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Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins says he expects it to be five to 10 years before he can restore public trust in the bank.
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Mr Jenkins said that people in large organisations, "want to do the right thing - it's sometimes that they perceive the right thing differently".
Mr Jenkins was guest editor of the Today programme on Radio 4 on Tuesday.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby - also on the programme- said that change would take "a generation."
Mr Jenkins made the comments in a session with students at Brooke House Sixth Form College in East London, at an event organised by the charity Speakers for Schools, which was founded by BBC business editor Robert Peston.
Archbishop Welby said that there had been a "progressive loss of vision of what banks are for".
He added that while many business leaders seemed to have realised the mistakes that had been made, some were clearly still "in denial", although he declined to name them.
He added that there was still refusal to accept the continued need for cultural transformation after the 2008 financial crisis from some in the banking sector.
"I came across senior members of the City who were still absolutely in denial about what happened in 2008," he said.
Speaking to the BBC's chief economics correspondent Hugh Pym, Archbishop Welby said that the failure to accept the need for change was still prevalent in remuneration, or pay practices, in the banking sector.
He said that it was a "generational" challenge.
When asked how far away banks were from serving society as a whole, rather than just the wishes of shareholders, the archbishop said that the challenge of leadership was to make clear the urgency of a "massive cultural change" away from serving shareholders.
Archbishop Welby and Mr Jenkins also appeared together on the Today programme, and spoke of the similarities between leadership of a bank and of the Church of England.
Mr Jenkins said that they shared views on "where banks need to go".
However, Archbishop Welby also told the Today programme that the Church of England is still deciding how to get rid of £80,000 in shares that help to fund short-term or "payday" lenders, such as Wonga.
It emerged in July that the Church had the investment. At the time, the archbishop said he was "embarrassed" by it.
Helena Morrissey, chief executive of Newton Investment Management, was also invited onto the programme and asked about the role of business in the wider community.
She said that "responsibly managed" companies were more likely to perform well, and achieve a competitive advantage.
Mr Jenkins became Barclays boss in August 2012.
It has been a difficult year for banks, with growing compensation claims for mis-selling as well as investigations into rigging parts of the market.
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I promise, I'm not going to explain the rules and regulations of Labour conference procedure. There has probably been more than enough of that already.
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Laura KuenssbergPolitical editor@bbclaurakon Twitter
What the shenanigans over a debate at Labour conference on the contentious issues around Brexit really shows us is who has the whip-hand now in the party.
The Corbyn-backing campaign group Momentum organised its members to choose subjects other than Brexit to be debated fully at the conference this week. It wasn't directly snuffed out by the leadership, it was a vote of delegates, but they act to protect their political hero.
Brexit is essentially the only big issue where Jeremy Corbyn is in conflict with the Labour membership. Motions that advocated membership of the single market or continuing freedom of movement clashed with the party's carefully constructed position on the EU and therefore would have given Corbyn's team a rough ride on the conference floor.
As it happens, the fact that debate was squeezed out has been so aggravating for MPs and campaigners who wanted to talk about the issue that some are as I write, queuing up to try to get a word in.
The party had planned to issue an emergency statement on the party's position this morning. After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, the text was apparently agreed last night I was told, but it now seems that it won't be published at all.
Not exactly a smooth start to the day, and a distraction from the shadow chancellor's announcement about capping credit card interest, the kind of policy that could have significant public appeal.
Labour's position on Brexit has been crafted to try to straddle the different views in the party, but it is under pressure.
Delegates this morning, waving EU flags, and giant inflatable parrots (no, me neither) have made that abundantly clear, arguing passionately both for and against changing the party's policy on the single market.
But Mr Corbyn's stock in the party is so high there have been moments during this conference when it has felt like little more than a victory rally. The clash of views over Brexit is real, and it is now on display. But it won't ruin the leadership's party.
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Lord McAlpine, the former UK Conservative Party deputy chairman has died, his family has announced.
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The 71-year-old, who was an aide to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, died last night in Italy, his family said.
Prime Minister David Cameron tweeted his thoughts were with his family, adding he was a "dedicated supporter of Margaret Thatcher and the Tory party".
As well as a politician, the peer was an art collector, property developer, author and fundraiser.
He was also part of the McAlpine construction dynasty.
Founded by his grandfather, Sir Robert, the firm is one of the biggest builders in the UK, responsible for the London 2012 Olympic stadium among many other projects.
He was made a director of the family firm at 21, five years after dropping out of top public school Stowe with three O-levels.
Lord McAlpine then went on to make a fortune of his own as a property developer in Australia, before turning to politics in 1975, when he met Lady Thatcher.
He became one of her closest advisers and Conservative Party treasurer throughout her period in office, from 1979 to 1990.
She made him a life peer, Baron McAlpine of West Green in Hampshire, in 1984.
BBC News's political correspondent, Rob Watson, said: "Lord McAlpine was one of those Conservatives who believed in Margaret Thatcher right from the start - long before anyone inside or outside the party talked of Thatcherism.
"As a close political advisor and prolific Conservative party fundraiser, he was key to her success as a politician.
"A Eurosceptic, he briefly left the Conservative party in the 1990s but later returned."
In recent years, Lord McAlpine was wrongly implicated in a child abuse scandal, when the allegations were the subject of a BBC Newsnight investigation.
The programme aired allegations that a Thatcher-era politician was linked to boys that were sexually abused while in the care of a children's home in Wales in the 1970s and 1980s, though it did not name Lord McAlpine.
But several Twitter users were ordered to pay him damages after the High Court found they had tweeted libellous messages about the peer.
The BBC apologised unreservedly and settled his defamation claim for £185,000. The corporation's then director-general, George Entwistle, resigned in the wake of the allegations, after less than two months in the role.
'Towering figure'
Current Conservative chairman Grant Shapps said: "Lord McAlpine made a huge contribution to public life. He was a man of integrity who had a successful career in both politics and business.
"He was a towering figure during the Thatcher era who did much for the Conservative party and our country.
"My thoughts are with his friends and family."
Conservative MP for Maldon, John Whittingdale, who was Lady Thatcher's political secretary, said Lord McAlpine was a key contributor to her three election victories.
"Margaret Thatcher relied on him heavily, the Conservative Party in some senses was almost saved by the fact that he was able to go around and raise support for the party amongst his friends, so I think the party and indeed she owe him an immense debt," he said.
Tory former chairman and Cabinet minister Lord Parkinson, who worked closely with Lord McAlpine during the Thatcher era, said he was an "outstanding" treasurer.
"He was a most unusual, intriguing, interesting character with a fantastic range of interests," he added.
Former Conservative Party chairman, Lord Tebbit, told BBC News: "He was just a joy to be with because he always had something interesting to say. A man of enormously rich experiences of business, a very cultured man, he was very much interested in the arts, things of that kind, and also much travelled."
He added: "He was a confidant which is very important to a prime minister to have somebody of irreproachable integrity and great discretion that they can talk about anything and know that it would not go any further.
"Alastair would not talk even to me about things that were said between him and the prime minister."
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Roman Catholic bishops have finished an often fractious synod on the family by reaching a compromise on divisive issues.
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Doctrine towards divorcees has been softened but there is no change in the church's stance on homosexuality.
In comments afterwards, Pope Francis appeared to criticise conservative bishops.
The church, he said, should confront difficult issues "fearlessly, without burying our heads in the sand".
At the synod, the name given to the meeting of Roman Catholic leaders, bishops voted on 94 articles dealing with how the church treats the family.
The most contentious, dealing with whether divorced and remarried believers should be allowed to play a full role in the church, only just passed.
The approved text calls for a case-by-case approach.
It also reiterates church teaching that homosexuals should not be discriminated against but said there were "absolutely no grounds" for gay marriage.
In his summary of the three-week gathering, Pope Francis said he wanted it to be about "listening to and making heard the voices of the families".
But he said the synod had "laid bare the closed hearts which frequently hide even behind the Church's teachings or good intentions", remarks seen as an attack on conservatives.
Analysis: Caroline Wyatt, BBC Religious Affairs Correspondent, Rome
The language of compromise is apparent throughout the final document. But what the Pope does with it - and how he takes it forward - is not yet clear. Pope Francis himself used his end of Synod speech as an opportunity to criticize "blinkered viewpoints".
What is obvious is that he wants a Church that is more merciful and less judgemental of those who stray from the path of righteousness: less finger-wagging, more hand-holding.
But in opening up so clearly the many very different views within this Synod, the Pope has been accused by some of sowing confusion, and quite possibly paving the way to real divisions within the Church in the future.
For some, the strength of the Catholic Church is in its unity of doctrine across the globe.
But for others, the process has been a welcome chance for church leaders to show that they can accompany families with greater understanding of the difficulties of living out their faith in the complex world of the 21st century.
He also acknowledged differences within the church, saying "what seems normal for a bishop on one continent is considered strange and almost scandalous for a bishop from another".
The text approved at the synod is only for guidance and Pope Francis must decide whether to advance it.
The opening of the synod was overshadowed by a row over a priest who announced he was in a gay relationship. He was later fired from his role at the Vatican.
The Vatican denied an Italian media report during the meeting that Pope Francis had a brain tumour, calling it "seriously irresponsible".
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Almost two million people in north-east England are expected to face restrictions as coronavirus cases rise.
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Northumberland, Newcastle, Sunderland, North and South Tyneside, Gateshead and County Durham council areas are in discussions to get the measures.
These may include pubs closing earlier and restrictions on households mixing.
It comes as Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the Sun: "The only way to make sure the country is able to enjoy Christmas is to be tough now."
He previously said the government was doing "everything in our power" to avoid another nationwide lockdown.
The PM also told the newspaper the government is promising £546m as part of a plan to help protect care homes from coronavirus this winter.
A full announcement detailing the new measures for the North East is expected later on Thursday.
"The number of cases has been rising rapidly in many parts of the country, but in particular in the North East, and so a decision has been made to impose further restrictions there," Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick told ITV's Peston programme on Wednesday.
"And a full announcement will be made tomorrow and so people living in that part of the country should watch out for that. And the measures will come into play at midnight on Thursday evening."
MPs from the area met with Health Minister Nadine Dorries on Wednesday evening.
BBC Newsnight political editor Nicholas Watt said a Labour MP told him measures would include pubs closing at 22:00 BST, no mixing with other households and public transport only for essential travel.
'Not a full lockdown'
Newcastle City Council leader Nick Forbes said the temporary measures would mainly be a restriction on social gatherings.
"The evidence we've found from local testing is that it's spreading in three main areas: in pubs, in people's homes and in grassroots sports," he said.
"So [council leaders] have put together a series of requests to government for additional restrictions around these areas for a fixed period of time to try to prevent a damaging full lockdown."
The council leaders had also requested additional funding for policing to enforce the measures, as well as additional local testing facilities, Mr Forbes added.
"All of the testing facilities in our region are more or less at full capacity every day - we're hearing stories of people being sent 200 miles to get a test and that's not acceptable.
"That's why we've asked as council leaders for more resources immediately, because we need to make sure anyone with symptoms gets an immediate test and gets the result back straight away."
The North East has seen a resurgence of coronavirus in recent weeks and four boroughs were last week placed on the government's watchlist for areas needing "enhanced support".
On Monday, councils in the seven areas of Newcastle, Northumberland, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, Gateshead, County Durham and Sunderland called for new restrictions.
BBC analysis of the government's figures shows that, as of Wednesday, Bolton had the highest rate in England at 204.1 per 100,000 people in the week to 13 September.
Sunderland's rate was 82.1 per 100,000 people, South Tyneside was 93.4, Gateshead was 81.7, Newcastle was 64.1, North Tyneside was 46.7, with County Durham at 37.4 and Northumberland at 25.7.
In total there were 1,106 new cases in a seven-day period.
A spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care said: "We constantly monitor infection rates across the country and keep all measures under review in consultation with local leaders.
"Any changes to local restrictions will be announced in the usual way."
Other parts of the UK, including Birmingham and Greater Manchester, are already subject to increased measures.
In an interview with the Sun on Thursday, Mr Johnson compared the graph showing UK virus cases to the humps on a camel's back, saying the aim is to "stop the surge" in cases and "flatten the second hump".
He said he did not want to lock down sections of the economy, but that the government "will be looking at" requiring pubs to close early.
On Wednesday, the prime minister told a committee of MPs a second national lockdown would be potentially "disastrous" for the UK.
He admitted there was not enough testing capacity - amid widespread reports of difficulties obtaining them - and said new nationwide restrictions such as the "rule of six" were necessary to "defeat" the disease.
Coronavirus cases across the UK increased by 3,991, taking the total to 378,219, according to figures from the government.
Analysis - Daniel Wainwright, BBC England Data Unit
While parts of north-west England have consistently had the highest rates of new infections for some time now, areas of the North East have also been reporting big increases.
In the week to 30 August Sunderland had 24 cases. Two weeks later it was 228.
The rise in South Tyneside was also very large, up from 70 cases in the last week of August to 141 in the week to 13 September.
Parts of the region are recording rates they haven't seen since May, when the country was still subject to most of the full lockdown measures.
Testing capacity has increased since then but there have been shortages due to the recent surge in demand.
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Do you live in one of the areas where restrictions are being reintroduced? How will you be affected? Do you have any questions? Share your views and experiences by emailing [email protected].
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A fire has gutted the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, the oldest scientific institution in the country.
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Most of the 20 million items it contained, including the oldest human remains ever found in the Americas, are believed to have been destroyed.
The cause of the blaze is not known. No injuries have been reported.
The museum, located in a building that once served as the residence for the Portuguese royal family, celebrated its 200th anniversary this year.
The fire started on Sunday evening, after the facility had closed for the day.
Aerial images broadcast on Brazilian television showed it spreading throughout the building.
Brazil's President Michel Temer said in a tweet that it was a "sad day for all Brazilians" as "200 years of work, research and knowledge were lost".
Roberto Robadey, a spokesman for the Rio fire department, is quoted by the Associated Press news agency as saying that the hydrants closest to the museum were not working and that firefighters had to get water from a nearby lake.
By Monday morning the fire was under control and some of the museum's pieces had been rescued, he added.
A stark metaphor for a city in crisis
By Katy Watson, BBC South America correspondent
This isn't just Brazilian history that's gone up in flames. Many see this as a metaphor for the city - and the country as a whole.
Rio de Janeiro is in crisis. Growing violence, a deep economic decline and political corruption have combined to make the city a shadow of what it once was. It was only in 2016 that it was hosting the Olympic Games - an event into which Brazil poured billions of dollars.
But the hangover from the sporting event has hit Rio hard. Add to that the fact that federal spending has been slashed, and with violence on the rise, tourism numbers have also declined.
This was a museum that many saw as long ignored and underfunded - now, with devastating consequences for Brazil's heritage.
What did the museum contain?
It was one of the largest museums of natural history and anthropology in the Americas.
Its millions of artefacts included fossils, Brazil's largest meteorite, dinosaur bones and a 12,000-year-old skeleton of a woman known as "Luzia", the oldest ever discovered in the Americas.
The building was also home to items covering the centuries from the arrival of the Portuguese in the 1500s to the declaration of a republic in 1889.
The ethnology collection had unique pieces from the pre-Columbian era and artifacts from indigenous cultures.
Pieces from Greco-Roman times and Egypt were also on display at the museum.
Portugal's royal family transferred the court to the building in 1808, when the country faced with the threat of invasion from Napoleon.
The museum was established in 1818, with the aim of promoting scientific research by making its collection available to specialists.
What has the reaction been?
Marcelo Moreira - a journalist with TV Globo in Rio - told the BBC: "It's very sad... This museum has a great history. It represents a lot for Brazilian history and Brazilian culture. It's really a big loss for Brazil."
In an interview with Globo, the museum's director said it was a "cultural tragedy".
One museum employee told the network that project managers had had "tremendous difficulty" trying to secure funding for "sufficient" resources for the palace.
Another, librarian Edson Vargas da Silva, is quoted by local media describing the building, which he said had wooden floors and contained "a lot of things that burn very fast", such as paper documents.
Employees had reportedly previously expressed concern about funding cuts and the dilapidated state of the premises.
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The UK's ability to attract talent is already suffering, following the vote to leave the EU, according to the boss of the UK's fifth-largest bank.
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Simon JackBusiness editor@BBCSimonJackon Twitter
Standard Chartered is "preparing for the worst" from Brexit, chief executive Bill Winters told the BBC.
The UK-headquartered bank is in the process of turning its Frankfurt branch into a subsidiary requiring additional capital, licences and staff.
He said this was "inconvenient and expensive" and will damage London.
"London will take hits in the context of Brexit… I think big parts of the euro-denominated corporate banking business will be forced into Europe.
"It's possible that through the Brexit negotiations that there is some sort of extended passporting rule [ability of banks to sell services across Europe from a UK base] but none of us are expecting that quite frankly, or preparing for that.
"We have to prepare for the worst… let's hope for the best, but we're prepared for the worst."
Talent loss
Mr Winters said he would be happy to take the tens of millions of pounds he has spent on Brexit contingency planning and "flush it down the toilet" if it meant he could carry on as before and maintain the bank's current structure.
The mood music from the UK has already affected the bank's ability to attract the best and brightest talent according to Mr Winters.
"We have already had some setbacks for the talent pool in London through the restriction on student visas. That's already a problem.
"Some of the best talent that we can have in the UK marketplace is coming from students that have chosen to study here and then stayed for some extended period afterwards… We've noticed that's been impacted already.
"More through a sense from non-UK [people] that this might not be such a hospitable place any longer - it's more psychological than contractual."
Official numbers bear this out. After a decade of uninterrupted growth, applications from EU students for places at UK universities dropped by more than 7% last year, according to UCAS, even though their right to stay on and work is, as yet, unaffected.
A Department for Education spokesperson said it was taking action to provide certainty for students.
"We have confirmed that EU students starting their courses in the academic year 18/19 or before will continue to be eligible for student loans and home fee status and will have a right to remain in the UK to complete their course," they added.
Trump's mistake
Standard Chartered is not a High Street bank here in the UK.
It is probably best known here as Liverpool FC's shirt sponsor but it is a well-known financial brand in Asia, the Middle East and Africa and has a front row seat when it comes to financing global trade and investment.
It provides advice and cash to grease the wheels of commerce within and between some of the world's fastest-growing markets.
Former Wall Street banker Mr Winters is convinced the US under Donald Trump is making a big mistake in allowing China to grow its global economic influence in areas from which the US is retreating - as demonstrated when it dropped out of a trade mega deal called the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
"They're creating effectively a multi-regional trading bloc creating these markets in much the same way that the US and UK created markets in Europe after the Second World War during a period of so much devastation.
"They are creating markets where they will be less dependent on Europe…the US is taking itself out of some of the key discussions for them and then actual trade agreements where the US could continue to have an extremely benevolent influence that it has had for decades. I think we have got to be extremely careful about that - and the UK does as well."
Mr Winters understands risk. He was part of a major report into the stability of the UK financial system commissioned by the government after the financial crisis. He believes the banks are much more secure than they were a decade ago but that has presented another type of risk.
A lot of banks have seen their profitability, their earning power reduced.
They have been forced to hold more shock-absorbing money in reserve and that has meant their earning power per pound of the capital they set aside has diminished.
Meanwhile, technology companies are coming along and doing lots of the things banks like to charge for - like foreign exchange and making payments - and doing them more cheaply and conveniently.
Many experts think banking's next crisis is the competition from nimble tech firms that don't have all the expense associated with being a bank.
This is one reason why many banks' shares (including Standard Chartered) - are trading at roughly half the price they appear to be worth on paper.
The idea that banks can't make enough money may seem perverse but any business that can't earn a sufficient return on the capital provided by investors is ultimately doomed as investors will take their capital away.
Mr Winters, however, is confident that banks are here to stay.
"For my thirty five years in banking I've started every year with people saying there is some enormous competitive threat looming - and they are right - there always is. But if you serve your customers as best you can you will stay relevant"
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An anatomical specimen labelled "Yeti's finger" has been left overlooked in a museum for decades, its origins unexplained, until BBC reporter Matthew Hill set out to investigate.
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In the vaults of the Royal College of Surgeons' Hunterian Museum in London are thousands of anatomical specimens from both human and animal species.
Still used as a teaching museum today, it was founded in the 18th Century by John Hunter, a surgeon, anatomist and naturalist.
His collection has been added to over the years, including in 1975 when a collection of research specimens and notes were bequeathed to the museum by primatologist Professor William Osman Hill.
The collection's catalogue was only rudimentary, and many specimens had not been cleaned or prepared, meaning there was little interest in terms of research, and much of it was left unseen for many years.
But in 2008, work on Prof Hill's collection turned up something very odd: a box of items apparently relating to his interest in crypto-zoology, the study of animals not proved to exist.
It contained plaster casts of a footprint, hair, scat (dropping) samples and an item recorded as a yeti's finger.
The specimen was 9cm (3.5 inches) long, 2cm wide at the widest part, curled and black at the end with a long nail.
According to the notes in the box, it was taken from the hand of a yeti. Its origin was listed as Pangboche Temple in Nepal.
Yeti expedition
Professor Hill's notes recorded that the finger had been brought to him by Peter Byrne, a former explorer and mountaineer.
Mr Byrne is now 85, and living in the United States, I discovered. When he recently visited London, I arranged to meet him.
He did indeed bring the yeti's finger to London, he explained. His story began in 1958, when he was a member of an expedition sent to the Himalayas, to look for evidence of the legendary Abominable Snowman.
"We found ourselves one day camped at a temple called Pangboche," Mr Byrne told me.
"The temple had a number of Sherpa custodians. I heard one of them speaking Nepalese, which I speak.
"He told me that they had in the temple the hand of a yeti which had been there for many years.
"It looked like a large human hand. It was covered with crusted black, broken skin.
"It was very oily from the candles and the oil lamps in the temple. The fingers were hooked and curled."
Returning to London, Mr Byrne found himself repeating the story to Prof Hill in a restaurant at Regent's Park Zoo, a meeting set up by the expedition's American sponsor, Tom Slick.
"Osmond Hill said: 'You have got to get this hand. We've got to see it. We want to examine it.' But I had already asked the lamas there if I could have the hand and they said no, it would bring bad luck, disaster to the temple if it was taken away."
Prof Hill and Mr Slick asked Mr Byrne to go back and at least try to get one finger with permission from the temple's custodians.
The plan was to replace the missing finger with a human finger. Prof Hill then brought out a brown paper bag and tipped out a human hand onto the table.
"It was several months old and dried. I never asked him where he got it from."
Returning to the temple, he gave a donation in return for the finger, and then wired the human finger onto the relic.
Mr Slick helped ensure the finger would reach London safely with the help of his friend, the Hollywood actor James Stewart and his wife Gloria, who were in India at the time.
They were to meet in the Grand Hotel in Calcutta, said Mr Byrne.
"They were a little bit worried about customs, so Gloria hid it in her lingerie case and they got out of India no trouble.
"They arrived at Heathrow, but the lingerie case was missing."
A few days later, a customs official returned the case to the Hollywood couple, reassuring Gloria that a British customs officer would "never open a lady's lingerie case".
The finger was handed over to Prof Hill after which, Mr Byrne explained, he lost contact with him.
DNA test
But could this finger really have come from a yeti?
The Royal College of Surgeons granted a request for a DNA test to be carried out on a tiny sliver of the finger.
The finger is of human origin, according to Dr Rob Jones, senior scientist at the Zoological Society of Scotland.
"We have got a very, very strong match to a number of existing reference sequences on human DNA databases.
"It's very similar to existing human sequences from China and that region of Asia but we don't have enough resolution to be confident of a racial identification."
The "yeti's finger" is now all that remains of the original yeti's hand, which was stolen from Pangboche monastery in the 1990s.
Mike Allsop, a New Zealand pilot and mountaineer, became aware of the story and was moved to help the monastery get the hand back.
He has recently launched a campaign to find the original hand and has also made a replica, which he recently presented to the monks.
He informed me the monastery would like to have the finger returned, but does not want any trouble. I understand the Royal College of Surgeons is keen to help.
Matthew Hill presents Yeti's Finger on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday 27 December 2011 at 11:00 GMT. Or catch up online afterwards at the above link.
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South Africa's elite police unit has raided the home of a controversial business family linked to President Jacob Zuma, as pressure increases on him to stand down.
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Officials say three people were arrested as part of an investigation into the wealthy, Indian-born Guptas.
They have been accused of using their close friendship with Mr Zuma to wield enormous political influence.
Meanwhile, Mr Zuma's party has given him until the end of the day to resign.
His links to the Guptas are one of the reasons he is being forced to resign before the 2019 general election.
The Guptas and Mr Zuma deny all allegations of wrongdoing.
Pressure has been slowly increasing on Mr Zuma to stand down in recent weeks. He was expected to respond to a formal request from the African National Congress (ANC) to step down at some point on Wednesday.
However, shortly after ANC chief whip Jackson Mthembu announced that a motion of no-confidence in the president would be heard on Thursday, Mr Zuma appeared on television to say he was not prepared to stand down immediately as he had not be given good reasons as to why he should resign.
Analysis: Coincidence, or something more?
By Andrew Harding, BBC News, Johannesburg
The timing is remarkable… So why did South Africa's elite Hawks choose to move against the Guptas now? There are four possibilities:
1: This was a genuine coincidence.
The Hawks have, in recent weeks, begun to accelerate their investigation into alleged corruption at the Estina Dairy in Vrede [scroll down to read more on the allegations], with assets already seized, and prosecutions prepared, so perhaps, given the unpredictable way the political drama surrounding President Zuma is unfolding, this is just one of those serendipitous things.
2: The Hawks, with an eye on the news and the clear sense that President Zuma is losing power - and therefore any protection that the Guptas enjoyed as his friends is waning too - decided there was a risk members of the Indian-born family might flee the country.
3: The man who presumably authorised the move against the Guptas, the National Prosecuting Chief Sean Abrahams, saw the way the tide was turning against Mr Zuma (who appointed him). Mr Abrahams has been branded "Sean The Sheep" by South African media, following widespread claims that he has helped to protect Mr Zuma, the Guptas and others from corruption investigations.
Mr Abrahams, who denies the allegations, might be looking to curry favour with any new ANC-led administration.
4: Cyril Ramaphosa, or those close to him, somehow influenced the police into launching the move in a deliberate attempt to put added pressure on President Zuma. His son, Duduzane, works for the Guptas and is being talked of as a possible target of the NPA's investigations.
This would be an illegal move, but one that many South Africans now see as entirely possible, given the apparent politicisation of the justice system and the erosion of key institutions during the Zuma era.
Why was the Gupta's house raided?
According to a statement released by the Hawks - the police's elite high-priority crimes unit - the raids were carried out in connection with the Vrede farm investigation.
Three people were arrested during the raid, with two more expected to hand themselves in. According to local media, one of those arrested was a Gupta family member.
That investigation relates to the Estina dairy farm near Vrede, in the Free State, a project which was originally meant to help poor black farmers but from which the Gupta family are alleged to have pocketed millions of dollars, allegations they deny.
A tranche of leaked emails released last year alleged that some of the money ended up paying for the family's lavish wedding at Sun City, South Africa's upmarket holiday resort.
In January, the Hawks raided the offices of the Free State Premier, Ace Magashule, looking for documents linked to the project. Mr Magashule was elected secretary-general of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) in December.
Just who are the Gupta family?
The embattled Gupta family own a range of business interests in South Africa, including computing, mining, air travel, energy, technology and media.
The three brothers, Atul, Rajesh and Ajay, moved to the country in 1993 from India, just as white-minority rule was ending.
They are known friends of President Zuma - and his son, daughter and one of the president's wives worked for the family's firms.
The brothers have been accused of wielding enormous political influence in South Africa, with critics alleging that they have tried to "capture the state" to advance their own business interests.
What are the other allegations against the Guptas?
Former Deputy Finance Minister Mcebisi Jonas made a public allegation in 2016 that he was offered 600m rand ($50m; £36m) by the Gupta family to be the next finance minister - as long as he did their bidding.
It was followed by a damning report by a South African government ombudsman that accused the Guptas and President Zuma of colluding to win government contracts.
The public backlash worsened in 2017 when more than 100,000 emails were leaked which appeared to show the extent of the family's influence.
It suggested a complex web of government contracts, as well as alleged kickbacks and money laundering.
It prompted marches and public protests against the family and President Zuma, dubbed the "Zuptas".
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Jeremy Corbyn has said it is wrong to blame "an entire ethnic community" for child abuse after one of his frontbench team quit over a press article.
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Sarah Champion faced a backlash after writing in the Sun that "Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls".
The Rotherham MP quit as shadow equalities minister and apologised for her "extremely poor choice of words".
The Labour leader denied claims he had sacked Ms Champion for speaking out.
He told BBC Manchester: "Child exploitation is wrong. Child abuse is wrong. It is a crime, and it has to be dealt with.
"But you cannot blame an entire community, an entire nation or an entire ethnic community. You have to deal with it for the crime of what it is."
Asked if he had sacked Ms Champion over her comments, he said: "Look, she resigned and I accepted the resignation, so, clearly, I think it's right thing to do and I thank her for her work."
Communities Secretary Sajid Javid accused Mr Corbyn of stifling debate.
The Conservative minister said in a tweet: "Corbyn wrong to sack Sarah Champion. We need an honest open debate on child sexual exploitation, including racial motivation."
Business Minister Margot James said she was "enraged" by the Labour leader's "treatment of Sarah Champion".
She wrote on her Facebook page that the Rotherham MP's comments "might have been hard hitting, but that doesn't make them any less true".
The Conservative MP for Stourbridge added: "There needs to be a discussion about how we overcome the cultural attitudes towards women that have contributed to these crimes; and to the ways in which they were covered up for so long.
"There has been a disgraceful history of shouting down brave Labour women MPs who have stood up to community pressures in Northern cities like Keighley (just google former MP Ann Cryer) and Rotherham in exposing these crimes, of which the appalling treatment of Sarah Champion is yet another chapter."
Conservative former Children's Minister Tim Loughton said he did not know if Ms Champion had been sacked or not - but he accused Mr Corbyn of being "deaf to a problem that is happening in our country".
The Equality and Human Rights Commission said it was a "real shame" that Ms Champion had resigned because of "over-sensitivity about language".
Labour's shadow justice minister, Yasmin Qureshi, refused to be drawn on whether it was right that Ms Champion had stepped down.
"I think you need to ask Sarah that question," she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"Of course we should deal with abuse wherever it occurs and we should ask ourselves as to what we can do to ensure these things don't happen."
Ms Champion's article was written after 17 men were convicted of forcing girls in Newcastle to have sex.
The men, who were mostly British-born, were of Iraqi, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian, Iranian and Turkish heritage.
In interviews following the convictions, the Labour MP said such crimes involved "predominately Pakistani men" and a fear of being called racist was hampering the authorities' investigations.
She then wrote the Sun article, which also included the line: "These people are predators, and the common denominator is their ethnic heritage."
Among the article's critics was fellow Labour MP Naz Shah, who said it was "irresponsible" and "setting a dangerous precedent".
Following the backlash, Ms Champion sought to distance herself from the article, claiming it had been altered, something denied by the newspaper.
Announcing she was stepping down, Ms Champion said: "I apologise for the offence caused by the extremely poor choice of words in the Sun article on Friday.
"I am concerned that my continued position in the shadow cabinet would distract from the crucial issues around child protection which I have campaigned on my entire political career.
"It is therefore with regret that I tender my resignation as shadow secretary of state for women and equalities."
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The apparent unmasking of a Russian man accused of the Salisbury poisoning has made headlines around the world, but for many the source of the revelation may still be unfamiliar.
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By Gareth EvansBBC News
Bellingcat, a website which describes itself as "the home of online investigations", published the bombshell piece on Wednesday.
It said that one of the suspects was not a civilian on a sightseeing trip, the explanation put forward by Russian President Vladimir Putin, but rather a highly-decorated military officer named Anatoliy Chepiga.
British officials haven't commented, but the BBC understands there is no dispute over the identification. Russia has dismissed the claim as "groundless".
The website behind the story was founded in 2014 by British journalist Eliot Higgins, with the help of a crowd-funding campaign.
At the time of its creation, he was a lone blogger known as Brown Moses who was operating out of his living room in Leicester.
He had been made redundant from his job as an administrative and finance worker for a group that housed refugees and, in 2013, he began to focus on his blog full-time.
Despite having no formal journalism training or experience, he quickly gained a reputation in the relatively new field of open-source, citizen journalism, in which people analyse publicly available materials to uncover new facts about major stories.
His focus was conflict zones, primarily in the Middle East, and he initially looked into the use of chemical weapons in Syria by examining videos and pictures online.
"I just enjoyed doing it so much and I was getting more and people reading it," he tells the BBC.
"I saw more and more people who were doing their own kind of open-source investigation and more people who were becoming interested in it."
He saw an opportunity to build something bigger than his blog, and decided to try to raise funds for Bellingcat through the funding site Kickstarter.
The name comes from the idiom 'to bell the cat', which means to take on a dangerous task.
In a post announcing the creation of Bellingcat, Mr Higgins said the website would have two main objectives.
Firstly, "[bringing] together a group of writers and activists who through using open source tools have transformed journalism" and, secondly, "[attracting] others to come and learn how to use these same tools".
The latter has been an ever-present feature on the site, which has a dedicated section that offers advice and information to budding citizen journalists.
There is an eclectic mix of guides, ranging from how to identify burnt villages by satellite imagery to how to collect sources from Syria if you don't read Arabic.
"I intended the website originally as a place to have guides and case studies for people who could then learn how to do it themselves," he says.
"On the other side, I wanted our own investigations, and a place where people could share what they found interesting and post their own findings."
In the past few years, the website has been behind a number of high-profile investigations that have received widespread media coverage.
It spearheaded an examination of the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 which came down over Ukraine in 2014, killing all 298 people on board. The West and Ukraine say pro-Russian rebels shot down the flight, while Moscow has repeatedly blamed Ukrainian forces.
But in 2016, Bellingcat said it had identified Russian soldiers who were likely to have been involved.
It linked personnel from the 2nd Battalion of the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade to the tragedy following an open-source investigation.
Bellingcat said it then submitted all uncensored names and supporting evidence to the Dutch investigators, who are continuing their criminal inquiry into the disaster.
Last year, Mr Higgins told the website Motherboard about the important role social media played in that investigation. "We had photographs shared online, people discussing the photographs, people tweeting about it," he said.
"It created ripples, and what we try to do is identify them, and understand them in the context of all the other material. That gives us a very solid case."
Other notable Bellingcat investigations have looked into the bombing of hospitals in Aleppo, Mexican drug lords and the war in Iraq. All of these hinged on using publicly available information to uncover new facts.
Its work on the Skripal poisoning involved using some similar methods.
Bellingcat says its investigators searched images on several online search engines, browsed photos of a military academy yearbook, searched specific terms online and scoured leaked Russian databases.
It then obtained extracts from the passport file of Anatoliy Chepiga, which contained a photograph that strongly resembled the Salisbury suspect originally named as Ruslan Boshirov.
"The Skripal story has been a coalition of people from different backgrounds working together," Mr Higgins says. "To be able to build that community and be part of that is something I'm proud of."
He says the reaction to the investigation has been satisfying. "It's been really nice to actually see a Bellingcat story make such an impact [in the UK]", he says.
The website has been criticised by Russia - which has disputed the Skripal investigation and publicly questioned whether Bellingcat is an arm of the UK government.
But Mr Higgins often responds to these allegations directly on social media and is relaxed about it.
"We're used to getting [criticism] both from the social media public and the Russian government itself," he says. "It would be more surprising if they didn't react to our pieces!"
Despite what he describes as "day-to-day internet drama", the website has continued to grow. Mr Higgins says its funding comes from crowd-funded donations and workshops he holds on open-source investigations.
There has also been a flurry of donations from the public following the release of the Skripal investigations.
"Up until about a year ago, we were mostly volunteers and I had three or four people working with me," he says. "Over the last year we have expanded to 10 members of staff plus a translation team and our volunteers. So we've expanded quite significantly."
He is now aiming at expanding Bellingcat's work.
"We're focusing on a few key areas, we're looking at Yemen and Libya as areas to expand into so we're involved in a couple of projects there," he says.
"Everyone here is motivated because they enjoy the process rather than focusing on a particular topic," he adds. "They enjoy the process of doing an investigation and finding out stuff and making discoveries."
"I think that's the biggest motivating factor and why they enjoy it."
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A violinist took a fatal overdose after learning the jury in the trial of the man who sexually abused her was instructed by the judge to find not guilty verdicts for several charges.
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Frances Andrade died at her home in Guildford, Surrey on 24 January 2013, a week after testifying against ex-choirmaster Michael Brewer.
Brewer abused Mrs Andrade at Chetham's School of Music in Manchester.
He was jailed for six years for five counts of indecent assault.
Mrs Andrade was 14 when the abuse began in 1978.
Det Con Mark Atkinson, the officer who led the case against Brewer, said: "There was no official process in place [to keep her updated with the trial].
"I would do it in due course. I did not contact Fran about it.
"From what I've heard afterwards, Fran was aware because it was reported in the press."
'Declined help'
The inquest at Woking Coroner's Court heard Mrs Andrade, 48, told her GP and nurses in 2011 that she did not want counselling because police had said it might interfere with her recollections.
But Mr Atkinson said he had strongly advised her to seek help and gave her the contact for the Rape and Sexual Assault Centre in Guildford, although she did not seek counselling.
"I asked Fran if she was getting any help and what type of help she was receiving," he said.
"She advised that she had not got any help because it would have had an impact on the trial.
"I said this was absolutely not the case and that if she needed help I could arrange that.
"I was not aware she had declined help until after the trial."
The inquest also heard that after taking a third overdose on 3 January, the mother-of-four had insisted she did not want to take her own life.
Juliet Mutumbani, a mental health nurse for the Surrey and Borders partnership NHS Trust's Home Treatment Team, said: "Mrs Andrade said she did not take the overdose to kill herself but as a way of coping with the court case.
"Her response was she had a family to think about."
The inquest continues.
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A catamaran that was missing for more than a week after disappearing during a transatlantic race has been taken to the Isles of Scilly of Cornwall.
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The Orinoco Flo was spotted on Monday by a rescue helicopter about 80 miles (130km) off the islands.
The islands' St Mary's lifeboat was dispatched to meet it. The catamaran was brought into port overnight.
Last seen en-route to Falmouth from Antigua, the yacht went missing on 2 June and had been out of radio contact.
The single-handed skipper of the yacht, Matthew Gill, lost his mast in bad weather about 852 miles (936km) out in the Atlantic.
He waited two days for the sea conditions to calm down before beginning the task of retrieving the heavy mast.
The skipper, who had rigged an improvised mast and sail, was unhurt.
The rescue was coordinated by Falmouth Coastguard and the vessel was spotted by a helicopter from RNAS Culdrose in Cornwall.
Phil Mathias, from the coastguard, said: "The gentleman was on board but he wasn't making any progress. There was very little wind. One of his engines had broken down.
"He still had a fair old way to go about 75-80 miles off Scilly. So he decided to accept the help of St Mary's lifeboat."
The yacht is being refuelled on Scilly before Mr Gill plans to motor on to Falmouth.
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Brazil has said it is investigating corruption and price-fixing allegations against 18 companies, including Siemens of Germany and Alstom of France.
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Brazil's antitrust agency accused the firms of being part of a cartel to fix prices for the construction and upkeep of metro and train networks, including in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.
Siemens said it had "zero tolerance for any kind of illegal conduct".
Alstom said it was "taking the allegations very seriously".
Brazil's Administrative Council for Economic Defence (Cade) said the 18 companies were part of a cartel involved in 15 projects valued at $4 billion (£2.4bn) in total, with contracts in the Brazilian Federal District and the states of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul.
Cade is part of Brazil's justice ministry, responsible for investigating anti-trust cases.
"Cade has started (...) administrative proceedings to investigate alleged cartel conduct in the bidding for trains and metros between at least 1998 and 2013," it said in a statement on its website.
"Eighteen companies and 109 employees of these companies are accused of involvement in illegal (activities)."
'Cooperation'
According to Cade, the companies adopted "several anti-competitive strategies", such as the prearrangement of offers tendered in bidding processes, and bribed dozens of officials to secure the contracts.
At times, it alleged, the cartel would also determine which company would win a bid by putting only one forward to tender an offer.
In a statement sent to the Associated Press (AP) agency, Siemens said it was "collaborating'' with the investigations, which it said would "lead to a more ethical and transparent business environment in Brazil".
In another statement seen by AP, Alstom said it was "taking the allegations very seriously" and "carrying out its own thorough investigation".
Cade has also named companies from Spain, Canada, South Korea and the United States, among other countries.
It said the firms that allegedly formed part of the cartel would be summoned to present their defence.
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Voters will head to the polls to elect a Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Devon and Cornwall on 6 May.
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PCCs work to ensure police forces in England and Wales are running effectively.
Their responsibilities include setting out force budgets, holding chief constables to account and providing a link between communities and police.
PCCs are usually elected every four years, but elections were postponed in May 2020 due to coronavirus.
These are the candidates who have said they intend to stand for Devon and Cornwall PCC this year (listed alphabetically):
Brian Blake, Liberal Democrat
Brian Blake served with Devon and Cornwall Police for more than 30 years before moving on to work at the Ministry of Defence for 13 years.
Gareth Derrick, Labour
Gareth Derrick served in the Royal Navy for 36 years and was elected as a city councillor for Plymouth in 2018. He sits on the Police and Crime Panel.
Alison Hernandez, Conservative
Alison Hernandez is the incumbent PCC and was first elected in 2016. She runs her own management consultancy business.
This list will be updated if and when more candidates declare they will stand.
Follow BBC News South West on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to [email protected].
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Police and crime commissioners
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A nurse who pulled an 88-year-old dementia patient along by her ankles has been struck off.
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Steven Campbell, 50, was convicted earlier this year of dragging Jessie Colquhoun along the corridor into her room at Glasgow's Gartnavel Hospital.
The Nursing and Midwifery Council ruled he will not work as a nurse again after he failed to show remorse or give a reasonable explanation for his actions.
Campbell's victim also had a heart condition and arthritis.
The incident, which took place in October 2017, was reported to authorities after it was witnessed by relatives of another patient.
Two sisters visiting their grandmother in hospital reported Campbell to the Care Commission.
In January, they told Campbell's trial at Glasgow Sheriff Court that they witnessed Ms Colquhoun being "dragged along the corridor by the ankles".
Campbell claimed Ms Colquhoun had been aggressive and that she put herself on to the floor and he and a colleague controlled that movement.
He said he had put his hands on her calves and swivelled her then slid her into her room.
But Sheriff Mary McCrory said she found the sisters' evidence that to be "convincing and utterly compelling".
She made a community payback order with the conditions he must carry out 200 hours unpaid work, and Campbell was tagged for three months and given a curfew.
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Rene Redzepi is the Willy Wonka of food science, conducting gastronomic experiments so popular that customers fly round the world to eat at his £150-a-head Copenhagen restaurant.
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By Stephen SackurBBC News, Copenhagen
If you have just thrown out your Christmas tree, may I make a suggestion? Next year don't dump it, burn it or shred it - just eat it.
Believe me, the needles from your average Christmas fir can be delicious.
How do I know? Well I am just back from the most extraordinary gastronomic journey of my life - the citrusy tang of freeze dried Christmas tree was just one of the surprises along the way.
My guide was Rene Redzepi, a bearded 34-year-old chef with intense brown eyes whose Copenhagen restaurant Noma is currently regarded by food critics as the world's finest.
Actually, to his worldwide legion of gastronomic disciples, labelling Redzepi as a cook is akin to defining Michelangelo as a jobbing painter and decorator.
From humble beginnings - he left school at 15 with no qualifications - Redzepi has developed a philosophy of food which embraces science, nature and art.
I met him in the teeth of a biting wind on a bleak quayside in the Danish capital. Rene's restaurant occupies the end of an old warehouse overlooking the water - but that was not our first destination.
Instead he took me to a sturdy houseboat tied up at the jetty. "Welcome to the Nordic Food Lab," he said with a smile.
If Willy Wonka had been Scandinavian, this is what his chocolate factory might have looked like.
Pine floor, white walls, clean lines, and on every available surface outlandish food experiments being conducted by white-coated technicians.
In one corner, an array of flasks bubbling with brown liquid. Nearby a centrifuge whirring. It would not have looked out of place in a nuclear lab.
"We're trying to break down peas to get at the natural pea fat. Maybe we can produce pea butter," Rene explained.
I was invited to taste a murky liquid from a small glass pipette. It tasted a lot like soy sauce. Apparently it was extracted from local seaweed.
This is what chef Redzepi calls "the science of deliciousness".
Live ants served
From freeze dried pine needles to fermented mackerel, 21st Century chemistry is being harnessed to the age-old quest for new flavours.
The raw materials are local - either foraged from the sea, the shore or the forest - or grown by a select band of trusted organic producers.
It is that commitment to authentic Nordic ingredients that defines Redzepi. No olive oil, no garlic, no reliance on air transport and the freezer to subvert the rhythm of the seasons.
This means that eating at this time of year is truly a taste of Nordic winter - bitter leaves, mushrooms, nuts, berries, and moss are in, but sun-dried tomatoes are most definitely out.
I confess I was nervous before taking my seat in the compact dining room. Foodies think nothing of flying half way round the world for a table here - reservations have to be made months in advance.
And there is something quite disconcerting about being one of 40 diners in a restaurant staffed by 70. Frankly even if a dish tastes disgusting, the pressure is on to empty your plate.
To my relief, the two dishes I had been most worried about - the live wriggling prawn and the live local ants (apparently they release a delicious lemon grassy acid taste when they expire in your mouth) were off the menu.
Many of the 16 courses were no bigger than a chicken nugget.
I will not bore you with every detail, but the highlights included - snail wrapped in nasturtium flowers, quail's egg served on a bed of smoking hay, mussels served in an edible seaweed shell, fried moss dusted with porcini shavings, and for pudding, an ice cream served in luminous green dill sauce.
Was it delicious? Well, as the curate said of his egg, it was in parts. But even when it was not, the experience was extraordinary.
Rene's international team of chefs served many of the dishes themselves. They explained the provenance of the food, the intricate preparation and the quest for perfect presentation.
They were neither fussy, nor pretentious - my heart warmed to a young Irish sous chef who whispered of his local cheese dish "You'll love the cracker because it tastes just like a Ritz".
Given the cost - dinner starts at £150 a head - and the long waiting list for a reservation, Noma is an experience for the lucky few.
But Rene Redzepi's obsession, serving food that in his words gives you "a sense of time and place to your very bones" is surely relevant to us all.
Come to think of it, I have got a fir tree in the garden. I have got a lawn full of moss and some very strange fungi growing in my borders. Lunch, anyone?
Stephen Sackur spoke to Rene Redzepi for a recent edition of BBC's Hardtalk, available online (UK only) at the above link.
How to listen to From Our Own Correspondent:
BBC Radio 4: A 30-minute programme on Saturdays, 1130.
Second 30-minute programme on Thursdays, 1100 (some weeks only).
Listen online or download the podcast
BBC World Service:
Hear daily 10-minute editions Monday to Friday, repeated through the day, also available to listen online.
Read more or explore the archive at the programme website.
Stephen Sackur also presents HARDtalk broadcast on BBC World News and the BBC News Channel.
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Councils across Wales need to work together more in return for remaining as 22 separate authorities, the finance secretary has warned.
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By Nick ServiniPolitical editor, Wales
Mark Drakeford said councils needed to put greater urgency into pooling back-office functions like wages, council tax administration and legal services.
Joint working will form part of a local government bill next year.
A consultation on reforming council elections could also see 16-year-olds given the vote by the Welsh Government.
On Tuesday, Mr Drakeford is setting out plans for councils in three regions, based around Cardiff, Swansea and north Wales, to work together in areas like economic development, strategic planning and transport.
He said there had been reluctance among councils to share back-office services and called for more energy in reform so the public receives a more efficient service.
"There is a bargain here. I am persuaded that keeping the 22 local authorities as the front door that people walk through and where they elect their local councillors, so they know who is accountable for these services. I think that case is made," he said.
"But behind that front door, we need local authorities more committed to working together, to working across boundaries, to sharing services, to doing things in a collaborative regional way.
"They get the certainty of knowing they are there, they were elected for five years in May, they will be elected for another five years in five years' time, but behind the front door, systematic, mandatory regional working on shared services is the way of the future."
The Welsh Government dropped merger plans to cut 22 councils to eight or nine last year.
In addition, the consultation starting on Tuesday also asks whether prisoners should be able to vote.
However, the Welsh Government is unclear whether it will have the powers to introduce such a measure.
It will also look at whether councils should be allowed to decide their own voting system, which has been opposed by the Electoral Reform Society for potentially creating too much confusion.
Welsh Local Government Association (WLGA) leader Debbie Wilcox said councils already "have a track record of leadership and delivery on regional collaboration", such as the city deals in Wales.
"We are yet to see the full detail of the cabinet secretary's final proposals but there was broad endorsement of his initial white paper earlier this year," she said.
"Councils are moving towards more collaborative and regionalised services already but the WLGA has argued that any reform proposals must be underpinned by clear local accountability and that statutory duties and funding should continue to be routed through local authorities."
She added the WLGA was "keen to work with the Welsh Government" on electoral reform.
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Thousands of people have braved the rain to take part in Bristol's Pride celebrations.
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The Pride Parade set off from Berkeley Square at 11:00 BST and travelled down Park Street to College Green where the main event is being held.
It marks the end of Pride Week - a celebration of the lives and talents of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) community.
More than 40 acts are expected over five performance areas and two stages.
The parade was led by Afro Brazilian Sambistas dancers and the city's first openly-gay lord mayor, Councillor Peter Main.
The event is headlined by singer Martha Wash and performer Bright Light Bright Light.
During the evening a number of parties are planned.
A spokesman for the organisers said the parade was particularly important this year given cuts to services and that other community events had been cancelled.
"It's also the chance to show prejudice has no place in our city and that it is our diversity and communities that make Bristol and the South West great," he said.
"We welcome everybody that values equality to join us.
"Many people who may not be gay themselves may have some form of prejudice to overcome or know someone who is and want to show their support," he added.
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Same-sex marriage has become a front-page issue in the final days of Australia's election campaign.
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The ruling conservative Liberal Party has promised to hold a plebiscite on the issue if it returns to power at this weekend's election.
But questions remain over whether the party would abide by a result in favour of same-sex marriage.
Meanwhile a video has emerged of Opposition Leader Bill Shorten praising the idea of a plebiscite.
Mr Shorten last week slammed the government's plan as a "platform for homophobia" and advocated a parliamentary vote to decide the issue.
But he told a Christian lobby forum in 2013 that he would rather let the public vote on same-sex marriage than leave the issue to MPs.
Ministers dodge questions
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is tipped to hold power at the election on Saturday and is aiming to hold a public vote on same-sex marriage by the end of the year.
But the result of the vote would be non-binding and MPs would need to pass further legislation to make it law.
Two senior Australian ministers have refused to say if they would support same-sex marriage in parliament.
In an interview, Treasurer Scott Morrison refused six times to say how he would vote.
"My view is, if the plebiscite is carried nationally, then the legislation should pass," Mr Morrison told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
"If the plebiscite is not carried, then I think that settles the matter."
The treasurer - an evangelical Christian who worships at a Pentecostal megachurch - refused to give a straight answer when challenged for "clarity" on the issue.
In a separate interview, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop echoed the treasurer's comments, refusing to be drawn on the "hypothetical" issue.
"I would take my electorate's view into account, but I would also take into account how the plebiscite played out across Australia because, for example, a referendum gets up if it is a majority of states, majority of people in the majority of states," she said.
'Attitudes have moved on'
Meanwhile the video of Mr Shorten telling church leaders in 2013 that he was "completely relaxed" about a plebiscite on same-sex marriage has undermined his attack on the government.
Mr Shorten has claimed that the plebiscite would unleash a campaign of homophobia and hate, which could be avoided through a parliamentary vote on gay marriage.
In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corp., he played down his previous comments.
"Community attitudes have moved on in Australia," he said.
"When you look at the experience in Ireland, over a year ago, some of arguments which emerged were really ugly and repugnant."
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull - who takes a progressive stance on many social issues - says he will vote in favour of the marriage bill.
As a cabinet minister, he indicated he would have voted in favour of a motion to legalise same-sex marriage last year.
The proposal was opposed by former prime minister Tony Abbott.
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Campaigners have withdrawn their legal challenge against mud from alongside a nuclear power site being dumped off Cardiff Bay.
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By Steffan MessengerBBC Wales Environment Correspondent
The activists had requested an injunction to stop the work, which began last month.
About 300,000 tonnes is being dredged from the seabed near the Hinkley Point C building site in Somerset.
Independent AM Neil McEvoy said they agreed to discontinue the action after securing an Assembly vote.
It will come in a debate on the issue on 10 October.
The Campaign Against Hinkley Mud Dumping has argued Natural Resources Wales (NRW) failed to carry out an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and said core samples tested were insufficient under international rules and did not cover all significant radioactive substances from the Hinkley plant.
But both developers EDF and NRW insist independent tests have shown the sediment poses no risk.
Because the Severn Estuary is a designated special area of conservation, the developers argue that the sediment needs to be deposited locally, so the Cardiff Grounds site - which is licensed - was most suitable.
Hundreds of thousands of people have signed online petitions calling for further testing, after campaigners raised fears the mud could be contaminated with discharges of nuclear waste from the old Hinkley A and B reactors.
EDF has argued it is an "infinitesimally small level of exposure to radiation, far below the threshold requiring a more detailed assessment or even close to approaching a radiation dose that could impact human health or the environment".
Meanwhile, the Welsh Government has refused calls for further probes, claiming that could set a dangerous precedent.
More on this story:
The legal action was not about testing but whether an EIA was needed for the dumping to go ahead.
'Good news'
EDF argued that the work was covered by the 2,000-page environment statement that had been carried out for the Hinkley Point C project as a whole, which made several references to the dumping.
This formed part of the main planning application for the new nuclear power station, which had been approved by the UK Government.
But the campaigners claimed a separate assessment should have been carried out specifically relating to the dumping itself.
Following a successful crowd-funding campaign, legal action was brought on behalf of anti-dumping activists by Cian Ciaran - keyboard player for the Super Furry Animals.
Mr McEvoy said the action had confirmed that no EIA covering the dumping in Cardiff Grounds existed.
He urged all AMs to support the motion to stop further dumping at the Senedd next week.
"Some Labour AMs have expressed their concern about the dumping and we'll see now if they have the courage to do the right thing and vote with their conscience," he said.
An EDF spokesman said the claimant's decision to drop the case was "good news for a project that is vital for the UK's energy future and provides work for 25 Welsh companies and 1,000 Welsh workers".
He added: "EDF did everything that it was requested to do when it applied for a licence to dredge and deposit mud in the Severn estuary.
"The mud is no different to mud found anywhere else up and down the coast and it has been thoroughly tested by independent experts who confirmed it poses no threat to human health or the environment. The sediment is not classed as radioactive under UK law."
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The polite diplomatic façade was maintained but the words of the Egyptian and Ethiopian representatives revealed a belligerence that was hard to disguise.
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By Damian ZaneBBC News
The recent meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss Ethiopia's huge hydro-electric plant, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (Gerd), straddling the Blue Nile, was held by teleconference.
The social distance that the participants observed underscored the diplomatic gulf.
It is a gulf that threatens to sweep up the populations of the two countries into a nationalist fervour and mutual distrust.
The Gerd, which sits on the Nile's main tributary, is upstream of Egypt and has the potential to control the flow of water that the country almost entirely relies on.
It also will be, when fully operational, the largest hydro-electric plant in Africa, and projected to provide power to 65 million Ethiopians, who currently lack a regular electricity supply.
The construction, which began in 2011, is almost complete.
For the Egyptian and Ethiopian representatives at the UN meeting, the very existence of their countries was at stake.
"A threat of potentially existential proportions has emerged that could encroach on the single source of livelihood of over 100 million Egyptians," the country's Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said.
Using similar language, Ethiopia's UN ambassador Taye Atske-Selassie countered: "For Ethiopia, accessing and utilising its water resources is not a matter of choice, but of existential necessity."
When to fill up the dam
The rhetoric may disguise that after nearly a decade of talking, the two countries have managed to agree on a lot of things, but the crucial questions of how and when to fill up the dam, and how much water it should release, remain unresolved.
Years of bilateral and multilateral talks, expert commissions, an agreed Declaration of Principles between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan, the third country affected, have still not settled these basic issues.
And now we are at a point where Ethiopia says it will unilaterally start filling up the dam in the next few weeks to coincide with the rainy season. It is a process that is expected to take up to seven years.
For Ethiopia, the construction and filling of the dam are not two separate events, one of the country's negotiators Zerihun Abebe told the BBC.
"The Egyptians tried to confuse the international community" by suggesting that they are different things, he added, and argued that the 2015 Declaration of Principles allowed for Ethiopia to go ahead.
But this is not how Egypt sees it.
After the United States and the World Bank got involved late last year but failed to get Ethiopia to sign up to a document agreed with Egypt in February, the African Union (AU) has now said it will try and find a solution.
If the words of Egypt's foreign minister are anything to go by then a deal is urgently needed.
Colonial-era treaties
"The unilateral filling and operation of this dam without an agreement that includes the necessary precautions to protect the downstream communities… would heighten tensions and could provoke crises and conflicts that further destabilise an already troubled region," Mr Shoukry warned.
For its part, Ethiopia said it wanted to negotiate under the auspices of the AU, rather than the UN, but blamed Egypt for its "intransigence and its insistence on historic rights and current use".
Those rights, as far as Egypt is concerned, go back to at least 1929, when the British government recognised the "natural and historical right of Egypt to the waters of the Nile". It also granted Egypt veto rights on any projects upstream.
Then in 1959, Egypt and Sudan signed a deal in which the two countries agreed to share the Nile's resources, with Egypt taking the biggest volume. No reference was made to any of the other nine countries in the river's basin, including Ethiopia, the source of the Blue Nile.
The tributary, which merges with the White Nile in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, provides around 80% of the total flow of the river and Ethiopia sees it as a "historic injustice" that it is unable to take advantage of this natural resource, Mr Zerihun said.
If Ethiopia agrees to allowing a specific volume of water to flow to Egypt every year then this will "confirm a colonial privilege of the most downstream country, Egypt. It's like neo-colonialism and that is unacceptable," he added.
In essence, what Ethiopia is accusing Egypt of is wanting to maintain the flow that was guaranteed in 1959.
Ethiopia says that in the second year of filling it will release a minimum of 31 billion cubic metres through the Gerd, but beyond that it cannot be tied to a specific number.
Explore the Nile with 360 video
Join Alastair Leithead and his team, travelling in 2018 from the Blue Nile's source to the sea - through Ethiopia and Sudan into Egypt.
This 360° video is a version of the first VR documentary series from BBC News. To view the full films, click here.
Maintaining the flow of a set volume of water to Egypt regardless of the rainfall pattern could mean that the Gerd will stop functioning during prolonged droughts.
While Egypt is alarmed by the prospect of not knowing how much water it is going to receive.
Nations united over the dam
The generation of so much heat after nine years of negotiations may reflect the fact that this is the diplomatic end-game rather than an unbridgeable gap and things will soon cool down.
But both Egypt's President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi and Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed also have domestic political considerations and populations who have become heavily invested in the issue.
In Ethiopia's case, people have literally invested in the dam. The $4bn (£3.2bn) cost of the project has been partly met by persuading Ethiopians at home and abroad to lend the government money by buying bonds.
While Mr Abiy faces political challenges that have dented his support, the Gerd is an issue that people can rally behind.
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Some have taken to the video-sharing platform TikTok to illustrate the issues with cups and jugs of water. One that has been widely viewed shows a woman with a jug, representing Ethiopia, pouring water into two small cups and saying that her country is in control.
Egyptians have made their own videos, with one suggesting that the dam is vulnerable to attack.
In general, Egyptian media have been supporting the government in the talks over the dam, with some outlets accusing Ethiopia of being uncooperative during the crisis.
While the media in the two countries may want to up the stakes, it is the job of diplomats to try and calm things down.
It is still not clear, however, that those involved in the talks are doing this.
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Former Co-operative Bank chairman Paul Flowers has been suspended by Labour for bringing the party into disrepute after he was reportedly caught buying and using illegal drugs.
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He has already apologised after a newspaper showed him apparently handing over £300 to purchase cocaine.
Mr Flowers was chairman of the Co-Op Bank from April 2010 to June this year.
The chairman of the Commons Treasury Committee said he had been "manifestly unsuitable" for the role.
The Co-operative Group has launched an investigation into "any inappropriate behaviour" at the group or the Co-operative Bank and a "root-and-branch review" of the structure of the organisation.
Mr Flowers, 63, who lives in Bradford, has been a Methodist preacher for almost 40 years and served as a Labour councillor for Bradford Council for a decade.
'Difficult year'
The Mail on Sunday alleges that he handed over money for cocaine last weekend. His acquaintance Stuart Davies, who made a film of events, told the newspaper he had exposed Mr Flowers because he had been disgusted by his hypocrisy.
Mr Flowers has already apologised, but a Labour spokesman said: "In the light of recent reports, we have today suspended Paul Flowers as a member of the Labour Party for bringing the party into disrepute."
Labour leader Ed Miliband said: "He was involved in the Co-op and that is no longer the case. I think we will leave it there.
"You appoint people from a whole range of backgrounds to look at a whole range of issues and we have a range of business people working with us.
"The police are looking into the matter and I'm not going to comment on an ongoing investigation. Suffice to say that group no longer exists. We should let the police inquiry take its course."
Mr Flowers gave evidence to the Treasury Select Committee on 6 November - a few days before he allegedly bought the drugs.
The questioning followed Co-op Bank coming close to collapse after pulling out of a deal to buy hundreds of Lloyds Bank branches.
It blamed the economic environment and increased regulations for its withdrawal in April but was later found to have a £1.5bn capital shortfall.
The committee's chairman, Conservative MP Andrew Tyrie, told BBC Radio 4's World at One: "It's fair to say that the majority of my colleagues had already concluded he was manifestly unsuitable well before the weekend's revelations."
Mr Flowers has also been suspended from the Bradford church where he is minister for three weeks pending an investigation.
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The Metropolitan Police Commissioner interrupted a BBC radio interview to jump into a taxi and make an arrest.
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Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe was near Bruce Grove station in Tottenham, north London, when a cab driver said his passengers had refused to pay the fare and stolen money from his dashboard.
Sir Bernard jumped into the minicab in pursuit and arrested a suspect some distance away.
The Met Police said a 19-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of theft.
Sir Bernard was taking part in a pre-recorded interview with BBC London 94.9 Drivetime presenter Eddie Nestor on the issue of cuts at about 11:30 BST when the minicab driver approached him.
The Met Police said "four males were seen to jump out of the vehicle and run off" and the Commissioner and an officer got into the minicab in pursuit.
A 17-year-old youth was arrested inside Bruce Grove station on suspicion of theft, handling and making off without payment.
The officers then left the taxi and got into a police car that arrived there, before embarking on their search for the three other suspects.
One of them, aged 19, was seen in nearby Napier Road and subsequently arrested on suspicion of theft and making off without payment. Both arrested men are in police custody.
'Very slack'
Speaking to BBC London 94.9, the driver, who gave his name as Mohammed, said he had picked up some people from a hotel in Chingford and was asked to drive them to a location but one of the passengers asked to be taken to Stamford Hill instead.
He claimed the passenger then took £20 from his dashboard and ran away.
"When I see the police, I ask the police 'Please can you stop the guys?" he said.
Asked whether he knew the officer who jumped into his cab was the head of the Met Police, the driver said "no", but added: "He's very good man, very kind man, he help us as well... he come sit in the car and searched the area as well."
After the pursuit and arrest in Tottenham earlier, the commissioner said: "The important thing for today, at least for me, is that I have made an arrest at every rank as a police officer, so as chief constable at Merseyside, but never as commissioner, and I have been here three years.
"That's very slack, it's a disgrace, but today we have put it right."
In 2006, when Sir Bernard was the chief constable of Merseyside, he sprinted after a suspected drink-driver in the Edge Lane area of Liverpool after spotting him from his chauffeur-driven car.
The officer ran after the man and arrested him.
The Met Police said a 47-year-old man who attended a north London police station to "act as an appropriate adult" for the 17-year-old who was arrested on suspicion of theft from a motor vehicle earlier in the day, was himself arrested.
Police found the adult was wanted on suspicion of theft over a separate offence.
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An eight-week-old baby died from a head injury after being shaken by her mother or father, a jury has heard.
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Tiffany Tate and Michael Roe deny murdering Holly Roe and causing or allowing her death at their Sussex home in September 2018.
Lewes Crown Court heard post-mortem tests found the infant had bleeding and bruising around her brain, bleeding in both her eyes and 12 rib fractures.
Prosecutor Sally Howes QC said all the injuries were non-accidental.
"The opinion of the many pathologists involved in the investigation into the death of this baby is that the combination and extent of the injuries found indicates... some form of shaking," she said.
Ms Howes said experts concluded the brain injuries were likely to be caused by "violent shaking" and the rib fractures were thought to be caused by "excessive squeezing".
Jurors heard experts found Holly's injuries fell into three key time periods, haemorrhages less than 48 hours before death, several days before she died and a few weeks before her death, while the rib fractures were two to 10 days before her death.
An ambulance was called to the family home in Alderbrook Close, just after 01:30 BST on 10 September 2018, following reports a baby was in cardiac arrest, the court was told.
Paramedics found the infant cold, not breathing and with no heart activity at all.
Holly was later declared dead in hospital.
'Difficulty bonding'
She was born on 14 July 2018, two months prematurely, and shortly afterwards Ms Tate told a health visitor she was having "difficulty bonding" with her daughter, the jury was told.
A few days before Holly died Mr Roe told a health visitor he had taken over night-feeds as Ms Tate "had no patience feeding Holly at night".
On 10 September, Ms Tate was upstairs in bed and Mr Roe was alone with Holly when he gave her a midnight feed, the court was told.
Mr Roe told police she was "absolutely fine" before he put Holly to bed and then fell asleep, jurors heard.
He said later something "startled" him and when he felt Holly's head it was cold while her chest was warm.
Jurors were told Mr Roe woke Ms Tate and gave Holly two rescue breaths but she did not respond.
The court heard Ms Tate told police she was woken by Mr Roe at 01:30 BST who said: "Holly's cold. She's not breathing."
Jurors also heard Ms Tate told police she was woken a couple of weeks earlier by Holly screaming and heard banging in the lounge before she found Mr Roe trying to feed Holly through her nose with a syringe.
The jury heard she told police Holly sounded in pain and was "proper screaming".
The trial continues.
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A 16-year-old boy who became homeless after his parents abandoned him did not receive proper support from Kent County Council, a report has found.
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The Local Government Ombudsman (LGO) said the boy did not accept foster care and went on to "sofa surf" but the council had not explained the benefits of being a "looked-after" child.
The council said the report did not fully reflect the case's complexity.
But it accepted the boy should have been designated a child in care.
Nigel Ellis, LGO investigations chief, said: "This vulnerable person was denied access to key welfare services that he was entitled to and that the council has a duty to provide."
The report said the boy was made homeless in 2011 after his parents left the family home without making alternative arrangements for his welfare.
'No record of explanation'
The boy did not feel able to accept foster care, it said.
But investigators found the council did not properly assess whether the boy should be looked after and there was no record of staff clearly explaining the benefits of this to him.
The LGO said the boy would have had a social worker and proper planning for adulthood and it was likely he would have had an offer of housing when he was 18, if he had been looked after.
It found the council guilty of maladministration causing injustice, recommended the authority now confirm the boy as a "leaving care child", inform the relevant housing authority and set aside £3,000 for the injustice to be used to promote his independent living.
Councillor Jenny Whittle, cabinet member for specialist children's services, said the council was committed to resolving matters and had acted on the recommendations.
She said: "We did repeatedly offer him foster care, which he refused, and gave him financial help but we accept that we failed to offer him a wider range of accommodation."
In a separate report on Tuesday, the LGO found Kent County Council had overcharged the public for home care services under a provisional charging policy between April 2011 and December 2012.
The ombudsman had investigated a complaint that the county council charged for care services before making a financial assessment, contravening government guidelines.
The council said it accepted the findings and had withdrawn the policy and agreed to refund those affected but it believed government guidance about care charging was unclear.
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Joe and Jill Biden's German shepherds have been removed from the White House after the younger dog, Major, reportedly bit a security agent.
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According to US media, the pets have been sent back to the Biden family home in Wilmington, Delaware.
It follows Major's aggressive behaviour towards White House staff.
The Bidens adopted three-year-old Major in 2018. He became the first dog from an animal shelter to live in the White House.
Their other dog, Champ, is 13.
Anonymous sources told CNN that Major had been jumping, barking and charging at White House staff and security.
Both dogs moved into the White House four days into Joe Biden's presidency.
His wife, Jill, told The Kelly Clarkson Show last month she was focused on getting the dogs settled.
"They have to take the elevator, they're not used to that, and they have to go out on the South Lawn with lots of people watching them. So that's what I've been obsessed with, getting everybody settled and calm," she said.
Sharing the limelight with their owners, the dogs appeared alongside the first lady in a public service announcement encouraging Americans to wear face coverings, and also gave their own Christmas message in December.
The White House has a long history with pets, although Donald Trump was the first president in more than 100 years not to have a dog. At a rally in Texas in 2019, he said he would "feel a little phony" about walking one on the White House lawn, plus he didn't have the time.
Major is the first dog from a shelter to live in the White House, however President Lyndon B Johnson also had a rescue dog - a terrier mix named Yuki.
Yuki was found at a Texas petrol station by the president's daughter, Luci, on Thanksgiving Day in 1966, according to the Presidential Pet Museum website, which compiles information on the White House pets.
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Labour's Tom Watson has resigned from his shadow cabinet role as the party's general election co-ordinator.
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The MP has been embroiled in a row about the role of the Unite union in candidate selection in Falkirk.
Mr Watson, whose office manager was the union's choice for the seat, wrote that it was better for the "future unity" of Labour that he resigned.
Unite said the party's inquiry into the Falkirk selection had been a "stitch-up" and a "disgrace".
But Labour leader Ed Miliband told the BBC he was "incredibly angry" that the "good name of Labour Party members, of trade union members and of the Labour Party has been besmirched by the behaviour of a few individuals".
Unite - one of Labour's biggest backers - has been accused of hijacking the process to select a candidate in Falkirk to replace outgoing MP Eric Joyce.
'Mess'
Mr Watson's office manager, Karie Murphy, was the union's preferred candidate.
The MP, a former flat-mate of Unite's general secretary, offered to go on Tuesday but was asked to reconsider by Mr Miliband.
After Mr Watson resigned on Thursday, Labour spokesman confirmed it had suspended Falkirk party chairman Stephen Deans and Ms Murphy.
It also closed down the scheme under which unions could sign up members to the Labour Party and pay the fees on their behalf.
Mr Miliband said: "I am not going to have abuse of membership procedures and parliamentary selections in my party, and that is very clear, and I want to be clear about that to the leadership of Unite the Union in particular."
But Unite's general secretary Len McCluskey denounced the party's own investigation as "simply a stitch-up" designed to "produce some evidence, however threadbare, to justify pre-determined decisions".
He added: "Even on the basis of this flimsy report, it is clear that these decisions cannot be justified."
Mr McCluskey accused Labour of trying to "smear" Unite and its members, adding: "The mishandling of this investigation has been a disgrace."
He called for an independent investigation into events in Falkirk.
In his resignation letter, Mr Watson said he was not quitting because of "unattributed shadow cabinet briefings around the mess in Falkirk... though they don't help".
'Loyal servant'
He said: "I fully accept the consequences of that decision and genuinely hope my departure allows the party to move on."
In response, Mr Miliband praised Mr Watson's efforts to "regalvanise the grass roots" and said he had "helped to put real spirit into Labour Party activists up and down the country".
But he said: "As I said to you when we spoke at lunchtime today, I do believe that it does now make sense for you and for the party for you to step down."
Conservative Party chairman Grant Shapps said "This is a clear vote of no confidence in Ed Miliband's weak leadership from the man he brought in to run his campaign. But this still doesn't change the fact that Len McCluskey's Unite union is taking over the Labour Party."
Labour officials have now taken charge of the selection process in Falkirk for the 2015 general election, following claims that Unite had encouraged its members to join the party in order to lend their support to the union's preferred candidate.
Now only those who were party members by March 2012 can take part in the vote.
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A group of politicians are threatening legal action unless Boris Johnson orders an independent investigation into Russian interference in elections.
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The letter signed by Green MP Caroline Lucas and Labour's Chris Bryant follows a report which said the UK "badly underestimated" the Russian threat.
The parliamentarians argue the prime minister's "lack of action" breaches the right to free elections.
The government said the UK had "robust systems" to protect elections.
In July, Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee published a long-awaited report into Russian activity in the UK including disinformation campaigns, cyber warfare and the targeting of Russian expatriates in the UK.
It claimed the government made no effort to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 EU referendum and called for "immediate action" including "an assessment of potential Russian interference" in the Brexit vote.
US intelligence chiefs have accused Russia of interfering in the 2016 presidential election and earlier this month they warned that China, Russia and Iran were among the countries seeking to influence this year's vote.
Now a group of MPs and peers in the UK say they will take the prime minister to court if he refuses to take "essential steps to protect future elections".
'Last resort'
Describing legal action as "a last resort", the letter urges the PM to "order an independent investigation of Russian interference with the democratic process from at least the 2016 EU referendum".
Ms Lucas, Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, said: "Democratic processes are clearly at risk and it seems that the integrity of our elections is being deliberately undermined."
And Mr Bryant, the Labour MP for Rhondda, said: "The government's refusal to investigate is a complete dereliction of their duty to keep us and our way of life safe."
The group also includes Labour MP Ben Bradshaw, SNP MP Alyn Smith, the Lib Dem peer Lord Strasburger and Baroness Wheatcroft, who resigned from the Conservative Party last year.
A Cabinet Office spokeswoman said: "Safeguarding our democracy will always be an absolute priority and the UK has robust systems in place to protect our elections from interference.
"To prevent any future threats we are bringing forward new legislation to provide the security services and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to disrupt hostile state activity.
"And we have also published proposals for a digital imprint regime that will improve transparency in political campaigning online, and are developing an online media literacy strategy, to help empower the public to question the information they read online."
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A £15m regeneration plan for Liverpool's Welsh Streets has stalled hours after councillors gave the go-ahead to build new homes.
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The council planning committee backed a plan on Tuesday to build more than 150 new homes, demolish up to 440 homes and refurbish 37 houses.
But Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has frozen the plan while he decides whether to hold a public inquiry.
Mayor of Liverpool Joe Anderson urged Mr Pickles to let the scheme proceed.
Mr Pickles' decision came after representations from campaigners opposing demolition.
A Department for Communities and Local Government spokesman said: "The department has received representations asking for this application to be called-in.
"We have issued an Article 25 notification on this planning application while we assess whether or not to do so, so we can give the matter proper consideration."
But Mr Anderson said the decision should be made locally.
"The local community have said in no uncertain terms what they want in the Welsh Streets and as mayor I have listened to them in progressing these proposals," he said.
"They are fed up with constant unnecessary delays which are stopping them having the good quality homes they deserve," Mr Anderson added.
Irene Milson, chair of the Welsh Streets Tenants' Association said they had waited 10 years for the decision.
'Managed decline'
However Clem Cecil, director of Save Britain's Heritage (Save) said the organisation wanted to save more homes from demolition.
The campaign owns a house in one of the streets where a resident has spent more than £3,000 on renovating the property.
Another local campaigner, Jonathan Brown of Share Our City said: "If it goes through, the application will represent the triumph of managed decline over real regeneration.
"There will be up to 300 fewer homes and no local shops or businesses on the site."
A spokeswoman for the housing association Plus Dane said any delay to the scheme "would seriously jeopardise the funding available".
The social landlord could lose 50% of its funding for the project from the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) as the job must be completed by March 2015.
The Secretary of State has up to three weeks to decide whether to hold a public inquiry, which could delay the project by six to 12 months.
Thirty-seven houses will be restored including 9 Madryn Street - birthplace of former Beatle Ringo Starr.
The regeneration will also see 280 houses demolished in the first phase, ending 10 years of consultation. A second phase would see a further 160 homes demolished.
Of all the houses included on the site, 40 will be retained. These include the refurbishment of 37 terraced properties - 16 of them on Madryn Street, five on High Park Street and 16 on Kelvin Grove.
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Bristol Airport has begun testing driverless pods on its roads which are shared with buses, cars and pedestrians.
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The Capri project has secured £4.2m to run the pilot scheme as part of its overall aim to develop the technology.
Previously, Capri has tested the pods on designated roads or sharing space with pedestrians only.
The pods will run along routes about 1,800ft (548m) long between the car park and terminal on the airport site.
Capri said the aim was to ensure the pods were safe when encountering cyclists, children and adults who may be distracted.
The electrically powered pods will also help the airport cut its carbon emissions on the ground, it added.
The airport was chosen as the pods were originally developed by Bristol firm Advanced Transport Systems.
Dr Julian Turner, chief executive of Westfield Technology which makes the pods, said: "The design came out of the local area so it's great to bring it back again.
"The vehicle will navigate, slow down if someone walks in front of it and take you to your destination."
Analysis
By Dave Harvey, BBC West Business Correspondent
They've been running driverless pods at Heathrow for a decade. So why the fuss at Bristol Airport this morning?
In short, because they'll be sharing the road. Driverless vehicles have been running successfully all over the world, but always on dedicated roads.
No human drivers to interact with, no kids running in the road, no dozy pedestrians talking on a phone and not looking at the traffic.
So-called "driverless" car experiments on public roads have so far always had an engineer in the car, clutching an emergency stop button.
Bristol Airport offers this project a perfect test bed. The short run from the long stay car parks to the terminal building is complex enough.
There will be other motorists, other buses, cyclists, and plenty of pedestrians crossing the road.
Can the new system safely navigate all these daily hazards, and still deliver people quicker to the terminal?
Driverless car engineers the world over will be watching keenly how it works.
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Three thousand people have marched to mark the closure of Kellingley Colliery in North Yorkshire, and with it the end of British deep coal mining.
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BBC Look North's Danni Hewson said miners from former pits around the country had felt they had to attend.
The march started at Knottingley town hall in West Yorkshire and finished with a rally at Kellingley Miners Welfare.
The miners finished their final shifts at the pit on Friday.
Pit owner UK Coal said it would oversee the rundown of the mine before the site was redeveloped.
The remaining miners at the 58-hectare site are to receive severance packages at 12 weeks of average pay.
'The Big K'
Production began at Kellingley, locally called "the Big K", in April 1965.
It once employed 3,000 miners but its closure was announced in March, along with Thoresby in north Nottinghamshire, after the government refused further aid.
In April, the government loaned £10m to UK Coal for the managed closures. In a written statement to Parliament, Business Minister Michael Fallon said: "There is no value-for-money case for a level of investment that would keep the deep mines open beyond this managed wind-down period to autumn 2015."
Kirsten Sinclair, whose partner worked at Kellingley, said: "It's really important that [the closure] was marked. Nothing had been arranged for them and we just felt that this couldn't happen, they couldn't just go.
"The guys needed some love and affection shown to them for everything that they do."
Phil Whitehurst, of the GMB union, said: "Now the final 450 miners, the last in a long line stretching back for generations, are having to search for new jobs before the shafts which lead down to 30 million tons of untouched coal are sealed with concrete."
Dave Douglass of the NUM, said: "All them young lads in North , South and West Yorkshire who had long, well-paid futures in the coal industry have had that ripped away from them and absolutely nothing put in its place."
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A venue which hosted The Beatles in the 1960s faces a temporary shutdown as financial savings "need to be found".
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Staff have been offered voluntary redundancy by the trust which runs Stroud's Subscription Rooms.
It is expected to close its doors within the next few months, although no date has been announced.
The building was sold to Stroud Town Council for £1 by the district council last year and leased to the Stroud Subscription Rooms Trust (SSRT).
The district and town councils gave the trust £290,000 in grant funding but what is left of the money is not sufficient to continue trading, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.
'Historic venue'
A business plan was created for the trust to become financially self-supporting within five years, but improvements to the building, rising wage costs and low returns from bookings have seen planned changes delayed.
A report presented to town councillors last week said savings "needed to be found".
The town council and SSRT issued a joint statement saying they were working with promoters and performers to either postpone or relocate events which were booked during the closure period.
They also said the trust was "dedicated to ensuring that this historic venue thrives" and asked for continued public support
The 186-year-old venue has hosted a number of famous bands through the years, including The Beatles in 1962.
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Salmon that escaped from a fish farm near Campbeltown during Storm Ellen have now been found in three rivers in Cumbria in England.
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Almost 50,000 fish escaped when cages at the North Carradale farm broke free from their anchors in August.
Many have been found in local waters but now six have been discovered 150 miles away.
The owner of the fish farm, Mowi, said it would not comment on every incident of suspected captures of farmed salmon.
The fish were caught on the River Ehen, the Border Esk and on the Cumbrian Derwent river.
More of the fish are suspected to be in other rivers in the area.
This has been a massive change in the ecological balance of a marine ecosystem and the full impacts of it are only just starting to play out.
The escapes have more than trebled the number of salmon in the seas around the west coast, all competing for the same food as a wild species already experiencing significant decline.
Many have already been caught on local rivers but for six to be caught in Cumbria - more than 150 miles away - suggests this is not just a problem confined to Argyll.
Scientists are working to establish the full impact but it may not be truly known for some time.
The cages at the North Carradale farm broke free in the storm and drifted half a mile causing damage to four of the 10 pens.
Thirty thousand salmon died but another 50,000 escaped.
The figure is more than double the number of wild salmon on the west coast and there are fears the sudden overpopulation could cause an ecological disaster.
The Environment Agency and Fisheries Management Scotland (EAFMS) is warning anglers to be vigilant for the last month of the fishing season.
Farmed fish are usually distinguishable by their damaged fins.
Brian Shields from the EAFMS said: "We want to see as many wild fish spawning as possible to benefit future fish generations which is why we want to make sure these farmed fish can be removed from our rivers, within the law, to prevent future damage to the wild stocks."
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David Bowie's final album, Blackstar, has been shortlisted for the 25th annual Mercury Prize.
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It faces competition from two grime albums - Kano's Made In The Manor and Skepta's Konnichiwa.
The records, which address everything from police harassment to broken families, both reflect an emerging maturity in the genre.
Radiohead receive a record fifth nomination for their stirring, emotional album A Moon Shaped Pool.
The band, who are currently on tour in the US, have yet to win the album of the year award.
Other artists nominated for the £25,000 prize include Laura Mvula, The 1975 and Michael Kiwanuka.
The full list of nominees is:
Read more about the nominees
Blackstar, which contains the line: "Look up here, I'm in heaven," on the track Lazarus, has been called Bowie's "parting gift".
Released just two days before his death from cancer, it went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic.
There is also a nomination for former Mercury Prize-winner Antony and the Johnsons, who now goes under the name Anohni.
Her album, Hopelessness, is a lacerating look at the modern world that rages against President Obama, drone warfare and ecological disaster.
The shortlist was chosen by a panel of judges that includes former winner Jarvis Cocker, Radio 1's Annie Mac, pop producer Naughty Boy and singer Jessie Ware.
Notable omissions include Adele's 25 and Coldplay's A Head Full Of Dreams, which were the two biggest-selling albums released during the eligibility period: 26 September 2015 to 29 July 2016.
PJ Harvey, the only artist to win the prize twice, also misses out on a nomination for her latest album, The Hope Six Demolition Project.
The shortlist will be whittled down to six albums on the night of the awards, with one of those finalists selected by a public vote.
Presented by Lauren Laverne, the ceremony will be broadcast live on BBC Four and 6 Music on 15 September.
After last year's low-key event, the award will be handed out at a gala concert in London's Eventim Apollo, after Hyundai stepped in as a headline sponsor.
Analysis by Mark Savage, BBC Music reporter
After the row over diversity at this year's Brits, the Mercury list does its best to redress the balance, with an all-female rock band, two grime MCs, a music icon and a transgender torch singer.
Many of the nominated albums are unswervingly political. Anohni accuses President Obama of "executing without trial", while Skepta delivers a powerful message to the establishment: "We don't listen to no politician".
All of the records feel vital and innovative - yet it's the most commercial list in years, with all but one of the nominees having entered the UK album chart, four of them at number one.
That's thanks to a new panel of judges which puts an emphasis on musicians - including Jarvis Cocker and Naughty Boy - over rock critics and industry "suits".
They've even taken the brave decision to omit Adele's all-conquering 25. Not that she'll mind: The £25,000 prize is only just enough to buy one of her concert tickets on the secondary market.
Follow us on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, on Instagram at bbcnewsents, or email [email protected].
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Uganda's parliament has passed a law to impose a controversial tax on people using social media platforms.
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It imposes a 200 shilling [$0.05, £0.04] daily levy on people using internet messaging platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Viber and Twitter.
President Yoweri Museveni had pushed for the changes, arguing that social media encouraged gossip.
The law should come into effect on 1 July but there remain doubts about how it will be implemented.
The new Excise Duty (Amendment) Bill will also impose various other taxes, including a 1% levy on the total value of mobile money transactions - which civil society groups complain will affect poorer Ugandans who rarely use banking services.
State Minister for Finance David Bahati told parliament that the tax increases were needed to help Uganda pay off its growing national debt.
Experts and at least one major internet service provider have raised doubts about how a daily tax on social media will be implemented, the BBC's Catherine Byaruhanga reports from Uganda.
The government is struggling to ensure all mobile phone SIM cards are properly registered.
And of the 23.6 million mobile phone subscribers in the country, only 17 million use the internet, Reuters reports.
It is therefore not clear how authorities will be able to identify Ugandans accessing social media sites.
Mr Museveni pushed for the social media law back in March. He wrote a letter to Finance Minister Matia Kasaija insisting that the revenue collected by the social media tax would help the country "cope with consequences of olugambo [gossiping]".
But he argued there should be no tax on internet data as it was useful for "educational, research or reference purposes".
Critics at the time said the law would curtail freedom of expression.
Mr Kasaija dismissed concerns that the new law could limit people's use of the internet.
"We're looking for money to maintain the security of the country and extend electricity so that you people can enjoy more social media, more often, more frequently," he told Reuters in March.
Social media have become an important political tool in Uganda for both the ruling party and the opposition, our correspondent says.
Access to platforms was shut during presidential elections in 2016. President Museveni insisted at the time that it was done to "stop spreading lies".
Other East African countries are passing laws criticised by activists as affecting freedom of expression.
Tanzania's government won a court case on 29 May against opponents of new regulations requiring bloggers to pay a licence fee and disclose their financial backers.
In Kenya, a new cybercrime law came into force on 30 May.
Journalists and bloggers managed to win a court order to suspend some parts of the law including clauses on spreading "false" information, which they argue is an attempt to muzzle independent media.
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Hollywood musical La La Land has broken the record for the most Golden Globe Awards, winning seven prizes.
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It won every award it was nominated for - including best musical or comedy film, best director, screenplay, score and song.
Its stars Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling also won in the acting categories.
The Globes are seen as pointers to the Oscars. Moonlight was named best drama film, while Casey Affleck and Isabelle Huppert won other acting prizes.
British actors also enjoyed a golden night in the TV categories, with prizes for The Night Manager and The Crown.
Affleck was named best actor in a film drama for his role in Manchester By The Sea and French star Huppert was the surprise winner of the award for best film drama actress.
Her performance in thriller Elle - which was also named best foreign language film - beat contenders including Natalie Portman, who had been considered the favourite for playing Jackie Kennedy in Jackie.
Viola Davis was named best supporting film actress for playing a woman in 1950s Pittsburgh in Fences - a role she first played on Broadway six years ago.
The movie is an adaptation of the August Wilson play, which explores race relations in post-war America.
Accepting the award, Davis said: "It's not every day that Hollywood thinks of translating a play to screen - it doesn't scream 'moneymaker'. But it does scream art, and it does scream heart."
In a surprise result, British actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson was named best supporting actor for his role in Nocturnal Animals - a prize that had been widely expected to go to Mahershala Ali for Moonlight.
Zootopia was named best animated feature film at Sunday's ceremony, which was hosted by Jimmy Fallon.
The comedian's opening monologue was less risque than those of some of his predecessors, but he still found time to make light of the divisive year in US politics.
The talk show host joked that the Golden Globes ceremony was "one of the few places left where America still honours the popular vote" - a reference to Donald Trump beating Hillary Clinton in the recent US election despite getting fewer votes overall.
He also described grief-stricken film Manchester By The Sea as "the only thing more depressing than 2016".
The ceremony featured several references to Mr Trump - not least when Meryl Streep launched an attack on the US President-elect while accepting the Cecil B Demille award for outstanding contribution to entertainment.
Streep referred to Trump's mocking of a disabled reporter and said: "Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose."
There were several British triumphs in the television categories, including wins for Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie and Olivia Colman for The Night Manager.
Claire Foy also won best actress in a television series for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix's The Crown.
The Golden Globe Awards, which are run by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, honour the best in TV and film from the past year.
Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email [email protected].
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Pupils and staff at a primary school are being tested for tuberculosis after confirmation one person had contracted the disease.
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Public Health England (PHE) has said it is "working closely with" St Cuthbert's Primary School in Withington, Manchester.
Head teacher Mylene Maguire said the school was open as normal.
Precautionary TB screenings for pupils took place last week and staff will also be screened, Ms Maguire added.
Tuberculosis, which can cause fever and coughing, is easily treated with antibiotics.
PHE said the person with TB was responding well to specialist treatment.
Ms Maguire said: "We're following the expert advice of health professionals at PHE who are leading on this.
"A programme of screening for all pupils took place last week as a precautionary measure and staff are also being screened.
"This was overseen by PHE who have been in direct contact with parents throughout the process. They will also oversee any follow-ups should this be necessary."
TB symptoms
PHE said it was "working closely with the school, and screening has been arranged for those who have had prolonged contact with the case".
"Letters have been sent to students and staff to explain the situation with further advice and information about TB."
Dr Merav Kliner, consultant at the Greater Manchester Health Protection team, said: "The risk to other contacts, including those in a school or workplace setting, is low.
"However, purely as a precautionary measure, we are working closely with the school to arrange screening for close contacts in line with national guidelines."
Related Internet Links
Public Health England
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Pollution caused by traffic is above legal requirements in most parts of Brighton and Hove, a report has found.
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The study by Brighton and Hove City Council found that 46 out of 63 locations recorded pollution levels above EU targets during 2011.
Councillors are now likely to back a drive to cut fumes and airborne particles caused mainly by vehicles, the local authority said.
The council said the city risked being fined millions under EU legislation.
Chairman of the committee, Councillor Pete West, said: "It is is a long-standing problem which makes the possibility of EU fines all the more worrying. It's proving very difficult to combat the problem of nitrogen dioxide levels in the city, which in cases are nearly twice as high as the EU limit."
'Cause of asthma'
Mr West said it was not known how much the fines could be, but but it could be millions of pounds.
But he added: "The main worry of course is people are living in the city and suffering from high levels of air pollution which is affecting their health."
He said options to be considered included introducing low emission zones, and encouraging people to change fuels and drive electric vehicles.
Possible measures also included minimising vehicle journeys, funding alternatives to car use, making sure low-emission modes of transport were well catered for, ensuring buses were not caught in traffic queues so that public transport could provide a quicker alternative, and use of more low-emission buses, lorries and vans.
The report found the three most polluted sites were North Street, Viaduct Road, and part of Lewes Road,
The council said pollution at those sites consistently hovered at about one and half times EU legal average levels for nitrogen dioxide - a gas that caused illness and shortened life expectancy especially among vulnerable people.
Neil Churchill, chief executive of Asthma UK, said two-thirds of people with asthma found traffic pollution made their condition worse, but it had also been found that traffic pollution played a part in causing asthma in the first place.
The report will go before the council's environment committee on 11 July.
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Naturalist Sir David Attenborough has revealed his favourite animal is the monkey, when quizzed by the children of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.
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Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis were given the chance to ask the 94-year-old broadcaster one question about the natural world.
It is the first time Prince Louis, two, has been heard speaking in public.
The young prince asked: "What animal do you like?" "I like monkeys best because they are such fun," Sir David replied.
"Mind you, you can't have monkeys sitting around the home because that's not where they live," he cautioned, mindful perhaps of the duke and duchess's domestic life at Kensington Palace.
"So what can you have at home that you like? Well, which would you choose - a puppy or a kitten?" said Sir David, before continuing: "It's a very difficult question. I think I'd go for a puppy."
Prince George, the eldest son of Prince William and Catherine, wanted to know: "What animal do you think will become extinct next?"
"Well, let's hope there won't be any," said Sir David.
"There are lots of things we can do when animals are in danger of extinction. We can protect them."
He related how the population of mountain gorillas in central Africa, which were "very, very rare" 40 years ago, had grown from 250 animals to more than 1,000, thanks to public awareness and global fund-raising.
"So you can save an animal if you want to and you put your mind to it," the famous naturalist told the seven-year-old prince.
"People around the world are doing that because animals are so precious, " he added. "So let's hope there won't be any more that go extinct.
Like her brother, Princess Charlotte, five, began her question with a confident: "Hello David Attenborough!"
"I like spiders, do you like spiders too?" she asked
"I love spiders. I am so glad you like them!" said Sir David. "I think they're wonderful things."
"Why is it that people are so frightened of them? I think it's because they have actually got eight legs, which are much more than us. And if you've got eight legs you can move in any direction - so you can never be quite sure which way that spider is going to go!
"But spiders are so clever. Have you ever watched one try to build its web? That is extraordinary. How does it make this circular web like that... how do they do it? Try and watch and see how they do it - it's marvellous."
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More than 100 voters have received two postal ballots for this month's EU referendum.
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The Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire district councils said that 113 Abingdon residents and six Henley locals have received two postal votes.
The authorities have said that the printing company had been informed of the error.
In 2011 an investigation found that postal packs were not supplied by printers in the 2010 General Election.
'Offence to vote twice'
Both councils have said that residents who have received two ballots will not be able to vote twice as ID numbers used to authenticate voters are duplicated on the back of the voting card.
Vale of White Horse chief executive David Buckle, said: "If someone does return both packs there is no possibility of their vote being counted twice.
"We have a sophisticated computer system for processing returned postal votes that will reject any duplicate.
"I hope no one does this as it is an offence to attempt to vote more than once in the referendum."
Both councils have sent out about 25,000 postal votes and have received back 6,000 packs.
About 400 applications a day are made for postal votes for both authorities.
In 2011 the councils were criticised in an independent review, which identified that 2,035 postal votes were not sent to residents.
Related Internet Links
South Oxfordshire District Council
White Horse District Council
Electoral Commission
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House price growth saw a modest slowdown in 2017, with London the weakest performing region, the Nationwide building society has said.
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According to its latest House Price Index, average prices have grown by 2.6% over the past 12 months, down from the 4.5% recorded in 2016 and 2015.
In London, average house prices actually fell, although by a modest 0.5%, the lender said.
London was the worst performing area for the first time since 2004.
"Low mortgage rates and healthy employment growth continued to support demand in 2017, while supply constraints provided support for house prices," said Nationwide chief economist Robert Gardner.
"However, this was offset by mounting pressure on household incomes, which exerted an increasing drag on consumer confidence as the year progressed."
Looking ahead to 2018, the Nationwide said it expected house prices for the year to rise by about 1%.
"Housing market activity is expected to slow only modestly, since unemployment and mortgage interest rates are expected to remain low by historic standards," said Mr Gardner.
"Similarly, the subdued pace of building activity evident in recent years and the shortage of properties on the market are likely to provide ongoing support for house prices."
Outlook for 2018
Housing analysts and commentators are expecting a similar picture for house prices in 2018. If anything, they are predicting slower property price growth owing to the squeeze on people's incomes.
That would be welcomed by potential first-time buyers, but not by investors.
Many suggest that the picture will be very different depending on the area of the country.
The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors says prices might well fall in London and the South East of England, while rising fastest in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the North West of England.
It is not only geography that housing market analysts believe will be important in 2018, but also the type of property.
Property portal Rightmove, which tracks asking prices, expects homes with two bedrooms or fewer to rise in price by 3%, compared with a 2% rise in three and four-bedroom homes.
Regional split
The Nationwide said regional house price growth rates had converged over the past year. The fastest-growing region was the West Midlands, where average prices rose 5.2% year-on-year.
However, significant disparities remain in price levels and affordability. The Nationwide said house prices in London were still about 55% higher than they had been in 2007, whereas in the North of England as well as the Yorkshire and Humberside regions, prices were lower than their 2007 peaks.
Samuel Tombs, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said mortgage rates could increase from the end of February.
A lack of consumer confidence could affect demand from potential movers during the year, he added.
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Israel has fully reopened its cargo crossing with Gaza, saying it is in response to a period of relative calm.
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Lorries carrying fuel and commercial goods passed through Kerem Shalom on Wednesday after weeks of restrictions.
The fishing zone off Gaza's coast was also restored to 17km (nine nautical miles), having been reduced to 6km.
Kerem Shalom was closed for all but humanitarian deliveries in retaliation for cross-border incendiary kite and balloon attacks by Palestinians.
Human rights groups said the move amounted to illegal collective punishment.
Kerem Shalom is the main lifeline for the two million people living in Gaza, and the territory's economy is almost entirely dependent on it.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman promised to use a "heavy hand" with the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which dominates Gaza, when they imposed tighter restrictions on the use of Kerem Shalom on 9 July.
They demanded Hamas stopped the launching of incendiary balloons and kites that have sparked hundreds of fires in southern Israel since April, burning more than 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres) of forest and farmland and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage.
However, the arson attacks did not stop and there have been several flare-ups in violence that have raised fears of a new war.
Last Wednesday night, militants fired more than 180 rockets and mortars into southern Israel, and the Israeli military carried out more than 150 air strikes on "military and strategic" targets in Gaza. The escalation left three Palestinians dead and seven civilians in Israel injured.
A truce mediated by Egypt and the UN reportedly took effect the following night, and there have been fewer reports of incendiary devices being launched since.
In a message posted in Arabic on Facebook on Wednesday morning, Mr Lieberman said he had decided to reopen Kerem Shalom and extend the fishing zone "as a clear message to the residents of the Gaza Strip: peace and quiet are worth it and violence is not".
"The residents of Gaza have much to gain when the citizens of Israel enjoy peace and security, and much to lose when quiet is disturbed."
Mr Lieberman accused the leadership of Hamas of using civilians "as live ammunition and as human shields" and warned: "If Hamas turns to violence again, we will respond immediately and in a much more severe manner than before."
More than 160 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the end of March - most during protests along the Gaza-Israel border at which thousands have expressed their support for the declared right of Palestinian refugees to return to their ancestral homes in what is now Israel.
One Israeli soldier has been shot dead by a Palestinian sniper during the same period.
The BBC's Yolande Knell in Gaza says the reopening of Kerem Shalom crossing has raised hopes that Egypt and the United Nations could be getting closer to negotiating a more comprehensive truce between Israel and Hamas that would prevent another escalation and ease the severe economic hardship in Gaza.
On Tuesday, Israel's finance minister confirmed a report that Mr Netanyahu had secretly met Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt in May. The two men are believed to have discussed the terms for a ceasefire, the easing of the blockade of Gaza, and the rebuilding of its infrastructure.
Israel and Egypt imposed a land, sea and air blockade on Gaza when Hamas reinforced its power over the territory in 2007 by ousting its rivals, a year after winning legislative elections. The two countries say the blockade is for self-defence.
In a separate development on Tuesday, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said that it might not be able to open schools for more than half a million children in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon this month because it had run out of money to pay their 22,000 teachers.
Unrwa officials said the decision by US - which has long been the agency's largest single donor - to withhold $305m (£240m) of funding this year was the main cause of the financial crisis. The Trump administration has said it will withhold funds until Unrwa makes unspecified "reforms".
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Military charity Help for Heroes says 142 staff roles are at risk, as its income has dropped by nearly a third during the pandemic.
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The charity, which supports wounded veterans and their families, says there are likely to be about 80 redundancies.
It relies on donations for 97% of its funding, but its fundraisers have been cancelled or postponed since March.
Charity chief Melanie Waters said: "These tough decisions have been made to protect the future of the charity."
Three Help for Heroes recovery centres - in Yorkshire, Devon and Essex - will remain closed indefinitely as Help for Heroes focuses on face-to-face community and online-based support.
The charity said demand for its services rose by 33% during May and June - compared to the same period last year - as the consequences of the national lockdown impacted on veterans' mental health.
Requests for help with physical conditions also increased by nearly a third over the same period.
Meanwhile, the charity - which furloughed 130 staff at the start of the pandemic - said it anticipates funding will remain down by around a third for the foreseeable future, as the economy struggles to recover.
Ms Waters said a major restructure was the only way the charity could continue with its work.
"In 2007, we made a promise on behalf of the nation to provide lifetime support to wounded veterans, and their families, and we are striving to keep that promise," she said in a statement on their website.
"The crisis has had a devastating impact on the whole UK charity sector, with lasting consequences, and it has hit us hard."
The charity said it was working closely with the Ministry of Defence "to provide core recovery activities for wounded, injured or sick service personnel" and hoped to reopen its Tedworth House recovery centre in Wiltshire, with social distancing measures in place - as well as their community office in Wales.
Last year, the charity - which was set up in 2007 by former Army Captain Bryn Parry and wife Emma - raised around £27m.
"We remain absolutely committed to our wounded and their families and will continue fighting for, and changing the lives of, those we support for as long as they need it," said Ms Waters.
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Companies with a defibrillator should buy a cabinet and put it outside so it can be more easily reached, according to the Jersey ambulance service.
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Mike Judge, from the service, said the cabinets would allow more people to access the vital equipment.
St John Ambulance have helped install more than 200 defibrillators in Jersey in the past 13 years.
The charity says moving them outside makes them available 24 hours a day.
A spokesman said dozens of islanders have been trained to use them and making them more easily accessible could help save more lives.
Mr Judge said the new cabinets are linked to the ambulance service and anyone can call 999 to request an access code.
He said: "We would urge owners of defibrillators to consider purchasing a cabinet and place it on the exterior of their building so that in the case of an emergency help can be given in the fastest time possible."
The first publicly accessible defibrillator was unveiled in May 2014 in memory of the former Commander of St John Ambulance Jersey, Nigel Truscott MBE.
It was placed on the outside of Morrier House in St Helier and since then another 13 have been placed on buildings across the island.
The charity says it wants to make Jersey a "heart friendly island" and the most heart aware place in Europe.
Micki Swift, from St John Ambulance, said: "With 220 machines being part of our St John Ambulance Jersey Defibrillator Programme that started in 2001 we are well on the way to reaching that goal.
"With so many people now trained by St John Ambulance to use this type of machine, I am sure these units will be greatly appreciated by the general public of Jersey."
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A retired clergyman has gone on trial accused of what was described as the "sinister and deliberate" sex abuse of two men and a boy in the late 70s and early 80s.
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Granville Gibson has pleaded not guilty to eight counts of indecent assault and one of serious sexual assault.
Durham Crown Court was told the alleged offences were carried out while he was the minister at St Clare's Church in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham.
The 80-year-old, from Darlington, later went on to become an Archdeacon.
'Veneer of respectability'
The prosecution described his alleged actions as a gross breach of trust, saying he used his position in the church under a "veneer of respectability" to abuse young men in his care or employment.
One witness told the jury that at the age of 18 he had been sent to the church to complete his community service.
At first, Mr Gibson seemed to care for him and the pair engaged in play fighting, but within weeks it had turned into sexual touching and one serious sexual assault, the court was told.
The victim said the actions made him feel sick and he could not believe what was happening.
The prosecution also claimed Mr Gibson targeted a family friend for three years from the age of 12, using a pretence of comforting the boy to sexually assault him.
It is also alleged he indecently assaulted a 26-year-old man who had a junior role at the church, and when he tried to make a complaint to the then Bishop of Durham he was told he was causing trouble and would be better off finding work elsewhere.
The trial continues.
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It will be 40 years tomorrow since the first North Sea oil came ashore in Britain. It was from the Argyll field, and landed by tanker at the Isle of Grain refinery in Kent.
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Douglas FraserBusiness/economy editor, Scotland
The trickle became a torrent later that year, 1975, when the Queen pushed the button on the Forties pipeline.
There followed a vast engineering effort, making the technology being pioneered in Scotland's north-east and Northern Isles a global centre for the new offshore frontier. It's been compared to the enormous achievements of the Victorian engineers, but much of it out of sight.
It brought many jobs, and some terrible tragedies in the risky venture of tapping into the North Sea's black gold. With more than 40 billion barrels extracted so far, it also brought tax revenue - many tens of billions of pounds.
You don't have to be a supporter of Scottish independence to ask if it was wise to spend that as it came in, rather than amassing a vast trust fund, as Norway did.
Stretching reserves
Today and tomorrow, in Aberdeen, the industry gathers for an annual conference, to take stock of the first 50 years since exploration began (the first gas find was in September 1965) and four decades since oil began to flow.
More significant and time-consuming will be the questions about how to stretch the remaining reserves for another 40 or 50 years.
The industry meets at a very challenging time.
When Oil and Gas UK, the trade body, convened this conference last year, the oil price was about to start its slide from $115 per barrel. By January, it hit $45. It's now in the mid-60s, with conflicting signs of its future direction of travel.
Few think it will rise much above $70, because that's the point at which fracking starts again in North America, pushing up supply. Fracking is much more responsive to price than offshore producers can afford to be.
That plunge in the value of this asset has focused attention on the problem of the high cost of operating in British waters. Along with some North American reserves of oil and gas, this is seen in a global context as among the most expensive places to operate.
Unfinished business
Costs per barrel have been rising very steeply; partly because fewer barrels are flowing from older, smaller and hard-to-reach reserves: as old equipment needs more and longer shutdowns for maintenance: and partly because the industry had become inefficient through recent years of booming investment.
Much of the talk in Aberdeen this week will be about driving those costs down further, including the tax bill. Frustration about tax, along with regulation, was found to have soared in a recent survey of industry concerns in north-east Scotland.
However, the industry's requests for reduced tax were largely answered in George Osborne's March Budget. The unfinished business is on incentives for exploration, which has been particularly weak of late, and eventually removing Petroleum Revenue Tax altogether.
A recent analysis by Edinburgh-based energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie reckoned that drilling costs could be one third down by the end of next year. Much of that is in the cost of hiring a rig, which has always been very volatile.
Operating costs are on track to fall by up to 15% in the UK sector, according to WoodMac, and development costs for new investments by between 10% and 20%. If the price per barrel is to stay in the $60 range, these percentages may have to get bigger, and one area of tension is where they erode pay and conditions for offshore workers.
Common interest
Those attending can expect to hear industry talk about how to co-operate on operations and investments in future - shared services, using standardised fittings and repeat designs rather than bespoke, holding inventories in common, and sharing hardware such as pipelines.
The industry talk is also about regulation. Whereas it's been carried out from Whitehall until now, Sir Ian Wood's review of what has to be done for "Maximising Economic Recovery" has led to an independent, Aberdeen-based regulator.
At its head is Andy Samuel, who will be a star turn at the conference. He has clout, and a remit to force operators to work together and more efficiently in the common interest of the industry and taxpayer. Offshore bosses are eager to hear how he's going to use that clout.
It's been noted before that the alignment of interests between industry and government are no longer as clear as they were. There are tensions around the next phase for the North Sea as it moves into this new era, of lower prices, lower profits, lower tax and lower costs.
Now entering its 50s, the industry may pay special attention to a conference session on Thursday afternoon entitled "Maintaining Focus in Late Life"
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They once made up 4% of Birmingham's population and were its biggest minority group - but official figures say the number of Irish in the city has declined.
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Yet 80,000 people are expected to attend the city's annual St Patrick's Day parade - believed to be the third biggest in the world after New York and Dublin - on Sunday. Are the Birmingham Irish really disappearing? Or has the definition simply changed?
The city's Irish connection is plain to see; passengers arriving at Birmingham's coach station are greeted by a sign reading "one hundred thousand welcomes" - a translation of the Gaelic greeting "cead mile failte".
Its placement - in "Irish Quarter" Digbeth - is no accident.
The storied Dubliner pub - restored after it was gutted by a fire in 2006 - sits next door while Birmingham's Irish Centre is a few hundred yards down the road.
'No work here'
Regarded by some as a spiritual home of the Irish in Birmingham, Digbeth is also the terminus for the St Patrick's Day parade.
But statistics say the number of Irish-born in the city has shrunk.
The 2001 census counted 22,828 Republic of Ireland-born and 6,086 Northern Irish Birmingham residents in 2001, whereas those numbers had dropped to 16,085 and 4,623 in 2011.
Two other cities in Britain noted for their Irish populations - Liverpool and Manchester - showed a more modest decrease in the same period, and, in fact, Merseyside's ROI-born contingent fell by just three.
However, 50,900 Irish nationals emigrated from the Republic of Ireland in 2013, and a survey found almost 60% of respondents did so to find work.
The same report, from University College Cork, found New Zealand, Australia and Canada were drawing increasing numbers but the UK remained the most popular destination.
Paddy Foy, chairman of the Midlands Republic of Ireland Soccer Supporters Club, believes young Irish - many of them equipped with degrees - are heading for London instead of Birmingham.
He said the stereotype of the Irish "navvy" - manual workers employed in the construction industry - often no longer applies.
"When my mum and dad moved over in the 1950s the Irish did the jobs the English didn't want to do," he said.
"My dad helped to build [Birmingham landmarks] Spaghetti Junction and the Rotunda.
"Now the Irish are going to London to join big corporations because that's where the jobs are seen to be."
Maurice Long, of the Kerry Association, said Irish people were still coming to Birmingham to find work, but the flow was "slowing down".
"The call to Birmingham is not like it used to be, work availability is not here, the cash is not here," he said.
"A lot of people are choosing New Zealand and Australia - those places don't seem so far any more.
"When I used to go home to Ireland the journey from New Street station took 23 hours."
Mr Long, who emigrated to Birmingham 50 years ago, added young people who do look for work in the Midlands often stay for a short time.
"They've found Birmingham wasn't as good as they thought and they've come from one recession into another," he said.
'Strong Irish culture'
But do the numbers tell the whole story? While the official statistics suggest just over 20,000 Irish-born in Birmingham, they don't take children - or grandchildren - of immigrants into account.
Organisations such as the charity Irish in Birmingham have said counting second and third-generation descendents in the city's Irish community would put the numbers closer to 100,000.
Anne Tighe, head of Birmingham's St Patrick's Day Parade board, said while the older generation may be fading, their offspring were keeping Birmingham's Irish tradition alive.
Born in the city to Irish parents herself, she said there was still evidence of a thriving community.
"I think it's a very strong Irish culture in Birmingham," she said.
"We have Gaelic football teams, a fantastic Irish dancing scene, there are places you can learn Irish instruments and there's a great music scene for both traditional and more modern artists.
"There are still a lot of Irish traditions and Irish family values, those are all very strong in the Irish community in Birmingham."
Siobhan Mohan, editor of community newspaper The Harp, agreed Birmingham's Irish-born population was ageing.
"The demographic seems to be changing, on the parade day you used to see lots of first-generation Irish in the crowd but the numbers seem to be dwindling these days," she said.
Ms Tighe said she felt the St Patrick's Day parade was a chance to not only celebrate Irishness, but the "unique" Irish culture in Birmingham.
"I think of myself as British but I regard my Irish roots as very strong and I'm also proud of being a Brummie," she said.
"From my point of view organising the parade is important because I want Birmingham to be proud of and celebrate its history.
"A lot of other cities are much better at recognising that and I think we should be too."
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An investigation is under way after eight children fell from an inflatable slide at a fireworks display.
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Woking Park in Surrey was evacuated and a major incident declared after the children - all under the age of 16 - fell at about 19:30 GMT on Saturday.
Seven were discharged from hospital overnight, with an eighth kept in for observation, with injuries "not believed to be significant".
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is investigating.
The site was evacuated at about 20:00 to allow the helicopter to land and "multiple crews" from the South East Coast Ambulance Service (Secamb) to help the injured.
Fireworks organiser Michael Holden, of Woking District Rotary, said it appeared the children had fallen to the ground from the top of the slide.
He said: "We don't still know yet what exactly happened but eight children appear to have come off near the top of the slide and landed on the floor alongside it."
He estimated about 5,000 people were in the park at the time.
One eyewitness told BBC News correspondent Simon Clemison there were "about 40 children" on the slide, which is about 30ft (9m) high when fully inflated.
Chris Tierney said he removed his three children from the slide "a couple of minutes before the incident" as he "felt the slide had become overcrowded".
He said his daughter was "getting bundled on by bigger children... kids were getting injured and crying. It was a disaster waiting to happen."
At the scene
By Tom Pugh, BBC News
Amid the merry-go-rounds, win-a-prize stalls and bumper cars at Woking Park lies the deflated inflatable at the centre of Saturday night's incident.
The park remained sealed off on Sunday morning as police maintained a low-key presence at the scene.
One witness, Andy Datson, 23, described seeing children being tended to by emergency crews.
Another described hearing an announcement over the public-address system which first alerted visitors to a "serious" incident.
Thousands of people are said to have been here on Saturday night to enjoy what should have been a fun night.
Later, scene-of-crime officers arrived at Woking Park to carry out inquiries.
All the children injured were aged under 16, Secamb said.
Those taken to London hospitals were treated at St George's Hospital and King's College Hospital, while one was treated at St Peter's Hospital in Chertsey, Surrey, a spokeswoman said.
The fireworks display was abandoned shortly after the children were injured.
Eyewitness Oliver Trimble told the BBC a message went over the event's loudspeakers announcing the evacuation shortly before 20:00.
He said he saw victims being treated by medics, adding: "It was quite a horrendous sight to see.
"This is one of Woking's biggest events of the year, thousands of people come to see the fireworks," he said.
Local musician Anna Neale said she had planned to take her daughters, aged 10 and six, on the giant slide after the fireworks.
"We saw all the blue lights and saw the air ambulance arriving. We all evacuated very calmly. Everyone was just shocked," the 36-year-old said.
Mr Holden said: "We have used this funfair operator for a number of years. We have never had any problems before. [The operator] is as upset as we are.
"We are very shocked and distressed by the whole thing, but we are relieved to hear this morning that seven out of the eight children have been discharged from hospital."
The park will remain closed on Sunday while police investigate the cause of the incident, the club added.
John Edwards, of Edwards Amusements, who hired the slide on behalf of the rotary club, described it as an "unfortunate accident."
He told the BBC: "I do not know what happened", but said the slide did not collapse, the children fell.
He said the slide had been removed by the HSE and he was now dismantling the rest of the fairground.
The funfair was put under police cordon and investigators were inspecting other attractions, including the crooked house and the Ferris wheel.
A Woking Borough Council spokesman said: "We will be working with the police and relevant authorities to understand and explain what happened."
Officers have appealed for any eyewitnesses or those with video or photos of what happened to contact them.
Mark John, from Airquee, an organisation that inspects inflatables, said the items should go through rigorous checks to ensure they are safe.
"Inspections can take anything from a minimum of 45 minutes right up to several hours," he said.
"As people are aware lately there's a lot of emphasis on making sure the anchor points are in place and intact as they should be for protection against gusts of wind or strong winds."
Joe Mercer, general secretary of the Showmen's Guild, told the BBC: "This slide has up-to-date test certificates and insurance documents, these have been provided to police. Our members are fully co-operating with the authorities; no arrests have been made."
He added: "Members of the Showmen's Guild operate equipment at fairs to strict safety standards that are subject to HSE scrutiny. Our thoughts are with those affected by this incident."
A spokeswoman for the HSE said: "We are aware and making initial enquiries."
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Facebook is to allow app developers to advertise their products on its members' mobile-device news feeds.
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The network will charge a fee for every time users click on the ads to download the software from elsewhere.
Facebook had previously warned its financial health would suffer if it could not find ways to make money out its mobile users.
Its shares have nearly halved in price since its flotation, costing investors a total of about $50bn (£31bn).
Details of the latest move were revealed on the site's developers blog.
It invites software developers to sign up to a "beta" test in which they can decide whether to target users of Apple's iOS App Store or Android's Google Play store.
A "power editor" option can also allow users to be targeted on the basis of what other apps they have downloaded within Facebook.
For example if they have played Disney's Gardens of Times on their laptop via the network, they might then be offered other hidden-object games when using Facebook's smartphone app.
If a user clicks on one of the links, they will be redirected to the appropriate app store where they can purchase the software.
Facebook will charge advertisers for every click made, and allows them to set a maximum budget.
Switch to mobile
The move is Facebook's latest effort to make money from its mobile users.
It said it had 543 million active members using the site via a mobile phone or tablet at the end of June.
It has previously experimented with a number of other formats, including paid-for "Pages You May Like".
It also introduced Sponsored Stories to its mobile app earlier in the year.
These are posts created by an advertiser that appear if a "friend" or page the user is connected to shares the material. By paying a fee, the business or organisation can increase the likelihood their posts will be seen.
The site's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, said it was making about $500,000 worth of sales through mobile Sponsored Stories every day at the end of June.
"People who use our mobile services are more active Facebook users than people who only use our desktop services," Mr Zuckerberg said, explaining why it was important for his firm to focus on the sector.
"On average, mobile users are around 20% more likely to use Facebook on any given day."
Flat payment revenues
The firm's chief financial officer, David Ebersman, added that daily web views in some developed markets had started to decline in favour of mobile use.
He said this could be why it was experiencing "flat" payment revenues - cash raised by taking a cut of fees charged on its site.
Although Facebook does allow users to download and play games on its mobile apps, most have ignored the option and download third-party titles via Apple or Google's stores, even if they first heard about the software via Facebook.
"In the past 30 days, we have sent people to the Apple App Store and Google Play 146 million times, via clicks from channels such as news feed, timeline, bookmarks and App Center," Facebook said in its developers blog.
'Execution challenges'
One analyst said it was inevitable that Facebook would adapt its mobile service.
"If the majority of use is on mobile then there needs to be ads there," Enders' Analysis's Benedict Evans told the BBC.
"I would expect Facebook to experiment and see what users' feedback is.
"Clearly there are a lot of execution challenges as Facebook may have a lot of less space to play with on a mobile device than it has on a desktop, and people may feel the adverts intrude on their experience.
"But Facebook is an ad-funded business, therefore there needs to be ads on mobile."
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Blue whales are the biggest animals that have ever existed on Earth but they only recently* got that way.
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Jonathan AmosScience correspondent@BBCAmoson Twitter
This is the extraordinary finding from a new study that examined the fossil record of baleens - the group of filter feeders to which the blues belong.
These animals were relatively small for most of their evolutionary existence and only became the behemoths we know today in the past three million years.
That is when the climate likely turned the oceans into a "food heaven".
Favoured prey - such as krill, small crustaceans - suddenly became super-concentrated in places, allowing the baleens with their specialised feeding mechanism to pig-out and evolve colossal forms.
"The blue whales, the fins and bowheads, and the right whales - they are among the most massive vertebrates to have ever lived," explained Nick Pyenson from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, US.
"Some of the dinosaurs were longer, but these big whales even outweighed the largest dinosaurs. And isn't that surprising? People kind of think of gigantism as being a fact of the geologic past. But here we are, living in the time of giants on Planet Earth," he told BBC News.
*Whales have been around for about 50 million years - a blink of the eye in the 4.6-billion-year history of the Earth.
Dr Pyenson is publishing the new research - conducted with Graham Slater from the University of Chicago and Jeremy Goldbogen from Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station - in a journal of the Royal Society called Proceedings B.
It is based on a deep analysis of the Smithsonian's extensive collection of cetacean bones, and in particular of whale skulls which are a good indicator of overall body size.
The team estimated the lengths of 63 extinct species, including some of the very earliest baleens that swam in the oceans more than 30 million years ago. And combined with data on modern whales, this investigation was then able to establish the evolutionary relationships between whales of different sizes.
What emerges from the research is a picture showing not only that gigantism is a recent phenomenon but that this bigness arises independently in the different baleen lineages.
The smaller whale species that had previously persisted start to go extinct within the last three million years, right at the same time as the giants begin to appear.
It all points to a major shift in the environment and the team suggests the best explanation is the onset of ice ages at the end of the warm Pliocene Epoch, the beginning of the Pleistocene.
The existence of major ice sheets would have restructured the oceans, changing the way water and nutrients were distributed.
"This period sees some dramatic changes, including the closure of the Panamanian isthmus, shutting off connection between the Atlantic and Pacific," explained Dr Slater.
“Ice sheets in the north develop a lot of cold water that sinks and is then transported around the globe. And what you get are intense upwellings that bring that nutrient-rich cold water back to the surface. That allows algae to go crazy and that allows krill to feed and to form really dense aggregations."
It is not the abundance of prey per se that favours large baleens, but rather the prey's patchy, concentrated nature. And with their filter-feeding system of eating, the big whales are able to take maximum advantage.
“They can travel from one feeding zone to the next very efficiently because their big size means their 'miles per gallon', their MPG, is very high. And they seem to know precisely the right time to turn up at these feeding grounds," Dr Slater added.
Two points are worth noting. First, commercial whaling in the last century decimated baleen populations and very probably removed most, if not all, of the ultra-giants out there. Few blues now exceed the 30m lengths that were often recorded at processing factories.
Thanks to the international moratorium on whaling, the true giants could yet return. But this raises the second issue: the changing climate.
If the experts are right, we are heading back towards the Pliocene. Increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could well see global temperatures in the next century that are three or four degrees warmer than they are today. This would almost certainly trigger further ocean changes.
"We’re playing with the dials on 'Spaceship Earth'," commented Dr Pyenson.
"We don’t know how things are going turn out, especially for these food resources which may or may not be persistent in space and time. There are some baleens that we think might be more flexible. Gray whales, for example, appear to have a very broad feeding range; blue whales not so much - they really need their krill."
Richard Sabin is the curator of marine mammals at London’s Natural History Museum.
He called the research "compelling and important" and also highlighted the ecological knife-edge on which some of these animals must live: "There are 90 or so cetacean species. They’re a very diverse group and some of them are very specialised.
"So, you have creatures like the river dolphins that use echo-location to find their prey and the blue whales that are very specialised feeders with their krill. These animals have evolved within systems that they now depend on remaining stable."
London's NHM is about to make its blue whale skeleton the star attraction of a remodelled entrance hall.
The near-4.5-tonne specimen has been hung from the ceiling in a lunge-feeding pose, mouth open.
The display is under wraps for the moment, but a big unveiling is promised in the next few weeks.
"The visualisations that we released give you an idea, but they don't really do it justice. She looks spectacular. You get so many different perspectives from the different angles, and you get a real sense not just of her size but of her dynamism as well."
London’s Natural History Museum will also stage a new exhibition on whales to coincide with the unveiling.
[email protected] and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos
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The Gaia observatory has released a second swathe of data as it assembles the most precise map of the sky.
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By Jonathan AmosBBC Science Correspondent
The European Space Agency telescope has now plotted the position and brightness of nearly 1.7 billion stars.
It also has information on the distance, motion and colour of 1.3 billion of these objects.
Gaia's "book of the heavens" will not be complete until the 2020s, but when it is the map will underpin astronomy for decades to come.
It will be the reference frame used to plan all observations by other telescopes. It will also be integral to the operation of all spacecraft, which navigate by tracking stars.
But beyond that, Gaia promises a raft of new discoveries about the properties and structure of our Milky Way Galaxy, its history and evolution into the future.
It will enable scientists to find new asteroids and planets; and to test physical constants and theories.
Gaia should even refine the techniques used to measure distances across the wider Universe, and reduce the uncertainties we currently have about the age of the cosmos.
Gaia was launched in December 2013 to an orbit some 1.5 million km from Earth.
Its two identical telescopes throw their captured light on to a huge, one-billion-pixel camera detector connected to a trio of instruments.
A first tranche of measurements was released in 2016. This contained the position and brightness of "just" 1.1 billion stars, and information on the distance and motion of the two million brightest objects.
This second data release adds 600 times more stars with distances, covering a volume 1,000 times larger and all with precisions that are 100 times better.
"This is a unique moment," said leading British Gaia scientist Prof Gerry Gilmore. "This is the first time that mankind has had a significant 3D map of a significant volume of the Milky Way. It really is a breakthrough moment," he told a meeting at the Royal Astronomical Society in London.
Gaia: How far is it to the nearest stars?
Gaia measures anything that moves - which is actually everything that is out there.
It sees stars' "proper motion", which is their general track across the heavens as they orbit the galaxy. The telescope also sees their "parallax" - their apparent looping behaviour, which is a function of Earth and Gaia changing their vantage point as they circle the Sun (It is the parallaxes that yield the distances).
And what Gaia also sees is the stars' movement along its line of sight - their so-called "radial velocity", their true motion on the sky. Gaia delivers this data for the first time in the new release.
"We now have seven million line-of-sight velocities of stars which is more than all other measurements ever done. This is a huge sample compared with the few hundred thousand that we had before," said Prof Mark Cropper, from the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University College London.
It is the radial velocities that allow researchers to make movies of the Milky Way, to run its life forwards and backwards in time, to determine, with the aid of other Gaia information, where stars were born and where they will likely end their days. It should be possible, for example, to find our Sun's siblings - the stars that were created in the same gas and dust cloud billions of years ago but then subsequently went their different ways.
There will be another two big data releases in the coming years. The more Gaia works, the more precise its measurements - and the more objects it will detect. There is an expectation, for instance, that tens of thousands of planets will eventually be found in Gaia's data.
The scale of the venture means there is too much information for professional astronomers to scrutinise, and amateurs and schools are being asked to get involved.
An alert system operates that throws up interesting objects that brighten or dim out of the ordinary. Some of these will be exploding stars - supernovae.
Many UK schools are now engaged in classifying these objects.
Meg Greet, a physics teacher from Eastbury Community School in the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham, said Gaia was a fantastic educational tool: "These long-term embedded enrichment projects, rather than school trips and one-off activities, are the things that make a genuine impact on our school-children scientists, helping them to develop their creativity, their questioning skills - the kind of things they need to become the scientists of the future."
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General public in Sri Lanka will be the next target of threats and intimidation if current threats against journalists continued,
media organisations have warned.
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The Free Media Movement (FMM) said a number of journalists who supported the main opposition candidate, Gen Sarath Fonseka,
were sacked from state media.
"While Some are still in the hospital after being beaten others were interdicted," FMM general secretary Sunil Jayasekara
told BBC Sandeshaya.
He was commenting at a protest organised by a group of media organisations against the continuous threats to media workers
by the government during and after the recently concluded presidential election.
Threats to Lankaenews
At least two journalists; BBC's Thakshila Dilrukshi Jayasena and Jude Samantha were beaten in the run up to the elections.
So far no suspects have been arrested.
Prageeth Ekneligoda, a political columnist and a cartoonist for Lankaenews web newspaper is missing since 24 January.
"I knew he has had threats to his life for some time now," Prageeth's wife, Sandhya Ekneligoda told BBC Sandeshaya.
"One reason is that he wrote in Lankaenews. Other reason is he supported Gen Fonseka's election campaign. Another suspicious
thing is that Colombo newspaper removed his second article after themselves requesting his articles," she said.
Editor of Lankaenews Sandaruwan Senadheera says those who did not like Mr. Eknaligoda's writing are behind his disappearance.
"The abduction was well planned ahead at an election time so that not much attention would be paid to the incident," he said.
Lanka newspaper
Mr. Senadheera added that his website came under continuous threats, including an unknown group intimidating them for few
nights and locking the office premises, during the election period.
General Secretary of Media Workers Trade Union Federation (MWTUF) Dharmasiri Lankapeli said everybody who exposes corruption
and anti-democratic measures of the government have come under threats by the government.
Sri Lanka police were recently ordered to remove the seals on pro-opposition Lanka newspaper by the Colombo magistrate.
The journal affiliated to the opposition JVP has supported Gen Fonseka's candidacy during the election campaign.
Its editor, Chandana Sirimalwatta is still in police custody.
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A new multi-million pound surf attraction that could transform a former aluminium factory site in the Conwy Valley has been unveiled.
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Conwy Adventure Leisure is behind the Surf Snowdonia project, which aims to create an outdoor wave centre and 100 new jobs at Dolgarrog.
The company is about to submit a planning application for their final proposals.
A community consultation is being held on Wednesday.
Residents will be given the opportunity to learn more about the regeneration plans and the first images of what the new surf attraction would look like have been released.
The attraction would aim to offer an authentic surfing experience with technology creating man-made waves.
The creators are based in San Sebastian in Spain.
Managing director of Conwy Adventure Leisure Steve Davies said: "We've done our homework and we think this facility would attract 67-70,000 visitors [a year] and not just surfers but family visitors.
'Consistent waves'
"Surfing is already a cold water sport so we're not trying to turn Dolgarrog into Hawaii.
"Currently it's surfers wearing wetsuits chasing waves, which may or may not come, but we'll be offering 6ft, consistent waves, so the customer gets want they want."
Mr Davies said if everything goes to plan the surfing lake could be open by the summer of 2014, with the rest of the facilities open by 2015.
Dolgarrog Aluminium, which employed 170 people, closed in 2007 and an action group was set up to develop the site.
Conwy council deputy leader Ronnie Hughes said it was an exciting proposal.
"It would be a unique attraction, drawing on a new market with many potential economic, employment and tourism benefits," he added.
"The Dolgarrog site is immensely important within the Conwy valley and it is important that we see it brought back into active economic use in a way that supports the county's economy in a sympathetic way, yet also brings something new and unique to the area."
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Yoga and kilts in a Perthshire forest has proved to be just what the world was waiting for.
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By Steven McKenzieBBC Scotland Highlands and Islands reporter
A short video on Facebook has been viewed 43 million times in the five days since it was posted by BBC Scotland's The Social.
The video features Finlay Wilson, a Dundee-based forest yoga instructor, and friend Tristan Cameron-Harper, a former professional ice hockey player.
The video was shot at The Hermitage near Dunkeld two weeks ago and features Wilson and Cameron-Harper wearing only kilts.
The video ends with a cheeky shot of the pair doing a headstand.
Thirty-year-old Wilson said: "Apparently there is something about the recipe of beards, kilts, butts and the Scottish highlands that just works."
Cameron-Harper, who was born on Jersey and grew up in Dundee before playing ice hockey professionally in Canada, the US, Holland and then Glasgow's Braehead Clan, said it took him 40 takes to pull off the final shot in which the kilts slip down to reveal their bottoms.
He said: "Finlay managed to do the final shot with the kilt dropping away perfectly first time, every time. He was freezing by the time I managed to do it.
"It was good fun to do and we've had such incredible feedback since. We are now just riding its wave and seeing where it takes us next."
Until the next phase of kilted yoga comes along, the 28-year-old is working towards becoming a professional climber and has been honing those skills on trips into Scotland's hills, including the Cairngorms.
Wilson, meanwhile, has an idea where to take the kilted yoga next - combining it with his dog Amaloh.
A video of him and Amaloh doing yoga has also been popular on social media.
Mr Wilson said: "He's a rescue dog from Sri Lanka.
"When I was out there on my honeymoon he would be there all the time. He would be at my yoga mat. He would be outside my room in the morning, he would stay with us all day long and it just got to the point when I was leaving, I thought: 'I can't leave this dog here'.
"He was skin and bones, mangy, bits missing, but his character was so winning I could not have left him. He's a sweetheart."
Mr Wilson added: "He's getting pretty good at yoga. He can do down dog pretty easy. He can get his foot behind his head easier than I can, that's for sure.
"Kilted yoga for dogs could be the next big thing."
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Hundreds of birds are to be culled at a farm in Kent where an outbreak of avian influenza of the H5N2 strain has been detected.
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A 1km restricted zone has been placed around the premises near Deal "to prevent the disease spreading".
Public Health England (PHE) said the risk to the UK population was "very low" but it was "looking for evidence of spread to control and eliminate it".
All 480 birds at the site are to be "humanely culled".
The UK's chief veterinary officer, Christine Middlemiss, said: "Immediate steps have been taken to limit the risk of the disease spreading and all remaining poultry and captive birds at the farm will be culled."
There will be no impact on food supply as the farm does not supply poultry, meat or eggs commercially, she added.
Bird keepers have been told to remain alert for signs of disease and to report suspected cases immediately.
"We are urgently looking for any evidence of disease spread associated with this farm to control and eliminate it," Ms Middlemiss said.
Dr Gavin Dabrera, consultant in acute respiratory infections at PHE, said bird flu was an "uncommon infection" in humans.
But he advised people not to touch sick or dead birds and to wash hands thoroughly with soap after contact with any animal.
The Food Standards Agency said properly cooked poultry and poultry products, including eggs, were safe to eat.
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Councillors have voted in favour of a revised road layout plan for a Somerset town, despite some local opposition.
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The plan for Radstock was supported by cabinet members at Bath and North East Somerset Council on Wednesday evening.
The council has the new layout will reduce congestion, create a more defined town centre, and enable the construction of a new housing estate.
Opponents believe it will not improve traffic jams and will take trade away from the town's main shopping streets.
Cabinet member, Roger Symonds, a Lib Democrat councilor, said: "There will be regeneration in Radstock, there will be 210 houses built that will enable young people to stay in their home town if they wish to stay there.
"This road scheme will take cars off the central roundabout where the wheel and museum is, so it will make that junction much easier and it will make less jams in Radstock."
But campaigners are unhappy and will continue to campaign against the project.
Amanda Leon, from the Radstock Action Group, said: "The [traffic flow] modelling they did was insufficient and unconvincing so that remains to be seen, personally I don't think it will make any difference to congestion, it will simply deter anybody from coming to the town centre."
The plans involve linking up The Street, which is currently one-way, and Frome Road in the town centre.
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British author Hilary Mantel could be the first person to win all three UK major book prizes after being nominated for the Woman's Prize For Fiction.
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Her historical novel, Bring Up The Bodies, is up against 19 other titles including six debuts and two previous winners in the long list.
The writer, who won the Booker Prize last year, also received the Costa Book of the Year for the novel in January.
The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced on 5 June.
Mantel, whose novel is part of a trilogy about Henry VIII's adviser Thomas Cromwell, already holds the record for being the first woman and the first living British author to win the Man Booker Prize twice.
The Women's Prize for Fiction - formerly known as the Orange Prize - is now in its 18th year.
The award has been funded privately this year by donors including Cherie Blair, entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox and author Joanna Trollope after Orange ended their 17-year sponsorship deal.
The long list includes former actress Kitty Aldridge for her third novel, A Trick I Learned From Dead Men, while Ros Barber's The Marlowe Papers is the first novel written in verse to be recognised.
The youngest author to be nominated is 25-year-old Israeli Shani Boianjiu whose novel, The People Of Forever Are Not Afraid, is based on her national service in the Israeli Defence Force.
Also on the long list are previous winners Zadie Smith and Barbara Kingsolver for their novels NW and Flight Behaviour respectively.
If either of the writers win the prize, they would be the first person to do so twice.
Actress Miranda Richardson, chair of the judges, said it was a "daunting" task to reduce the list of submissions from over 140 to 20 books.
She said the list was "truly representative of that diversity of style, content and provenance" adding she did not "anticipate the job becoming easier at the next stage".
Debut US novelist Madeline Miller won the award last year for The Song of Achilles - a story of same-sex romance set in the Greek age of heroes.
Other previous winners of the prize, include Lionel Shriver for We Need to Talk about Kevin (2005), Marilynne Robinson for Home (2009) and Tea Obreht for The Tiger's Wife (2011).
The shortlist will be announced on 16 April with the winner announced at a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall in London.
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Plans for an attraction to elevate people nearly 70m (229ft) above Bristol city centre have been approved.
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Council planners had recommended refusing permission for Arc Bristol, a glass capsule viewing pod raised by a pivoting structure.
They said the design, which has capacity for 44 people, was "overbearing" and would dominate the historical buildings nearby.
But councillors voted unanimously to approve the construction.
A joint planning application was submitted by Arc's developers and local science exhibition We The Curious.
The Arc will be able to carry up to 42 passengers and two crew on a 20-minute ride from the roof of We the Curious up to a height of 69m above the city.
There are plans for it to operate 12 to 18 hours per day.
The glass capsule would be suspended between two carbon-fibre masts that would pivot on their base to raise it up.
Alice Ellis, project manager for Arc Bristol, said: "The base will be in Millennium Square and the mast will pivot around and turn the capsule.
"The unique thing about Arc is that it moves and we hope that people will get that 'wow' moment when they go up in the air, it is going to be really exhilarating."
Ms Ellis said Bristol "absolutely needs Arc", adding that it would bring "amazing benefits" as a "calling card to Bristol for the rest of the world".
The project has the support of business leaders, tourism chiefs and the Dean of nearby Bristol Cathedral.
Its height, reaching 78m (255ft) at its tallest point, is a cause for concern for some though, and the plan received objections from Historic England and the Victorian Society.
Bristol City Council planners said it would "result in a degree of less than substantial harm to the heritage assets" in the area and concluded "the benefits do not outweigh the scale of the harm involved".
However their concerns were discussed at length at a meeting on Thursday, but councillors disagreed and approved the plans.
It is understood the Arc could be in place in three years' time.
Related Internet Links
Bristol City Council
Arc Global
We The Curious
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Jay-Z and Lady Gaga are among the stars who allegedly declined to appear in a documentary about R Kelly, the series' producer has said.
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Surviving R Kelly, which premiered in the US on Thursday, explores decades of sexual abuse allegations brought against the artist, all of which he denies.
John Legend is one of the only musicians who agreed to be interviewed.
In December 2018, the New York screening of the series was evacuated.
It followed individuals stating they received "a threatening phone call".
'Messy and muddy'
The show's producer Dream Hampton said it was "incredibly difficult" to get celebrities who had collaborated with Kelly to come forward.
"We asked Lady Gaga. We asked Erykah Badu. We asked Celine Dion. We asked Jay-Z. We asked Dave Chappelle. (They're) people who have been critical of him," she told the Detroit Free Press.
But Hampton doesn't believe it's because they support him or his actions.
"It's because it's so messy and muddy. It's that turning away that has allowed this to go on," she told Shadow and Act.
John Legend is one of the only major musicians involved in the docuseries made by Lifetime - he appears in the final episode which airs on Saturday.
"R Kelly has brought so much pain to so many people," he said.
The All of Me singer has been praised for his participation, with Hampton calling him a "hero", a title which he rejects.
"To everyone telling me how courageous I am for appearing in the doc, it didn't feel risky at all," he wrote.
Despite being one of the most successful R&B artists in history, Kelly's career has been plagued by accusations of sexual misconduct since the 1990s.
The new documentary details the relationship in 1994 between the late singer Aaliyah and Kelly, who married him when she was 15 and he was 27.
Vibe magazine later discovered that Aaliyah had lied on the wedding certificate about her age, listing herself as 18. The marriage was annulled in February 1995.
The late pop star's mother, Diane Houghton recently released a statement calling comments made by one of the documentary's interviewees "lies and fabrications."
"My husband and I were always on tour with [Aaliyah] and at interviews and every place she went throughout her entire career," she wrote.
"Whoever this woman is, I have never seen her before anywhere on planet earth, until now," Houghton added.
The series also includes the singer's second ex-wife Andrea Kelly, who also made abuse allegations.
#MeToo founder Tarana Burke, R Kelly's brothers and more than 50 other women also gave interviews in the documentary.
Hampton told the Detroit Free Press the women were "survivors" and praised them for their bravery.
"I admire them so much and have all the respect in the world for them," she added.
In July 2018, R Kelly released a 19-minute song called I Admit, which responded to multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against him.
The track, posted on the R&B star's SoundCloud page on Monday, admitted to infidelity but denied allegations of paedophilia and non-consensual sex.
The track came after a BBC Three investigation that sparked the #MuteRKelly campaign to limit his air-play.
The BBC has contacted representatives for Lady Gaga, Erykah Badu, Celine Dion, Jay-Z and Dave Chappelle for comment.
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The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said the UK's decision to leave the European Union has "thrown a spanner in the works" of its global growth forecast.
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Instead of predicting 3.2% growth in 2016, the IMF's World Economic Outlook (WEO) now expects only 3.1%.
It says the UK will be the worst affected of all the advanced economies.
Its 2017 UK growth forecast has been slashed from 2.2% to 1.3% and this year's has been cut from 1.9% to 1.7%.
The IMF's global growth forecast for 2017 has also been revised down from 3.5% to 3.4%.
Before the referendum vote on 23 June, the IMF says that the global economy had been showing promising signs of growth.
Analysis: Kamal Ahmed, BBC economics editor
The IMF does not believe that fears over an economic downturn have passed.
But, now the vote has been taken, now the Bank of England has made it clear it stands ready to loosen monetary policy further to support growth, now the government has signalled it could be willing to borrow more at ultra-low interest rates to invest, the hit to confidence (that essential economic driver) may not be as severe as some believed.
Read more from Kamal here.
"The first half of 2016 revealed some promising signs, for example, stronger than expected growth in the euro area and Japan, as well as a partial recovery in commodity prices that helped several emerging and developing economies," Maury Obstfeld, IMF Economic Counsellor and Director of the Research Department said in a statement.
"As of June 22, we were therefore prepared to upgrade our 2016-17 global growth projections slightly.
"But Brexit has thrown a spanner in the works."
Uncertainty
The IMF says that while the effects of Brexit are greatest in the UK, there is not enough information available to make a full assessment of its impact.
A UK Treasury spokeswoman said: "The decision to leave the European Union marks a new phase for the British economy, but the message we take to the world is this: our country remains open for business. We are the same outward-looking, globally-minded, big-thinking country we have always been."
The IMF also highlights the stresses that Brexit may cause within the European banking system, particularly in Italy and Portugal.
It says: "The Brexit vote implies a substantial increase in economic, political, and institutional uncertainty, which is projected to have negative macroeconomic consequences, especially in advanced European economies."
However Mr Obstfeld added: "The real effects of Brexit will play out gradually over time, adding elements of economic and political uncertainty that could be resolved only after many months.
"This overlay of extra uncertainty, in turn, may open the door to an amplified response of financial markets to negative shocks."
The IMF has produced two other set of predictions, a "moderately worse" one, and another that is "much worse", depending on how hard the UK finds it to re-establish trading relations with the EU and the rest of the world.
The "much worse" scenario would see global growth slow to 2.8% this year and next.
But Mr Obstfeld said: "The main reason we place less weight on these alternative scenarios, especially the more severe one, is that financial markets have proven resilient in the weeks after the referendum, re-pricing in an orderly fashion to absorb the news."
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50 Cent has defended sending a controversial tweet that has been condemned as anti-gay.
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Many took the tweet to suggest gay men should commit suicide and it has caused a massive row in the States.
It comes at a time when the American media has been covering a number of suicides by young gay people.
But 50 says the tweet has been misinterpreted: "Somehow they turned a simple joke into an anti-gay statement. I have nothing against people who choose an alternative life."
He adds: "In fact I've publicly stated my mom loved women. It's funny how people think negative statements are newsworthy but positive statements are not worthy of coverage."
He also points out that lol (laugh out loud) was at the end of the statement.
Star Trek star Zachary Quinto is one of the people who has criticised the rapper, sending him a tweet saying:
"You know what would truly make the world a better place? If people with as much influence and privilege as you spread hope not hate."
Stars like Kylie Minogue and Joe Jonas have got behind the It Gets Better campaign in the States to highlight the gay suicides and put a stop to bullying.
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Are you ready for a second dose of Guardians Of The Galaxy? The sequel has finished filming, its lead actor has revealed.
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Chris Pratt, who plays Star Lord in the Marvel movies, shared the news with Instagram followers by posting three photos from the final day of filming.
The movie is due for release on 5 May 2017.
This gives director James Gunn and his team less than 11 months to deliver a second intergalactic blockbuster.
"That's a wrap on #gotgvolume2" Chris Pratt wrote in his first Instagram update.
In his second update he shared a photo of him and stuntman Tony McFarr. "Love you buddy!" he wrote.
The third showed a second photo of Chris and Tony. They look similar-ish.
Two of the images show Pratt in a similar costume to the one he wore in the first movie.
James Gunn also shared a video on his Facebook page announcing the completion of filming.
"I am wrapping Mr Chris Pratt from the set of Guardians Of The Galaxy volume 2," James says in the video.
Chris Pratt also appears, thanking the crew and setting expectations high for the new movie.
"This is going to be the greatest spectacle film of all time," Chris says.
A fan questioned whether the video was to mark Chris Pratt completing work on the film or the completion of the movie itself.
"We're wrapped," James replied.
Guardians Of The Galaxy is one of the most successful Marvel movies yet, making more than $771m (£540m) at the worldwide box office.
It was beaten by The Avengers, The Avengers: Age Of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War and Iron Man 3.
That's no mean feat, considering Guardians Of The Galaxy were relatively unknown characters compared to the likes of Captain America and Iron Man.
Guardians Of The Galaxy 2 reunites the cast of the original movie alongside Chris Pratt.
Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Michael Rooker, Glenn Close and Karen Gillan return, along with the voices of Vin Diesel and Bradley Cooper.
The sequel will also add Pom Klementieff as alien hero Mantis to the mix, along with cinema icons Kurt Russell, Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone.
Fan theories suggest this trio will play the original 1969 Guardians Of The Galaxy - Starhawk, Charlie-27 and Nikki - but this is yet to be confirmed.
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The celebrity and businesswoman Paris Hilton has backed parents trying to toughen to the law on restraint and seclusion in Northern Ireland schools.
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By Robbie MeredithBBC News NI Education Correspondent
Tweeting to almost 17 million followers she appealed to Stormont's Education Committee to provide "meaningful protections" to children.
The committee held a hearing on restrictive practice, seclusion and restraint in schools on Wednesday.
Some parents have previously called for stricter protocols.
The British Association of Social Workers Northern Ireland (BASWNI) has also said the practices could have damaging effects.
Department of Education (DE) guidance states that all incidents involving the use of reasonable force should be "rare" and must be recorded by schools.
However, the recording of such incidents is not a legal obligation.
'Appoint parent-carer champion'
MLAs on the Education Committee heard from representatives from the International Coalition against Restraint and Seclusion (ICARS) and Parent Action NI.
Orla Watt from Parent Action NI told MLAs that children with special educational needs had "suffered" restraint and seclusion in special and mainstream schools in recent years.
Ms Watt said as well as new legislation there was a need for more training for school staff and boards of governors, and parent-carers wanted to be involved in that.
"We'd also like to request the appointment of a parent-carer champion similar to a mental health champion," she said.
SDLP MLA Daniel McCrossan agreed and said there was a "desperate need for a voice, someone central" to stand up for families.
Ulster Unionist MLA Robbie Butler also supported the need for a parent-carer champion.
In a briefing paper to the committee, ICARS said that stricter protocols on restraint and seclusion were needed so that the Northern Ireland Assembly could "fulfil its obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child".
Mother's 'harrowing' evidence
Deirdre Shakespeare and Beth Morrsion - who founded ICARS with Zoe Read - also gave evidence to the committee.
The organisation is campaigning for Harry's Law, named after Ms Shakespeare's autistic son, which would make it compulsory for schools to report when they had restrained or isolated a child to parents and the Education Authority.
It would also mean that more school staff were trained in more positive ways to address a child's behaviour rather than resorting to restraint or seclusion.
"The first step is ensuring mandatory recording and documenting of any incidents of physical or mechanical restraint or the use of seclusion on a child," Ms Shakespeare said.
Ms Shakespeare also told the committee of her son Harry's experience of being restrained at school and the pain that had caused her family.
In response the committee chair and Alliance Party MLA Chris Lyttle said MLAs would "do everything that we can" to support tougher protocols in Northern Ireland.
Sinn Féin MLA Pat Sheehan, the deputy chair of the committee, called Ms Shakespeare's evidence "extremely harrowing".
"We also have a responsibility to future generations to try and ensure whatever has happened to your children doesn't happen again," he said.
'Out-of-date guidance'
The Department of Education's Ricky Irwin acknowledged to the committee that more clarity was needed on when restraint and seclusion could be used in schools and that existing guidance was "out of date".
"Now more than ever we need to provide clarity on physical intervention, especially when supporting pupils with very complex needs who require this intervention as part of their support plan," he said.
"There is no legal requirement at present for schools to inform the department of incidents and any follow-up."
He said the department had not updated its advice on reasonable force since a circular issued in 1999 but was now carrying out a review on the use of restraint and seclusion in education.
He said that the views of school staff, children, young people and their parents and carers would be sought as part of the review.
However, there is as yet no timetable for when that review will be completed and any recommendations for change would have to be approved by Education Minister Peter Weir.
Mr Irwin said the evidence heard by the committee had been "disturbing" and the department wanted to make sure there was no inappropriate use of restraint or seclusion in schools.
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Millions of women in Mexico have taken part in a day-long strike to highlight rising levels of gender-based violence.
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The protest, dubbed "The Day Without Us", saw women across the country stay home from work and school on Monday.
In Mexico City, few women could be seen on public transport, in major shopping areas or in restaurants and cafes.
An estimated 10 women are killed each day in Mexico and police are investigating more than 700 cases of "femicide", the killing of women.
Many schools were closed as a result of the protest and female students boycotted university lectures.
"This is what a society without women would look like," Jorge Luna, a 21-year-old employee at a cafe where only male staff turned up for work, told AFP news agency.
Some women who did choose to work wore purple ribbons or clothing to express solidarity with the action. Several newspapers featured purple-coloured pages and left empty spaces where women writers would normally have appeared.
The protest followed a huge demonstration in Mexico City on Sunday that marked International Women's Day.
About 80,000 people took to the streets and there were clashes between police and protesters.
The rally began peacefully, but police said some groups threw petrol bombs and officers responded with tear gas. More than 60 people were injured.
The problem of violence against women in Mexico is getting worse and the government is being accused of inaction.
President López Obrador was criticised in February for suggesting that media were "manipulating" the problem. He later said his government was attentive to the issue.
All images subject to copyright.
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An eight-year-old boy has created a Santa's grotto to fundraise for children who have to spend Christmas in hospital.
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Billy Cook from Jaywick in Essex will open his grotto on Saturday.
Entry is free but there will be a donation box and funds raised will go to the Brompton Fountain that helps young patients to celebrate Christmas.
His mother Danell said he wanted to help because his younger brother Sonny Lee spent last Christmas in hospital.
Two-year-old Sonny Lee has congenital heart disease and more than £10,000 raised by his family since he was born has been donated to the Royal Brompton Hospital that treated him.
This year he is due to spend Christmas at home. His mother Danell and aunt Sarah Jane Mole have praised Billy's fundraising efforts.
"It's fantastic that a boy so young has done so much.
"It was upsetting for all the family when Sonny Lee was born and dealing with it has been a hard journey but they have taken it well.
"This was Billy's idea to pay something back. His sister Bobbie Jean is the leading fundraiser in the family," his mother said.
"Billy's first idea was to put up Christmas decorations and ask for donations, but he wanted to take it a step further and built a winter wonderland in his nan's shed," his aunt added.
"There is a donation box and people have already started giving him children's toys and money."
The grotto opens in Brooklands Gardens in Jaywick at 17:00 GMT and the house is lit up with Christmas decorations.
All the family have joined in dressing as Santa, Mother Santa, elves and helpers.
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Allowing teachers to formally prepare pupils for unofficial post-primary tests means those who were doing it anyway are now off the "naughty step".
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By Eimear FlanaganBBC News
It brings to an end almost a decade of pretence and defiance by schools who had disregarded official guidance.
However, the fact that the exams will remain unregulated means parents are still "stuck in the middle" of one of Stormont's most testing controversies.
There remains little consensus among politicians, parents or teachers.
'Perceived threat'
Ralph Magee, headmaster at Andrews Memorial Primary School in Comber, County Down, leads one of the schools that openly coached pupils for the unofficial transfer tests.
"From our perspective, we were on the naughty step," Mr Magee told the BBC's Good Morning Ulster programme.
"It was public that we were, because we were honest about what we were doing."
Last year, 93% of his P7 pupils completed the unregulated tests in a bid to secure a grammar school place.
The headmaster said the decision by Education Minister Peter Weir to reverse government policy removes the "perceived threat" to schools who had continued to coach pupils since the abolition of the 11-plus exam in 2008.
Parents 'stuck in the middle'
"What it doesn't change is the fact that testing is still unregulated and we still have two private companies essentially vying for business, and that I don't think is helpful," Mr Magee said.
"Parents in this position can't really be blamed, they're stuck in the middle."
After grammar schools decided to set their own tests, they split into two camps running totally different exams.
The Association of Quality Education and a group of Catholic grammar schools drew up separate entrance tests, now known as AQE and GL Assessment.
Pupils can choose to sit either one of the unofficial tests, both or none.
However, many teachers remain strongly opposed to academic selection at the age of 10 and 11.
'19th Century'
They include Pat McGuckian, the principal of St Patrick's High School in Keady, County Armagh, one of the top non-selective schools in Northern Ireland.
She said the minister's decision was a retrograde step.
"It is moving us back from to the 19th Century," she told the BBC. "I expected this to happen but I feel quite depressed this morning.
"Northern Ireland need an education system fit for the 21st Century, not the 19th Century."
She claimed the decision was "not based on any robust educational research".
"All of the research suggests that a child's ability is not fixed at 11 and if you label children at 11 you create a system of haves and have not."
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A series of forgotten photographs of Lawrence of Arabia have been uncovered at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI).
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TE Lawrence was made famous by his World War One exploits in the Middle East.
The images include two of him astride the motorcycle he was fatally injured on in May 1935 in Dorset.
He died six days after the incident, aged 46, only two months after leaving military service.
PRONI member of staff Colin Shaw said he found the photographs when he was researching a query.
The set of 58 pictures are from the notes and papers of Lawrence's biographer, Harford Montgomery Hyde, a former MP for Belfast North.
Mr Shaw said that although he had seen the David Lean directed film about Lawrence from the 1960s, he was amazed at how much more there was to the scholar, writer and soldier.
"For somebody who died at a relatively young age, 46, he achieved so much," he added.
"He was a practising archaeologist in the Middle East before he joined the army.
"There is a lot of interest in the First World War at the moment because of the centenaries, so I was fascinated by his distinguished military career.
"After the war he experienced difficulties readjusting to post-war life, and enlisted in the RAF under the pseudonym of John Hume Ross, and then the Royal Tank Corps where he, again, enlisted under another pseudonym - T. E. Shaw."
'Pioneering study'
Mr Shaw added that Lawrence had "refused a knighthood, worked for Winston Churchill, and unlike the 6ft 3ins Peter O'Toole (who played him in the movie), he was only 5ft 5ins".
"I subsequently found out that Hugh Cairns, the neurosurgeon who tended his injuries, would later write a pioneering study entitled 'Head injuries in motorcyclists - the importance of the crash helmet', which would led to the British Army ordering all despatch riders to wear safety helmets in November 1941," he said.
"I had no idea that there had been so much resistance to the wearing of helmets."
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A British survivor of mass shootings at a Tunisian beach resort identified her friend's body by her glittery toenail polish, an inquest has heard.
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Mother-of-four Trudy Jones, 51, was one of 30 Britons to die in the attack in June 2015.
She was on holiday with friend Carol Anne Powell, who survived the attack and later identified Ms Jones's body.
Islamist Seifeddine Rezgui gunned down 38 people in total at the five-star Riu Imperial Marhaba, near Sousse.
An inquest at the Royal Courts of Justice in London is set to hear evidence about each of the 30 British victims. The first victim the inquest heard details about was Ms Jones.
In Ms Powell's statement, she said she "heard the most terrible explosion" behind her.
She added that she initially thought it was an explosion in a beach kitchen, and then crowds of people appeared, running away from the area.
She told the inquest how Ms Jones, from Blackwood in South Wales, had gone to the beach, saying: "I wanted to run towards the beach to check on Trudy, but people were running towards me shouting 'Go, go'."
"I started to run towards the hotel with the crowds of people."
Ms Powell described eventually deciding to play dead in a hotel car park.
She said a man picked her up and put her on his shoulders - while she continued to play dead - before carrying her to the safety of a neighbouring hotel.
"I am desperate to find out who he is because he saved me," she added.
Later, Ms Powell had to go to the mortuary where the victims' bodies were being held, and identified Ms Jones by her distinctive nail polish.
The court was told that a post-mortem examination was carried out in Tunisia and another in the UK - where Ms Jones was also identified through dental records.
Speaking to BBC Wales, the Jones family said: "It's been a heartbreaking day for all, re-living the events of June 2015.
"We will never come to terms with the loss of Trudy. She was the family's rock and our inspiration to life.
"Even though after this inquest it will be put to rest, we will never forget our treasure. She will always be in our hearts."
Gunman 'appeared calm'
Another witness said he hid behind a sun lounger as tourists were "executed" by the gunman, the inquest heard.
Simon Greaves, who had been on holiday with his wife, said in a statement that he had seen Rezgui kill a person on a sun lounger with a single shot "like an execution".
"People were screaming and running towards the gate to the hotel and into the sea to seek safety," he said.
He said Rezgui "appeared very calm and looked like he knew exactly what he was doing".
He added: "My only thought was to get to my wife. I had no other thoughts."
The hearing briefly paused as Mr Greaves began to get upset.
He said he initially thought the gunshots were firecrackers: "I don't know the number of shots but it was a hell of a lot."
'I assumed we would be safe'
Another witness, Mark Hornby, who had booked a last-minute holiday at his local Thomson shop and was on holiday with Ms Powell, told the court that his travel agent had not said Tunisia was a terror risk.
"I assumed we would be safe," he said in a statement read out on his behalf.
At the time, the Foreign Office warned that "further attacks are possible" in the country, following shootings at a museum in the capital city of Tunis four months earlier.
Mr Hornby also told the court that there was "no security at all" at the front of the hotel and area around the hotel, despite the area being a known terror risk.
"It was easy to walk into another hotel, there was no one checking you," he added.
Rezgui was shot dead by police about an hour after the attack, which began at about midday on Friday 26 June 2015.
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ASAP Rocky has pleaded not guilty to assault in Stockholm.
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The US rapper, real name Rakim Mayers, is on trial accused of assaulting a 19-year-old Afghan refugee in the Swedish capital a month ago.
Two members of the 30-year-old's entourage are also on trial and have pleaded not guilty.
ASAP Rocky and the two other suspects, who've been held in prison after a fight that took place on 30 June, claim they were acting in self-defence.
Warning: There are images below showing bloody injuries to a person's body, which you may find upsetting
The trial - which is in its first day - was delayed starting due to the massive media and fan interest in the case.
There were issues getting in and out of the court and some fans had to be turned away from the public gallery as it quickly filled up.
The prosecution are going through a detailed 522-page preliminary report, which contains extensive photographs of injuries the alleged victim suffered.
The alleged victim, who is not being named by media, has claimed damages of roughly £12,000 (139,700 Swedish Krona).
They allege that ASAP Rocky used a weapon - claiming the injuries are consistent with the use of a bottle or a similar blunt object.
A lawyer for one of the rapper's co-defendants claims he has completely new evidence that he believes will ensure the trio are found not guilty of assault - but would not yet reveal what type of evidence it is.
It's expected that evidence will be shown to the court on Thursday.
Inside the courtroom
Maddy Savage, BBC News
Sat in the front row, ASAP Rocky has appeared really engaged throughout the hearing.
He's wearing a green T-shirt - a standard-issue uniform given to suspects detained in Sweden before a trial - and his braids are tied back off his face, so you can see the earpiece he's using to listen to a translation of the proceedings.
The document that's being presented to the court includes text messages from some of ASAP Rocky's friends, graphic photos of the alleged victim's injuries, and transcripts of conversations witnesses had with the police.
Photographs of the bottle allegedly used during the fight have also been shown.
ASAP Rocky's mum is in the front row in the gallery, where his supporters and media are sitting.
It's separated from the main courtroom via a glass screen. She's being mobbed by journalists as she enters and leaves the courthouse and looks unsettled by the attention.
Just before the court broke for lunch she shared a long hug with one of ASAP Rocky's other supporters in the gallery.
The trial is scheduled for Tuesday, Thursday and Friday - although it could finish before then.
Assault causing actual bodily harm carries a maximum prison sentence of two years in Sweden.
ASAP Rocky has been held in custody since 3 July following an alleged assault which took place on 30 June.
His imprisonment has attracted the attention of US President Donald Trump, who said he'd spoken to the Swedish Prime Minister after requests to intervene from Kanye West and his wife Kim Kardashian West.
The prosecutor in charge, Daniel Suneson, previously told Radio 1 Newsbeat he hadn't spoken to any White House representatives, or any representatives of the Swedish government, while investigating.
President Trump later demanded that Sweden "Give A$AP Rocky his FREEDOM".
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Work has begun on a major overhaul of the nuclear power station at Hunterston in Ayrshire.
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By David MillerBBC Scotland environment correspondent
It follows the decision to extend the station's working life by a further seven years.
Hunterston B opened in 1976 and was originally scheduled to be decommissioned in 2011, but will now generate electricity until 2023.
EDF Energy says it is investing more than £20m to ensure it continues to operate efficiently and safely.
Station director Colin Weir told BBC Scotland: "As the plant ages, we have to look at what's ageing and replace some components.
"More importantly, we also test and inspect our components, much as you would with a vintage car.
"We take a great deal of care with our nuclear power plant."
The work is known as a "statutory outage".
The operators of nuclear power plants are required by law to carry out regular inspections and maintenance.
Major work can only be carried out when part of the plant is shut down.
One of Hunterston B's two Advanced Gas Cooled Reactors (AGRs) is currently offline as a result and won't return to service until October.
The workforce at Hunterston, near West Kilbride, has doubled as a result of the project and firms across the west of Scotland have won new business.
Local bed and breakfast owners in Ayrshire are benefiting from the influx of workers and, at the other end of the economic scale, major engineering companies are benefiting too.
Doosan Babcock in Renfrew is one of those firms.
The company's nuclear service director, Cameron Gilmour, said: "We support EDF at Hunterston and Torness in Scotland, but also across its other nuclear stations in the UK.
"We employ up to 1,000 people with EDF and in Scotland our nuclear business is very important to sustaining jobs locally and investing in facilities like those we have here in Renfrew."
But anti-nuclear campaigners say the money being invested at Hunterston could be better spent elsewhere.
Dr Richard Dixon, of Friends of the Earth Scotland, said: "You could create many more jobs if you were investing in energy efficiency, insulating people's homes, and in particular in renewables.
"You would get more jobs for the same amount of money and you wouldn't be creating more nuclear waste, for which we have no solution."
The nuclear plant at Torness in East Lothian began operating in 1988 and is due to be decommissioned in 2023.
Its working life is also expected to be extended, subject to approval by the UK's Office for Nuclear Regulation.
The Scottish government is opposed to the construction of new nuclear power stations in Scotland, but the UK government says new stations will have an important role to play in the country's future energy mix.
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More than 10,000 military personnel are to take part in a major UK-led Nato exercise in Scotland.
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Joint Warrior is held twice a year, in spring and autumn.
Starting on 30 March, the first of this year's exercises will involve 35 warships, five submarines and 59 aircraft.
The Clyde will be a gathering point for many of the ships involved and some of the aircraft will operate from RAF Lossiemouth in Moray.
The exercise involves live-firing training at ranges in the Highlands, including at Cape Wrath.
Last April's staging of Joint Warrior saw a delegation of Russian military personnel come to Scotland to observe one of Europe's largest Nato exercises.
The visit was in line with the UK's obligations to the Vienna Document which aims to promote mutual trust and transparency among states signed to it.
While not unusual, the visit for Joint Warrior came amid suggestions of a new Cold War.
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An Australian mining firm says it regrets clearing a key Aboriginal site in the west of the country without following proper procedures.
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Fortescue Metals Group was supposed to develop the land in the presence of community elders, who were to salvage artefacts and perform cultural rites.
But work to expand an iron ore mine went ahead without them due to what the firm called an "administrative error".
Mining companies are under pressure to improve management of indigenous sites.
Earlier this week, another mining company, BHP, said it was investigating a rock fall in the Pilbara, also in Western Australia, which damaged a sacred site. The site was not part of active mining operations.
And last year Rio Tinto was ordered to rebuild an ancient Aboriginal cave system it blew up in the same state in May.
The incident at Juukan Gorge led to the resignation of the firm's chief executive and other senior members of staff.
'Sincere apology'
The latest incident in the Weelumurra Creek area happened despite an agreement that elders of the Wintawari Guruma people should be present when the site was developed.
But Fortescue chief executive Elizabeth Gaines said the work had been carried out earlier than scheduled.
"I have spoken to Wintawari Guruma Aboriginal Corporation (WGAC) Chairman Glen Camille regarding this incident to personally express my regret and sincere apology on behalf of Fortescue," she said in a statement.
"We have carried out a full investigation into the matter which has shown that this unfortunately occurred as a result of an administrative error... We have paused all clearing works at this site as we work with WGAC on the matter."
But Mr Camille urged the Western Australian government to prosecute the company, according to Reuters news agency.
The government said the matter was being investigated.
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Football fans have voiced their anger at a decision to axe a number of bus routes to Reading's ground.
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The services from Basingstoke and Farnborough in Hampshire, and Bracknell and Wokingham to the Madejski Stadium will not operate this season.
The club said the Stagecoach services only attracted limited passengers and there were other transport links.
But fans have argued that the routes have been busy and going by train will cost them three times as much.
'Heavily subsidised'
Fan Daniel Mitchell said: "There were a lot of people using these services, although they suggest it has been running at a loss.
"Now instead of costing about £5 to get to the Madejski it will be more like £15."
Mick Hall, another football supporter, said: "This is going to cause us a lot of extra expense for going by car or by train and bus this season.
"We used to get between 50 to 70 people on our bus from Bracknell."
Reading Football Club said: "[The services] had been very heavily subsidised since their inception in 2007, but the very low number of passengers sadly did not warrant a continued further outlay.
"Train services run from each of these locations to Reading town centre, and with the excellent shuttle bus service from the station to Madejski Stadium, there are still very good transport links."
All Reading buses remain in place for the season, with timetables and fares both remaining unchanged.
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A group of men standing around a desk: it is not the typical image that goes viral online.
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The photograph in question was taken on US President Donald Trump's first day in the Oval Office on Monday, when he signed a ban on federal money going to international groups that perform or provide information on abortions.
"Men making decisions about women's bodies" was a much-repeated phrase on Twitter, as it was shared hundreds of thousands of times, including by author JK Rowling.
The concern over lack of women at the table comes as Mr Trump's cabinet attracts attention for the high proportion of white, male nominations.
And while some people welcomed the move on abortion, others on social media expressed alarm and confusion over what its impact could be.
Viral images and headlines do not always tell the whole story. So here is an at-a-glance look at what President Trump's executive order means.
Is this a step towards banning abortion in the US?
Not in itself. This particular executive order is relevant outside of US borders.
The policy requires non-governmental organisations receiving federal funding to agree to "neither perform nor actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations".
This particularly worries women's rights campaigners in developing countries, where funds or facilities are already limited.
Although this policy does not directly affect services in the US, Mr Trump has said he supports an abortion ban at home.
His signing of this order as one of his first executive actions indicates he still sees the issue as a priority.
Is President Trump the first to introduce a ban on foreign funding?
Republicans and Democrats have been involved in a political tug-of-war over the issue for decades.
Republican President Ronald Reagan first created the Mexico City Policy in 1984, stopping funding for international groups which perform or provide information on abortions.
But Democrats later rescinded it under the Clinton administration.
It was reinstated when President George W Bush took over in 2001 and overturned again by President Barack Obama in 2009. And now it is back.
What has all this got to do with Mexico City?
The order's official name is the Mexico City Policy because President Reagan first implemented it at a United Nations population conference in Mexico City.
And why is it sometimes nicknamed the 'global gag law'?
Critics of the policy say organisations working around the world feel censored by it because they cannot offer women full advice on family planning.
If they flout the rules, they lose funding which, in some cases, could threaten certain projects or the whole organisation.
However, pro-life groups have welcomed the new administration's swift move.
"President Trump's immediate action to promote respect for all human life, including vulnerable unborn children abroad, as well as conscience rights, sends a strong signal about his administration's pro-life priorities," said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of US pro-life organisation Susan Anthony List.
Is it unusual to have so many men at the table?
No. Like many governmental decisions, the rules on abortion are often determined by male officials.
Many on social media were quick to point out that the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling - seen as a landmark case for abortion rights in the US - was delivered by an all-male Supreme Court.
The Roe v Wade decision says abortion is legal until a foetus is viable, typically between 22 and 24 weeks.
What are Mr Trump's views on abortion?
The new US president has previously changed his mind on the issue. He has gone from being pro-choice in 1999 to being against abortion today, although he says he would allow exceptions such as in the case of rape or incest.
On the presidential campaign trail, he said he believed "some form of punishment" should be in place for women who have abortions, if the practice is banned.
But, after strong criticism, he released a statement saying that only the doctor or practitioner should be punished, not the woman.
In an interview with CBS News, Mr Trump said: "The laws are set. And I think we have to leave it that way."
He refused to say whether he believed abortion was murder, but he later conceded that he could not disagree with the statement.
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Staff at a tax office threatened with closure in Gwynedd will keep their jobs, it has been confirmed.
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But HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) said the office at Ty Moelwyn in Porthmadog, which employs 17 people offering a Welsh-language service, would move to Thedford House in the town in 2018.
Staff were told the news on Thursday.
It had been announced in 2015 that all tax offices across Wales would close, with staff expected to transfer to new centres in Cardiff and Liverpool.
Next year's move will mean Porthmadog staff are based in the same building as the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in the town.
HMRC said it would enable both departments to explore how they might work together in the future to provide Welsh language customer services.
Rachel McLean, director general of customer services at HMRC, said: "This move is vital to the success of our plans to continue to provide Welsh language customer services from Porthmadog.
"It will also allow us to explore how we might develop those services with both DWP and other government departments in the future."
Simon Brooks, chairman of Porthmadog town council said: "This is excellent news for the staff and their families and for the whole community.
"It is also a boost for the Welsh language in the Porthmadog area."
UK government minister Guto Bebb said he was "delighted" the future of the office had been secured.
"This demonstrates the UK government's commitment to the Welsh language and to ensuring that we maximise the benefits that come from co-locating government offices to provide the best possible service for the taxpayer," he said.
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Avid Life Media, the owner of infidelity dating website Ashley Madison, is being investigated by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), company executives said.
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Last year, hackers stole the personal information of millions of the website's customers, which helps link up married people who wish to cheat.
The hack led to an internal shake-up.
Chief executive Rob Segal and president James Millership took the helm in April, Avid Life said on Monday.
The two told Reuters they did not know the exact focus of the FTC's investigation.
A spokesperson for the commission declined to comment on the investigation.
The FTC's consumer protection unit can investigate cases where consumers were told their information was secure, but was then handled recklessly or inappropriately.
In 2015, hackers published the data stolen from Ashley Madison, exposing the personal information, including names, of the website's users.
'Life is short, have an affair'
Ashley Madison- which uses the slogan "Life is short, have an affair" - has faced a mounting list of investigations and lawsuits since the website was hacked.
In a statement on Monday, Mr Segal said: "The company is truly sorry for how people's lives and relationships may have been affected by the criminal theft of personal information."
The company plans to spend millions of dollars improving its cyber security and Mr Millership said its aim was "to rebuild Ashley Madison as the world's most open-minded dating community."
In 2014, another of Avid's dating sites, JDI Dating, paid $616,165 (£473,268) to settle an FTC investigation into that site's use of computer programs that created fake profiles, known as fembots. The use of fembots was judged to be misleading to customers.
Ashley Madison was also exposed for using fembots in 2015. The website used these programs to strike up conversatiosn with paying male customers. The website has a five to one male to female ratio.
Avid said it shut down these fake profiles in the US, Canada and Australia in 2014 and the rest of the world by 2015.
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An investigation into the alleged activities of the Army's most high-ranking agent in the IRA will also examine possible crimes by IRA members, agents, Army and police handlers.
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The agent, codenamed Stakeknife, has been linked to more than 50 murders.
The investigation will be led by the chief constable of Bedfordshire Police.
The PSNI said it would "not seek to direct or control, or in any way interfere" with the inquiry, which could take up to five years.
The agent known as Stakeknife has been named in the media as Freddie Scappaticci, originally from west Belfast. Mr Scappaticci has denied the allegations.
During a press briefing on Friday, PSNI Chief Constable George Hamilton said the investigation team would not include any current or former members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), PSNI, Ministry of Defence or MI5.
"After taking a number of issues into consideration, I have decided that a team resourced with external officers and staff funded by the PSNI is the most appropriate way forward, given the size, scale and complexity of the investigation," he said.
The chief constable said the team would consist of between 50 and 70 investigators.
'Complex investigation'
Mr Hamilton also introduced the man who will lead the investigation, Jon Boutcher, the chief constable of Bedfordshire Police.
"I am humbled to have been asked to lead such a critically important and complex investigation," he said.
"I do not underestimate the huge task of establishing the circumstances behind how and why these murders occurred during those dark days.
"My principal aim in taking responsibility for this investigation is to bring those responsible for these awful crimes, in whatever capacity they were involved, to justice.
"As soon as officers and staff are in place the investigation team will begin reaching out to victims, victims' families and all interested parties to receive information."
Who is Stakeknife?
Freddie Scappaticci is alleged to have been the most high ranking British agent within the Provisional IRA who was given the codename 'Stakeknife'.
He was the grandson of an Italian immigrant who came to Northern Ireland in search of work.
He has admitted, in the past, to being a republican but denies claims that he was an IRA informer.
He is believed to have led the IRA's internal security unit, known as 'the nutting squad,' which was responsible for identifying and interrogating suspected informers.
Mr Scappaticci left Northern Ireland when identified by the media as Stakeknife, in 2003.
In October 2015, the director of Public Prosecutions in Northern Ireland, Barra McGrory QC, announced that he had asked the police to investigate allegations that Stakeknife was involved in 24 murders.
The IRA's internal security unit is believed to have killed at least 53 people it claimed were informers between 1978 and 1995.
It is unlikely that Stakeknife had a role in of all of those killings, but they will all have to be re-investigated in an attempt to establish precisely the extent of his involvement.
The daughter of a woman who was allegedly murdered by the IRA said she was relieved that the investigation was "finally starting".
Belfast woman Caroline Moreland, a Catholic mother of three, was abducted and murdered in July 1994.
The body of the 34-year-old was found near Rosslea, County Fermanagh.
Her daughter, Shauna, said: "I'm still very cynical of getting the whole truth but I don't think I would be able to go on with this fight believing that I couldn't get aspects of the truth at least."
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A charity worker who worked with Mother Teresa in India has died after an alleged attacked in Swansea.
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Mark Bloomfield, 54, died on Saturday after he was found injured in High Street in the city centre last Thursday.
A man has been charged with causing grievous bodily harm.
The family of Mr Bloomfield, originally from Stratford Upon Avon, paid tribute to his charity work across the world saying he "had built a legacy".
They said that as a special assistant to Mother Teresa in Calcutta, he was an essential contributor to her mission.
Mother Teresa, the Roman Catholic nun worked with the poor in India and died in 1997 - aged 87.
"In India, he organised free cataract surgery camps and founded schools that gave rare access to education for girls. In Africa, he helped preserve wild game by introducing ultralight aircraft to combat the onslaught of poachers.
"He will be remembered for all of this and more by his mother and three siblings."
The family said Mr Bloomfield would continue to have an impact on others' lives as a registered organ donor.
South Wales Police are investigating the incident linked to his death near the Full Moon pub on Swansea's High Street on 18 July at around 15:00 BST, and are appealing for information.
Colin Thomas Payne, 61, from Swansea, is currently remanded in custody having been charged with causing grievous bodily harm.
A 21-year-old man and a 50-year-old woman were also arrested in connection with the matter and were released under investigation.
Det Ch Insp Darren George has appealed for witnesses and said: "My sincere condolences are passed to Mr Bloomfield's family, after he sadly passed away as a result of his injuries."
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UN talks on sustainable development are encountering disputes, delays and diplomatic wrangling, days before world leaders arrive to sign a new agreement.
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By Richard BlackEnvironment correspondent, BBC News, Rio de Janeiro
The talks, in Rio de Janeiro, are aimed at putting the world economy on a more sustainable path, helping people out of poverty while protecting nature.
Yet developing countries have walked out over money, and the presence of Palestinians has brought complications.
Campaigners say there is little hope of momentous changes being agreed here.
"That's not even a question anymore," said Lasse Gustavsson, executive director of conservation with WWF International.
"It's clear we will get something, but it's equally clear we will not get what the planet needs," he told BBC News.
Preparatory talks broke down on Thursday evening as the G77/China bloc of 131 developing countries walked out of a number of sessions.
They said they could not talk about issues such as the green economy - which some see as likely to put a brake on development - unless western nations were clear about the amount of financial aid they were prepared to pledge.
The draft agreement negotiators are working on contains paragraphs that would commit the developed world to providing either $30bn per year or $100bn per year - but western governments are not prepared to agree to either figure.
Long weekend
Discussion groups reconvened on Friday morning; and Nikhil Seth, head of the Rio+20 secretariat, told reporters there was a "sense of cautious optimism and constructive engagement".
But by Thursday evening, he said, only 28% of the negotiating text had been agreed - an increase of 8% in two days.
Responsibility for the talks passed to the Brazilian government on Friday evening.
Luiz Alberto Figueiredo, director of environment in Brazil's foreign ministry, said the pace would pick up in order to finish the talks by Tuesday, when heads of government arrive.
"Only essential issues will be discussed so we can reach a text as soon as possible," he said. "Now it's the final hour."
A further stumbling block concerns the participation of Palestinian delegates.
As a recently admitted member of Unesco, the Palestinian delegation believed it had a seat at the table here under what is known as the All States rule.
But as talks began, the US objected to this interpretation. So officially, the preparatory talks did not begin; as of Friday afternoon, the situation had not been clarified.
It is unclear whether or how the Palestinian presence will affect next week's three-day summit, at which their minister will be entitled to make a set-piece speech.
More than 26,000 delegates have now been registered for the summit, including politicians, government negotiators, journalists and business leaders.
But the biggest contingent comes from groups campaigning either for poverty alleviation or environmental protection; and they appear uniformly frustrated by how much time is being taken up on detailed haggling rather than on agreeing a visionary outcome.
"It is developing countries and the world's poorest people who have the most to lose from a weak outcome at Rio+20," said Stephen Hale of Oxfam.
"We urgently need Brazil to step forward and persuade other countries to make commitments that match the urgency of the challenge."
WWF suggested that European heads of government, who are in the main staying away, should re-assess their priorities.
The UK's David Cameron and Germany's Angela Merkel are among those who are scheduled to attend the G20 meeting in Mexico on Monday and Tuesday before flying back to handle any fallout from Sunday's general election in Greece, rather than making the comparatively short hop to Rio.
"We have most of the heads of government, even heads of state, coming in from emerging economies - their GDP is about 30% of the world total, Greece's is about 0.37%," said Mr Gustavsson.
"We may look back on this as a historic moment when Europe handed over the sustainable development baton to the emerging economies."
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Roland* was a first-year student when he joined the Buccaneers, a secret, illegal student society in Nigeria. A brutal initiation ritual was held late at night in the forest.
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By Helen Oyibo BBC Pidgin, Lagos
Older members, singing, dancing and drinking, formed a ring around him and other blindfolded initiates, beating them severely until the early hours of the morning.
The ritual was supposedly to purge the initiates of weaknesses and instil bravery in them.
"The moment you go in there and come out, you are a different person," Roland told the BBC.
These societies, also referred to as confraternities and campus cults, have names like Vikings, Black Axe, Eiye (a word in the local Yoruba language for bird), and the Buccaneers.
They have a chain of command similar to militia groups, use code words and have insignia bearing the favourite weapon of the cult, along with its colour.
Members are promised protection from rival gangs, but it is mostly about power and popularity.
These secret societies are banned in Nigeria and hundreds of members have been arrested and prosecuted over the years. Nevertheless, they continue to operate, especially on university campuses, where they still attract new members.
'Fake news' about gangster attacks
These cults have been accused of being behind serious violence, including killings, at universities across the country and sometimes harassing lecturers for good grades.
In some cases, students are lured with promises of networking opportunities.
Most societies now operate off campus as well, often with members who never went to university. They have increasingly resorted to crime.
14 shot dead at University of Nigeria in 2002
13 butcheredat Kogi State University in 2019
5 hackedto death at Rivers State University in 2006
2 beheadedand used as goalposts at Abia State University in 2016
2 killed while sleeping at University of Jos in 2002
1 killed at Institute of Technology, Enugu, in 1997
In places like the commercial capital Lagos and oil hub Port Harcourt, cults have been known to recruit teenagers into street gangs that serve as a training ground for membership if they get to university.
In April, residents of Lagos and neighbouring Ogun state resorted to forming vigilante groups as reports spread that hundreds of gangsters belonging to One Million Boys and Awawa Boys were attacking some neighbourhoods.
There was a lockdown in the state to halt the spread of the coronavirus and some residents said the gangs had become more daring and were robbing homes.
Soon there were more reports, especially on social media, of gangs attacking people in other communities in what looked like massive coordinated attacks.
The police denied there were widespread robberies in the state, describing the reports as "fake news" spread by the gangsters to cause panic as a prelude to launching attacks.
Police, nevertheless, confirmed they had arrested more than 200 suspected cultists for being involved in a gang war that broke out after the death of a cult leader in a fight.
Why Roland became a Buccaneer
Roland decided to join a cult to get protection at his university in eastern Nigeria.
A friend of his was robbed by a confraternity member resulting in a feud. Roland got dragged into the feud, and was assaulted on two occasions.
He reported the attacks to university authorities, but campus security guards could do little.
These unarmed private guards were - and remain - no match for the cultists, who carry guns and other deadly weapons.
Roland's search for the "least violent fraternity" led him to the Buccaneers after he declined an invitation to join the notorious Black Axe.
But once inside he lived in fear of rival groups.
Nobel laureate's role in formation of societies
The confraternity system in Nigeria was not always so violent.
It was started way back in 1952, during the last years of British colonial rule, by a set of young idealistic men.
They included Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka at Nigeria's prestigious University of Ibadan in Oyo State in south-western Nigeria.
The students named their confraternity the National Association of Seadogs, or Pyrates, to rebel against notions of elitism by middle-class Nigerians.
The original founders, known as the Magnificent Seven, were committed to the pirate theme. They used to even pretend to be pirates, wearing bandanas and carrying cutlasses.
"We were having fun with a social orientation," Soyinka told the BBC.
He described the present confraternities as "vile, evil groups".
"I never imagined that any university-based group could actually adopt a mafia style, which involved manhood tests like raping, robbery, arms, murder, kidnapping.
"At no time did I imagine that anything could degenerate. And why did it degenerate? Instead of these kids being treated as the criminals they were, they were being protected by their parents and their relations," he said.
The Pyrates, of which Soyinka is still a member, now exist as a group dedicated to "humanitarian and charitable endeavours".
It no longer recruits students, and its leadership took it off campuses in 1984 in order to distance the Pyrates from violence.
How the societies became violent
A split in the Pyrates in the late 1960s had led to breakaway students starting the Buccaneers, and other societies.
Petty rivalries developed between them as they jostled for prestige, power, women and access to corrupt politicians who began hiring cult members to unleash violence against opponents.
Some groups are more violent than others and not all members are involved in crime. Nevertheless, they all strike fear in the hearts of Nigerians.
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The Black Axe are among the most notorious. They emerged in the 1970s and were originally known as the Neo Black Movement. Its founders said the group's aim was to "liberate" the black race.
But at universities, the group no longer seems to be driven by any political ideology.
Instead, Black Axe members are accused of numerous killings and sexual attacks.
Military accused of funding cults
In 1999 they killed five members of the student union at Obafemi Awolowo University in the ancient city of Ile-Ife in Osun State.
Black Axe members have also been victims of brutal violence.
At the University of Port Harcourt in the mid-1990s, a cult leader was decapitated and his bloodied head was hung on a pole at the university's entrance as a sign of triumph.
Cult violence on campuses has decreased in recent years. It was at its worse in the 1980s and 1990s when Nigeria witnessed numerous coups.
The military was repeatedly accused of funding and arming confraternities to attack and suppress the student protest movement demanding democracy.
Journalist Omoyele Sowore knows the groups well from that era, when he was a student at the University in Lagos.
Cults were causing havoc on campus and as president of the student union he decided to take them on.
It would prove costly.
"I almost lost my life," Sowore told the BBC.
In March 1994, he was held at gunpoint and injected with an unknown substance.
"Several of them pounced on me. They stabbed me in the head and left the knife there and stripped me naked," Sowore said.
He was later rescued by other students and taken to hospital.
Cults, drugs and people trafficking
The activities of some of these groups are not restricted to Nigeria. The Eiye cult is accused of criminal activities as far away as Europe.
Its members were among a group of 23 arrested by police the Spanish region of Catalonia in 2015 for being part of an international syndicate accused of trafficking people and narcotics (cocaine and marijuana) and forging passports.
The group was also accused of facilitating the transport of stolen crude oil into Europe.
Rarely do members leave a cult while still in university - those who dare to do so are assaulted or, in some cases, killed.
Some students have quit their studies to escape the grip of the cults.
Others remain lifelong members of their cult. It provides them with networking opportunities to get good jobs and to access power.
They also fund the cults, whose members in turn act as pimps. They hook them up with female students, sometimes for sex orgies involving politicians and businessmen.
Roland believes the cults offer a false sense of security, prestige and power. Members are always on the edge, not knowing when a rival group will attack.
"Half the time you would be afraid. No matter what they [members] say, they are always afraid," he said.
* Roland's name has been changed for his own protection
* All illustrations by the BBC's Manuella Bonomi
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Organisers of commemorations to mark the 70th anniversary of the Coventry Blitz are debating whether to sound an air raid siren to mark the bombings.
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The Luftwaffe dropped thousands of tons of bombs on the city on 14th November 1940, killing hundreds of residents and destroying most of the city centre.
Residents are being asked by the city council if they want a siren sounded during a weekend of commemorations.
Some say it will act as a poignant reminder, but others disagree.
'Bring back memories'
The siren, with its two-tone wail, would be activated during a civic service in the cathedral ruins on Sunday, 14 November.
John Huthwait, 81, from Coventry, was only 11 when the city was devastated during the 12-hour blitz.
He said sounding a siren would give an idea of what people lived through.
"I think it is no problem, it will bring back memories. I mean we have got to remember these historical things," he said.
However, other residents who lived through the Blitz have said the eerie sound was too painful a reminder.
Three-quarters of the city centre were devastated, including the ancient cathedral, hospitals, schools and the tram system.
The council is expected to make a decision about sounding the siren at a meeting next month after hearing feedback from residents.
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A 76-year-old man has appeared in court accused of stalking his MP and sending her a letter with white powder on it.
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Exeter Crown Court heard Maurice Kirk contacted Taunton Deane MP Rebecca Pow asking for help in suing the police in a long-running legal battle.
The contact triggered a campaign of harassment, the Crown alleges that also included visiting her house and posting a picture of a shotgun online.
Mr Kirk of Westgate Street, Taunton, denies stalking.
Lockdown breach
Robin Shellard, prosecuting, told jurors the stalking started in May 2019 while Mr Kirk was in prison for an unconnected offence of breaching a harassment order against a doctor.
Mr Kirk contacted his Conservative MP for help suing police over a prosecution in which he was cleared of fixing a machine-gun on a vintage plane after claiming it was a harmless piece of metal.
He sent a letter to her that she opened and read when she realised her hands were covered with white powder. Ms Pow washed her hands, put on rubber gloves and then contacted the police.
The powder turned out to be harmless, the court heard, and Mr Kirk said the white powder was dried toothpaste that he had used to seal the envelope with.
Mr Shellard said further incidents happened in 2020 that caused Ms Pow distress when Mr Kirk left prison.
It is alleged Mr Kirk, who is representing himself at trial, became aggressive with Ms Pow's office manager during an unannounced visit and on 27 May, 2020, during the national lockdown, turned up at the MP's home.
Pictured with shotgun
Ms Pow found another letter in which Mr Kirk said he had tried plans A, B, C and D and was moving on to plan E, although he did not explain what that plan might be.
The prosecutor said Mr Kirk had called the police himself informing them he was going to Ms Pow's house and there was "likely to be a breach of the peace".
"He was advised not to go and told he could be arrested if he did so," Mr Shellard told the court.
Mr Kirk later posted a video clip of his visit to the house on his website with a message accusing the MP of being responsible for his previous imprisonment.
He also posted a photo of himself carrying a shotgun with two pictures of Ms Pow posted directly beneath.
His campaign caused her to become scared of using public transport and caused her to increase her personal security by carrying an alarm, jurors heard.
Mr Kirk said his contact was normal and was no more than a constituent seeking help from an MP.
The trial continues.
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Two German researchers say they have exposed the porn-browsing habits of a judge, a cyber-crime investigation and the drug preferences of a politician.
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By Mark WardTechnology correspondent, BBC News in Las Vegas
The pair obtained huge amounts of information about the browsing habits of three million German citizens from companies that gather "clickstreams".
These are detailed records of everywhere that people go online.
The researchers argue such data - which some firms scoop up and use to target ads - should be protected.
The data is supposed to be anonymised, but analysis showed it could easily be tied to individuals.
People's browsing history is often used to tailor marketing campaigns.
Linking list
The results of the research by Svea Eckert and Andreas Dewes were revealed at the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas this weekend.
The pair found that 95% of the data they obtained came from 10 popular browser extensions.
"What these companies are doing is illegal in Europe but they do not care," said Ms Eckert, adding that the research had kicked off a debate in Germany about how to curb the data gathering habits of the firms.
Before the data is used to customise the range of adverts which people see, any information that could be used to identify exactly who generated the clicks is supposed to be removed.
However, said Mr Dewes, it was "trivial" - meaning easy - to tie the information directly to people and reveal exactly where they went online, the terms they searched for and the things they bought.
Cyber-hacks season:
The data analysed by the pair connected a list of sites and links visited to a customer identifier. However, he said, by drawing on public information that people share about their browsing habits, it became possible to connect that entry on a list to an individual.
"With only a few domains you can quickly drill down into the data to just a few users," he said.
The public information included links people shared via Twitter, YouTube videos they reported watching, news articles they passed on via social media or when they posted online photos of items they bought or places they visited.
In many cases, he said, it was even easier to de-anonymise because the clickstreams contained links to people's personal social media admin pages which directly revealed their identity.
"The public information available about users is growing so it's getting easier to find the information to do the de-anonymisation," he said. "It's very, very difficult to de-anonymise it even if you have the intention to do so."
Dangerous data
The information revealed an intimate portrait of the browsing habits of people, said Ms Eckert.
"This could be so creepy to abuse," she said "You could have an address book and just look up people by their names and see everything they did."
In many cases the browsing habits did not expose anything illegal but might prove difficult for public figures to explain or justify, she said. In some cases it could leave them open to blackmail.
"After the research project we deleted the data because we did not want to have it close to our hands any more," she said. "We were scared that we would be hacked."
When asked about UK plans to make ISPs gather clickstreams on every Briton for security purposes, Ms Eckert urged the government to restrict for how long the information could be kept.
"If you are strong on data protection then you should not be allowed to do it," she said, "But for security purposes then perhaps you can hold on to it for a while."
Limiting how long it could be held would lessen the damage if the clickstreams were leaked or hacked, she said.
"You have to be very careful," she said "It's so, so dangerous."
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Wales may qualify for the highest level of European funding for the third time.
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By Guto ThomasBBC Wales political correspondent
Official figures suggest the poorest parts of Wales may fail to reach 75% of the average EU levels of wealth creation.
The 2009 statistics shows Wales as a whole has a measure of economic activity (known as gross value added) of just 74.3% of the UK average.
Wealth generation in West Wales and the Valleys for 2008 was down to 62.6% - the lowest level since devolution.
Described in Cardiff Bay as "an ironic mix of good and bad news", Plaid Cymru's MEP Jill Evans told BBC Wales: "Although I would prefer if Wales' GVA figures were above the threshold, I believe that a new round of European funding can be of real benefit to Wales' economy.
"The cuts in public spending in Wales will only heighten the European funding's importance to Wales."
This view was echoed by Labour MEP Derek Vaughan.
"Although these figures are disappointing on the face of it, it means that Wales could once again benefit from billions of pounds of Euro funding.
"A short time ago it seemed that the rules would change meaning Wales would lose out, however after my successful campaign it now seems Wales is guaranteed funding post 2013."
While key decisions about regional EU funding for 2014 onwards have yet to be made, it's likely that qualification for the next round of aid would depend on GVA statistics for a three-year period, such as 2007 to 2009.
The GVA for Wales compared to the rest of the UK in 2007 was 74.6%, 74.1% in 2008 and 74.3% in 2009 - giving an average of 74.3%.
If this level of GVA is reflected for West Wales and the Valleys when compared to the EU as a whole, it is conceivable that the poorest regions of Wales would qualify for the highest level of aid again.
This is despite the investment of billions of pounds of European funding in the poorest parts of Wales since 1999.
According to the Conservative MEP for Wales, Kay Swinburne: "This is a damning indictment of the Welsh Assembly Government that has failed to improve living standards in Wales.
"For Plaid to suggest that this is good news for Wales is appalling - I do not want us to lag behind Romania and Bulgaria - we need to aspire to succeed."
About £3bn in Objective 1 European funding was received in 1999 to 2006 and another £2bn in convergence funding from 2007 to 2013.
'Hugely disappointing'
Welsh Secretary Cheryl Gillan described the latest figures as "hugely disappointing", and that the statistics, which were released on Wednesday, "show that under the final year of the previous government, Wales was still the poorest part of the UK and the prosperity gap with the rest of the UK is widening".
"The prosperity level in Wales is now below what it was when the Welsh assembly was created in 1999 and is significantly below the level it was at in 1989 under the last Conservative government.
Deputy first minister Ieuan Wyn Jones said: "These figures show how all parts of the UK were hit hard as the first phase of the global recession took hold.
"While relative GVA per head in Wales performed slightly better than the UK as a whole during that period, our share of total GVA remains a challenge."
Valleys
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures reveal that west Wales and the valleys - which benefited from both types of European funding - has the lowest GVA per head of all the comparable regions in the UK.
GVA per head in 2008 was just £12,860 - which is 62.6% of the UK average.
John Bufton, UKIP MEP for Wales, said "Wales could qualify for the higher tier of EU support by default but this is nothing to celebrate.
"EU Regional development policy is clearly failing.
"What we must remember is that this is Welsh taxpayers' money to begin with, and only a small remuneration of the billions we pay to Brussels - money that clearly would be better spent at home, how we see fit."
Final assessments of the performance of the Welsh economy and key statistics to determine future funding for poorer regions are expected to be completed towards the end of 2012.
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Moscow is launching an app to track the movements of people in the capital diagnosed with coronavirus, who have been ordered to stay at home.
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By Leo KelionTechnology desk editor
The city's IT chief said the service would become operational on Thursday.
The move coincides with a separate initiative to help European health authorities create virus-tracing apps that communicate with each other. This could help relax border restrictions.
Germany is expected to announce its own app that ties into the scheme shortly.
NHSX, which is working on something similar for the UK, has been in communication with those running the project but has yet to commit to interoperability.
Location data
Moscow was put into an indefinite citywide quarantine on Monday.
Its Social Monitoring app will initially be limited to citizens who have already tested positive for Covid-19 but not been kept in hospital.
It will request access to the user's calls, location, camera, storage, network information and other data. The intention is to check they do not leave their home while contagious.
The local government's IT chief, Eduard Lysenko, said the app was being made available on Google's Play and Apple's iOS stores. He said those affected who did not own a smartphone could borrow one with the software pre-installed, for a fortnight.
"We'd be concerned about the possibility of this app being used to track the movements of millions of people as well proving to be a tool for social control," said Privacy International senior researcher Tom Fisher.
"For people to lose faith in the government and health authorities at this time, through being subjected to intrusive and unnecessary surveillance, will only serve to damage efforts to fight this virus."
Mr Lysenko also revealed plans to launch a related scheme for Moscow's wider population, in which residents will request a fresh QR (quick response) code each time they want to leave their home.
The square barcodes would be issued via email or an app, he added, to allow people to go out for shopping and dog-walking, among other tasks.
Citizens would be obliged to show the police their code if requested, he said.
Mid-April apps
The pan-European scheme involves about 130 scientists and technologists, who have been working on a way for different countries' coronavirus-tracing apps to link up without weakening privacy protections.
Several nations are working on apps that let users enter a unique code if they are found to have the virus.
The software will then send an alert to other people they have recently come into close contact with, advising them to go into quarantine or take other protective measures.
By doing this, others who are not affected might be able to be released from lockdown.
The Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) initiative aims to deliver a "multi-country exchange mechanism". So if someone travels from one European country to another, they can still receive or trigger an alert, even if using a different app to locals.
Chris Boos, one of the project's coordinators, said about 90% of the work had already been done and the technology should be ready for release by the end of next week.
A few governments had already signed up to take part but had yet to make formal announcements.
"You will see the first applications built on this by 15 April or 19 April - something like that. We're not talking about months, we're talking about a very short time," he said.
The aim was for more than 60% of each participating country's population to install the software, said his colleague Prof Marcel Salathe, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne.
A third leader, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (FHHI) executive director Prof Thomas Wiegand, said Bluetooth signals appeared to be the best way to track when people had come into close proximity to each other.
And the resulting records could be stored in an anonymous, encrypted form.
"Even if the data stored in the country data centres is subpoenaed or a hacker steals it, there is no way to trace back the patients or the contact people," Mr Boos said.
He also promised privacy activists would be invited to inspect the source code for themselves.
Germany's De Spiegel newspaper reports the country's federal government will soon confirm its own plans for an app co-developed with the FHHI.
The country has some of the toughest privacy laws in the world.
The report said use of the tool would be voluntary and a guarantee would be given that all of the data would be deleted soon after the crisis was resolved.
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Another case of coronavirus has been diagnosed in Northern Ireland, taking the total to four.
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The latest person who has tested positive is an adult who recently returned from Italy - their diagnosis has been linked to a previous case.
Northern Ireland's chief medical officer said he expected more cases "in the days and weeks ahead".
Five more cases were also confirmed in the Republic on Friday evening, taking the total on the island to 22.
The test sample from the latest case in Northern Ireland will be sent to a laboratory in England for verification.
"Northern Ireland remains in the containment phase and it is important to emphasise that," said chief medical officer Dr Michael McBride.
The first person to be diagnosed in Northern Ireland - which was confirmed last week - was a woman who had returned from northern Italy, the area at the centre of the outbreak in Europe.
That was followed by two more cases that were confirmed on Wednesday - one of those was a postgraduate student at Queen's University in Belfast.
A group of students at the university were asked to self-isolate as a precautionary measure as a result of that case.
The latest case is not connected to the university, BBC News NI understands.
Drive-through testing facilities are expected to be operational at hospitals across Northern Ireland within the next week.
One is already in place at Antrim Area Hospital.
In other developments on Friday:
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A charity supporting transgender children and young people has issued an apology after thousands of emails were made public online.
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Mermaids UK said it was "deeply sorry" for what it called a "historical data breach" after it was first reported by the Sunday Times.
The paper claims the correspondence included "intimate details", names and addresses, but the charity denies this.
Mermaids said it had taken immediate action and reported the breach.
In an official statement on the Mermaids UK website, the charity claimed that the emails were from 2016 and 2017, and that they were searchable only "if certain precise search-terms were used".
It maintained there was "no evidence" the information had been retrieved by anyone other than the Sunday Times, or those contacted by their journalist.
A Mermaids spokesperson told the BBC the emails were shared to a private group on a private messaging platform.
They insisted that the 1,100 emails were between executives and trustees of the charity, discussing matters relating to their work.
"To be clear this is absolutely not Mermaids service users emailing each other, and their emails and private correspondence being available to an outside audience," the spokesperson said.
The Times, however, reported that the emails contained "intimate details of the vulnerable youngsters it seeks to help".
It said the emails could be found simply by typing in the charity name and its charity number.
Mermaids UK stated it had notified the Information Commissioner's Office, the data protection watchdog, and contacted those affected.
The Charity Commission had also been notified, it said, and an independent investigation into the breach would be launched.
"We're going to be employing a third party to oversee processes and advise on how we can improve internal practice," the spokesperson told the BBC.
"I think it's important to note that this dates back some two years when Mermaids was a smaller charity dealing with the first aggressive onslaught from those who are opposed to giving vulnerable transgender children and young people the safe spaces they need."
Mermaids UK was formed in 1995, and is the country's leading charity in services offering support around gender and identity to children and young people up to 20 years old.
It recently received £500,000 from the National Lottery Community Fund.
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The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has put an ultimatum to the secretary of state over the latest political crisis, party sources have told the BBC.
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It comes as talks continue at Stormont to try to resolve the situation.
It was sparked by the murder of a former IRA member, Kevin McGuigan Sr, in August.
On Wednesday, well-known republican and northern chairman of Sinn Féin Bobby Storey was one of three men arrested over the murder.
The talks are taking place without the Ulster Unionists, who said they would not take part unless the status of the Provisional IRA is resolved.
The UUP said it would not return to the talks unless the IRA issue was top of the agenda.
Ultimatum
DUP leader Peter Robinson has said his party would continue to talk, but warned that if devolution collapsed it could be a decade before it returned.
The first minister has held talks with the Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers but details of the ultimatum have not been made public.
BBC News NI Political Editor Mark Devenport said it probably concerns the suspension or adjournment of Stormont.
He said there was no doubt the arrests were having "a very destabilising effect on the talks".
Police have said they believe IRA members were involved in the shooting of Kevin McGuigan.
Sinn Féin has denied this and maintains the Provisional IRA no longer exists.
North Belfast MP Nigel Dodds said the situation in Northern Ireland was "grave".
"We have now reached tipping point. Indeed in my view, we have gone beyond the tipping point. We are in a very grave state as far as devolution is concerned," he said.
Prime Minister David Cameron has appealed to keep the "spirit" of the peace process alive in dealing with the current political crisis at Stormont.
UUP leader Mike Nesbitt said his party had walked out because talks on paramilitary activity could not be "lumped in with the other issues".
He said if others, including the chief constable and secretary of state, acknowledge "the IRA exists... why can't Sinn Fein say that?"
Mr Nesbitt said it would be a big step if Sinn Féin were to make such an acknowledgement and help secure his party's commitment to the talks.
Sinn Féin MLA Conor Murphy said the party had "fulfilled every obligation under the peace process".
"We're quite clear that the IRA has left the stage," he said.
"We're quite happy to look at the whole issue of armed groups. There are a lot of armed groups in society, and we're quite happy to look at what the parties can collectively do about armed groups.
'Stunt politics'
"If unionism wishes to seize on an issue around the tragic killings of two men to try to upend the institutions for some electoral advantage, then there's not much we can do about that."
DUP Minister Arlene Foster said the talks were not all about Mr Nesbitt.
"[The UUP] reminds me of a self-indulgent child. You know what you should do with a self-indulgent child? You should not indulge them. You should get on with the business at hand," she said.
"If the Ulster Unionists aren't prepared to deal with the issues at hand and face republicans and deal with them then the Democratic Unionist Party will."
Despite the UUP's decision, Northern Ireland Secretary of State Theresa Villiers said the tone of Tuesday's opening meeting was "genuinely constructive".
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With only hours to go until the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the biggest fashion moment of the year remains a secret.
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The secret is: Meghan's wedding dress.
What will Meghan wear?
What will Meghan wear?
Once upon a time... royal wedding dresses were richly coloured
Queen Mary I was married in purple in 1554 - reserved exclusively for royals
In 1816 Princess Charlotte wore real silver thread with silver embroidery
Then Queen Victoria chose a simple white dress in English silk and lace
And set the pattern for white weddings ever after
The Queen Mother broke the mould in a loose flapper-era gown
But there are some style rules almost all royal dresses follow
No knees, please - royal dresses are nearly always full length
Since the 50s, skirts have slowly increased in volume
Sweden's Crown Princess Victoria went for an 'off-the-shoulder' look
But sleeves are still the done thing for most royal brides
A couple more finishing touches help define the royal look...
A train adds a sense of grandeur as you glide to the altar
And a veil remains quintessential for a royal wedding - Kate wore one too
The timeless princess role-model remains Grace Kelly in a high neck and full sleeves
Quite different from the layered tulle dress Meghan wore as an actress in Suits
But maybe she has a few surprises for us - we'll soon find out
Click next arrow to proceed
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Swipe to progress
If you can't see the explainer above, follow this link.
Royal wedding: What we know so far
Who is Meghan Markle?
Four vintage royal wedding gowns
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Epic Games, the studio behind the hit game Fortnite, has started legal action against Apple and Google in the UK.
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By Chris FoxTechnology reporter
Both Apple and Google removed Fortnite from their smartphone app stores in a row over the cut of sales they take from developers.
Epic Games claims the two tech giants' rules are in violation of UK competition laws.
But both companies say Epic Games broke their terms and conditions by trying to bypass their payment systems.
Apple said Epic Games' action had been "reckless".
What is the dispute about?
When people buy an app, subscription or in-app item on Apple's App Store or the Google Play store, the tech giants take a cut of the fee.
Typically they take a 30% cut, although in some cases the rate is lower.
For this reason, some companies charge more for subscriptions when people buy directly in the app instead of on their website, while others do not sell subscriptions in-app at all. Companies are also banned from telling app users a cheaper deal is available.
Epic Games has previously said it thinks a 30% cut is too much, given the amount of money and effort it invests in developing its games.
In August 2020, the company bypassed the Apple and Google payment systems to let Fortnite players buy virtual currency at a lower price, direct from Epic.
Both app stores then removed Fortnite from their services, and Apple terminated Epic Games' developer account.
What is the UK case about?
In documents submitted to the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal (CTA), Epic Games alleges that Apple and Google have abused their dominance over their smartphone operating systems.
While Apple produces iOS exclusively for its iPhones, Google's Android software is open-source so in theory any smartphone-maker can use it.
However, Google also produces a suite of proprietary tools including Maps, Search and the Play Store, which power some of the most popular services on smartphones. Phone-makers must enter an agreement with Google to use them on their devices.
Epic Games alleges that both companies abuse their power by:
Epic Games is not seeking a financial payout but instead wants the court to order Apple and Google to:
In a statement, Epic Games said: "We believe that this is an important argument to make on behalf of consumers and developers in the UK and around the world who are impacted by Apple and Google's misuse of market power."
It has taken similar legal action in the US and Australia.
On Thursday, 21 January, the CTA will decide whether Epic Games can include US-based divisions of Apple and Google in its legal action.
How have Apple and Google responded?
Apple said its priority was to create a "safe and trusted place to download software" and that it applied its rules equally to all developers.
"Epic enabled a feature in its app which was not reviewed or approved by Apple, and they did so with the express intent of violating the App Store guidelines," it said in a statement.
"Their reckless behaviour made pawns of customers, and we look forward to making this clear to courts in the UK."
Google said: "The open Android ecosystem lets developers distribute apps through multiple app stores. For game developers who choose to use the Play Store, we have consistent policies that are fair to developers and keep the store safe for users."
It said it welcomed the opportunity to "continue discussions" with Epic Games about bringing Fortnite back to the Google Play store.
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It was market day in Toribio, a small rural town in south-west Colombia.
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By Arturo WallaceBBC Mundo, Bogota
By mid-morning, some 3,000 people were busying themselves in the main square, among the stalls packed with fruit, meat and other products.
But then the sound of gunshots, followed by a huge explosion, turned a normal Saturday into a day people would never forget.
Rebels from Colombia's biggest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), had detonated a bus laden with gas canisters. The blast killed four people and injured 103.
Almost 500 houses were badly damaged - practically the entire town.
Toribio, located in the mountains of Cauca province, some 304km (189 miles) from Bogota, had seen plenty of Farc attacks before.
"But this is the worst that ever happened to us," Mayor Carlos Banguero told the BBC.
That same day, 9 July, the rebels also targeted three other neighbouring towns.
"The attacks... brought back images that Colombians thought were in the past," an article in Colombian newspaper El Tiempo said.
The Farc has been hit hard in recent years by Colombian government forces.
But the latest attacks have raised questions as to whether the rebels are back on the offensive.
No hiding places
The issue is being debated almost daily by politicians and the media, with some arguing that the security policies of President Juan Manuel Santos have emboldened the rebels.
Mr Santos categorically rejects this.
Speaking just after the Cauca attacks, he insisted that the rebels were acting "out of desperation".
"They're doing their best to distract the security forces because we're taking away their sanctuaries and lairs," he said.
A report published on 17 July by the Bogota-based think-tank Corporacion Nuevo Arco Iris said that the increasing number of Farc attacks was not the result of a supposed weakness of Mr Santos's military strategy.
The rise, the group said, stemmed rather from a strategy the rebels started to implement in 2008.
"The Farc came to realise that they needed to wage a different kind of war," said Leon Valencia, the director of Nuevo Arco Iris.
"And Cauca is their laboratory," he told the BBC.
According to Nuevo Arco Iris, the rebels are using much smaller units and increasingly relying on car bombs, ambushes and hit-and-run attacks.
"It's a strategy that allows them to exist, to say: 'Here we are, you can't forget about us,'" Mr Valencia said.
"I believe they will try to regain some strength to force a negotiation," he explained.
Drug routes
Juan Obdulio Gaviria, an adviser to former President Alvaro Uribe, believes the surge in Farc activities is linked to the possibility of talks.
"It is the result of having dropped the policy of permanent confrontation for one which contemplates the possibility of dialogue," he said.
Mr Gaviria also said the armed forces had been undermined by the prosecution of several of its members for alleged human rights violations.
"Any military operation is now examined as if it was a crime, and that has lowered the troops' morale," he said.
Illegal drug production and trafficking are also factors.
The Farc rely heavily on the cocaine trade to finance their campaign.
"What we're seeing is a battle to get back some of the drug-trafficking routes towards the Pacific Ocean," said Juan Carlos Villegas, the president of the National Business Association of Colombia (Andi).
This is consistent with the increasing number of attacks in Cauca, Norte de Santander, Arauca, Caqueta and parts of Antioquia reported by Nuevo Arco Iris.
In these regions, the number of Farc attacks during the first six months of 2011 exceeded last year's total.
In Colombia overall, the 1,115 Farc attacks registered from January to June represent an increase of 10% when compared with the total for the same period last year.
Mr Valencia says there were also increased attacks in the two previous years, when President Uribe was still in power.
The Nuevo Arco Iris report says that the hardline security policy pursued by Mr Uribe did deliver significant blows to the rebels but successes were over-exaggerated.
The continued guerrilla presence, the report concludes, suggests that "these successes will tend to fade".
So far, the Farc upsurge seems to have had little impact on the lives of most Colombians, especially those living in urban areas.
Officials are keen to stress that security will be tight during the forthcoming Fifa U-20 World Cup from 29 July - 20 August.
And the country's tourism authorities will be hoping their marketing message resonates with people thinking of visiting Colombia: "The only risk is you might want to stay."
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A 7ft (2.1m) boa constrictor fell from an attic on to the landing as the hatch was opened.
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Stephen Hope and his wife Annette were left "stunned" after the reptile fell at their home in Stockingford, Nuneaton.
"I'd only gone up there to look for some books, it was pretty frightening," Mr Hope said.
The snake, thought to be 14 years old, is now being cared for at the Nuneaton and Warwickshire Wildlife Sanctuary.
Warwickshire Police said the force was called to reports of a snake at a property at 19:15 BST on Friday.
The snake, now nicknamed Lofty, is "doing well" according to the wildlife sanctuary's owner Geoff Grewcock.
Mr Grewcock said: "No-one's got any idea how it got in the attic.
"Maybe someone's just dumped it and it crept in there".
Mr Hope said they would be getting a builder to check out the attic, "just to make sure there's no other snakes up there".
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Microsoft has signed a deal with chip designer Arm that will give it in-depth access to processor blueprints.
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The licensing deal means Microsoft can look at the entire instruction set that Arm chips use.
Arm designs the chips that power the vast majority of the world's mobile phones as well as an increasing number of netbooks and tablet computers.
Microsoft is one of just a handful of companies that have signed such a deal with Arm.
The only other companies publicly acknowledged by Arm to be architecture licensees are chip makers such as Qualcomm, Marvell and Infineon. Other firms tend to buy licences for access to specific Arm processors.
Ian Drew, a spokesman for Arm, said Microsoft has had a relationship with the chip designer since 1997. This has led to Microsoft producing mobiles and embedded devices that have Arm-designed processors inside.
"The architectural licence really is about the full access to the instruction set," said Mr Drew. "It's quite a large step."
An instruction set is the long list of all the things that a particular chip can do and the way it manages memory and other sub-systems to get them done.
Mr Drew declined to speculate on what the deal might mean for future Microsoft products.
In a statement, Microsoft said of the deal: "With closer access to the Arm technology we will be able to enhance our research and development activities for Arm-based products."
Many Microsoft rivals, such as Apple and Amazon, already produce popular portable gadgets that use Arm-designed processors. Google is also preparing its Chrome operating system for release this year and that is widely expected to run on tablets and netbooks that have an Arm chip onboard.
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Four men have been held for more than two years at Brook House immigration removal centre as the average length of detentions has grown, a report found.
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Prison inspectors discovered the average period of stay at the facility near Gatwick Airport had risen from 28 to 48 days.
Twenty-three people were held for more than a year.
The Home Office said it did not want to detain people for longer than necessary but some had prolonged the process.
Brook House holds almost 400 adult male asylum seekers, illegal immigrants and foreign national offenders.
Despite a push by the Home Office last year to reduce the number of people being detained, inspectors could not identify why periods of detention had lengthened.
The report added that some detainees at the G4S-run centre had been held for excessive periods due to "unreasonable delays in immigration decision making".
Peter Clarke, chief inspector of prisons, said the lack of analysis made it "hard to see how detention periods could be systematically reduced and the inevitably negative outcomes for detainees mitigated".
A 2016 Home Office review said fewer people should be detained in immigration centres, while pointing out that each place cost £34,000 a year.
'Prison conditions'
In response to the report a spokesman said: "Detention is an important tool that helps us remove those with no right to be in the country and it is vital that this is carried out with dignity and respect."
But he said some of those being held had attempted to frustrate the removal process by failing to provide accurate and timely information about their identity.
He said of the people leaving detention in 2016, 64% left within 29 days and 93% in less than four months.
The centre was assessed as "reasonably good" on safety, respect, activities, and preparation for removal or release, but inspectors were concerned that the residential units "very closely resembled" a prison.
Director of the removal centre, Ben Saunders, said inspectors had "rightly" identified the purpose-built design was stark in some places, and G4S would work with the Home Office, which owns the buildings, to soften the environment.
Brook House opened in 2009 but a year later was branded "fundamentally unsafe". A further report in 2012 found there were still "significant concerns", but in 2013 inspectors saw sustained improvement.
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A new bus station will be built at the main entrance of Wales' biggest hospital to improve traffic flow.
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The hub at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff will concentrate drop-offs and pick-ups in a single area.
Cardiff council's planning committee unanimously backed the plan, aimed at cutting car use and boosting safety.
However, some members raised concerns about the loss of open space and trees as the station will take over nearly a third of the site's Millennium Garden.
The new building will incorporate a waiting area, a coffee shop, and a 200-space bike store for hospital staff, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.
It will also include a new covered walkway, and a bridge and lift link to the multi-storey car park.
Cardiff and Vale University Health Board wants "to improve the flow of traffic around the site and improve the separation of buses, cars and pedestrians in the interest of highway safety", a report to the planning committee on Wednesday said.
Lyn Hudson, a Conservative councillor whose Heath ward includes the hospital, said she welcomed the proposals and had been "battling" for such a solution for a decade.
However, fellow Tory Mike Jones-Pritchard raised concerns about the "significant" loss of open space.
"The green aspect of the hospital is extremely important to patients and staff," he said.
Traffic problems have been a major headache for hospital bosses in recent years.
In 2017, the road layout on site was changed in a bid to prevent motorists using it as a "rat run" to avoid rush-hour congestion.
The same year, 75 members of hospital staff lost a court battle over fines for parking in unauthorised areas amid claims of a lack of space.
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The Queen has been attending the Braemar Gathering on Royal Deeside.
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The annual Highland Games event is held a short distance from the Royals' summer retreat on the Balmoral estate in Aberdeenshire.
This year's gathering marks the 200th anniversary of the society which runs it.
About 17,000 spectators were expected to cheer on competitors in the tossing of the caber and tug-of-war contests.
From Braemar, Nicholas Witchell, Royal correspondent
It's one of the fixtures in her summer diary: a visit to the Braemar Royal Highland Gathering.
She may be just a few days short of claiming Queen Victoria's record for the longest reign in British history but this Queen is not going to be diverted from her regular routine.
And so on a sunny afternoon in the Scottish Highlands, the Queen with her husband the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales took their seats in the special royal pavilion to watch cabers being tossed, hammers being thrown and tug of wars being contested, all to the strains of the dozen pipe bands which are attending the Gathering.
The Queen first attended the Braemar event as a seven-year-old child in 1933. She has attended virtually every year since coming to the throne in 1952.
Year after year it has been a reassuringly familiar event for her, an opportunity to relax with family and friends in a tranquil environment.
As she arrived the announcer reminded the crowds that in a few days her reign would be the longest of any British king or queen.
The crowds in Braemar celebrated the fact, just as many more elsewhere in the country will do in coming days.
Pipe bands and dancers are also performing to the crowd at the Princess Royal and Duke of Fife Memorial Park.
The Queen was accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles and her eldest grandson Peter Phillips, and his wife Autumn.
Queen Victoria first attended Braemar in 1848 and since then it has been regularly visited by the reigning monarch and other members of the royal family.
Braemar Royal Highland Charity, which organises the event, said: "Every gathering is a memorable occasion and that of 2015 will be no exception."
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A brain tumour survivor is helping to clean pollution from shorelines while cycling around the UK coast.
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Kiko Matthews, 36, who grew up in Herefordshire, was diagnosed with Cushing's disease in 2009.
She had a second tumour removed in 2017 while training for a row across the Atlantic, which she completed in a record time last year.
Ms Matthews has reached the Highlands in her Kik-Plastic cycle challenge which started in Margate in May.
Her cycle around the UK and part of Ireland is due to end in London next month.
On a ferry from Mallaig to Knoydart she said: "This has been my favourite leg of the challenge so far. The scenery is beautiful."
She added: "To date 2.1 tonnes of litter and pollution has been cleared off beaches helped by 1,250 volunteers.
"The response from communities along the way has been very positive."
In March last year, Ms Matthews set a new world record for the fastest transatlantic crossing by a female rower.
She rowed the 6m-long (21ft) Soma of Essex for up to 16 hours a day, sleeping in two-hour shifts.
Her journey from Gran Canaria to Barbados was completed in 49 days, almost a week shorter than the previous record.
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Teachers fear discriminatory language is becoming more acceptable among some pupils and parents after the Brexit vote, MSPs have been told.
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Edinburgh University's Moray House School of Education called for race to be "explicitly back on the agenda" after the referendum in June.
Academics from the school said teachers were now "reluctant and anxious" about addressing racism.
But they said there had been no spike in recorded hate crime in Scotland.
MSPs were listening to evidence being submitted to Holyrood's Equalities and Human Rights Committee.
The academics said recent discussions with teaching staff pointed to a "growing mood" among some pupils and parents that discriminatory language and views were acceptable.
Some parents were also more likely to excuse behaviour such as racial bullying with phrases like "it happens all the time" and "[it's] just unfortunate my daughter was caught", MSPs were told.
The researchers added: "In the views of these school leaders, such a response would not have been forthcoming in previous years. 'Race' needs to be explicitly back on the agenda."
They recommended updated advice for schools, more training for teachers and better recording of incidents of bullying and harassment to tackle the problem.
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Australia is overtaking the UK as the world's second biggest destination for international students, says research from University College London.
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By Sean CoughlanBBC News education and family correspondent
Researchers at UCL's Centre for Global Higher Education say the UK is being pushed into third place behind the United States and Australia.
Australia has been rapidly expanding its international student numbers.
The British Council says it shows the UK needs to "look again" at its policies towards overseas students.
An analysis this year found that overseas students added £20bn to the UK's economy - and universities in the UK have warned that immigration rules after Brexit will need to be more welcoming for students.
Catching up
The UCL study has tracked the latest movements in international students and report author Professor Simon Marginson says Australia is moving ahead of the UK.
He warns that Canada is also catching up in taking a growing slice of the lucrative overseas student market.
Three years ago the UK was recruiting around 130,000 more overseas students than Australia, says Prof Marginson, who is also co-chair of the Higher Education Commission's current inquiry into international students.
But he says successive years of Australia having increases of 12% to 14% in overseas students have seen it catch up and overtake the UK, which has been growing much more slowly.
Official student figures for 2018 from the UN's education agency, Unesco, will not be published until after the end of this year.
But the UCL researchers are "certain" that Australia is on the verge of moving ahead of the UK in overseas students and this "may have already happened".
Best student cities
"UK higher education is still highly valued internationally, but the government has held down the growth of international student numbers for five years, by limiting new student numbers and post-study work visas," says Prof Marginson.
"Meanwhile, competitor nations are strongly promoting their international education."
Australia has been marketing itself as an English-speaking country with high-performing universities, with an attractive climate and a welcoming culture for overseas students.
This year's Best Student Cities rankings put Melbourne and Sydney in the top 10 - although London was the highest ranked of all.
Australia has succeeded in attracting students from outside Europe, particularly from China.
The research from UCL warns that the UK's future intake of international students will depend on keeping its appeal for European students.
Post-Brexit plans
Last week, the government set out post-Brexit plans that would keep open the door to visa-free travel for European Union students coming to UK universities.
But there was no detail on whether EU students would have to pay full international fees.
Universities in the UK have been campaigning for overseas students to be taken out of net migration figures.
A spokeswoman for the British Council said that international students are "an immense source of long-term influence and soft power for the UK".
She said the UK was competing with countries with "welcoming visa policies" and "comprehensive international education strategies".
With the approach of Brexit, she said "it has never been more important to reinforce and open up international channels for the UK".
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