said the epicentre was near Cwmllynfell in Swansea Valley and at a depth of 7.4km.
Many people took to Twitter to ask "what was that?"
Seismologist Richard Luckett, of the British Geological Survey, said the earthquake was the largest in mainland UK since the 5.2 magnitude Market Rasen earthquake in 2008, and was felt across a large area of Wales and England with the reports from Birmingham and Devon.
There have been no reports of injuries or serious damage but South Wales Police said it received 205 calls in the 15 minutes after the earthquake happened.
A Welsh Football League match at Port Talbot Town against Taff's Well was called to a brief halt by the tremor about half way through the game.
Mountain Ash Golf Club reported a trophy was dislodged from its cabinet.
"The whole building just rocked," said a tweet from the club in Rhondda Cynon Taff.
Bryan Jones, 72, of Treorchy, Rhondda Cynon Taff, said: "It was like a tremor but it was quite frightening for my granddaughter - she swore a little bit and my wife got up asking 'What was that?'"
Steven Clathworthy, from Blackmill, near Bridgend, said: "I heard a bang and felt a tremor and the settee moved.
"I looked out the window to see if it was wind after hearing a noise and a shudder. It wasn't like you see on TV. It was like 'Ooh, what was that?'"
Anne Jones, near Builth Wells, Powys, said the tremor "felt like a bomb had gone off, the whole house shook", while Barbara Watkin described a "rumbling noise" in Ceredigion.
There were also reports in north Wales, with some claiming they felt the tremor in Broughton, Flintshire, and Llangollen, Denbighshire.
Louise Craig, from Connah's Quay, Deeside, said it was "the most excitement I've had on a Saturday afternoon for a while".
Neath Port Talbot councillor John Warman said he had received a large number of calls from Cimla residents about the earth tremor.
"It was quite frightening and a number of people went out of their homes to investigate," he said.
"The ground moved quite alarmingly and, at first, it was not clear exactly what it was and inquiries were made with the emergency services to check if there had been a gas explosion or water burst underground."
Gareth Rhys, who was in Cardiff when the earthquake hit, said the "whole room shook".
"My desk was moving independently of itself and there was a low rumble. It didn't last more than about 10 seconds but it was the strangest sensation I've ever experienced."
But not everyone felt the earth move, with others complaining they had missed it. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-47773024 | Buses, trains and automobiles will be the focus of MSPs attention this week as Holyrood when they debate the Transport Bill.
And it all ties in with that other B-word - Budget, not Brexit.
In order to strike a Budget deal with the Greens back in February, the Scottish government agreed to a workplace parking levy.
This is the piece of legislation which could see councils empowered to adopt that new tax.
Importantly the levy is not included in the bill just yet, but the Greens will table an amendment at stage 2.
The other opposition parties are less convinced of its merits.
They says an underfunding of local government will force councils to burden their communities without proper economic assessment.
The Scottish government said no impact assessment has been undertaken on the parking levy - instead they have insisted this would be for councils to undertake should they wish to make use of the powers.
Will you have to pay to park at work?
The Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee endorsed the Transport Bill at the start of March, but urged the government to ensure enough time was given at stage 2 to properly scrutinise the parking plan.
Basically, as the bill is stands it is fairly uncontroversial. But a storm might be brewing.
What else is happening at the Scottish Parliament this week?
The bulk of Tuesday afternoon will be spent on the Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Bill.
The Scottish government is under pressure to strengthen the legislation, which currently proposes to cut emissions by 90% by 2050 and set a net-zero target when a "clear pathway" exists to achieve it.
Campaigners have called for the net-zero target to have a firm date attached to it.
Ministers have insisted on waiting for for fresh advice from the independent Committee on Climate Change before doing so.
That advice is due in May.
The debate is particularly timely as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meets in Edinburgh this week.
The evening member's debate will be led by SNP MSP Rona Mackay to highlight Stalking Awareness Week, which takes place next week.
Last November, Ms Mackay pledged to take forward a members bill to create stalking protection orders - first proposed by colleague Mairi Gougeon before being appointed a minister.
In the morning, the economy committee continues its inquiry into the construction sector, this time hearing from the Construction Scotland Industry Leadership Group.
Brexit comes to Holyrood on Wednesday morning when the constitution committee takes evidence from Brexit Secretary Mike Russell.
This session was scheduled last week but was postponed due to the uncertainty at Westminster.
On Monday, MPs will take part in a second round of votes on alternative Brexit proposals.
It is understood SNP MPs could support the 'Common Market 2.0' motion, which would mean joining the European Free Trade Association and European Economic Area.
Mr Russell will provide an update on the Scottish government's position, which has been to remain in the single market and customs union. The Common Market 2.0 motion backs staying in the former but not necessarily the latter.
In the afternoon, the Scottish Tories have the floor after portfolio questions on the environment and rural economy.
The party plan to bring forward debates on two separate areas of health policy - the precise topics are yet to be confirmed.
Ending the day will be SNP MSP Sandra White highlighting the Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) campaign.
First minister's questions takes place as usual from noon, after general questions.
Then Tory MSP Rachael Hamilton leads a member's debate on declining salmon stocks. She will urge the Scottish government to take "urgent action" on conservation and management.
The Transport (Scotland) Bill debate will be preceded by transport portfolio questions.
Full committee listings are yet to be published, but the Social Security Committee is continuing its inquiry into welfare and housing.
This session will focus on social sector tenants, with evidence being taken from housing associations and local authorities. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/teams/b/barnsley/8457689.stm | Barnsley have completed the signing of Hull's Nathan Doyle on a free transfer.
The 23-year-old utility player, who has been on loan at Oakwell since 18 September 2009, has agreed a two-and-a-half year deal.
Reds boss Mark Robins told the club website: "Nathan did very well during his loan spell and we are delighted to bring him back to the club.
"This is a deal we have been working on for a while and I am delighted that it has now come to fruition."
Meanwhile Grimsby are expected to complete the signing of striker Michael Coulson on a permanent basis.
Coulson has been on loan at Blundell Park since November. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-41649111 | A 39-year-old woman has died in a house fire in Aberdeen.
Firefighters were called to a blaze on the first floor of a four storey building in Shapinsay Square at about 21:10 on Monday and extinguished the flames.
The cause of the fire is still being investigated, but it is not thought to have been suspicious.
No-one else was hurt in the incident. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8620178.stm | Economists call them the "Bric" countries. Hiding behind the obscure title are some of the world's fastest growing and potentially largest economies - Brazil, Russia, India and China. Now the leaders of these countries are meeting in Brazil's capital Brasilia for the second Bric summit.
The inventor of the acronym Bric is Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O'Neill. In 2001 he argued that "over the next 10 years, the weight of the Brics and especially China in world GDP will grow" and as a result "world policy making forums should be reorganised" in favour of the Bric countries.
Since then this economic grouping has taken on greater significance, culminating in a summit last year in Russia where the four nations talked about how they could best tackle the economic crisis.
The location of the first summit was poignant, because some critics say that Russia's economy is not strong enough to justify its presence in the group.
Others question whether the Bric states have a common agenda at all.
But Russian President Dimity Medvedev stresses the grouping's importance: "In recent years Bric contribution to the growth of the world economy exceeded 50%", adding that the four countries accounted for 14.6% of the world's economy.
He went on: "By strengthening the economic base of a multi-polar world, the Bric countries are objectively helping to create conditions for the strengthening of global security."
So while the original concept was an economic one, some think that Russia is trying to turn the Bric group into a political alliance.
Russian foreign ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko last week called Bric "a reliable pillar in the formation of polycentric, fair and democratic world order".
And Arkady Dvorkovich, the Russian president's top economic adviser, said that Russia wanted these summits to become a regular event.
The strength of Russia's economy depends heavily on commodities like oil, and was hit hard by the global financial crisis. Last year it shrank almost 8%, unlike the other Bric countries, which continued to grow.
Some experts described Russia as "an outsider in Bric" and said its economic expansion had "been brought to a screeching halt".
Mr O'Neill, however, defends his decision to group Russia with the other top emerging economies. He told the Financial Times that although Russia had "disappointed", it would "deserve its Bric status" if its economy bounced back soundly in 2010 and 2011.
While Russia's official GDP growth forecast currently stays at 3.1% for this year, the International Monetary Fund thinks that the country's economy will grow by 3.6% in 2010, compared with China's 10%, India's 7.7% and Brazil's 4.7%.
If these forecasts are correct, the Russian economy could pretty much return to its pre-crisis state, beating the developed economies' growth rates despite experiencing a huge fall just a year ago.
It might give Moscow a chance to silence those critics who have been saying that Russia was using the Bric platform to promote and push its own agenda at the first Bric summit, while not even deserving its place in the bloc.
Though for years Brazil, Russia, India and China have often been talked about as a group, experts note that the countries' agendas are not exactly the same.
"What brings them together is that they are at the frontier of capitalism," says Christian Lohbauer, an international relations expert at the University of Sao Paulo.
"But it's obvious they don't have a common agenda and their interests diverge and are [at] many times conflicting."
For example, Russia and Brazil benefit from rising commodity prices, while for China and India it is a completely different story.
Also, a top official at Russia's economic development ministry has said that China and India are among the 23 countries that limit free access to their markets for Russian companies.
This week China introduced a duty on imports of US and Russian electrical steel, accusing the two countries of selling the product at abnormally low prices.
For his part, Brazilian finance minister Guido Mantega said his country's manufacturers were being "harmed" by Beijing's currency policy, despite China being "an important trade partner".
However such differences don't mean the bloc can be written off.
Vladimir Portyakov, deputy director of the Institute of Far Eastern Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, says the Bric countries have already managed to come up with "some elements of the common position".
First of all, he says, they agree that emerging economies should increase their role in international financial institutions.
Mr Portyakov told the BBC Russian Service that there was an idea to use the Bric countries' national currencies in mutual trade and potentially turning them into global reserve currencies in the future.
At the first Bric summit, the group discussed the US dollar's status as the world's main trading currency, and the topic has made it back on the agenda.
Presidential adviser Arkady Dvorkovich confirmed the Bric summit participants would discuss the possibility of using the International Monetary Fund's own currency - called special depository receipts (SDRs) - as a global currency instead.
"I do not think we may expect any detailed decision on this currency at this year's meetings, though," he added.
Brazil's foreign ministry official Roberto Jaguaribe also said, "Bric members agree that it is in their advantage to abandon the dollar in mutual transactions in the future.
"However, they also understand that haste in this process will result in losses."
Evgeny Yasin, head of research at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, told Russian daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta that plans to discuss the possibility of abandoning the US dollar at the summit were an attempt to put pressure on the world's leading powers.
He points out that any dollar instability would be potentially harming to China as it could hit Chinese exports.
Mr Jaguaribe's comments seem to support this view.
"None of the Bric countries is interested in rocking the boat too much, everybody is interested in the dollar and depends on it," he said.
Another topic that was raised last year and will be discussed again this time is the role of developing countries in the world.
Brazil's President Lula da Silva expects the Bric summit to call for reforms of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
"We call for sweeping reforms for developing countries to have an active voice in defining their own future," Chinese news agency Xinhua quoted him as saying.
"Brazil did not become a creditor of these bodies for things to remain as before," he warned.
Jim O'Neill told the Times after the first Bric summit: "Today it's embarrassing that they [the Bric countries] are not involved in an improved version of G7 and G8, and, of course, the IMF and World Bank need to have their governance structure changed dramatically to reflect this.
"The advent of the G20 is a step in the right direction."
Experts agree that so far the Bric group has been much more about words rather than actions.
But if forecasts about the four countries overtaking the six largest western economies over the next two to three decades are correct, actions will undoubtedly follow.
"I suppose that the potential of the [Bric] cooperation should not be exaggerated and we should not expect fast results, but this potential definitely exists," said Mr Portyakov. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37758164 | Major multinational aid funding may be cut unless it provides better value for money, International Development Secretary Priti Patel has said.
More than £4bn of UK aid goes to global organisations such as the World Bank.
In an interview in Kenya with the BBC's James Landale, Ms Patel also said that she wanted to use the aid budget to help pave the way for trade deals.
But Labour said Ms Patel had "no mandate" for changing how aid was given and called on her to abandon the plans.
Ms Patel, who was speaking on her first visit to Africa since she was appointed to her new role, witnessed what some of her department's £12bn budget is supporting on the ground.
She saw humanitarian aid being delivered, via a payment card that gives Kenyan women £20 a month from the British taxpayer to buy the food they need to survive.
She said: "We have to make sure that our aid works in our national interest and also that it works for our taxpayers. Much more openness, much more transparency and much more accountability."
She is about to publish a review of the work of big multinational aid organisations that spend money on behalf of the UK, and said she would cut off funding if they did not meet new performance targets by spending better and wasting less.
"The government's approach is focused on ensuring that we drive taxpayer value - so when it comes to multilateral organisations, focus on performance agreements," she said.
"If they are not performing then obviously we'll look at the contributions that we give to them. We need to be challenging."
Ms Patel was referring to agencies such as the World Bank, the European Union and other smaller bodies. They spend 40% of the UK's aid budget.
It is the first time this multilateral funding has been reviewed as a whole for five years.
Our diplomatic correspondent says Ms Patel also wants to use bilateral aid to secure new trade deals and make allies in the World Trade Organization, which the UK will need after Brexit. She also hopes to use aid to reduce the flow of migrants to Europe.
Ms Patel said: "British soft power is exactly where DfID (the Department for International Development) and our aid and other relationships around the world come together to deliver in our national interest and deliver for Britain when it comes to free trade agreements but also life post-Brexit."
Government officials would not name specific projects potentially at risk in the Multilateral Aid Review but pointed to criticism levelled at the World Health Organisation for its handling of the Ebola crisis as an example of where reform was needed.
Ms Patel has been a longstanding critic of some aid spending and her remarks will unnerve many multilateral agencies and non-governmental charities opposed to the idea of further so-called "conditionality" being imposed on their spending, our correspondent says.
She told him she wanted to use Britain's aid budget to boost economic development, announcing a £30m programme to encourage more job-creating investment in Kenya.
And she promised £95m to help Kenya break down barriers to trade, particularly by speeding up the flow of goods through the port of Mombasa.
She said she would undertake joint missions overseas with International Trade Secretary Liam Fox to gather what she called "intelligence" about economic opportunities for British businesses.
"We are a global leader when it comes to international development, we have a strong footprint overseas and it is right that we use that footprint in the national interest," she added.
Kate Osamor, Labour's shadow development secretary, said "Priti Patel has no mandate or evidence to fundamentally change the way UK aid is distributed.
"She seems fixated on imposing her dogma of the free market over the clear evidence that UK aid is the most efficient and effective in the world.
"It reaches the people who need help, including many young girls and women." |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-47381124 | A murder investigation is under way after a man was stabbed to death in east London.
The 20-year-old victim is the fifth person in nine days to be fatally stabbed in the capital.
Police were called to Cranbrook Road in Ilford at 20:48 GMT on Tuesday and found the man with stab wounds.
He was pronounced dead at the scene about half an hour later. Scotland Yard said no arrests had been made.
A crime scene is in place at Cranbrook Road and the front entrance to Ilford railway station is closed. An entrance at the back of the station has been opened.
Zamirullah Stanikzai, 21, who works in a phone shop near where the stabbing occurred, said he saw two men with knives.
Another witness named Andy, who was at a betting shop nearby e said he was "terrified" and "shaking with nerves".
"The staff in the betting shop were shaking. Everyone was just really nervous and petrified.
"I'm 42 and I was brought up in the east end and I don't even feel comfortable going around London anymore because you don't see any police presence at all."
Ilford South MP Mike Gapes said he was "shocked and saddened" to learn of the man's death.
There have been 12 fatal stabbings in London this year.
Across England and Wales, there were 285 killings by a knife or sharp instrument in the year ending March 2018, the highest since records began in 1946. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/teams/q/qpr/1554048.stm | BBC Sport Online explains how the Moonies religious cult would be more than just money to Queens Park Rangers.
It seems that Queens Park Rangers may have had their prayers answered - quite literally.
The Division Two side have had a tough time over the past few months, tumbling down a league and going into administration with debts of �11m.
But the path to enlightenment may have been revealed in the form of the Unification Church, otherwise known as the Moonies.
QPR spokesman Mike Hartwell has admitted that the religious movement has shown an interest in buying the club.
Involvement with the Unification Church, famous for their mass wedding ceremonies, may be worrying to some at Loftus Road.
But it would mean belonging to a huge financial empire.
The Moonies are estimated to have over $10bn in business assets, including an American daily newspaper, the University of Bridgeport and a major publishing company.
The church also owns a number of other clubs across the world, including teams in Brazil and Korea.
Clearly QPR might never have to worry about money again if the cult's leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon was at the helm, but many fans say that it is about more than just finance.
Loyal Supporters Association secretary Joe English is cynical about their intentions.
"People think that if someone comes in with a big fat cheque book, then QPR will get into bed with anyone, but that's not the case," said English.
"I think it's dangerous getting involved with those people. What's their motive?"
Certainly, the Moonies may have some hard beliefs for the Loftus Road faithful to swallow, claiming that Reverend Moon is effectively the Messiah.
According to Unification theory, Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden before they could produce the "good family" and Christ was murdered before he, too, could marry and procreate.
Hence, Moon has stated that he and his wife are the first "true parents" - something that many fans might not want to digest with their halftime pie.
"You don't want religion, even subtly pushed down your throat at a football match. You go there to get away from things like that," said English.
"I mean, what's going to happen? Is swearing going to be banned at the training ground?"
Certainly, the Moonies might try to instil the players with a sense of divine purpose.
As long ago as 1979, the spiritual leader Moon said: "A Moonie soccer champion will still be kicking the ball, even if his leg is broken."
Watching a team play with broken limbs may be an uncomfortable experience for QPR fans, but a name-change would be more than they could bear.
Last year, the Unification Church set up a new professional team in Brazil called "New Hope".
It remains to be seen whether they intend to inspire the same brand loyalty with QPR, perhaps renaming them "New Hoops".
But fans, who so vociferously opposed a merger with Wimbledon a few months ago, are unlikely to want any tampering of that kind.
Links to more QPR stories are at the foot of the page. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-36079445 | At least 28 people have been killed and 329 injured in a huge explosion in the centre of the Afghan capital Kabul, police and officials say.
A suicide attacker detonated a vehicle and a fierce gun battle followed. Officials say the attack is now over and the area has been cleared.
It comes a week after it said it was launching its "spring offensive", warning of large-scale attacks.
Tuesday's bombing happened during the morning rush hour in Pul-e-Mahmud, a busy neighbourhood where homes, mosques, schools and businesses nestle close to the Ministry of Defence, other ministries and military compounds.
Soldiers and security officers are reported to be among the casualties, but the majority are civilians.
The blast shattered windows up to 1.6km (one mile) away. The Associated Press quoted a police officer as saying it was one of the most powerful explosions he had ever heard, and he could not see or hear anything for 20 minutes after.
It appears the initial blast cleared the way for Taliban fighters to enter the area - a commonly used tactic.
"One of the suicide attackers blew up an explosives-laden truck in a public parking lot next to a government building," Kabul police chief Abdul Rahman Rahimi told AFP news agency.
"The second attacker engaged security forces in a gun battle before being gunned down," he added.
Hours after the assault was declared over, another blast rocked Kabul. Police told a BBC reporter in Kabul it was caused by an improvised explosive device (IED).
"It was as huge as in the morning," said Afghan MP Elay Ershad. "So everyone [is] scared of this situation."
Casualties are high because the assault happened in a densely packed neighbourhood during rush hour.
Usually the Taliban does not say it is behind such attacks, which cause large numbers of civilian deaths. But today they did because the target was high-profile and it appears that, for them, hitting the target was worth the civilians killed and wounded.
What we hear less of are similar planned attacks that are foiled by the Afghan security forces, and there are plenty. But preventing such attacks altogether is next to impossible.
The country has been at war for three decades, explosives are easily available and bomb-making skills are common.
The Taliban's "spring offensive" is part of a propaganda war. The group fights all year round and so do the Afghan security forces. It is the story of the past 37 years.
It is unclear precisely how many attackers were involved and the Taliban have been known to exaggerate details.
The presidential palace - only a few hundred metres from the blast - condemned the attack "in the strongest possible terms".
"Such cowardly terrorist attacks will not weaken the will and determination of Afghan security forces to fight against terrorism."
A tweet from President Ghani's office's official account suggested the attack "clearly shows the enemy's defeat in face-to-face battle with ANSDF" - the Afghan National Security and Defense Forces.
But correspondents say that in fact the Taliban has gained in strength since the bulk of British, American and other Nato forces left in 2014.
It has also been buoyed by a flood of foreign fighters joining its ranks, and now controls sizeable parts of Afghanistan. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3446059.stm | It's easy to lose track of the news. So at the end of the week, it's good to keep an eye on some of those things which shouldn't go unnoticed.
If you spot something you think should be included next week, send it to us using the form at the bottom of the page.
1. Frying pan fumes can kill canaries, according to the Worldwide Fund for Nature.
2 Bill Clinton sent just two e-mails while he was president.
3. Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, has got solar panels fitted on the roof of his Cricklewood home.
4. Whales can explode - a dead sperm whale this week exploded in Taiwan, showering blood and body parts on passers-by. Marine biologists blamed it on a build-up of gases inside the whale.
5. More than a quarter of UK households have no savings, according to statistics revealed this week.
6. Pets will be eligible for frequent flier points on Japanese airline JAL from March. The points will be exchangeable for cage rentals on board, as well as gifts.
7. The man who invented Ctrl+Alt+Delete retired on Friday. David Bradley, 55, spent five minutes writing the computer code that has helped bail out millions of PC users, while working for IBM in the 1980s. "I may have invented it, but Bill Gates made it famous," Bradley said.
8. 70% of mobile phone owners in the UK have pre-pay models.
9. Cunning bargain hunters are roaming Ebay looking for misspelled goods which attract hardly any bids because they don't turn up in text searches. One man bought three Compaq laptops at a pittance simply by asking for "Compacts" instead.
10. Brits drank 35% more champagne in bars and pubs in 2003 than in the year before.
If you see something you think should be included next week, let us know using the form below. Thanks to John Clare and Bob Smit. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-41664379 | Lottery tickets could be sold by Harrogate council to raise money for good causes in the community.
Tickets for the weekly online draw would cost £1 with the winner getting 20% of the profits from total sales.
At least 60% of proceeds would go towards voluntary or community-based organisations, the council said.
The authority said it would enable it to help local projects that were struggling to survive because of government funding cuts.
Councillor Graham Swift said other councils, which had set up similar schemes, had demonstrated it was an effective way of raising funds.
Aylesbury Vale District Council, the first authority to set up an online lottery, raised more than £70,000 for community organisations, according to a council report.
The Gambling Commission said 19 authorities currently hold licences to run lotteries, although they may not yet be up and running.
If approved by Harrogate Borough Council's cabinet, the lottery could be launched by spring, with the first draw taking place in July. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/breakfast/2168168.stm | Environmental campaigners in America are concerned about a new danger to the world's whale population.
It's sonar - powerful sound waves used by submarines and ships to track activity underwater.
Research has shown that the sonar waves can be heard by whales and dolphins - and campaigners believe it may be causing the whales to beach.
It was a stranding of rare beak nosed whales in the Caribbean which gave scientists their first proof of the harm sonar can inflict.
In spite of the efforts of local people, six whales died.
Each whale ear was sliced into a thousand sections and stained to reveal bone and blood. Red areas show the bleeding caused by exposure to military sonar.
At the moment, we think sonar precipitated the strandings, " says Dr Darlene Ketten.
"The animals were driven to strand by the stress of being exposed to this particular sonar."
The sonar implicated in this stranding was mid-frequency.
The new system is lower and louder and travels much further. The noise is the equivalent of a jumbo jet taking off.
The American Navy says it needs a more powerful device to keep track of potentially threatening submarines. But it's continuing to research into the effects of sonar on marine life.
"There is no finite correlation between low frequency sonar and negative effects on marine wildlife.
"Can marine life hear it? Yes. Does it have a major effect? We don't know."
This uncertainty alarms wildlife groups. They're now threatening legal action to protect sea-life from the sonar.
"It causes us great concern that the navy proposes to deploy one the loudest sound systems devised by man over 80 per cent of the world's oceans without really understanding what the implications are."
Whales are already under threat from pollution, fishing nets and collisions with boats. Although the research is inconclusive, conservationists say we should avoid any further risks to them. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32980354 | Four people have been seriously hurt in a crash between two carriages on a rollercoaster ride at Alton Towers.
West Midlands Ambulance Service said two men, aged 18 and 27, and two women, aged 19 and 17, suffered "significant lower limb injuries". They were airlifted to trauma centres in Stoke and Coventry for treatment.
Alton Towers said all guests involved were evacuated by 18:35 BST.
A director described it as "the most serious incident" in the park's history.
The passengers were trapped for several hours on the ride, about 25ft (7.6m) above the ground.
Eyewitnesses reported hearing "a loud crash" when the crash happened at 14:09.
Ben Richardson said: "When the second carriage crashed people were screaming and shouting - even after it stopped. Everyone around the park ran over.
"The people looked significantly distressed. It was almost like a car crash, very full-on."
Alton Towers said first responders based at the park were on the scene "within minutes", quickly followed by the emergency services.
Hospital trauma team consultants were also brought in to help treat passengers.
Alton Towers has said the park will be closed on Wednesday "following the dreadful incident on The Smiler".
In a statement the theme park said: "All guests with pre-booked tickets, or those who arrive at the theme park, will have the choice of either having their tickets revalidated for an alternative date or a full refund."
Sophie Underwood, who was in the park at the time of the crash, said: "It wasn't very high but it was obviously high enough for them to cause some quite serious injuries to the people that were on the rollercoaster.
"They literally had come back off and round the back of a loop, and straight into another empty coach that had been stuck."
The Smiler opened in May 2013 and is billed as the world's first 14-loop rollercoaster.
It holds the official Guinness World Record for most loops in a rollercoaster, according to the Alton Towers website.
The resort claims it features "a series of twisted psychological effects including optical illusions, blinding lights and near misses designed to mess with your mind".
There have been several accidents and incidents involving the £18m ride since it opened in May 2013.
A group of 16 journalists were left dangling on it at a steep angle as they tried out the rollercoaster before it opened to the public.
The ride shut for four days in July 2013 after a piece fell off the track, and 48 people had to be rescued.
It closed again in August 2013 for five days due to a "technical issue".
In November 2013 it closed for five days after wheels fell off and hit four people in the front carriage. The injured people were looked after by park staff and did not need treatment by the ambulance service, a spokeswoman said at the time.
Riders were also left stranded in the air when the ride ground to a halt at the top of a near vertical section 14 months ago.
Ellis Dyson, 23, who was in the queue for the ride, added: "The ride was delayed because of a technical fault for a while and then the ride came back on.
"They sent a carriage without any people on it first and then sent a carriage with people on and that was the one that crashed. The platform of the ride where we were vibrated and a massive loud crash."
Visitors reported on social media that the ride had broken down earlier in the day.
Media captionEyewitness Ben Richardson: "People were screaming and shouting"
Lucy Farrugia said: "Smiler broke down when I was on it this morning and now it's crashed. Hope everyone on it is OK, saw the air ambulance arrive."
Merlin Entertainments said there would be a "full investigation" and the Health and Safety Executive were already on site.
Ian Crabbe, divisional director at Alton Towers said the whole team at the park was "devastated" by the incident.
"Our thoughts and main concerns and focus are with injured people and the 16 people that were stuck on the train and their immediate families. That is our major concern," he said.
Merlin Entertainments was the biggest faller on the FTSE 100 after the crash, with shares down 3%.
It is the world's second-largest visitor attraction operator behind Disney and runs 105 attractions, 11 hotels and three holiday villages in 23 countries.
A help-line for concerned relatives has been set up by the Park which is 0800 230 0770.
Alton Towers is located near the village of Alton in Staffordshire and used to be a country estate.
It originally became a tourist attraction because of its gardens, but travelling fun fair rides were added to the grounds in the 1950s.
The installation of the Corkscrew rollercoaster in 1980 is regarded as a key point in the development of Alton Towers into a major theme park.
It now has some of the UK's best known rollercoasters - including Nemesis, Oblivion, Air and Rita - and attracts millions of visitors every year. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-47906487 | About 30 foreign nationals have been found in the back of a van stopped by police on the M5.
Officers were called at about 07:10 BST to Newlyn, Cornwall, after people were seen getting into the back of a van from a boat.
It was stopped near Cullompton in Devon at about 09:00 and about 30 people, believed to be Vietnamese, were found inside.
Four men have been arrested on suspicion of modern slavery offences.
Three men have been taken into custody and one man has been taken to hospital, where he is under police guard.
A Border Force investigation is currently under way in Newlyn and centres around the Johan Sebastian yacht.
The National Crime Agency, UK Border Agency and other relevant partner agencies have been informed.
Inquiries are ongoing and witnesses are asked to contact Devon and Cornwall Police. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7978418.stm | A woman who went on an intense grapefruit-based diet developed a blood clot in her leg and risked losing the limb, US doctors have reported.
The unusual case, written up in the Lancet medical journal, occurred in Washington state in November last year.
Medics concluded grapefruit had affected the way the 42-year-old's body processed her contraceptive pill.
A UK expert stressed this was an unusual case, but said extreme diets may have "unpredictable consequences".
In November 2008, the woman came to the casualty department of the Providence St Peter Hospital in Olympia, Washington state.
The day before, she had gone on a long car journey, after which she felt pain radiating from her lower back down to her left ankle.
When she arrived at the hospital she was experiencing difficulty walking, shortness of breath, and light-headedness.
By the next day her left leg had turned purple.
The woman was generally in good health but was slightly overweight and had decided to diet.
Three days before falling ill, she had begun a crash diet which included eating 225g of grapefruit each morning, after rarely eating the fruit in the past.
When doctors examined her, an ultrasound scan confirmed the woman had a large blood clot within the veins of her left leg, which stretched from her hip down to her calf and she was deemed to be at risk of losing her leg because of gangrene.
The woman was given clot-busting treatment and had a stent, a kind of tube, fitted in order to widen her vein.
The doctors treating her said a number of risk factors had contributed to the woman developing the clot.
She had an inherited disorder which increased her risk, as did being on the combined Pill. Being immobile in a car probably also contributed to the clot forming.
Writing in the Lancet, the authors led by Dr Lucinda Grande, called it a "constellation of potential risk factors".
But they added: "The increased [oestrogen] serum concentration due to her three days of grapefruit for breakfast may well have tipped the balance."
They suggest the fruit blocked the action of a key enzyme that normally breaks down the form of oestrogen in her contraceptive.
Dr Trevor Baglin, a consultant haematologist at Addenbrooke's NHS Trust in Cambridge, said: "From this case study it appears as if the grapefruit enhanced the thrombotic effect of the contraceptive pill in the presence of a genetic predisposition.
"However, it is worth pointing out that this is a single case study and a very unusual case at that.
"I would suggest that any extreme diets should be avoided because they can have unpredictable consequences."
A spokesman for the Florida Department of Citrus - an executive agency of Florida government which markets, researches and regulates the state's citrus industry, said: "The Lancet report looks to be inconsistent with published scientific studies which indicate grapefruit does not cause a clinically significant interaction with oral contraceptives.
"We are aware of no validated evidence that grapefruit affects oral contraceptives, and they are generally considered to be safe to consume with grapefruit." |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/711917.stm | In the southern Iranian city of Shiraz, the case of the 13 Iranian Jews and eight Muslims accused of spying for Israel has aroused widespread concern among western governments and human rights groups.
It has also focused attention on the Jewish community in Iran, the oldest and biggest in the Middle East outside Israel.
In the heart of the Islamic Republic, Jews gather in a synagogue to recite their evening prayers, as they have done for centuries.
The Jews have a history in Iran which goes back more than 2,500 years.
Despite the Islamic Republic's bitter hostility to Israel, the Jewish community has clung on and survived.
Since the Islamic Revolution, it has dwindled from an estimated 80,000 souls, to perhaps only around 30,000.
Miss Hassidim is a 25-year-old worshipper and is one of the few young people not trying to emigrate.
"A lot of my friends and family left this country during these years," she says.
"Every year, the number of people coming to this synagogue is less and less."
In the early years of the Islamic Republic, many Jews may have left out of fear.
Now those who do want to leave do so for mainly economic reasons.
Jobs are few and far between, and candidates from the Muslim majority usually get preference.
However, the Jews are a tolerated minority who are respected, like Christians, as People of the Book.
At a Jewish library in Tehran, the librarian proudly shows off a new monthly magazine now being published for the community.
The librarian says that many of the books in the library are in Hebrew - though they steer clear of politics.
"These are printed in Israel," she says, pointing to some books.
"But about religion - our religion. This is printed in Israel too. It's not a problem with the authorities."
Farangis Hassidim is director of the only Jewish hospital in Iran.
It is Jewish-run, financed by the Jewish community, but nowadays only a handful of the actual patients are Jewish.
Not so long ago, it was one of the focal points of a vibrant local Jewish community in south Tehran.
"Maybe 90% of the people living round here, even 30 years ago, they were mostly Jewish," says Farangis Hassidim.
"And now, Jewish people, they have left south of city, and some they left the country. And they don't come back to us."
The depletion of the community is sadly evident at the nearby Jewish public baths.
It was once ornate and magnificent. Now almost derelict, it serves just a handful of elderly customers.
The bath attendant says that there used to be about 7,000-8,000 Jews living in the area.
"We did a survey recently and there are only 70 left now, including adults and children," says the bath attendant.
"This place has been kept going for just seven or eight old people who come here for a bath. There is no money coming in."
Most of those who have left the area have gone abroad, many to the US, others to Israel and elsewhere.
Some officials say the emigration rate has increased since the arrest of the 13 Jews in Shiraz and Isfahan.
As Haroun Yashaya'i, head of the Jewish Society says, the whole community has felt it as a heavy blow.
"This has been one of the worst things that's happened to the Jewish community here since the Islamic Revolution," he says.
"The accusation of organised espionage has hurt us a lot, and it's caused feelings of insecurity within the community," he says.
"What does spying mean? If I write to my brother in Israel, does that make me a spy?"
"We know all these people, and nobody believes they're spies."
Anxieties have been somewhat reduced by the fact that it has been made known that only one or two of the 13 Jews will actually face spying charges.
Many Iranian Jews believe they are being used as pawns in the ongoing struggle within the Islamic regime between moderates, and the hard-liners whom some Jews believe are bent on undermining and embarrassing President Mohammed Khatami and the reformists.
There are some who are trying to use this case against Iran. We're absolutely opposed to this, because we are part of the Islamic Republic. We're Iranians who happen to be Jews and to be living in Iran."
They also have distinctly mixed feelings about all the noises made, ostensibly on their behalf, by Israel, the United States, and other outside quarters.
Manuchehr Eliasi is the Jewish member of the Iranian parliament.
"We appreciate the efforts of those who are genuinely trying to help these 13 people," he says.
"But unfortunately, there are some who are trying to use this case against Iran."
"We're absolutely opposed to this, because we are part of the Islamic Republic. We're Iranians who happen to be Jews and to be living in Iran."
"We condemn all those who throw in their lot with the enemies of the Iranian nation."
The United States has spelled out clearly that future relations with Iran will hinge on the outcome of the trial.
That alone greatly raises the stakes.
The Jewish community, struggling to survive in this ancient land, will be praying that justice and fair play prevail over politics. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-36142424 | Pop star Prince did not leave a will, his sister has revealed in court documents.
The papers, filed in state court in Minnesota, show Tyka Nelson has petitioned for a special administrator to oversee the star's estate.
The rock legend, aged 57, was found dead in an elevator at his Paisley Park Studios compound in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota last Thursday.
The size of Prince's fortune is unclear but includes $27m (£18m) in property.
Nelson is Prince's only surviving full sibling and stated in the papers that immediate action was necessary to manage her brother's business interests.
Prince is on course to dominate the UK charts this week, as mourning fans rush to buy his music, while the Hollywood Reporter claimed over three million of his songs and albums had been bought in the US since his death.
A private memorial service was held for the rock star on Saturday, attended by about 20 of his closest friends and family.
Following the service, drummer and frequent Prince collaborator Sheila E confirmed there were plans to turn Paisley Park into a museum, akin to Elvis's Graceland.
Thousands of fans have flocked to Paisley Park, the First Avenue nightclub, and other sites made famous by Prince since his death, while tributes have come from Lady Gaga, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Justin Timberlake and President Obama, amongst others. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-41650901 | A police dog stabbed while protecting his handler from an armed suspect has been named animal of the year.
German shepherd Finn was left fighting for his life after being stabbed in Stevenage last year. Handler PC Dave Wardell sustained a minor hand injury.
The pair returned to duty 11 weeks later after a lengthy recovery.
The award was given by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) at a ceremony at the House of Lords.
PD (Police Dog) Finn and PC Wardell were attacked by a boy armed with a 30cm (12in) hunting knife in October 2016.
The wound came within an inch of the dog's heart and punctured a lung. Vets spent four hours saving his life.
A photograph of Finn's stomach wound, held together with 30 stitches, prompted an online campaign - championed by PC Wardell - for a change in the law regarding injuries to police support animals.
It became known as Finn's Law and culminated in a parliamentary debate which led to stricter sentencing guidelines.
Philip Mansbridge, UK director of IFAW, described Finn as a "remarkable dog" and said his heroics showed the "special relationships that can exist between dogs and people."
PC Wardell added he was "really blown away" by the award.
Finn retired from duty in March at the age of eight, and now lives with the Wardell family.
A 16-year-old boy was convicted of the attack in June. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12854225 | In a smoke-filled and cardamom coffee-infused cafe in Gaza City all the talk is of this week's violence.
"Why is Palestinian blood cheaper than Israeli blood?" asks Wael Abu Awema, a 40-year-old father of five.
There have been Israeli attacks on Gaza every day this week. At least 10 Palestinians have been killed, including at least four civilians, two of them children. More than 30 Palestinians have been injured.
"Of course we are worried. My kids are wetting themselves at night when they hear the Israeli air strikes," says Mr Abu Awema.
His eyes are bloodshot and red, as if he also might be losing sleep.
Every day too, Palestinian militants have fired rockets and mortars into Israel, causing danger, fear and anxiety for communities living in range of the strikes.
There is concern on both sides that there could be a further escalation after Wednesday's bomb attack in Jerusalem in which a British tourist was killed and more than 30 people were injured.
No militant group - including Hamas's military wing the Al Qassam Brigades - has said it carried out the bomb attack.
Mr Abu Awema tells me he is not a supporter of Hamas, the Islamist movement that governs in Gaza.
In fact he actively opposes them. He says he has sympathy for the civilians who were targeted in the Jerusalem bombing.
But he says Gazans are all too familiar with the anxiety caused by violence.
On Wednesday, hours before the Jerusalem bombing, thousands of Palestinians attended the funerals of eight people killed in Israeli attacks.
Militants fired guns in the air as the bodies were carried from the main mosque in Gaza City.
Four of those who died were militants from the Islamic Jihad group. Israel says they had been involved in firing rockets across the border.
The other four were civilians killed by stray Israeli shelling on Tuesday evening.
They included an 11-year-old and a 16-year-old boy who had been playing football outside their home east of Gaza City when they died.
At least 12 others were injured in the attack, including eight children.
As night fell on Tuesday, the sound of ambulances could be heard racing through Gaza City carrying the wounded to Shifa Hospital.
Relatives screamed and wailed as blood-spattered children were brought into the emergency room.
Similar scenes were repeated at Jerusalem's Hadassah hospital after Wednesday's bomb attack.
Israel has said it regrets the death of Palestinian civilians. A spokeswoman for the Israeli Defence Force, Avital Liebervich, told me by telephone that Israeli forces were taking care not to cause civilian casualties.
She said Israel has been targeting militants, Hamas training facilities, smuggling tunnels and weapons factories.
This week, Abu Mohammed Dahlul showed me around what used to be his metal workshop in the Shaijayiah neighbourhood of Gaza City.
It was hit by an Israeli airstrike on Monday night.
Mr Dahlul walked me around the 3m (10ft) deep crater that now dominates his workplace. There was twisted metal everywhere and the remains of what used to be the roof.
He told me it was the third time the street which houses a number of factories had been hit in less than a year.
He said he was finished now and that the 30 people who worked for him would lose their jobs.
Mr Dahlul's workshop housed metal cutting equipment. I suggested to him that this could have been used to make weapons for Palestinian militants.
He denied this and said he has no connection with militant groups.
"If I ever see them come here in their tinted-windowed cars, I send them away," he tells me.
I have no way of knowing if Mr Dahlul is telling the truth. But if he is not, then he is a convincing liar.
Both Hamas and Israel have accused each other of escalating the violence.
On Saturday, Hamas - unusually - said it was responsible for firing a barrage of mortars into Israel.
It was the most significant Hamas attack since operation Cast Lead - Israel's major offensive in Gaza which ended in January 2009. Then, more than 1,300 Palestinians were killed as well as 13 Israelis.
Previously, Hamas officials have said they were trying to rein in rocket fire from Gaza.
Hamas said it was responding to an Israeli air strike that killed two of its members.
But many people here have been asking why Hamas chose this moment to break what many have seen as an unofficial ceasefire.
"This is the big question," says Dr Mokahmer Abu Sada, who teaches politics at Al Azhar University in Gaza.
"I believe it was to distract attention away from the protests that have taken place in Gaza in the past few weeks," he says.
This month thousands of Palestinian demonstrators - inspired by uprisings elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa - have taken to the streets of Gaza calling for political unity between Hamas and its secular rival Fatah.
For more than four years the two factions have been politically and geographically divided, with Hamas in power in Gaza and Fatah running parts of the West Bank.
The split happened when violence erupted a year after Hamas won Palestinian elections in 2006.
The protests in Gaza have been on a relatively small scale compared to elsewhere in the region, but Hamas has used force to break up some of the demonstrations.
"I think Hamas knows that an escalation with Israel will take attention away from these protests," says Dr Abu Sada.
He believes that Hamas is opposed to political reconciliation with Fatah and thinks an escalation in violence is the surest way to stop that happening.
Dr Abu Sada believes Israel too is against Palestinian reconciliation and wants an escalation for the same reason.
"I think it will be a limited escalation for a few weeks," he adds.
"But it is dangerous. It could get out of control. These things can quickly get out of hand." |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46972330 | France's national health agency Anses says it has found chemicals in babies' nappies that exceed safety levels.
Tests found levels above safety thresholds for substances potentially dangerous to human health, and lower levels of others including the controversial weedkiller glyphosate.
Anses said its nappy tests were the first of their kind in the world.
It has called for rapid action "considering the possible risks these chemicals may pose" to babies.
France's Health Minister Agnès Buzyn said there was "no serious or immediate risk" to babies' health.
"Obviously we should continue putting nappies on our babies. We've been doing that for at least 50 years," she told AFP.
But a joint statement by the health, finance and environment ministers said the government had given nappy manufacturers 15 days to come up with an action plan aimed at getting rid of the toxic substances.
Ms Buzyn said the government would accept a delay of up to six months for production methods to change.
The study was done on a number of different brands of single-use nappies available in the French market.
Some 4,000 such nappies might be used in the first three years of a baby's life, Anses said.
The report did not name the brands it tested, beyond saying it was representative of the French market. Some nappy brands available in France are also sold in other countries.
Under what it called "realistic use" conditions, it "detected a number of hazardous chemicals in disposable diapers that could migrate through urine, for example, and enter into prolonged contact with babies' skin," the agency said.
Some of the chemicals were added intentionally, "such as perfumes that could cause skin allergies", Anses said.
But others were probably introduced from contaminated materials, or as part of the manufacturing process plan.
Among the chemicals found in excess of safety thresholds were the perfumes Lilial and Lyral, and aromatic hydrocarbons, dioxins and furans.
Glyphosate was also listed in the agency's report, at lower levels.
Marketed under the name Roundup in the US, it is widely used but has been a frequent target for health and environmental campaigners after a World Health Organization study classified it as "probably carcinogenic".
Weedkillers: What do we know about glyphosate?
But it remains the most widely used herbicide in Europe, as EU officials do not agree that the product is a carcinogen. Yet in the United States, a groundskeeper who sued a maker of the chemical was awarded millions in damages by jurors who agreed it had contributed to his terminal cancer.
The weedkiller is due to be banned in France by 2021, and its presence in nappies made headlines in the country when the report was released.
"Anses recommends eliminating the chemicals found in single-use baby diapers, or reducing them as much as possible," the agency said in a statement.
That includes stopping the use of all perfumes, it said.
It is also calling for tougher regulatory measures at an EU level - something which the French government said it was pursuing in the wake of the report.
The umbrella group for makers of French hygiene products, Group'hygiène, released a statement about the report, saying more than three billion nappies were used every year without any adverse health effects. A range of quality and safety controls were already in place, it said.
The group's managing director, Valérie Pouillat, said manufacturers would "co-operate with the authorities to continue to meet the expectations of the consumers".
After the French report was released, Belgian consumer group Test Achats (also known as Test-Aaankoop) released results of its own nappy testing, due to be published next month.
It found that in Belgium, there were some chemical traces, but "no need to worry".
"The differences in results… are probably explained by the fact that the substances researched are not identical, and that the brands of diapers differ from one market to another," it said. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-18895335 | Has Libya bucked the Islamist trend?
It is difficult to sum up the alliance of parties that has done so well in Libya's first elections since the overthrow of Col Muammar Gaddafi.
The National Forces Alliance (NFA), led by ex-interim Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril, gained more than double the seats of its Islamist rivals.
So should its MPs be described as secularist liberals or moderate modernists?
The reality is that those in the alliance are largely unknown, expect for Mr Jibril - whose face was one everyone recognised when they went to the polls.
When it comes to their politics, Libyans certainly believe that the NFA is "liberal", but the word "secular" is not used.
Mr Jibril himself has already declared that his party shall refer to Sharia for guidance in legislation.
So do these final preliminary results, pending a two-week window for any legal appeal, mean the conservative North African country is less religious than neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt, where Islamists did well in recent post-revolutionary elections?
Libyans do not need politicians to tell them how to be good Muslims, says 18-year-old Heba, a tall, model-thin girl who presents an Arabic music programme on radio.
They want the parliament to deal with more pressing concerns, she explains.
"It's not like we expect nightclubs and things like that to suddenly open their doors here," she says.
"We have things to take care of like education and health."
The number of people who found the mere existence of religious parties an offensive concept was astonishing.
"We're all Muslims here! Who do they think they are preaching to us? They're not more religious than us" were common reactions heard in cities.
Libyans are ultimately tired of ideological preachers - they endured it for more than 40 years with Col Gaddafi's eccentric and confusing semi-Islamic, socialist ramblings.
And parties like the Muslim Brotherhood are seen as having hijacked Tunisia and Egypt's revolutions.
But it is not clear whether the centrist NFA will dominate the 200-member National Assembly because 120 seats are reserved for independents whose allegiances are not yet known.
In the end a grand coalition could be formed, which may or may not include the biggest loser in this recent election - The Nation Party led by former al-Qaeda-linked Abdelhakim Belhaj - which gained no seats at all on the party-list.
And for the first time women are now about to take up an active, public role in Libyan politics, with 33 gaining seats in the assembly.
But finding consensus on the conflicting regional needs will be hard.
"We'll probably need a lot of aspirin," one independent candidate, who did not make it to the assembly, jested some weeks ago.
Top of the issues that the country's MPs need to address is security.
They will need to ensure the disarmament of various gang-like militias who played no role in the conflict as well as the unification of brigades who did under a single official security umbrella.
The key to solving many of the issue lies in the economy.
The country certainly has enough oil revenues to help kick-start the private sector, which is desperately needed.
Libyans are already eagerly awaiting the next step of their new-found freedom - the drafting of a constitution, a process to be overseen by the national assembly, which they hope will seal their new democratic path. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3768971.stm | The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) is an association of oil-producing nations set up in 1960 with the express purpose of influencing oil prices by controlling supply.
Things have changed a great deal for the cartel in recent years.
In 2000, it adopted a price band of between $22 and $28 a barrel, levels a world away from current prices.
If the price went below $22 a barrel, production quotas would be cut. If it went above $28 a barrel, production would be raised.
Opec abandoned the price band in 2005 and now has no official price target.
When its members meet, they try to co-ordinate future production with their predictions for demand.
While there have been increases in production recently, the price of oil has continued to soar.
Opec's official position is that there is plenty of supply in the market. It says rising prices are the fault of investors in the financial sector, who are buying oil contracts in order to sell them on without ever planning to take delivery.
Clearly there are limits to the amount production can be raised, and Opec also sees dangers in increasing supply further.
"Producers fear that the financial sector will decide that there is over-supply in the market and move into other investments," says Manouchehr Takin from the Centre for Global Energy Studies.
"If there is a sudden change in sentiment like that, then the price could collapse."
That problem is exacerbated by the time delays in the system.
If producers in the Gulf, for example, decide to increase production, it will be about three months before any extra oil reaches the market.
If the announcement of extra production caused a big fall in prices, then the extra oil actually hitting the market three months later would exacerbate the problem.
And the members of Opec have a great deal at stake.
Many of the oil-rich states are rich in very little else.
Crude oil is their only export, making them uniquely vulnerable to world oil prices.
When prices fell to $10 a barrel in 1998, their economies were hit hard.
"In the US, Opec is viewed as a cartel and therefore something to be smashed, which is not a helpful way of thinking about it," says Tony Scanlan of the British Institute of Energy Economics.
"The one thing the Opec countries all have in common is their absolute reliance on one product - oil."
According to Mr Scanlan, the Opec countries cannot afford to treat oil "as just another commodity".
"When the price falls, it creates real pain. They have to feed and give welfare to their people, the same as Western countries," he says.
On the other hand, of course, when Opec members decided to stop supplying oil to countries they said were supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, a great deal of damage was done to the economies of the targeted countries.
More recently, Opec has improved its reputation, with attempts made to provide some stability to the oil market.
But since the 1970s, Opec's power has waned, with its control over oil prices being questioned.
There have been continuing disputes about whether member countries are actually sticking to their agreed quotas.
Also, strategies favoured by countries such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which have enormous oil reserves and relatively small populations, are often at odds with those of countries such as Iran and Nigeria, that have bigger populations and few other exports.
Indonesia has announced that it will leave Opec when its membership expires later this year.
The official reason is that it is no longer a net exporter of oil. But the cartel's only South East Asian member is also understood to have been upset that there have not been greater increases of production to try to bring prices down from their record levels.
Another factor weakening the cartel is that as oil prices have risen, reserves that were not previously worth tapping in non-Opec countries have now become viable and Russia has become a particularly significant supplier. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-47820217 | A charity has said it is faced with closure after its Arts Council (ACNI) funding was completely cut.
Planning Landscape Architecture Community Environment (PLACE) has an office in Belfast city centre.
It was one of a number of groups to have its annual funding withdrawn by the ACNI this year.
ACNI said it had to make "difficult strategic funding decisions" due to decreasing income from the National Lottery.
PLACE has been in existence for 15 years and runs a programme of tours, talks, exhibitions and festivals on architecture and the built environment in Northern Ireland.
It also works with community groups and public bodies to advise on urban planning.
In 2018-19 PLACE received £86,626 through ACNI's annual funding programme.
ACNI was its main source of income for its office, running costs and three full-time staff.
However, it has now been told that it will not receive any annual funding in 2019-20.
A spokesperson for PLACE said the cut was "shocking and disappointing".
The vast majority of arts organisations here would not exist without some form of public subsidy.
The Arts Council distributes millions of pounds of funding towards the running costs of arts groups every year.
About two-thirds of that funding - more than £8m this year - is from the government through the Department for Communities.
The other third - more than £4m - is from the National Lottery.
In recent years government funding to the arts has been cut, but this year it is National Lottery money which the Arts Council says has declined.
That has led to them having to make difficult decisions as demand for funding always outstrips the money they have available.
Groups like PLACE have suffered as a result.
"We were notified without warning that we have been offered three months of funding in order to 'exit' Arts Council of Northern Ireland support," they said.
"This puts PLACE at immediate risk of closure."
"There is no other organisation delivering the same unique mix of activities that PLACE does."
ACNI said they had provided £12.8m of annual funding to 97 arts organisations, a reduction from 102 in 2018-19.
While funding from the Department for Communities to ACNI was the same as last year, lottery funding had reduced by almost 5%.
The ACNI chair John Edmund said they did not have the resources to meet demand.
"Thirty-four organisations were offered standstill funding, five were offered strategic uplifts, while the remainder received cuts," he said.
"Within the context of reducing public funding, this year in particular from the National Lottery, the board had to make the difficult decision to reduce the number of annually funded organisations."
"It is with regret that we had to refuse annual 2019 funding to five current clients."
Among the organisations who have also confirmed to BBC News NI that they have lost ACNI funding this year are Voluntary Arts Ireland - who received £54,580 in 2018/19 - and Terra Nova Productions, who received £19,890 last year.
ACNI has said they will also be offered three months funding to help them exit from its annual funding stream. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47937031 | Spain holds its third general election in four years on 28 April, in a battle between the established parties, Catalan and Basque nationalists, and a rising far-right.
Support for the previous winner, the conservative People's Party (PP), has collapsed amid a corruption scandal. Its main opponent, the Socialist party, has rocketed to the top of the polls after seizing the prime minister's job last year.
One recent poll showed almost half of voters - 40% - had yet to make up their minds.
The Socialist and Podemos alliance of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's existing government needed the Basque and Catalan nationalists to support it.
But the Catalan pro-independence parties were partly responsible for the government's collapse after they pulled their support in February; and the crisis over the failed Catalan independence bid has made the nationalists hugely unpopular in much of Spain - making negotiations with them tricky.
The PP (led by Pablo Casado) and Ciudadanos (Albert Rivera) will probably need the support of Vox - but this is seen as unlikely.
Voters for Ciudadanos are largely opposed to entering government with Vox.
And Ciudadanos has also publicly said it will not form a coalition with the Socialists.
Despite widespread concerns about unemployment - which remains high in Spain compared to its European neighbours - it has barely been discussed by politicians.
"The campaign is going to remain around identity issues, and particularly around the Catalan issue... it seems that the economy is not, any more, the completely fundamental issue," Prof Teruel says.
Before the election, Mr Sánchez had been negotiating with Catalan parties to support his budget. But those talks broke down amid a public backlash over him meeting them, partly stoked by Vox's fervent opposition to any concessions on independence.
Despite the problems, Mr Sánchez's time as leader has seen support for his party surge - at the expense of coalition partner Podemos.
Meanwhile, a corruption scandal involving the PP last year toppled its leader and saw support plummet - leaving plenty of votes to fight for among a fragmented right.
Opinion polls suggest it has around 10% support, while its leader Santiago Abascal has the lowest opinion rating of any party leader.
Such an arrangement is precisely what happened in the regional government of Andalusia - where the PP, Ciudadanos, and Vox formed a right-wing regional government for the first time in 36 years.
"It should be noted that they do not display openly any Francoist imagery," he said. "They are not making gross mistakes. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1655788.stm | Trade ministers from 142 countries have agreed a deal to launch an ambitious new trade round at talks in the Gulf Arab state of Doha. BBC News Online explains why it matters for all of us.
Why does the deal matter?
World trade has been the fastest way to boost economic growth over the last 50 years, raising the standard of living of many countries.
Part of the reason has been the steady reduction in trade barriers which make it cheaper to sell goods around the world.
But plans to extend trade liberalisation stalled following demonstrations in Seattle in 1999.
World leaders hope, that with a dramatic slowdown in the world economy underway, made worse by the events of 11 September, starting a new round of trade talks will boost economic confidence.
Not really. The current deal in Doha is about the agenda for a new set of trade talks, which will now begin in January 2002.
But the plan is for an expanded range of issues to be considered by trade ministers, covering such areas as trade and environment, trade and investment, and the traditional areas like trade in manufacturing products and agricultural goods.
Eventually, the deal could mean that there is a big expansion of free trade around the world.
However, some developing countries have won more access to Western markets, especially for textiles, based on previous agreements, which will come into force earlier.
One of the aims of the Doha trade round was to provide more benefits to developing countries.
They have gained the right to bypass patent protection for drugs needed to fight health emergencies, and may gain more access for their agricultural products if talks proceed as planned.
But many developing countries are worried that some of the new items on the trade agenda might be difficult for them to deal with - although in some cases they will have the right to opt out.
Unexpectedly, it is the European Union who appears to have gained most from this trade deal.
That is because it was the EU who wanted to widen the range of topics discussed to include such items as environment (where many Europeans feel strongly) and investment (where European companies may now gain the right of equal treatment in relation to US multinationals when investing in developing countries).
Before the talks began, many people thought this was far too ambitious.
In return, the EU has had to make some concessions on its highly protected agricultural sector.
However, it has limited the damage with a qualifying clause that does not commit it to zero subsidies.
Is it good for the environment?
In the past, moves to protect the environment have been ruled out of order because of trade legislation.
For example, countries trying to stop the import of shrimp caught in a way that damaged turtles could be told this was illegal under WTO rules.
Now the EU has won the right to examine the relationship between trade rules and environmental protection laws.
The EU will also be able to press the case for environmental labelling to tell consumers, for example, that imported timber has been produced under environmentally sound conditions. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-34494990/north-korea-footage-of-military-celebrations-for-70th-anniversary | Huge military display for N Korea anniversary Jump to media player North Korea is holding huge celebrations to mark the 70th anniversary of the ruling Workers' Party.
North Korea celebrates ruling party Jump to media player North Korea is preparing to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the ruling Workers' Party.
Inside North Korea's underground system Jump to media player BBC correspondent Stephen Evans is allowed rare access to North Korea's underground system in the capital Pyongyang.
Inside the reclusive North Korea Jump to media player A BBC team has been granted rare access inside the reclusive state of North Korea.
A huge military display is under way in North Korea, to mark the 70th anniversary of the ruling Workers' Party.
The parade in the vast main square of the capital Pyongyang involves thousands of soldiers, tanks and missiles.
The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, has addressed the crowd with a message of unity and defiance. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5055170.stm | Chinese authorities have blocked most domestic users from the main Google.com search engine, a media watchdog said.
Internet users in major Chinese cities faced difficulties accessing Google's international site in the past week, Reporters Without Borders said.
But Google.cn, the controversial Chinese language version launched in January, has not been affected.
The site blocks politically sensitive material to comply with government censorship rules.
"It was only to be expected that Google.com would be gradually sidelined after the censored version was launched in January," Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.
"Google has just definitively joined the club of Western companies that comply with online censorship in China," the organisation said.
Google.com, the search engine's uncensored international site, had previously been available to Chinese web users, but problems accessing the site had been reported across the country recently. It was blocked nationwide on 31 May, the statement said.
The blocking was also being extended to Google News and Google Mail, Reporters Without Borders said.
A spokeswoman for Google in Beijing said that the problem was under investigation.
The spokeswoman, Cui Jin, said she could not give any more information.
On Tuesday, Google co-founder Sergey Brin defended his company's decision to launch the censored Google.cn service, a move which drew heavy criticism.
"We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service," he said.
"Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense."
In addition to Google, US companies Microsoft, Yahoo and Cisco Systems have also been accused of accommodating China's demands on censorship in return for access to its huge internet market.
The Chinese government's internet filtering is some of the most sophisticated in the world.
Content considered to be a threat, including references to the Tiananmen Square massacre and notable dissidents, is blocked.
Chinese authorities have also stepped up measures against software designed to bypass internet censorship, the Reporters Without Borders statement said. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-china-39202433/a-story-of-hiv-attitudes-and-baking | A story of HIV, attitudes and baking Jump to media player A Shanghai cafe employing people who lost their parents to HIV/Aids has encountered old stigma.
'What my name really means to me' Jump to media player After a racist prank, Chinese students at Colombia University hit back by explaining their names.
A Shanghai cafe employing people who lost their parents to HIV/Aids has encountered old stigma. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/funny_old_game/games/4383568.stm | The movie is 298k and should take no more than 2.5 minutes to download over a 56k modem.
It is designed to be played on computers with at least a 400Mhz processor and users with slower machines may experience performance problems.
If the game appears to be running slowly try closing down any other applications you may be running.
If the game becomes unresponsive click anywhere within the game area. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45642480 | Europe's Ariane 5 rocket has completed its 100th mission.
Tuesday's flight saw it lift two big satellites into orbit from its operating base in French Guiana.
Conceived originally to launch a European space shuttle, the rocket was adapted instead to put up the heaviest telecommunications spacecraft - a market it dominated for many years.
But the emergence of cheaper US rockets means the Ariane 5 must soon give way to a more competitive successor.
To be called, predictably, Ariane 6 - this vehicle should make its debut in mid-2020.
A backorder of Ariane 5s ensures the old workhorse will continue to fly for some time yet, however.
Two of its remaining missions include sending Europe's BepiColombo probe to Mercury next month, and putting up the $10bn James Webb Space Telescope - the follow-on to Hubble - in 2021.
"Ariane 5 has been a great success, and it's not over; we still have four or five years left with this product," said Alain Charmeau, who runs the rocket manufacturer ArianeGroup.
"And even though this is the 100th flight, we continue to improve the product. We continue to grab a few extra kilos in payload performance we can offer to our customers," he told BBC News.
Tuesday's telecoms "passengers" tipped the scales at a combined weight of 10 tonnes. Ariane placed them on a path that will eventually take them up to a position some 36,000km above the Earth.
From this vantage point, the Horizons 3e spacecraft will be able to deliver connectivity services across the Asia-Pacific region, and the Azerspace-2/Intelsat 38 platform will be able to do the same over Africa, Europe and Central Asia.
What is the record of the Ariane 5?
The Ariane 5 had a false start to its career when it broke up 37 seconds after leaving the Kourou launch pad on its debut flight in June 1996. The failure was put down to an error in control software.
There was one further outright failure of an Ariane 5, in 2003, but since then the rockets have earned great respect for their reliability and precision.
For a long period, the European workhorse would launch at least half of all the major telecoms satellites in any one year.
The more than 200 payloads launched over 22 years include the comet mission Rosetta, space telescopes, weather satellites, Galileo sat-nav platforms - as well as the many telecoms spacecraft.
Where's the competition coming from?
Europe's past dominance is being eroded by SpaceX, the California manufacturer, which can build and sell its Falcon vehicles on the commercial market at a price that substantially undercuts Ariane.
And SpaceX promises to drop its costs still further as it routinely flies rockets that are reusable. Each Ariane rocket is expendable; a new one is needed for every mission.
Jeff Bezos, the boss of online retail giant Amazon, is planning a similar approach with a forthcoming vehicle he calls New Glenn.
At the same time, a lot of spacecraft are getting smaller. Many are now shoebox-sized.
A swathe of start-ups are developing more modest rockets to try to match this shift in scale.
What is the future for Ariane?
Ariane's response is the introduction of a launcher that is simpler to build and operate, and which maximises the use of next-generation fabrication techniques, such as 3D printing.
This Ariane 6 rocket is well along its development path, with all its engines currently being tested.
It will still be a one-flight-only, expendable rocket; it will not be reusable. But the European Space Agency, which has overseen the design process, hopes the 40-50% reduction in unit cost will keep Ariane in a competitive position.
"We are in a very particular time when there is a lot of uncertainty," observed Jacques Breton, senior vice president at Arianespace, the company that markets and operates Ariane vehicles.
"Is the future small satellites; is it big satellites; is it constellations of satellites? Nobody really knows. But with Ariane 6 we will have a launcher which is versatile, that can adapt itself to any of these solutions. And it will be as reliable as Ariane 5 because it is the same European industry that is developing it."
The market for rockets is complex. It is skewed by geopolitical considerations. There are national security missions, for example, that are only ever likely to be launched on a home rocket.
ArianeGroup is looking for firmer guarantees from European governments that they will use Ariane 6 for all their institutional payloads.
This would help close the business case for Ariane 6, said Mr Charmeau.
"It's good to have many people supporting Ariane 6, but there is a nuance between 'support' and 'commitment'; they are not the same. And if I can get the commitment, I would be extremely happy." |
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-47772418 | The number of sick days taken off by teachers in Aberdeen due to stress-related conditions has risen by more than 60%.
Aberdeen City Council figures reveal 2,846 days of absence have been recorded since the start of the 2018/19 academic year.
This is up from 1,768 for the whole of 2017/18 - a rise of more than 62%.
The council said it supported staff's mental well-being through approaches including counselling services. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22535339 | Disabled people and their families are challenging the government's decision to cut housing benefit for recipients living in properties deemed too large.
Lawyers for 10 families are at the High Court arguing the move - dubbed a "bedroom tax" by critics - will force them from their homes.
They say the changes discriminate against them because they need extra rooms to cope with their disability.
Ministers say their changes are legal and bring back fairness to the system.
About 660,000 working-age social housing households judged to have too many bedrooms have lost an average of £14 per week since their benefit was cut at the beginning of April.
The 10 families, all disabled or the parents of disabled children, are challenging the changes during a three-day hearing.
Lawyers for one London family say they live in a damp, one-bedroom flat infested with mice. One son has autism, the other has Down Syndrome.
The child with autism sleeps in the bedroom while his mother, father and brother sleep on the floor in the living room.
Due to the changes, they say they cannot afford to move to the larger property authorities say they need.
Jacqueline Carmichael has spina bifida and needs to sleep in a hospital bed which, she argues, her husband and fulltime carer cannot share.
He sleeps in their spare room as there is not enough space in hers for a second bed.
In 2011, six-year-old Isaac was assaulted by the then partner of his mother, leaving him traumatised. He and his mother were made homeless and assessed as needing three bedrooms because, solicitors say, of Isaac's behavioural and mental issues.
His mother lost £15.52 a week on 1 April when the council judged they were under-occupying.
Martin Westgate QC, appearing for the families, told the judges: "Each of the claimants has a need, because of disability, to occupy accommodation larger than that which would be allowed to them under the size criteria."
Outside court, BBC correspondent Michael Buchanan said Mr Westgate argued the properties had been given to the families by their own local authorities, who assessed them as "needing the spare bedrooms to live with their disability".
Mr Westgate said the new regulations undermined the government's stated aim of encouraging "localism", as although allocations had been made in recognition of their needs, restrictions from central government meant they could no longer afford the homes given to them.
One of the claimants, widower Richard Rourke, who uses a wheelchair, has had his housing benefit cut by 25% because he was deemed to have two spare rooms.
He says he has a disabled stepdaughter at university who stays in one of the rooms when she returns home, and that the second - a box room - is used for storing essential equipment, including a hoist for him and a shower seat.
Lawyers for the 10 will argue the benefit cut is discriminatory and violates the Human Rights Act and Equality Act.
They say the £25m the government has made available to help disabled people affected by the benefit cuts is insufficient.
"My clients are disabled children and their families who don't have a spare room," said one of the families' solicitors, Rebekah Carrier.
"Many families up and down the country are, like my clients, desperately worried about losing their homes."
There has been fierce political argument about the new housing benefit rules, which supporters say withdraws a "spare room subsidy".
In the House of Lords on Wednesday, Welfare Minister Lord Freud was challenged about the rules, and told about the death of one woman who was said to have been worried about affording her home following the benefit changes.
Asked "how many people would have to commit suicide" before the government accepted that its policy was wrong, Lord Freud answered it was not appropriate for him to comment on the case.
However, he pointed out that discretionary payments were available for local councils to use in difficult cases. He said the government was "keeping a very close eye" on the housing benefit change.
The judicial review is going ahead after ministers lost an attempt to have the action thrown out last month.
A spokesman for the Department of Work and Pensions, which is responsible for the changes, said: "We are confident that these measures are lawful and they do not discriminate against disabled claimants or those with shared care of children."
He said it was "only right" to bring back fairness to the system and pointed out there were "two million households on the social housing waiting list and over a quarter of a million tenants... living in overcrowded homes".
The department said it is giving councils £150m to help vulnerable residents with the benefit changes.
Intended to reduce a £21bn annual housing benefit bill, the measure is also aimed at encouraging greater mobility in the social rented sector. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/7627926.stm | Operator BAA says Heathrow airport is "jam-packed"
An airport on an artificial island in the Thames estuary could be the answer to the overcrowding at Heathrow, London's mayor has suggested.
Boris Johnson believes the island solution could put an end to the need for a third runway at Heathrow.
Officials are looking at plans to reduce air traffic congestion at Heathrow and focus on a 24-hour airport off the Isle of Sheppey in Kent.
Heathrow handles more than 500,000 take-offs and landings a year.
In his transport manifesto unveiled during the mayoral elections Mr Johnson had spoken about a possible new airport in the Thames estuary.
Mr Johnson said: "You can't endlessly expand Heathrow in the suburbs of west London and entrench what was really a planning error of decades ago.
"I'm looking at all the airports around the perimeter including the option of a new site somewhere in the Thames estuary, that's something I definitely think we should look at.
"What we are looking at is a way of solving this great capital's aviation needs without endlessly expanding our number one international airport," he added.
A spokesperson for the mayor said Mr Johnson "wants to undertake a study to establish the feasibility of the idea once and for all and is in the process of examining the best way to take the study forward."
Mr Johnson added that the environmental impact on the proposed site will also be considered while judging the site's viability.
Grahame Madge, a spokesperson for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said Thames estuary is the feeding ground for "tens of thousands" of migrating birds.
"Any development proposed in an area that is internationally important for wildlife is a major issue.
"We would need to look at the proposals in detail, but it would be hard to see how you could locate an airport in an area so vital for birds without it being environmentally damaging."
John Stewart, from Hacan (Heathrow Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise) which opposes Heathrow's expansion, said: "The market in the South East couldn't support two major hub airports.
"It would need to be either Heathrow or an off-shore airport. But who is going to invest in a new airport with Heathrow just the other side of London?"
By the end of this year the government is due to make a decision on the proposed expansion of Heathrow.
Operator BAA has been stressing the need for expansion saying that Heathrow is "jam-packed" and needs a third runway to remain competitive globally.
But environmentalists, residents groups and councils opposing the move say the proposed expansion would have a serious impact on hundreds of thousands of homes in the area in terms of air quality and noise levels. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7408216.stm | Britain's Eurovision hopes will no doubt be dashed as bloc voting sweeps a Balkan or Baltic act to victory on Saturday. What patterns do mathematicians spot in the voting?
Eurovision has long been known as a festival of political skulduggery.
Claims that Sir Cliff Richard was robbed of first place in 1968 because of General Franco's scheming is just the latest story in a long history of grumbling about questionable voting practices.
So much so that allegations of vote-rigging have become the subject of intensive academic inquiry. Sociologists, engineers, mathematicians and even a molecular geneticist have been trying to determine whether suspicions of neighbourly back-scratching are well-founded.
In last year's contest, when the UK came second - from bottom - even commentator Terry Wogan's sense of humour failed him. "Over the last few years, the scoring has undoubtedly become ridiculous," he spluttered. "The voting is so influenced by Baltic groups, and Russian groups, it's become unfunny really."
Serbia was the Eurovision 2007 winner - a result predicted by Dr Derek Gatherer, a scientist who's been studying the song contest for the past five years.
"I decided that if I can write computer programmes to study patterns in biological sequence data, then presumably I can also write something that will study patterns in Eurovision," he says.
Dr Gatherer uses a computer to generate thousands of random simulations of Eurovision song contest results, using data on all the votes cast since 1975. These simulations are then compared with the real results. Any unusual voting patterns can be spotted.
"What comes out of this analysis is that there are essentially three large voting blocs within the contest. One of them is centred around the Balkan countries and the former Yugoslavia," he says.
"The second one is slightly to the east and is centred on Russia and the Ukraine, and includes countries like Belarus and Poland, Georgia and Moldova. And then there's one further north which is around Scandinavia. As well as the Scandinavian countries, it consists of the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania."
Derek Gatherer's statistical analysis also shows several smaller trading partnerships, including the UK and Ireland.
So Wogan's right. There's obviously something suspicious going on. Actually, that's not necessarily true.
Another academic has been looking at some possible innocent explanations. Dr Michel Vellekoop specialises in mathematical finance at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and ponders the statistical significance of Eurovision voting in his spare time.
"It may be that some countries will give many points to songs which are in the same language, or in a language which is similar," he says. "Or it may be that there are certain cultural characteristics, which makes a song more interesting to other countries."
Together with a colleague Dr Laura Spierdijk, he has taken a closer look at how individual countries have voted between 1975 and 2003.
After correcting for language, cultural and religious preferences, they found strong evidence of political voting only among Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Other voting patterns, Dr Vellekoop says, can largely be explained by language preferences and shared cultural tastes.
Cyprus and Greece, for example, are commonly accused of favouring each other and of all the countries, statistics suggest they are the most likely to vote for each other. Wogan seemed to sum it up when Cyprus awarded Greece 12 points in last year's contest. "Over the years people say this is ludicrous, this is ridiculous," he laughed. "But still they do it. They just don't care."
But Dr Vellekopp says his statistical analysis shows the reason the two countries give high marks to each other so often is because their people speak the same language and probably like the same kind of music.
Dr Gatherer also dismisses the idea of straightforward and widespread political bias. But neither can cultural preferences be the key, as voting blocs have grown so rapidly in recent years.
"In the 1980s, there were only two or three countries that were involved in observable vote trading partnerships. But from the 1990s onwards it increased dramatically. In 1993, there were six countries involved. In 1998, there were 12 countries, and now we have 31 countries involved."
"People observe it happening when they watch the contest and then they're motivated to go out and do it themselves in subsequent years. So it seems to be some kind of social epidemic that's spread through Europe and has infected almost everybody."
A Eurovirus. Whether you're in the camp of the conspiracy or the cultural theorists, the statistics explore in detail what the naked eye can already see - voting patterns.
Might the UK's Andy Abraham win, even if there's bloc voting?
Based on his analysis, Dr Gatherer will make a prediction for this year's winning entry after the semi-finals later this week. But he says the likely winners and losers are already clear.
"There are seven countries which are not involved in any kind of vote trading at all: Malta, Monaco, France, Israel, Switzerland, Portugal and Germany. They're at a serious disadvantage and are quite unlikely to win the contest, whereas countries at the centre of the larger blocs - like Serbia, Russia, Sweden and Iceland - have a much higher chance."
So what hope for the UK's Andy Abraham with his catchy song Even If?
"We simply won't get a lot of countries voting for us on the basis of bloc voting patterns," Dr Gatherer says. "So although I obviously wish the British entry the best of luck, I think we're labouring under a very difficult handicap." |
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/uk-england-birmingham-47755645 | Substitute Gerard Deulofeu scores twice as Watford come from two down to beat Wolves in extra-time and reach their first FA Cup final since 1984.
M6 West Midlands southbound severe disruption, at J8 for .
M6 West Midlands - M6 lane closed on exit slip road to M5 southbound southbound at J8, M5 interchange, because of a broken down vehicle. Traffic is coping well.
Dean Keates is sacked by Walsall after Saturday's loss to Oxford, with the Saddlers third from bottom of League One.
Millwall claim a deserved win over promotion-chasing West Bromwich Albion to remain one point above the Championship relegation zone.
Solihull Moors' push for automatic promotion continues with a deserved 1-0 win at Hartlepool in the National League.
James Dempsey is also accused of driving dangerously in the car while the baby was inside. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-34920730 | What happens to recyclable rubbish put in the wrong bin?
An average of 1,250 tonnes of Welsh rubbish - about the weight of 155 double-decker buses - is sent to landfill every day.
The total amount has dropped from 641,000 tonnes in 2012/13 to 453,000 tonnes in 2014/15 - a 30% fall in three years - with the amount spent on landfill having fallen by at least 23% in the last four years.
However, £130,000 is still being spent on Welsh landfill every day, according to figures obtained by BBC Wales.
So, what happens to a piece of recyclable rubbish after it is dropped into a bin bag headed for the dump?
Take, for instance, an empty aluminium drink can.
It gets binned at a home in Ruthin, Denbighshire, before being put out for refuse collectors on a Tuesday.
From there, it is driven to a transfer station half a mile (0.8km) away, where it is moved to a lorry with about 20 tonnes of other waste.
The articulated lorry drives its load 20 miles (32km) to Cory Environmental's Hafod Landfill site, near Johnstown, Wrexham.
It is then tipped on to the enormous dunes of rubbish - the site receives about 110,000 tonnes a year - and is ploughed with the surrounding junk into layers of waste by a giant £250,000 compactor.
How long will the can remain there before it eventually breaks down?
"It'll probably be there forever," said Ian Craven, Cory's area manager.
Scanning the mind-boggling channels of waste, you can see more crushed and twisted cans scattered around it. Lots of them.
Cory has planning permission to fill the site until 2043, with three million cubic metres of space still vacant.
The firm plans to make the site as green and attractive as possible, with trees and wildflower planting to create wildlife habitats, attractive for species such as the great crested newt.
The contaminated water - or leachate - and gasses are extracted from the waste mass, before finished areas are sealed with a capping layer of clay and topped with soil.
"People think it's just a hole in the ground but hopefully we will produce something that is of benefit to the environment and that people can eventually use and enjoy," Mr Craven said.
But the scale of the public cost of sending recyclable and compostable waste to landfill remains unappealingly massive.
Denbighshire council spent more than £1.4m on landfill and incineration last year.
Alan Roberts, senior waste officer at the authority, said it could save up to £500,000 a year if people put all their waste into the correct bin.
"Our recycling is at a very high level, comparatively, but it could be higher. Currently, around about 63% of the rubbish is recycled.
"A very significant proportion of what we collect in people's black wheelie bins is still recyclable material which has been put in the wrong container."
He estimated 20% of black bin waste collected was food and a further 20% was paper, cardboard and other items, all of which could all be recycled.
There is, he explained, still a "yuck factor" when it comes to storing food waste separately.
"People don't appreciate that they do really have food waste," he added. "But of course, things like bread crusts, vegetable peelings, even tea bags and coffee grounds actually do tend to come out of most kitchens."
Overall, the annual amount of biodegradable municipal waste (food, paper, and garden waste) from Wales sent to landfill has dropped from over 850,000 tonnes in 2005/6 to 256,000 tonnes in 2014/15 - a 70% reduction.
But how do you "nudge" - as Denbighshire puts it - people into being even more disciplined with their unwanted leavings?
"The approach we have taken has really been about removing the barriers to recycling and also, at the same time, making it somehow less convenient to choose not to recycle," Mr Roberts said.
Measures include smaller refuse wheelie bins and larger ones for recycling and, occasionally, enforcement action and even prosecution.
Mr Roberts said Denbighshire gets "massive support" from residents, but there are some individuals who simply will not cooperate.
For 2014/2015, it had the highest rate of any Welsh council for the percentage of its overall waste that was reused, recycled or composted - 65.9%.
But, like four more Welsh councils, Denbighshire's annual spend on landfill actually rose over the last four years. This, it said, is largely due to increases in landfill tax.
The Welsh government has targeted councils with recycling 58% of their waste by 2016, with that eventually rising to 100% by 2050.
Seven authorities had achieved the 2016 benchmark as of August, with Blaenau Gwent having the lowest rate of the rest, at 50%.
Denbighshire sends about a third of its non-recyclable waste to landfill, with the rest processed into a refuse-derived fuel, which is then burned to generate electricity and heat.
Some councils, such as Monmouthshire, dispose of almost all of their non-recyclable rubbish using these kinds of methods, such as energy from waste systems.
But for those areas still relying heavily on landfill to swallow their imponderable supply of waste, there remains an ignominious and airtight time capsule marking their legacy below ground.
"There are stories of old landfill sites that have been dug into from Victorian times and it is still possible to read the newsprint," Mr Roberts added, explaining that even organic waste takes much longer to degrade inside landfill.
"The waste will sit there." |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-43168245 | Much of the news in the UK this week has been driven by allegations by a former Czechoslovak spy that the opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was a paid informer for the country's communist era secret police, the StB.
Mr Corbyn emphatically denies the claims. Indeed all the evidence suggests he was never anything more than a person of interest to the StB. But as Rob Cameron reports from Prague, while the Cold War is over, a few sheaves of yellowing paper still have the power to throw lives into turmoil.
As I sat at my computer, poring over secret police files, I felt a sudden tug of nostalgia. The files were digital copies of reports written by StB officer Jan Sarkocy, sent to Britain in 1986 under diplomatic cover. When he met first Jeremy Corbyn, in November of that year, his business card read "Jan Dymic, Third Secretary to the Czechoslovak Embassy in London".
They were fascinating documents, cryptic and - for me - strangely evocative. Especially the references to North London landmarks I knew well, such as Seven Sisters Road, where the Labour MP for Islington had an office.
But my task was not to dredge up my own memories of Labour politics while the party was in opposition in the 1980s. Rather it was to examine the six documents in dossier number 12801/subsection 326, codename "COB", for traces of anything incriminating. And believe me, I couldn't find them.
Nothing in Agent Dymic's descriptions of three meetings with the Labour MP - two in the House of Commons, one on Seven Sisters Road - suggest the StB ever regarded him as anything other than a potential source. A young leftist with good contacts in the peace movement. An internationalist with a Chilean wife who kept dogs and goldfish. The only document he appears to have passed on to Agent Dymic was a photocopy of an article in the Sunday People about a bungled MI5 raid on the East German Embassy. And each meticulous report ended with a little note of expenses incurred; parking, two pounds; underground ticket, one pound. Signed: Jan Dymic.
For clarity I spent a morning with the woman who is now the custodian of millions of documents still marked "TOP SECRET": the Director of the Czech Security Services Archive. For research purposes these dossiers - once jealously guarded by the Communist-era secret police and intelligence services - are now freely available to anyone; all you have to do is ask for them.
The director had also given me Dymic's own personnel file. But his Slovak was littered with arcane abbreviations and jargon, and I was having trouble understanding them. "COB" was Jeremy Corbyn's codename, that much was obvious. Nothing sinister in that, she told me; the StB used them for everyone, including people they were interested in cultivating.
OK, but what were "GREENHOUSE I" and "GREENHOUSE II" - mentioned repeatedly in the files? The Czechoslovaks seemed obsessed with trying to penetrate these targets, and many of Dymic's approaches to British politicians - Jeremy Corbyn among them - were initiated with the aim of gaining access to them.
"GREENHOUSE…" the director frowned, peering at the screen. "I'm sorry...." she admitted, after a few minutes. "I've really got no idea."
Two days later, speeding down the motorway to Slovakia, I made a mental note to ask Agent Dymic - now just Jan Sarkocy - what this "GREENHOUSE" was. I had mixed feelings about this meeting, secured after many emails and texts. At home, the StB were the praetorian guard of Czechoslovak communism, responsible for hounding dissidents, torturing priests, and spying on a cowed population. Today, the epithet "estebak" - an StB officer - is still a term of abuse. They also had several high-profile successes abroad; recruiting two Labour MPs from the UK in the 1950s and 60s. Their rivals in military intelligence even recruited a Conservative one.
Media captionJan Sarkocy described Mr Corbyn as a "very, very good source"
After a huddle outside his house with Slovak reporters - where he made his explosive claims - Sarkocy had gone to ground, and was no longer talking. But finally, he relented, and so I now found myself outside his home in the village of Limbach, about half an hour north of Bratislava.
A thick layer of snow lay on the ground as we waited for him to answer the door. Lines from John Le Carre novels filled my head. "It is cold in Limbach at this time of the year," I said in an exaggerated East European accent, to ease the tension. My Czech colleague - there to film the interview - laughed.
In the end Jan Sarkocy was garrulous and friendly, still regarding his brief tenure in London with great affection. Most of what he told me, about an array of people and institutions, was so libellous - not to mention confusing - that I cannot even begin to repeat it here. But oddly not even he could remember what GREENHOUSE I and GREENHOUSE II were.
The answer finally came from a BBC colleague. "I've made some calls," he wrote. "The main effort of the StB abroad, as directed by their Russian masters, was to penetrate the UK's intelligence agencies. So GREENHOUSE I was probably Century House, the former headquarters of the SIS, more commonly known as MI6." Ah. And GREENHOUSE II was, I suppose, the headquarters of MI5.
The GREENHOUSE mystery solved, and the Corbyn frenzy dying down in London, I boarded a train back to Prague. As the 12:10 from Bratislava sped through the frozen fields, my head still spinning, I did what any journalist does at the end of a story: my expenses. Parking; two euros. Tram ticket: one. I suddenly had an image of Jan Sarkocy doing his in London 30 years ago.
A different job. A different era. But some things, I suppose, never change. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-47706599/helicopters-help-combat-baku-shopping-centre-fire | Helicopters combat shopping centre fire Jump to media player The fire broke out at a five-storey shopping mall in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku.
Huge fire in Paris apartment building Jump to media player Ten people have died and many more have been injured in the blaze in south-western Paris.
Fire sweeps through Ocado warehouse Jump to media player About 200 firefighters have been tackling the fire at the robot-run distribution centre.
Houston chemical fire to rage for days Jump to media player A chemical fire in Texas has been going on for three days, and fire officials say could go on for two more.
Nightclub building destroyed by fire Jump to media player Roads around Maidenhead town centre are closed due to the fire which began at about 02:00 GMT.
Firefighters have used two helicopters to put out a fire in a shopping mall in Azerbaijan.
They were called to the Diglas Trade Center in the capital Baku.
Ten people were treated for smoke inhalation after being evacuated from the building. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-47736651 | A woman has died in a fire at a house in Leicester.
The blaze started at a property in Saffron Lane at about 16:46 GMT on Wednesday, Leicestershire Fire and Rescue Service said.
A spokesman for the service said the woman, aged in her fifties, was pronounced dead at the scene.
An investigation has begun into what caused the fire. Leicestershire Police said no-one else was injured and a cordon remains in place at the house. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/4317521.stm | Early attention to security issues might have given us a better internet today - or the project might never have taken off at all, says Robert Kahn.
The net's co-inventor tells BBC Click Online how it all began, when, as an assistant professor of electrical engineering at MIT, he took a leave of absence to brush up on his networking theory.
The work that we did was principally on designing what a network would look like.
It was me working alone writing memos on the subject.
I thought, at that time, that this was about as much practical experience as one would really need, to be a good theoretician back in the university.
But it turned out that an agency of the US government, the Defence Advance Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa (it was known as Arpa back then) actually had plans to build a computer network in the country.
At the time, many people didn't think this was a very practical thing to do because it clearly didn't look like a business opportunity and there weren't that many computers around.
But I thought it was an interesting technical challenge, so I was actually the system designer of the Arpanet - the very first computer network.
When I got to Darpa, I got involved in the creation of two more nets.
One was using satellites, a kind of Ethernet in the sky, on Intelsat-4, and the other one was a kind of a mobile network where the nodes were packet radios that broadcast to each other, so all the nodes could be in motion, in principle, or they could stay fixed as well.
The whole goal of that effort seemed pretty straight forward at the time: given that you've got the nets, put them together and get the machines on them to work together.
That was the genesis of the project itself.
When I first started the programme I was talking about what we were trying to achieve, which was netting these different computers and networks, so I called the project "internetting".
For computer communications, computers talk in little bursts. They're not continuous like speech.
So setting up circuits when you're only going to use it for a little bit of time would be about as inefficient as reserving a road from New York to Los Angeles to drive your car, and letting nobody else on that road.
So the idea that you could share it with little bundles of information that were separately addressed was an interesting challenge.
We had a few simple goals.
We had to find a notion of what we called a gateway - today they're known as routers - that would handle IP routing through the net.
[It was] an end-to-end protocol which we called TCP that also had to understand IP kinds of communication that would deal with end-to-end problems, putting information back in order, doing error checking, getting re-transmissions when things didn't arrive, getting rid of duplicates, getting things back in order when they arrived out of order and so forth.
I think we succeeded in those very significantly.
In terms of dangers, such as viruses, fraud or identity theft, I don't think we were thinking about that at all when we got started.
If we had been worried about that, the net might have been better today but we might not have even got there.
Certainly people have asked why we didn't build security in from day one.
We weren't worried about viruses because we were dealing with a very narrow research community that was "colleagular".
They were all friends and colleagues, and many of those systems had no protections on them whatsoever.
It was only many years later when the net became really a public utility of sorts that those things started to show up.
We were not really thinking about the dangers of that and perhaps we should have done.
I wish we had spent more time on that, but again, in the context of what we were doing, we might not have actually got the project off the ground.
We would have spent all our time trying to convince people to let us deal with security technology when we didn't even have the technology that could work without it.
We might not have got there.
Robert Kahn was interviewed for the BBC's Click Online programme. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-42282690/antarctic-mountain-heights-re-measured | Britain has a new tallest mountain.
Mt Hope, which is sited in the part of the Antarctic claimed by the UK, was recently re-measured and found to tower above the previous title holder, Mt Jackson, by a good 50m (160ft).
Hope is now put at 3,239m (10,626ft); Jackson is 3,184m (10,446ft).
Dr Peter Fretwell from the British Antarctic Survey spoke with our science correspondent Jonathan Amos. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1413948.stm | Homeowners who are paying into endowment policies that are no longer on track to pay off their mortgage are being urged to take immediate action or they could face losing their homes.
A survey by the Financial Services Authority (FSA), the City watchdog, reveals a high degree of inaction among endowment holders - even though many face shortfalls worth thousands of pounds.
In the past year, almost all households with an endowment mortgage have received letters telling them whether their policy is on track to pay off their mortgage.
But figures from the FSA reveal that seven out of ten households have failed to respond.
Endowment-linked mortgages were the most popular type of home loan during the 1980s and early 1990s, but growth projections were based on healthy market conditions at the time.
Since then, poor stock market returns combined with low inflation now means that these original projections are no longer valid - and millions now face a shortfall on their loan.
Half of the endowment holders who have not taken action said the reason was that they now had other means to pay off their mortgage. The other policy holders - equivalent to 3.65m households - have failed to take any remedial action.
"Making sure you can repay your mortgage loan is one of the most basic financial needs," said Christine Farnish, director of Consumer Relations at the FSA.
"If there is a risk that you won't be able to, and you're not comfortable with that, then now's the time to decide on what to do. If you need to put more money aside to pay off your mortgage, it's a lot less painful to do it sooner rather than later," she added.
Experts fear that if they do not act now, they will not be able to pay off their loan at the end of the mortgage term, and could lose their homes as a consequence.
About 10.5m endowment holders should now have received a colour-coded letter which outlines how much their investment needs to grow to stay on track.
As many as 14.6% letters, just over 1.5m homeowners, have been sent 'red letters' warning homeowners that their policy needs to grow by more than 8% to meet its target.
Three in ten owners who have received 'amber letters' have been told to keep a close eye on their policy, whereas the 53.9% of mortgage holders who have received 'green letters' are likely to remain on track as long as the stock market grows by 6%.
But critics argue that the letters - sent by endowment providers - may only confuse policy holders further.
They also accuse the government of betraying endowment holders, after it ruled out a comprehensive investigation into the sale of endowment mortgages last year.
It is now up to individual policy holders to pursue their own compensation claims. So far, only £35m has been paid and to about 11,000 complainants.
The FSA is encouraging people to make claims to the Financial Ombudsman Service if they feel that they were not informed of the risks associated with the policies.
Despite revised projections, mortgage experts warned people last week not to surrender their policies. But they should also not top-up their plans according to their insurance company's projections.
Pat Bunton of London & Country, a mortgage broker, said: "Do not throw good money after bad. The best solution is to reduce your reliance on the endowment, and repay the loan by other means."
Bunton suggests moving any projected shortfall into a repayment loan. This will ensure that both the underlying debt is paid off each month.
The FSA's fact sheet "Your endowment mortgage - time to decide" can be found on its website.
"If you do not take some action now, when your mortgage matures you could face a big debt"
"You could be due compensation" |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-20658623 | A drama about a schoolgirl whose life changes after she witnesses a violent attack has been named best film at this year's British Independent Film Awards.
Broken, the debut feature by theatre director Rufus Norris, also picked up a best supporting actor prize for Rory Kinnear.
Psychological thriller Berberian Sound Studio won the most awards.
It received four trophies - including best director for Peter Strickland and best actor for Toby Jones.
The 15th annual awards, which honour films made mainly outside major studios, took place at Old Billingsgate in London.
Sunday's ceremony was hosted by James Nesbitt, who plays the dwarf Bofur in The Hobbit film out this week.
Broken, which stars Tim Roth, Cillian Murphy and newcomer Eloise Laurence, went into the awards as the frontrunner with nine nominations.
The story focuses on three families who live in the same cul-de-sac and are linked by a violent incident that has far-reaching consequences for them all.
Describing the win as "fantastic", first-time film director Norris told BBC News: "Hopefully it makes it more likely that I'll get the chance to make another film."
Norris's recent stage productions include London Road at the National Theatre and the opera Dr Dee, with Blur frontman Damon Albarn.
"I don't like stories where you get good people and bad people - I don't think life's like that," Norris said.
"Broken shows how people behave sometimes in really awful ways and sometimes in really good ways. And often it's to do with love, protection or fear. Those things affect us all. It doesn't mean they are terrible people."
Broken was first seen at the Cannes film festival in May, but is not released in the UK until next year.
Andrea Riseborough won the best actress prize for thriller Shadow Dancer, about an IRA member turned informer in 1990s Belfast.
Olivia Colman won best supporting actress for her role as the Queen Mother in period piece Hyde Park on Hudson.
It was Colman's second Bifa award in two years, having won best actress last year for Tyrannosaur.
Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio stars Toby Jones as a meek British sound engineer who is brought to Italy to work on the sound effects for a horror film.
With the actual gore kept off-screen, the audience sees Jones create horror noises by stabbing cabbages, chopping melons and twisting the stalks off radishes.
"The thing that really fascinated me was that these are innocent everyday sounds," said Strickland. "All you do is you alter the context of them and it completely disorientates you and it's quite disturbing"
The film's four wins included best achievement in production and best technical achievement.
The Imposter, the true story of a French conman who convinces a grieving Texas family that he is their missing son, won two awards: best British documentary and a directorial debut prize for Bart Layton.
Layton said: "I'd do an interview one day convinced I understood what happened, and the next day I'd sit down with someone with a different side of the story and come away with the opposite conclusion. My job was navigating these conflicting versions."
Sightseers, Ben Wheatley's pitch-black comedy about a couple on a killing spree during a caravan holiday, won the best screenplay prize for writers Alice Lowe, Steve Oram, and Amy Jump.
Oram and Lowe developed the lead characters on the comedy circuit over several years.
"It all started with us talking about childhood experiences of family holidays and we took that concept to its extreme," said Lowe.
James Floyd picked up the most promising newcomer award for his role in My Brother the Devil.
As previously announced, Jude Law received the Variety Award for helping to focus the international spotlight on the UK.
Sir Michael Gambon was awarded the Richard Harris Award for outstanding contribution by an actor to British film.
"My whole life has been spent worrying about learning lines," he joked to the BBC. "I've never relaxed - apart from Harry Potter where I just had fun!" |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/january/13/ | Around 13 people are killed and at least 140 injured as Soviet troops continue to attack Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.
Hindu-Muslim rioting breaks out in the Indian city of Calcutta resulting in the deaths of more than 100 people.
More than 1,000 people are feared dead after an earthquake strikes the Central American city of San Salvador.
American, British and French fighter jets carry out a series of bombing raids over southern Iraq.
Harold Shipman, who is believed to have killed more than 200 patients, is found hanged in his prison cell.
An army commander seizes control of Ghana while the prime minister is in London for medical treatment.
Peruvian left-wing guerrillas holding 72 hostages open fire on police outside the Japanese Embassy in Lima. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17817520 | US President Barack Obama has announced fresh sanctions against Iran, Syria and those who help them use technology to perpetrate human rights abuses.
He announced the new sanctions against "digital guns for hire" in a speech at the US Holocaust Museum.
Mr Obama has also asked US intelligence groups to include assessments of the likelihood of mass killings in its co-ordinated reports.
He said: "National sovereignty is never a licence to slaughter your people."
The executive order creates sanctions against the government of Syria and Iran "and those who abet them, for using technologies to monitor, target and track its citizens for violence".
"These technologies should be in place to empower citizens, not to repress them," said Mr Obama.
On Monday, the US Treasury announced the specific targets of the sanctions, including Iran's Islamic Revolution Guard Corps, Syria's General Security Directorate and its chief Ali Mamluk, as well as the state-controlled mobile phone company, Syriatel.
Six of the seven targets were already subject to US sanctions, with the addition of Datak Telecom, an Iranian internet provider.
Mr Obama signed the executive order for the sanctions on Sunday.
Correspondents say that while mobile and social technology has been credited with helping bring about political and regime changes in other Middle East countries, some regimes have used technology to track dissidents or block internet access.
Iran has provided the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with programs that jam mobile phones.
Social networking sites that the Syrian opposition would use to organise demonstrations have been blocked or monitored using similar technologies.
Before the speech, Mr Obama toured the museum for the first time as president, with writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.
The US president lit a candle in the Buchenwald section of the museum's Hall of Remembrance. Mr Obama's great-uncle helped liberate the camp at the end of World War II. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-13470956 | The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) has been ordered to pay £5,000 each to four women for failing to investigate allegations of slavery.
The women, who had arrived in London from Nigeria as children, said they were beaten and emotionally abused by families they were forced to work for.
The High Court said the force's "failure to investigate" breached the women's human rights.
The Met said it deeply regretted the women did not get the service expected.
The force had originally argued it could not carry out an investigation because the women would not co-operate.
But the court dismissed this claim as "untenable".
Mr Justice Wyn Williams said in his judgment the Met "did nothing to commence an effective investigation".
"Their names were known to the police, they wanted their complaints to be investigated.
"They were directly affected by the failure to carry out an effective investigation."
The court heard the women were brought to the UK when they were aged between 11 and 15.
The women, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, said they were made to work for no pay in households in and around London between 1997 and 2006.
They complained that the police had infringed their rights under the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms by failing to investigate over a "significant" period of time.
Phillippa Kaufmann QC said: "They want an acknowledgement of how all of them have been treated and they want just satisfaction in the form of compensation."
She said that above all they want lessons to be learned so that others in the same predicament can be rescued.
Ms Kaufmann told the court the women were at all times "willing and prepared to have their allegations of abuse investigated".
"The problem is that... officers on the ground were repeatedly and, in every imaginable context, reluctant to discharge that duty and, whenever it was triggered, they repeatedly failed to take any steps to investigate the serious offences which were staring them in the face."
Ms Kaufmann said officers did not understand the very serious nature of the crimes and that there was a "worrying lack of concern" for the victims.
A spokesman for the women's solicitors, Bhatt Murphy, said after the ruling: "The Metropolitan Police Service has not apologised to any of the victims for failing to investigate their abusers in 2007.
"Instead it argued unsuccessfully in court that it did not owe a legal duty to investigate credible allegations of servitude unless those allegations were reported whilst the servitude was ongoing."
Following Friday's ruling, Scotland Yard it would consider the judgement.
In a statement, the force said: "The MPS takes all allegations of this nature seriously and the original matters alleged are now subject to a full and ongoing investigation by detectives from the SCD9 Human Exploitation and Organised Crime Command, which has already seen one woman jailed for 11.5 years for trafficking offences."
It said the way in which the Met investigates such crimes had changed significantly since the introduction in April 2010 of the dedicated unit of 39 detectives responsible for handling all human trafficking and immigration offences. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-wiltshire-39278414 | Detectives investigating the murder of a man have released CCTV images of four suspects they want to trace.
Jordan Taylor, from Hilperton, died from stab wounds after he and a friend were attacked by a man in Trowbridge, on Sunday morning.
Det Insp, Jim Taylor said: "We have forensic evidence which can eliminate these people from our enquiries."
Police have already appealed for one man, seen wearing a green Parka-style jacket, to come forward.
The images of the four men were taken from the same camera around the time of the attack, which happened close to Trowbridge Community Hospital.
They show a smartly-dressed man walking towards Charlotte Street with an umbrella, another man walking from Timbrell Street to Union Street, a third wearing a hoodie top, and a white man in a green Parka-style jacket.
Police added foot patrols were being stepped up and house-to-house inquiries were continuing. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-47657770 | A woman who entered a "Miss Hitler" beauty pageant was obsessed with "ethnic cleansing", a court has heard.
Alice Cutter has denied being a member of a banned neo-Nazi organisation.
The 22-year-old is standing trial alongside her partner, Mark Jones, who is accused of being a "leader and strategist" for National Action.
Birmingham Crown Court heard they shared an "obsession with knives, guns and the ideology of violent ethnic cleansing".
Mr Jones, 24, and Ms Cutter, both of Mulhalls Mill, Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire, have pleaded not guilty to being members of National Action between December 2016 and September 2017.
Garry Jack, 23, from Heathland Avenue, Birmingham, and 18-year-old Connor Scothern, of Bagnall Avenue, Nottingham, have denied the same charge.
Prosecutor Barnaby Jameson QC told the jury Ms Cutter "was a central spoke in the National Action wheel", having been photographed giving the Nazi salute on the steps of Leeds Town Hall in May 2016.
Mr Jameson said that, in a private chat group with a convicted National Action member, she said she wanted to play football with the head of a Jewish person.
Meanwhile, Mr Jameson said Mr Scothern "came to Nazism via a circuitous route".
"He was drawn apparently to communism at one stage, and for a short time when he was 12 or 13 practised Islam.
"But make no mistake, however, that when Scothern found Nazism he never looked back," he said. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-politics-42299924/how-hopeful-are-people-of-getting-a-good-brexit-deal | How hopeful are people of getting a good Brexit deal? Jump to media player Emma Vardy has been to Basingstoke to find our how hopeful people are feeling about the deal.
How hopeful are people of getting a good Brexit deal?
With lots of glowing headlines in the papers and pictures of a beaming Theresa May everywhere, is it time for the Brexit doom-mongers to start feeling a bit more optimistic?
Sunday Politics reporter Emma Vardy has been to Basingstoke to find out how hopeful people are feeling about the deal. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/bristol/somerset/8568196.stm | Two customer help points have been stolen from stations on the Severn Beach rail line in Bristol.
The computerised machines were removed from Redland and Montpelier stations.
They provide passengers with the latest travel information and can also be used in an emergency to raise an alarm.
Sgt Mark Harris, from British Transport Police, urged anyone with information about the missing machines to contact police.
He said: "They could be your lifeline if an emergency takes place on the railway or at your station so it is vital they are located and replaced."
Richard Morrish, from First Great Western, said: "The customer help points are of no use to anyone outside the rail industry.
"However these machines do help people within the community and it's a shame that the minority have to ruin things for the majority in this way."
They were taken between 25 and 28 February. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7001464.stm | University of Florida police used a stun gun on a student taking part in a forum with former presidential candidate John Kerry.
Andrew Meyer was questioning Senator Kerry on why he did not contest the results of the 2004 election.
University officials said he exceeded his allotted time and became disruptive after his microphone was cut off.
Video footage shows police pulling Mr Meyer from the audience and pinning him to the ground before stunning him.
The 21-year-old student can be heard screaming for help as the stun gun is administered.
Mr Meyer was arrested and charged with resisting an officer with violence and disturbing the peace, reports local newspaper the Gainesville Sun.
After spending the night in Alachua County jail, he was released on Tuesday morning, the Gainesville Sun reports.
A spokesman for the university, Steve Orlando, said campus police would conduct an internal investigation into whether the weapon had been used appropriately. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-12015334/world-trade-center-build-at-halfway-point | World Trade Center build at halfway point Jump to media player Steel construction reaches the halfway point for New York's 1 World Trade Center.
Rebirth of ground zero eclipsed Jump to media player Twin Tower memorial site preparations overshadowed by row over plans to build an Islamic centre nearby and threats to burn the Koran.
Steel construction has reached the halfway point for New York's 1 World Trade Center.
The Manhattan building, also known as the Freedom Tower, stands more than 600ft (180m) high.
The tower will eventually have 104 stories, with an antenna reaching hundreds of feet higher, bringing it to 1,776ft - making it the tallest in the country.
Steve Coleman, spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said he was hopeful they would finish the building by the end of 2011. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/eng_div_1/3156143.stm | Norwich held off a late fight-back from 10-man Wimbledon to claim victory in a thrilling match at Carrow Road.
Damien Francis opened the scoring against his old club, and a brace from Mark Rivers put Norwich 3-0 up, before Dean Holdsworth and Mikele Liegertwood hit late consolation goals for the visitors.
The Canaries dominated the early exchanges and after Iwan Roberts had missed the target with a close range header, City took the lead on 10 minutes.
Rivers delivered a cross from the right and the ball fell to ex-Wimbledon midfielder Francis, who turned swiftly to blast the ball home with a left-footed shot from six yards.
With 27 minutes gone, the Canaries doubled their lead.
Gary Holt surged into the penalty area only to be pulled back by Leigertwood and Rivers coolly dispatched the resulting spot-kick for his third goal of the new campaign.
Ten minutes after the restart, Rivers scored his second goal of the evening to seemingly put the result beyond doubt.
McVeigh cleverly released Adam Drury on the left and his excellent cross was nodded in by Rivers from six yards.
Wimbledon desperately tried to salvage something out of the game and Alex Tapp forced Robert Green into a brilliant reflex save as the Norwich goalkeeper tipped his close range effort over the crossbar.
Six minutes from time the Dons' efforts were rewarded when Nigel Reo-Coker released Holdsworth who fired the ball into the top left corner of the net from 20 yards.
A minute later Wimbledon were brought back down to earth though when Peter Hawkins took his protests too far with the referee, who sent off the Dons defender for a second bookable offence.
Deep into stoppage time the visitors were given an unlikely lifeline when Tapp played in Liegertwood, who blasted the ball into the top left corner with his right foot from 25 yards.
But it proved to be no more than a consolation as the full time whistle was blown seconds later.
Norwich: Green, Edworthy, Mackay, Fleming, Drury, Rivers, Francis, Holt, Easton, Roberts, McVeigh. Subs: Crichton, Mulryne, Jarvis, Hammond, Henderson.
Wimbledon: Banks, Gier, Leigertwood, Chorley, Hawkins, Tapp, Reo-Coker, Nowland, Darlington, McAnuff, Agyemang. Subs: Heald, Holloway, McDonald, Holdsworth, Gordon. |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-47708746 | Image caption William Alldis runs a restaurant in Epping which champions "wild and locally produced food"
A chef has denied a firearms charge after he allegedly killed a deer with a rifle in a public park.
William Alldis, 40, is accused of shooting the animal with a Sako .243 rifle in Dagnam Park, Romford, north-east London, on 6 November last year.
The owner of the Cart Shed restaurant in Epping, Essex, denied possessing a firearm and suitable ammunition in a public place at Snaresbrook Crown Court.
He will face trial in September.
At a previous hearing, magistrates were told Mr Alldis had been reported to the police by a member of the public who claimed to have seen him shoot the deer.
Peter Glenser QC said the case was "having a serious effect on Mr Alldis' ability to earn a living".
The Cart Shed states on its website it champions "wild and locally produced food".
Judge Neil Sanders granted the defendant unconditional bail until the three-day trial, which is listed to start on 16 September. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-11983655 | Mobile phones could soon be helping re-assure Nigerians and Ghanaians they are getting genuine medicine.
A pilot scheme in the two nations has begun putting unique scratch codes on more than 500,000 medicine bottles and packets of pills.
When the code is texted to a free phone number, a return message will reveal that a drug is genuine.
The scheme hopes to boost efforts to tackle diseases such as malaria and combat the rise in fake medicines.
Globally, about 10-15% of all drugs are believed to be fake but in some parts of Africa this rises to 50%. The problem is made more acute in Africa because some fake medicines being offered to the sick are watered down versions of the real thing and dent the efficacy of the full strength drug.
"Some genuine medicines have lost their potency because of the counterfeiting," said Gabriele Zedlmayer, a spokeswoman for HP which is a partner in the labelling scheme.
This can be a particular problem with malaria as the disease is so widespread in sub-saharan Africa where it is the leading cause of death.
The scheme is being backed by governments and drug companies who have pledged to publicise how it works in pharmacies, surgeries, hospitals and community centres.
Painkillers, anti-malaria drugs and amoebicides from pharmaceutical firms May & Baker in Nigeria and Kama in Ghana will be the first to get the scratch-off labels.
Such a scheme was very important in Africa where about 80% of medicines are generic, said Bright Simons, founder of mPedigree which developed some of the technology to underpin the pilot.
By using the codes, people would get to know pharmacies, hospitals and other outlets they can trust, he said.
Mobiles were the best way for people in Nigeria and Ghana to find out about their medicines because they were so ubiquitous said Mr Simon, adding that even those who do not own a handset themselves can get access via friends and family.
Each packet or bottle has a scratch-off code that can be used only once, said Mr Simons. The security system behind the scenes flags any attempt to re-use codes. As well as letting people know they are getting genuine medicine, it will also alert people when fake medicines are being peddled.
If the pilot proves successful, the scheme will be extended to cover more than six million bottles and packets in the next 12 months.
"This is just the first step," said Ms Zedlmayer. "It can be applied to any kind of medication." |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8232570.stm | Startled pigeons might not appear to epitomise the wonder of evolution, but a study has discovered that the birds can communicate with their wings.
When a crested pigeon is startled into flight its wings produce a whistling sound which serves as an alarm call.
The pigeons have "modified wings" that produce the whistle as they fly, but only this sudden take-off creates the alarm that causes other birds to flee.
The team report their findings in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B.
Robert Magrath at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra led the study.
He and his colleague Mae Hingee took sound recordings from the birds.
"We audio recorded the sound of birds flying off from a feeder in routine flight and compared those sounds to those produced when we scared pigeons into take-off with a gliding model hawk," explained Dr Magrath.
The birds that took off in alarm produced louder whistles with a more rapid tempo of "notes", he told BBC News.
The researchers played back both alarmed and routine whistles to flocks of feeding pigeons.
"We found that they only fled to cover after hearing the alarmed whistles. [They] could tell the difference, and acted appropriately in response," said Dr Magrath.
He described how the birds' "modified" wings create the sound.
"The birds have one very narrow primary flight feather, which we suspect vibrates during flapping flight to produce the whistling," he said.
Sue Anne Zollinger, an animal communication researcher from the University of St Andrews who was not involved in the study, said the "playback" element of the study was revealing.
"Lots of people have studied sound production by birds' wings, but here the researchers have actually been able to put it into a context, [and] shown that the sound has a communication role," Dr Zollinger told BBC News.
She added that this information would help researchers to understand why being in a flock might be useful for some birds.
The ANU researchers pointed out that while scientists understand some evolutionary advantages of a flock, such as having more pairs of eyes to spot predators, this has clarified exactly how the birds understand that one of their flock has spotted a potential threat.
Dr Magrath concluded: "We'd like to find out more about the mechanism of sound production, try to work out whether it evolved specifically as an alarm signal, and see if other birds also use wing sounds [as alarm calls]." |
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38224564 | The tail of a feathered dinosaur has been found perfectly preserved in amber from Myanmar.
The one-of-a-kind discovery helps put flesh on the bones of these extinct creatures, opening a new window on the biology of a group that dominated Earth for more than 160 million years.
Examination of the specimen suggests the tail was chestnut brown on top and white on its underside.
The tail is described in the journal Current Biology.
"This is the first time we've found dinosaur material preserved in amber," co-author Ryan McKellar, of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada, told the BBC News website.
The study's first author, Lida Xing from the China University of Geosciences in Beijing, discovered the remarkable fossil at an amber market in Myitkina, Myanmar.
The 99-million-year-old amber had already been polished for jewellery and the seller had thought it was plant material. On closer inspection, however, it turned out to be the tail of a feathered dinosaur about the size of a sparrow.
Lida Xing was able to establish where it had come from by tracking down the amber miner who had originally dug out the specimen.
Dr McKellar said examination of the tail's anatomy showed it definitely belonged to a feathered dinosaur and not an ancient bird.
"We can be sure of the source because the vertebrae are not fused into a rod or pygostyle as in modern birds and their closest relatives," he explained.
"Instead, the tail is long and flexible, with keels of feathers running down each side."
Dr McKellar said there are signs the dinosaur still contained fluids when it was incorporated into the tree resin that eventually formed the amber. This indicates that it could even have become trapped in the sticky substance while it was still alive.
Co-author Prof Mike Benton, from the University of Bristol, added: "It's amazing to see all the details of a dinosaur tail - the bones, flesh, skin, and feathers - and to imagine how this little fellow got his tail caught in the resin, and then presumably died because he could not wrestle free."
Examination of the chemistry of the tail where it was exposed at the surface of the amber even shows up traces of ferrous iron, a relic of the blood that was once in the sample.
The findings also shed light on how feathers were arranged on these dinosaurs, because 3D features are often lost due to the compression that occurs when corpses become fossils in sedimentary rocks.
The feathers lack the well-developed central shaft - a rachis - known from modern birds. Their structure suggests that the two finest tiers of branching in modern feathers, known as barbs and barbules, arose before the rachis formed.
Kachin State, in north-eastern Myanmar, where the specimen was found, has been producing amber for 2,000 years. But because of the large quantity of insects preserved in the deposits, over the last 20 years it has become a focus for scientists who study ancient arthropods.
"The larger amber pieces often get broken up in the mining process. By the time we see them they have often been turned into things like jewellery. We never know how much of the specimen has been missed," said Dr McKellar.
"If you had a complete specimen, for example, you could look at how feathers were arranged across the whole body. Or you could look at other soft tissue features that don't usually get preserved."
Other preserved parts of a feathered dinosaur might also reveal whether it was a flying or gliding animal.
"There have been other, anecdotal reports of similar specimens coming from the region. But if they disappear into private collections, then they're lost to science," Dr McKellar explained.
Dr Paul Barrett, from London's Natural History Museum, called the specimen a "beautiful fossil", describing it as a "really rare occurrence of vertebrate material in amber".
He told BBC News: "Feathers have been recovered in amber before, so that aspect isn't new, but what this new specimen shows is the 3D arrangement of feathers in a Mesozoic dinosaur/bird for the first time, as almost all of the other feathered dinosaur fossils and Mesozoic bird skeletons that we have are flattened and 2D only, which has obscured some important features of their anatomy.
"The new amber specimen confirms ideas from developmental biologists about the order in which some of the detailed features of modern feathers, such as barbs and barbules (the little hooks that hold the barbs together so that the feather can form a nice neat vane), would have appeared also."
Earlier this year, scientists also described ancient bird wings that had been discovered in amber from the same area of Myanmar. |
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45324804 | Rival protests over a murder in the east German city of Chemnitz have ended with several people injured as objects were hurled by both sides, police say.
Far-right activists had gathered in the centre for a second day as a Syrian and an Iraqi remained under arrest on suspicion of Sunday's deadly stabbing.
Anti-Nazi activists rallied just metres away, accusing the far right of using the death for political ends.
Injuries were caused when protesters on both sides threw objects, police say.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel had warned that "vigilante justice" would not be tolerated.
Police warned masked demonstrators who were picking up stones in the city, about 200km (120 miles) south of Berlin, that their actions were being filmed.
Earlier, authorities said police were investigating alleged assaults on an Afghan, a Syrian and a Bulgarian during the unrest that broke out on Sunday.
Reports have included mentions of protesters chasing foreigners, though there are few details.
Chemnitz police, quoted by the local broadcaster MDR, said: "We did not anticipate such a total of participants [on Sunday]".
Bigger crowds thronged the city centre on Monday. MDR estimated the far-right turnout to be 5,000, with some 1,000 leftists opposed to them.
It is unclear what triggered a fight which reportedly preceded the stabbing, at about 03:15 (01:15 GMT) on Sunday, on the sidelines of a street festival.
The far-right demonstration in the city centre on Sunday caused the festival to be cancelled abruptly.
The stabbing victim, a carpenter aged 35, was critically wounded and died in hospital. He has been named as Daniel H, who had a German mother and a Cuban father.
The Syrian detainee is 23 and the Iraqi 22.
Police have denied rumours on social media that the fight was linked to the sexual harassment of a woman.
"It's sad that in the media they're just saying that a German has died, and that's why all the neo-Nazis and hooligans are out, but the media should describe who died, and what skin colour he had, because I don't think they'd be doing all this if they knew," she said.
Initially, about 100 people gathered on Sunday for a rally which passed off without incident, AFP news agency reports.
However, some 800 people later gathered at the Karl Marx monument, a focal point in the centre of Chemnitz.
The monument is a throwback to the city's days as a model socialist city in the former German Democratic Republic, when it was renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt.
Pegida, the far-right street movement, called for a new demonstration on Monday afternoon, while an MP from the far-right political party AfD, Markus Frohnmaier, tweeted: "If the state is no longer to protect citizens then people take to the streets and protect themselves. It's as simple as that!"
"Today it's a citizen's duty to stop the lethal 'knife migration'!" he wrote, alluding to the influx of migrants in recent years. "It could have targeted your father, son or brother!"
As the heap of wreaths and candles at the spot where the murder occurred grew larger on Monday evening, right-wing demonstrators massed at the Marx monument, and counter-demonstrators gathered close by.
Police reported some Hitler salutes among the far-right crowd, who held anti-immigration placards with messages like "Stop the asylum flood".
What did Merkel's office say exactly?
"We don't tolerate such unlawful assemblies and the hounding of people who look different or have different origins and attempts to spread hatred on the streets," Mrs Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert, told journalists.
"That has no place in our cities and we, as the German government, condemn it in the strongest terms. Our basic message for Chemnitz and beyond is that there is no place in Germany for vigilante justice, for groups that want to spread hatred on the streets, for intolerance and for extremism."
Martina Renner, an MP for the radical Left party, accused the far right of seeking to exploit the murder for political ends.
"A terrible murder, the background to which is still unclear, is being instrumentalised in the most repugnant way for racist riots in Chemnitz," she said in a tweet.
Why is the migrant issue so thorny?
In 2015, Chancellor Merkel decided to let in a record 890,000 asylum seekers. Syrians fleeing the civil war comprised the biggest group - a 403% rise on Syrian arrivals the previous year, the German migration office reported.
She and her allies were punished by voters at last year's general election, when the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) entered parliament for the first time, winning 12.6% of the vote and more than 90 seats.
Chemnitz is in Saxony, a region where AfD and Pegida are particularly strong. |