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Food labels displaying the amount of exercise needed to burn off calories have been found by researchers at Loughborough University to help people consume less - but campaigners warn they could affect those vulnerable to eating disorders. | By George BowdenBBC News
Hope Virgo has been in recovery from an eating disorder for over a decade, but she worries that the sight of exercise calorie labels on food packs could affect her mental health.
"Even though I am 11 years into my recovery I know that if I walked into a shop and saw that information I would find that incredibly triggering," she says.
"There isn't one thing that causes an eating disorder, but this idea adds to it and adds to the pressure. It will trigger people to feel certain things and in itself that is just as risky."
Researchers used data across 14 studies to find labelling exercise calories could cut about 200 calories from a person's average intake.
The study revealed it takes about four hours to walk off the calories in a pizza, or 22 minutes to run off a chocolate bar.
Hope, now a mental health campaigner, says the problem with exercise targets for snacks and meals is that they create "the mindset that you have to earn food".
"I developed anorexia when I was 13 and though it wasn't triggered by exercise, a huge part of it was an obsession with exercise," she says.
"I ended up being admitted to a mental health hospital and throughout that I had to re-learn about my body and learn how to exercise in a healthy way."
Hope adds that a lack of education about healthy lifestyles places unfair pressure on people.
Tom Quinn, from eating disorder charity Beat, also fears the concept could be unhelpful to those vulnerable to eating disorders.
"We know that many people with eating disorders struggle with excessive exercising, so being told exactly how much exercise it would take to burn off particular foods risks exacerbating their symptoms," he says.
"Policy makers looking to incorporate this change need to consider the impact that it may have on people's mental health."
Tally Rye, a personal trainer and health influencer, believes the idea of explicitly linking exercise with calories on food packaging would "promote feelings of shame and guilt around food".
"I don't think it will lead to long-term positive changes to having a healthy lifestyle," she says.
"Regardless of whether we have a completely sedentary day, we still need calories.
"This is also quite ableist - it is cutting out those who may not find it easy to move. Are the elderly not allowed to eat if they can't do the vigorous exercise required?"
"A more positive way to look would be to think how food can fuel a workout," she adds.
'Frightening'
Another person who has lived with an eating disorder, Rich, told BBC Radio 5 Live's Your Call programme on Wednesday that he found the idea of an exercise calorie label "frightening".
"I think anybody who has gone through an eating disorder, to then hear this kind of information... it is frightening," he said.
Rich recalled linking his calorie counts with exercise at the beginning of his eating disorder.
He added: "Food is an absolute necessity and it should be enjoyed not something you are looking at and worrying about. I think it is a very dangerous game."
But Prof Amanda Daley, who led the research at Loughborough, tells the BBC "there is no evidence that physical activity campaigns lead to eating disorders".
"We are not disregarding people with eating disorders, but this is about educating the broader public," she says.
"If you ask the public, they say that current food labelling is confusing. We have all different types of labels. Our view is that we need to put all the information in as clear a way as possible.
"When you say how much exercise is needed to burn off a muffin it is really clear."
For information and support on eating disorders, visit the BBC's Action Line.
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The time people in Jersey can spend using wireless internet for free could be restricted at a number of public places including the airport.
| This change is because of a new partnership between Jersey Telecom and The Cloud.
Users will benefit from increased security through their filtering system, faster connections and use of The Cloud's national network.
But people will now have to pay to access WiFi for more than 30 minutes.
Until they launched the new partnership people had unlimited access to the internet over WiFi in a number of public places including the airport, library, bus station and harbour.
The Cloud is one of Europe's leading wireless internet service providers.
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A 94-year-old man who survived a prisoner of war camp next door to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp believes a football league which the guards allowed them to set up may have helped save his life. | By Neil PriorBBC Wales
As Ron Jones, from Newport, prepares to mark Holocaust Memorial Day on Friday with a service at the city's cathedral, he says that amongst all the terrible memories, there will also be a few which will make him smile.
He was captured in 1943 fighting in the Middle East, and after nine months in Italy, was transferred to forced labour camp E715, part of the Auschwitz complex.
There he spent 12 hours a day, six days a week, working with hazardous chemicals in the IG Farben works, but on Sundays they were permitted to play football.
"I think the Germans thought that letting us play football was a quick and easy way of keeping us quiet," he said.
"The Red Cross would bring us food parcels, and when they heard about our football, they managed to get us strips for four teams: England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. I was always the Wales goalkeeper.
"It kept us sane, it was a bit of normality, but it sounds wrong somehow to say I've got fond memories of playing football, considering what was going on just over the fence."
He says as well as keeping up spirits, football played a major role in his survival, and that of many of his fellow prisoners, when they were forced on one of the series of extremely long marches westwards from PoW camps during the final stages of the conflict.
Whilst many of Mr Jones's friends died on the march, he believes it is no coincidence that those who had been involved in the Auschwitz football league fared better.
"You could say the football we'd played saved our lives. The football lads were fitter, yes, but more than that, they belonged to a group which kept each other going on the march."
E715 was located close to Auschwitz III, Monowitz, which held mainly Polish resistance fighters, political dissidents, homosexuals and some captured Soviet troops.
Whilst this was not officially a death camp, Mr Jones says it did not take long for him to realise that the inmates at Monowitz were far from safe.
"In the nights you could hear shots coming from Monowitz," he said.
"Not bursts like you had when you were fighting, but deliberate, regular every few seconds; like they had a system going.
"We didn't know who they were or why they'd been killed, and we couldn't help but be terrified that we'd be next."
'Walking skeletons'
But when the British PoWs were allowed out to play football, they would be taken to fields next to Auschwitz II, Birkenau, where killing was on an altogether more industrial scale.
"The first Sunday we went to the playing fields, we saw these people - well walking skeletons they were really - digging trenches," he said.
"We asked, 'Who are those poor sods?' and the German guards shout 'Juden', Jews, as if it had been a stupid question.
"We could only play in the summer, because everything was covered in snow through the winter. But when it was hot, this awful stench would waft across from the crematoriums.
"Your imaginations pretty much filled in the gaps for you, but we'd carry on playing football.
"Scoring a goal, making a save or arguing about an offside was the only way you could stop yourself from cracking up."
Mr Jones says he has spent a great deal of time since the war wondering about how much his German guards had known and cared about what was going on inside Birkenau.
"You have to remember that our guards weren't SS like in Birkenau; they were conscripted squaddies like us," he said.
"Dozens of them would come and cheer our football matches and have a laugh with us, and if you got them on their own, you could tell that they were ordinary, decent blokes.
"But if you asked them about Birkenau they'd get angry and scared. 'We didn't need to know', 'they didn't know', 'it was nothing', and even if it was, then 'it wasn't their fault, they weren't SS'."
"I had nightmares about Auschwitz for years after the war, but I bet mine were nothing compared with what those Germans must have gone through.
"Some would say they deserve it, but most likely they couldn't have done any more about it than we could have ourselves."
As the Red Army closed in, on 21 January, 1945 German guards burst into Mr Jones's hut in the middle of the night, and ordered him to leave immediately with whatever he could carry.
The Soviets liberated Auschwitz on 27 January, 1945, confirming for the first time the stories of the Holocaust's mass murder, which the Allies had hitherto rubbished as too extreme to be possible.
'One of the lucky ones'
But by the time the Russians arrived, Mr Jones was long gone; as part of the death march west, which killed anywhere between 3,000 and 8,000 Allied PoWs.
"We were on the road for 17 weeks, and God knows how many hundreds of miles we traipsed, through Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany and Austria."
"I was 13 stone (82kg) when I was captured, and when I was liberated by the Americans in April 1945, they weighed me, and I was seven stone."
Mr Jones considers himself one of the lucky ones.
"I was very lucky. I came home to a good wife, who helped me get over it. But lots never really recovered at all," he said.
"I think I'm probably the last now. There was another of the footballers who I got Christmas cards from, but there was nothing this year. So at 94, I think it's probably time to tell the story before it's too late."
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Thirty years after Pembrokeshire-born Terrence (Terry) Higgins became one of the first people in Britain to be claimed by Aids, the trust set up in his name is warning that Wales has once again become complacent about the threat posed by HIV. | By Neil PriorBBC News
The number of new cases each year remains low, but there has been a jump from 64 in 2001, to 160 in 2011 - a rise of 150% over the last decade.
But while the first, 1980s wave of HIV disproportionately struck young heterosexual professionals, gay people and drug users, the Terrence Higgins Trust warns that a potential second wave in the 21st Century may cross demographics who believed they were safe.
Of the 1,600 people in Wales currently living with HIV, it's estimated that 19% are unaware that they have it, and the majority of these are over 50.
"It's dangerous to generalise too much, but there's a significant proportion of the over-50s in Wales who felt they are a group who were completely removed from the original Aids crisis in the 1980s," says Joshua Hall, service manager for Terrence Higgins Trust Cymru.
At the time a lot of the people were in marriages or monogamous relationships, and so they didn't really need to worry, added Mr Hall.
"But 20 or 30 years on, and we're seeing that a lot of those relationships have broken down, and that the over-50s are just as sexually active as any other group," he said.
"What's more, because they're no longer of child-bearing age, over-50s in Wales are much, much less likely to use condoms with new partners."
Under 25s are also at an increased risk, who have no recollection of the original publicity campaign in 1987.
"The original Aids awareness campaign was probably one of the most successful pieces of public information of all-time," Mr Hall said.
'Dangers'
"People who were old enough can clearly recall the 'Don't Die of Ignorance' slogan and the tombstone imagery, and as a consequence at-risk groups revolutionised their behaviour and really put the brakes on the spread of HIV.
"But there clearly needs to be a repeat campaign, as young people now seem to have no cultural frame of reference to the dangers posed.
"When we do work in schools, an alarming proportion of the pupils we talk to either don't believe there's such a thing as HIV anymore, or else believe that it's entirely curable."
Terry Higgins was born in Haverfordwest in 1945, but friends say he left for London as a teenager as he felt uncomfortable growing up as a gay man in west Wales.
By day he worked as a reporter for the House of Commons' official record, Hansard, and in the evenings as a nightclub barman and DJ.
They were interests which would see him travel to work in New York and Amsterdam during the late 1970s.
But in 1980 he was forced to return home to London with a series of persistent and - at the time - unidentifiable illnesses.
In the summer of 1982 he collapsed while at work at the Heaven nightclub in London, and on 4 July he died of parasitic pneumonia.
Later that year, Martyn Butler, from Newport, along with two of Mr Higgins's other close friends, established the Terrence Higgins Trust in his memory.
It started in a London flat, but has grown to become a leading voice on sexual health, as well as providing counselling and clinics.
'Stigma'
"Terry was a good friend of mine, but at the time HIV had not been identified, we just knew that something unpleasant was going around in the gay community," said Mr Butler.
"We thought Terry may be at risk because he was a great traveller and he spent a lot of time in New York, where there were a lot of cases.
"One thing that Terry's death taught me was that I wanted to be sure that nobody died alone and unaware of what was happening."
But while the initial focus of the trust's work was on the gay community, Mr Butler explains that this is no longer the case.
"We had to educate the gay community - that was where it was springing up, but that gave it the stigma that still echoes down into a lot of heterosexual boys nowadays," he added.
"That is our biggest danger today - the gay community has educated themselves well but the heterosexual community often thinks it is not going to affect them.
"They are not getting tested, and that is a huge worry for me."
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As athletes prepare to take part in the Sochi Winter Olympics, competitors from previous years share the drama and emotion of their own personal stories. | By Alison Gee and Simon WattsBBC World Service
The bereaved skater
At 06:00 on the morning of his race in Calgary, Canada, in 1988, US speed-skater Dan Jansen got a phone call. His sister Jane was in hospital with leukaemia. "Mum said she wouldn't make it through the day most likely and so - tough day.
"Once I got on the ice there was nothing there, there was no stability in my legs, my skates didn't feel like they were my skates, I think I was just shaky."
He made a false start and when the 500m race finally got under way his left skate slipped and he fell. Sitting on the ice in Calgary he felt confused. "I didn't know if I should feel bad for falling in the Olympics or [that] my sister died." He fell again in the 1000m.
In 1994 in Lillehammer, Jansen was again the favourite to win the 500m. But on the last turn he slipped and finished eighth. He had one last shot at gold - in the 1000m, but he would have to beat his own personal best time.
Once again he slipped but kept his footing. "Something in me didn't panic this time… I stayed calm." He set a new world record and won the gold medal. "With my sister and all of it - it wasn't just a race, it was much more than that."
He had become tired of everybody feeling sorry for him. "This was better. Now they could actually be happy for me."
A bolt from the blue
After his first bobsleigh run, Robin Dixon from the British team checked the sled. "One of the bolts that held the rear axle was broken," he says, remembering the 1964 games in Innsbruck, Austria.
The British mechanics couldn't find a spare, but one of the greatest Winter Olympians of all time, Italy's Eugenio Monti, stepped in.
"He said: 'Don't worry, this is my last run for the day. When I've finished, send an Englishman down with a spanner and you can have mine.'"
Monti kept his promise and handed over the bolt from his own sled. The following day the British team raced before the Italians. Dixon and his partner Nash didn't think they had been fast enough to win so they went off to drink coffee and schnapps.
But when they heard the track was deteriorating, they rushed back to the course to see Monti finish 0.7 seconds behind them. The Italian came straight over. "He was genuinely delighted for us," says Dixon.
"It was a lovely gesture and really exceptional… I am a very determined, competitive animal... and I wouldn't have done it."
The International Olympic Committee gave Monti the Pierre de Coubertin medal - named after the founder of the modern Olympics and given to athletes who show the spirit of sportsmanship. It's an honour far rarer than a gold medal.
'A kind of Cold War'
In an incredible coincidence, East German figure skater Katarina Witt and her biggest rival, Debi Thomas from the US, both chose to dance the part of Carmen - the Spanish gypsy immortalised in Bizet's opera, in the 1988 Games in Calgary.
Witt emphasised the sex and death in the score, wearing heavy make-up and a red-and-black flamenco dress, while Thomas went for a lighter, more athletic interpretation in a black costume.
Witt was desperate to retain her Olympic title. "It was the battle of the two Carmens, and it was some kind of Cold War," she says.
"I was from East Germany and at the same time I was representing something which was more grey and more cold - that was the perception people would have."
Debi Thomas was representing everything that is good about America, recalls Witt. "The democracy and the freedom, and she was of course one of the first black skaters."
One of Witt's jumps didn't go as planned leaving her riddled with doubt. But when Thomas also made mistakes Witt came away victorious, feeling more relieved than excited. She celebrated with a glass of sparkling wine and a sausage.
The real Cool Runnings
"It was fast and dangerous." Six months before the 1988 Winter Olympics, that's all Jamaican army officer Devon Harris knew about the bobsleigh.
Jamaica had never been to the Winter Olympics before but two US businessmen, George Fitch and William Maloney, decided to change that by creating a Jamaican bobsleigh team.
"We couldn't even walk on the ice - we spent more time on our butts than we did actually running," says Harris remembering their first training session.
When they got to Calgary, Harris was "scared to death but I was having a ball".
They switched one of the team members at the last minute and ended up with the seventh fastest start time. But on the next run the sled hit the wall. "The next thing I knew my head was hitting the ice. I just remember thinking 'wow how embarrassing we crashed in front of the entire world.'"
The crowd cheered and said "We love you, we love you," but the team was worried about going home. "We thought we would be ridiculed and chased out of town, and it couldn't have been further from the truth."
Their faces appeared on stamps in Jamaica and their experience inspired the 1993 film Cool Runnings.
The assault
"There was a huge scream and somebody came running and told us that Nancy was on the ground," says Mary Scotvold, the coach of American figure skater Nancy Kerrigan. It was just weeks before the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer in 1994 and Kerrigan was screaming in pain during a practice.
"She was understandably hysterical, but she knew that a man had hit her hard on the knee and knocked her down."
Her assailant fled, and doctors said if his aim had been slightly different, Kerrigan would never have walked again. The attack was planned by the bodyguard and the ex-husband of rival American skater, Tonya Harding.
Harding admitted that while she had no role in planning the attack, she had covered up later knowledge of the incident. Four men were arrested including her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly.
The US Olympic committee began proceedings to remove Harding from the Olympic team, but she kept her place after threatening legal action. Seven weeks after the attack, Kerrigan skated at the Lillehammer Winter Olympics, purposely wearing the same dress she wore when she was attacked.
Nancy Kerrigan won silver, with Ukrainian skater Oksana Baiul taking the gold.
A miracle on ice
In the midst of the Cold War, at Lake Placid in New York state in 1980, two global superpowers clashed on the ice.
The USSR's Big Red Machine had won four Olympic gold medals in a row dating back to 1964 and expected to win the ice hockey semi-final against Team USA.
"We were basically a bunch of college kids playing against very skilled and very talented pro players from Russia," says Neal Broten, from the US side.
The Soviets were confident of victory. "We had beaten them soundly right before the Olympics so we weren't worried, we thought we would beat them easily," says Alexei Kasotonov from the Soviet team.
Inside the arena, the atmosphere was electric. As expected, the Soviets dominated the start of the game, but the US fought back and defied all expectations to win the match.
"The fans were going crazy… it was nuts in that arena," says Broten. "I don't even think our skates were touching the ice. If we played that team 10 times we would lose all 10 games." To beat them in our country was an achievement that rarely happens, he adds.
Team USA went on to win the gold medal. But the Soviet team and Alexei Kasotonov made a comeback, winning gold in 1984 and again 1988.
6.0, 6.0, 6.0, 6.0, 6.0, 6.0, 6.0, 6.0 and 6.0
It was Valentine's Day when the UK's Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean took to the ice in Sarajevo in 1984.
As they knelt, swaying to the haunting strains of Ravel's Bolero, they knew they were stretching the rules.
Dance routines could be no longer than four minutes and 10 seconds, but despite their best efforts, Torvill and Dean couldn't cut the music short enough - it was still too long.
To get around the problem they made sure their skates didn't touch the ice for the first 18 seconds - the clock only started ticking when the first blade made contact.
"It was unique for the time," says Dean. "We created that mood, that swirling, that intimacy right from the beginning which set the tone for the rest of the routine."
Some worried that the judges might find the routine too radical, but the former insurance clerk and police officer made history with their sensual dance.
In front of one of the UK's highest ever television audiences, nearly 24 million people, they received 12 perfect scores of 6.0 out of a possible 18. Most remarkable was the straight row of 6.0s for artistic impression from all nine judges - something that had never been achieved before.
"Our closest rivals were always the Russian skaters," says Torvill. "So to get a 6.0 from a Russian judge felt like a big deal. He could have given us a 5.9, but he didn't - it was a magical moment."
The embrace at the finish
When Kenya's first Winter Olympian, cross country skier Philip Boit, approached the finish line in Nagano in 1998, the crowd went wild.
"They were shouting 'Kenya GO!, Philip GO!' It was like I was winning a medal even though I was last," he says.
The winner of the 10km classic style event, Norway's Bjorn Daehlie, had finished 20 minutes earlier, but instead of going straight to the medal ceremony he waited for Boit, and hugged him when he finished the race.
Boit had not even seen snow until two years earlier and on the day of the 10km classic style event, heavy rain made conditions unusually tough. "I fell down so many times," laughs Boit. "Going uphill, the skis were collecting snow. It was like I had put on high heeled-shoes!"
Daehlie, who became the first man to win six gold medals at the Winter Olympics, was impressed that Boit was able to finish the race in such tricky conditions. "I wanted to wait [for him at] the finish line - this African, brave skier."
The embrace was a special moment for Boit - "I couldn't believe that he was the top guy and he was holding me."
Boit skied again at the Salt Lake Winter Olympics in 2002, but not against Daehlie who was recovering from a roller-skiing injury. He named his first child after the Norwegian icon and the two athletes are still friends.
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Teenagers have never been so tapped into technology - but how much is it taking over their lives? As part of BBC School Report's News Day, three teenagers describe the impact technology and social media have on their sleep, relationships and free time. | Heather, 15, Priory School and Specialist Sports College, Portsmouth
I'm on Facebook every day, probably for between one and three hours - but that's probably a lot less than some of my friends.
Sometimes you see online arguments blow up on Facebook and go on and on, and I just think to myself "How do you have enough time to spend on here arguing?"
I think in some cases social media does make teenagers less active.
But if I'd been born 30 years ago, and there wasn't social media and technology around everywhere, I still wouldn't have done any more sport. I'd have probably just been in the library a lot more.
In the evenings, I'm often in my bedroom using my laptop to revise using BBC Bitesize or finding old exam papers. But I usually have other tabs with social media or other websites running, and it's very tempting to just give yourself a few minutes off to check on those.
I think being online in bed is very different to reading a book. Being online is a lot more interactive and stimulates your brain in a different way, but I think I actually prefer books.
My parents trust me to manage my time online, and I try to finish by 11.30 at night, but it's very easy to lose track of time and suddenly realise it's way past then. But that can happen reading a book too.
I don't think what phone I've got is an issue for me. Half the time my phone doesn't have credit, and if I'm just calling my parents to tell them where I am, that can be done on my old "brick".
If anything, my dad - who's 47 - is more competitive about having the latest technology than I am. He gets really excited about having a new phone, and I just tend to wonder what does it really do that the last one didn't.
I do think that having brand-new phones is an issue for safety, but a lot of my friends tend to plan ahead and leave expensive things at home if they're going somewhere they think is risky.
My friend was pick-pocketed on a school trip to Germany and had her money stolen, but she'd deliberately left her phone in her room.
Sadia, 11, Our Lady's Convent High School, Hackney
I've got a laptop, a TV and an iPod Touch in my bedroom and I also have a Blackberry, which is one of the old ones.
When I go to bed and I'm supposed to be asleep, I sometimes talk to friends online or text them but it doesn't really affect my sleep because I like to wake up early. Sometimes I might read a book at night. I like doing both, because reading a book gives you education, and going online means you can talk to family members abroad and stuff like that.
I usually have four hours to go online and at about 6pm, my mum says I have got to read a book. Then I watch TV and go to bed, but sometimes I bring my iPod with me and listen to some music.
Modern technology does stop you playing outside so much because it's really addictive. Sometimes when I'm doing my homework, I just get carried away with talking to my friends online but my mum comes and tells me when it's time to stop.
I don't really have time to always see my friends face to face, so I'd rather message them - but we definitely have more fun when we meet up.
Olivia, 14, Tarporley High School, Cheshire
Your phone becomes a statement - you have to be able to access your social media on your phone, otherwise you can't stay in touch with what's going on.
And you really notice that lots of people's profile pictures show them holding their smartphone or looking into the mirror with their phone in hand - it's almost like the phone is part of them.
There is a hierarchy of the different brands of phone, and people who don't have a decent phone would probably be teased at least a little bit. I think you'd have to learn to laugh at yourself a bit, to be honest.
Sometimes I look at my friends' phones and think "I want that". I think lots of teenagers think that way too.
I'm unusual in that I'm not on Facebook, but I do like using Twitter and my mum and my auntie are on there too. I think that makes me self-censor what I write, but that's probably a good thing.
I think they feel I'm mature enough to deal with social media pretty responsibly. But if I was to tweet something inappropriate, I know it would be that would have to face up the consequences.
I tend to count to 10 before I tweet, as sometimes arguments happen on social media and get blown out of all proportion.
I often find myself thinking "why are you tweeting this?" The things that some people want to share - effectively with the whole world - could have a big impact on the rest of their life, for things like finding a job in the future.
I'm actually very disciplined, but I think the older you get, the longer you will probably end up staying up for, as that's when you spend more of your time online. If you're multi-tasking by tweeting when you're watching a soap earlier in the evening, that's different to being on Facebook or Twitter later on in your room.
I see a lot of people tweeting "I can't sleep" late at night or in the early hours. It shows you that people really are just spending their time on their phones, but sometimes I wonder why they want to share that information with me.
I don't have a curfew set by parents as such, but I think that I kind of have one anyway that I impose on myself.
The problem with being online late at night - rather than reading a book or something - is that there's always more to read or find out about. Teenagers are naturally curious and if you see something someone has retweeted, you want to click on their profile to see who they are. And then you find more things to click on, and so on - it's never ending. For some people, their phone is like another limb. They really can't be without it.
I like to think I don't fit the anti-social teenager stereotype - I'm just as happy talking to people face-to-face socially, not hiding away behind a screen.
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In the early 1990s I was working for a women's organisation that publicised research around the use of "new" technologies, such as the desktop PCs and the fax machine, and how they were contributing to a phenomenon we called "work speed-up". | Viewpoint by Barbara OttoThink Beyond the Label
Essentially, these technologies, which replaced the slower typewriter, copier and mail systems, crunched the number of hours it took for administrative assistants to produce and distribute documents. However, these women were now expected to complete more work in the same eight-hour day.
Fast forward to 2012, and our workforce is in a similar situation. In a recent survey by Wrike, 83% of 1,074 respondents say they work from home after (or before) work hours, which allows them to get more work done - for the same pay.
Telecommuters say they use technology like real-time communication, high-speed network mobile devices, cloud-based applications and video-conferencing tools to facilitate the modern-day version of "work speed-up".
What's more is that telecommuting, and the technology it orbits around, creates a lifeline for one group in particular: people with disabilities.
Access to work
With technology, people with disabilities, many who are unemployed or under-employed, can now take a job and be highly productive. After all, this group is an incredible adopter of technology because they depend on it for their livelihood.
At the very basic level, Microsoft and Apple already incorporate accessibility utilities into their operating systems.
Social platforms like Twitter and Facebook are getting more accessible and, as an added benefit, are eliminating the need for people with physical or cognitive disabilities to type long-form communications.
There are many other promising technologies that I think will further help people with disabilities integrate into the 21st century workplace, include smartphones, apps, services, solutions and bionics.
Touchscreen devices like the iPhone, once assumed to be inaccessible to blind users, now offer "gesture" based technology for interacting with the phone's interface. Google's Android platform and the Apple iPhone 3GS also now include free screen readers, making them particularly popular among blind users.
Siri, a personal assistant application for the iPhone, is an incredibly useful tool for people with disabilities. Siri translates voice into text and understands basic commands and questions, letting users interact with applications.
Accessible virtual-work platforms like oDesk embrace technology for everything from project management to billing, and create a very level playing field for people with disabilities.
Smart environments, like networked video cameras, enable people with mobility disabilities to communicate with their computer, so users can work effectively with assistive software for text entry, web browsing, image editing, and animation.
Personal guidance systems based on geo-coded QR codes and social computing let individuals take photos with their smartphone, and be provided with geographical and other information - like exits, lift doorways, and entrances to stairways.
Voice biometric solutions verify a speaker's identity. Twinned with speech recognition, users can perform commercial transactions on a mobile phone entirely through automated conversation - a great solution for people with physical disabilities.
For the deaf and hearing impaired, an app called SpeechTrans Ultimate lets them communicate with hearing people, who speak out loud into the user's mobile device, and the translated text automatically appears. It also integrates with Facebook chat.
The task management and organizational features on smartphones are helpful for people with cognitive impairments and autism. Also, apps like VoCal, which provides spoken word alerts to employees.
"Messages", an internet-based audio, text, and video conferencing application that is included with Macs, has high-quality video and frame rate capabilities and is ideal for people who use sign language to communicate.
The Tobii PCEye eye tracking system allows people with limited motor skills and certain neurological problems, to use their eyes to tell their computer what to do.
Schindler lifts, in use in hundred of high-rise buildings, use technology such as a personal identification card readers or keypads to understand the exact requirements of a user.
Added value
All of this is positive for the future of work because people with disabilities add tremendous value to the workplace.
People with disabilities are creative problem-solvers and technology adopters with fresh perspectives that organisations need.
Hiring people with disabilities enhances employee retention and engagement, as there are many job candidates with or without disabilities who want to work in holistically-diverse and socially conscious environments.
We've found they have low rates of absenteeism and turnover, which reduces a company's recruitment and retention costs.
Hiring the disabled helps companies develop new products and services, expanding their customer base, which is increasingly filled with older people starting to encounter disability.
All of this bodes well for the modern-day workplace.
I've said it before: If you want someone who thinks outside the box, hire someone who lives outside the box. So let "work speed up" begin for people with disabilities.
With new technologies on the horizon, we can tap this underused talent pool and move our notion of how and where we work solidly into the 21st century.
Barbara Otto is the principle of Think Beyond the Label, a private-public collaborative venture based in the US that aims to improve recruitment opportunities for qualified job candidates with disabilities.
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George Whitman, who died this week, ran a remarkable Paris bookshop that has for decades been more than just a place to buy books in English, but also a writer's refuge and tourist destination - a place with an atmosphere all its own. | By Christine FinnParis, France
George Whitman made his money selling books, but he never forgot what he owed to those authors.
His bookshop was a refuge for them. Over the decades, thousands of writers have helped out there, giving their time in exchange for a few hours, or even longer, with kindred spirits.
Whitman's dictum was, "Give what you can, take what you need."
A few lines of WB Yeats are painted on the wall: "Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise."
Visiting authors and students were able to work here, sleep amid its piles of books and soak up its unique literary atmosphere.
A few weeks ago, before George Whitman's death, I talked to his daughter Sylvia, about joining those ranks of writer-volunteers. Then, not long after, I stepped into the warm glow of Shakespeare and Company.
"And this is the section to do with Paris," said Linda at the counter, in her Irish lilt, starting my grand tour of the bookshelves.
It is a grey Monday morning, not a time you would expect many people around, but already the shop is buzzing with bibliophiles.
The store was named after another which used to stand not far away, also by the River Seine, a gathering place for the likes of James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. That Shakespeare and Company was owned by a woman called Sylvia Beach.
George Whitman named his own daughter Sylvia after her. Reputed to be the grand-nephew of the American poet, Walt Whitman, he had his own radical friends in Paris.
The work of these 1950s Beat poets occupies not just a section but a whole glass case in the shop.
His daughter took over the reins a few years ago and, as some wondered whether the e-book would come to replace its paper and ink counterpart, she took Shakespeare and Company online to promote its events and history. The virtual book seemed not to matter. As ever, it was all about just being there.
Linda guides me past poetry and the modern fiction sections, and through a series of tiny rooms which have the feel more of a library than a commercial enterprise. Mr Whitman described them as being like the chapters of a novel.
I study walls papered with news cuttings and postcards, and walk up the stairs - through "plays and playwrights" - to the hallowed upper floor. This is where Sylvia Beach's own library sits, in a room now used for events.
Amid the hush, I hear a familiar "tack, tack, tack, thunk" and a glimpse into a cosy writer's cave reveals someone sitting at an old portable typewriter at a desk, and shelves laden with well-thumbed books about how to get published.
The only other sound, apart from the typing and the conversation, comes from a piano on which customers sometimes get carried away. "It's nice," says Linda, "the sound carries downstairs to the tills."
She then gives me the science fiction and fantasy section to sort.
Putting the books into some kind of order is a strangely comforting task. Conversations continue around me.
A woman is flouting the "Please no photography" notice, directing a mobile phone photo shoot in the history section. "No," she instructs, "I want that shelf to be in it."
Someone else is seeking advice on a good title for a book club reading, which results in a lively dialogue about international authors.
I become fascinated by the role of the bookshop assistant.
In my hands, sundry titles are unearthed from darker corners of the shop, and putting them into the few gaps I find in the shelves means I am bringing them, and their authors, into the light.
On the stairs another volunteer is gamely trying to organise her section, precariously lunging with piles of books, between people going up and down.
We smile as a light bulb blows in the crime section, leaving it in mysterious darkness.
The light restored, a so-called "mirror of love" is revealed upstairs, its surface covered with notes and billets-doux, love poems and declarations.
Here you can see not only a fascination with books, words and with Paris, but also the reflections of book lovers chatting over dusty tomes. "Oh, that's my favourite Auster too," says one.
My session as a volunteer over, I go to collect my bag from a locker in the labyrinth upstairs. It turns out to be the lair of a writer-in-residence, 25-year-old Jimmy Hargreaves.
He is a published poet from Grimsby and, with his long hair flopping over his chiselled face, he looks every inch the part, head bent over his paper notebook.
"I'm a dreamer," he tells me. "This is a place where I can create."
How to listen to From Our Own Correspondent:
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Listen online or download the podcast
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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.
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Persistent heavy rain and 65mph gales are predicted to hit south and mid Wales on Saturday. | The Met Office said there was a risk of localised flooding as up to 5cm-7cm (2-3in) of rain is expected to fall.
The warning covers Blaenau Gwent, Bridgend, Caerphilly, Cardiff, Merthyr Tydfil, Monmouthshire, Neath Port Talbot, Newport, Powys, Rhondda Cynon Taff, Swansea, Torfaen and Vale of Glamorgan.
It is valid from 06:00 GMT to 22:00.
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Mima Jaffar and her five children had to flee to safety in their pyjamas as a blaze destroyed a neighbouring tenement. A year later, steel barriers still block the entrance to her family's home in the Pollokshields area of Glasgow. | By Jonathan PetersBBC Scotland news
The only thing that Mima can remember from the night of the blaze was a fireman standing on her bed.
"He said you have a few seconds. He said there is a fire - just take anything that is important," she recalls.
"We were just allowed to go out with only our pyjamas. It was freezing cold and raining a lot.
"From that day until now, it's been a disaster."
The blaze had started in the Strawberry and Spice Garden minimarket late on Sunday 10 November 2019.
It quickly took hold before destroying the 143-year-old tenement building on the corner of Albert Drive and Kenmure Street.
Since that night Mima, a single mother-of-five, has had no access to the home where she lived for more than 10 years as work continues to make the structure safe.
Her children have to make do without their clothes, computers, or important documents like passports.
Mima said they keep asking about getting back into the property to get their possessions.
Her eldest son no longer lives with the family, but his belongings are still in the building.
"He doesn't work, he needs me. He says: 'Mum, I need money, I need a jacket, I need clothes. How can I manage with one jacket?'
"And I say, I cannot give you money for a jacket, there are more important things."
Mima described the situation as "depressing" and said she needs to be let back in again soon.
"I really hope we get a chance to go back in and get our stuff, because it's been really hard," she said.
'We have had to reset our lives'
Another resident, Tim Mitchell, lived in a first floor flat.
"This is not only my home, it is my workspace as well," he said.
Tim has been allowed access to his flat on two occasions in the months following the fire.
But being unable to collect his possessions and resume his work as a videographer has caused huge disruption to his life.
Shortly before the Covid lockdown in March, Tim was told it would be a few months before residents could be allowed full access to their homes.
"Now we're not even sure, but I think it will be sometime in the spring," he said.
"We're talking about 18 months (since the fire). It is just very difficult because many of us have had to reset our lives because of this.
"It's extremely difficult, and we need to see an end to it."
'People broke down in tears'
Councillor Jon Molyneux has represented Pollokshields for the Green Party since 2017.
He was at the scene the morning after the fire and helped dozens of people in the following weeks.
"It's really tough," he said. "I had people who I spoke to in the immediate aftermath. They broke down in tears.
"It's actually symbolic for the community. This was an historic heart of the town centre.
"People want to see that it will come back and that there's going to be an opportunity coming out of this. People have had a hard year."
'We will continue to support the owners'
A spokesman for Glasgow City Council said it was still in regular contact with the owners, their factors and insurers about the properties and the necessary repair work.
It said there was an ongoing process under dangerous building legislation in relation to the walls which had separated the remaining buildings from those destroyed in the fire.
"These walls have to be repaired before the adjoining flats can be re-occupied," he said.
"We will continue to support the owners as their plans progress with the aim of people getting back into their homes as soon as is reasonably possible."
Plans have been submitted to fix the gable-ends, securing the buildings that still stand and allowing residents the chance to move back into their homes. This process is expected to take another five months.
For now, the evidence of the fire will remain for another winter.
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An animal welfare charity is appealing for information after a pair of foot-long (30cm) bearded dragons were found dumped on a green.
| The green/brown reptiles were at first thought dead when they were found on Saturday in Malgraves, Basildon.
RSPCA inspector Adam Jones took them to a vet where they were warmed up.
He said: "It is disgusting to think that they were in a warm, comfortable vivarium one minute then abandoned and exposed to all the elements."
Mr Jones said he could not comprehend "someone discarding animals like this".
"We have been experiencing strong gusty winds and rain and temperatures below 5°C, so they were just left to die," he said.
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Drake's opened a clothes shop in London. | By Hannah MooreNewsbeat reporter
The rapper already has shops in America and Canada, but the branch in Soho is his first in Europe.
"I came at 7.30pm last night and camped out. He's a huge influencer, a real icon," says 20-year-old Zac, who was first in the queue after a 17-hour wait.
"I spent about £600. It's been cold, and I feel like I'm going to faint from being tired but it was worth it."
Zac came along with Sophie, who is also a huge Drake supporter.
"I've been a fan of his music since way back," says the 18-year-old.
"I've been to see him live nine times, and we actually went to OVO Fest in Toronto this summer as well."
Sophie spent £350 on hoodies and tracksuit bottoms from the range, while other fans splashed out more.
"I spent £400. I know it's a lot of money, but because I buy and sell clothes I can fund it myself," says 18-year-old Max.
It's not unusual in Soho to see long lines of people queuing as streetwear brands like Palace and Supreme drop their latest collections.
And though the clothes can cost hundreds of pounds, their resale value is often much higher.
But Max, who travelled from Brighton and camped outside the shop overnight, says he won't be selling on the tracksuit and T-shirt he's bought.
"I think Drake's a cool geezer, his style's good. Within the streetwear community, if he wears something, it will influence people."
The Toronto star launched his clothing line in 2011.
He's one of a few rappers, including Kanye West, Tyler, The Creator and Skepta, to move successfully into fashion in the past few years.
So many people turned up for the London launch, that a ticketed queuing system was set up several blocks away from the shop.
"I was nine when Drake came out with mainstream music, and I've been a fan of his since then," says 17-year-old Kaya.
"My life is Drake, really. On my wall, on my phone, everything. I'll probably be backing up into my savings account to buy one of the tracksuits, but I just never thought he would bring it here."
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Meghan Markle made her name as an actress, campaigner and blogger before marrying Prince Harry in May 2018 and becoming the Duchess of Sussex. | Before meeting Harry, she had been best known for playing lawyer Rachel Zane in US TV drama Suits.
When she became a member of the Royal Family, she gave up her acting career - and immersed herself in the life of a working royal, using the platform to highlight the charities and causes close to her heart.
She became a mother in May 2019 but within a year she and Prince Harry had stepped away as working members of the Royal Family and started a new life in North America.
Early life
Born Rachel Meghan Markle on 4 August 1981, she grew up in a prosperous part of Los Angeles.
Her mother's home is in an area known as the "Black Beverly Hills", where the average price of a home is $771,000 (£587,000).
Meghan went to a private primary school in Hollywood and started campaigning for gender equality at an early age.
At 11, she wrote a letter to the then US first lady, Hillary Clinton, lamenting a washing-up liquid's TV ad strapline: "Women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans."
Within a month, manufacturers Procter and Gamble had changed the word "women" to "people".
"It was at that moment that I realised the magnitude of my actions," she later said. "I had created my small level of impact by standing up for equality."
At 15, she was volunteering in soup kitchens as her studies continued at a girls' Roman Catholic college, and she graduated from Northwestern University School of Communication, near Chicago, in 2003.
A stint working as an intern at the US embassy in Argentina made her think her path might lead her into politics, but she changed course when her acting career began to take off.
Between auditions, she has told of making money by doing calligraphy for wedding invitations, using skills developed in handwriting classes at school.
Her father was a cinematographer on the hit 1980s show Married... With Children, and her first television appearance in the US was in an episode of the medical drama General Hospital in 2002, before moving on to roles in CSI, Without a Trace and Castle.
There were leading roles in TV movies such as When Sparks Fly and Dater's Handbook, and bit parts in Hollywood films including Get Him to the Greek, Remember Me and Horrible Bosses, and she was a "briefcase girl" on the US version of game show Deal or No Deal.
She also appeared in the sci-fi series Fringe, playing FBI special agent Amy Jessup, but her most famous role was in Suits.
Meghan was in the show from its launch in 2011, but was written out in the finale of the seventh series. Fittingly, perhaps, she left after her character got married.
In real life, Meghan's union with Prince Harry wasn't her first marriage. In September 2011, she wed film producer Trevor Engelson, but the pair divorced two years later.
In September, it was reported that her ex-husband was producing a new TV show based on a man's custody battle with his ex-wife who marries into the Royal Family.
In 2014, she began writing about topics such as food, beauty, fashion and travel, as well as her own story, on her lifestyle website The Tig.
Meghan said setting up the website was an attempt to "reframe the beauty content to include think pieces about self-empowerment" and feature dynamic, inspirational women.
In one post, she explained: "I've never wanted to be a lady who lunches - I've always wanted to be a woman who works."
The site also carried candid blogs she wrote on every birthday. On turning 33 in 2014, she wrote: "My 20s were brutal - a constant battle with myself, judging my weight, my style, my desire to be as cool/as hip/as smart/as 'whatever' as everyone else."
She also grew a large social network profile, with 1.9 million followers on Instagram and more than 350,000 on Twitter.
But she shut The Tig in April 2017, and deleted her social accounts January 2018.
Her media career has gone hand-in-hand with support for causes that are important to her.
She tackled the issue of the stigma around menstrual health in an article for Time magazine in March 2017 and was a global ambassador for World Vision Canada, which campaigns for better education, food and healthcare for children around the world.
As part of her role, the actress travelled to Rwanda for the charity's Clean Water Campaign.
Meghan's commitment to gender equality has seen her work with the United Nations, and she received a standing ovation from an audience including UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for a stirring speech on International Women's Day 2015.
Commenting on how she combined acting with campaigning, she said: "While my life shifts from refugee camps to red carpets, I choose them both because these worlds can, in fact, co-exist. And for me, they must."
Meghan, whose father is white and mother is African-American, has also spoken about coming to terms with her racial identity.
In an article for Elle magazine, she wrote: "While my mixed heritage may have created a grey area surrounding my self-identification, keeping me with a foot on both sides of the fence, I have come to embrace that.
"To say who I am, to share where I'm from, to voice my pride in being a strong, confident mixed-race woman."
Marriage to Prince Harry
In late 2016, Prince Harry confirmed he was in relationship with Meghan - while issuing a statement accusing journalists of harassing her.
The pair had met on a blind date, organised by a mutual friend. After just two dates, they went on holiday together to Botswana.
In September 2017 Meghan told Vanity Fair magazine they were "two people who are really happy and in love".
And in an interview that November, when their engagement was announced, Prince Harry admitted he had never heard of Meghan before his friend introduced them, and was "beautifully surprised".
Meghan and Prince Harry got married at St George's Chapel, Windsor, on 19 May 2018.
Royal Tours and engagements
Meghan and Prince Harry embarked on their first royal tour together in October 2018 - visiting Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga over 16 days.
The trip coincided with the couple announcing they were expecting their first baby.
The duke and duchess followed in the footsteps of Prince Harry's parents - Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales - whose first royal tour was to Australia and New Zealand.
In September 2019, the couple undertook a 10-day tour of Africa, a continent that has always been particularly dear to Prince Harry's heart, leading to some speculation early in their marriage that they might at some stage choose to live there.
Meghan met Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn, as well as other key figures in South Africa's anti-apartheid movement.
She also made a speech to business people in Johannesburg in which she said such entrepreneurs had the power to change a world that seems "aggressive, confrontational and dangerous".
But by the end of the tour, the couple's talk about fighting injustice was being reported alongside news that they were beginning legal action against the Mail on Sunday for publishing a private letter sent by the Duchess of Sussex to her father.
Becoming a mother
When Meghan gave birth to her son Archie Harrison - on 6 May 2019 - the reaction from the New York Times reflected the mass interest in the event around the world as it wrote: "He is the first multiracial baby in the British monarchy's recent history, an instant star in a country where multiracial children make up the fastest-growing ethnic category."
But the royal couple had already decided to do things a little differently, underlining their determination not to follow the traditions of other recent royal births.
In advance, they chose not to reveal where the baby would be born and said there would be no running commentary of what was happening, instantly stopping the spectacle of the press pack joining the ranks of "royal superfans" camped outside a hospital for several days waiting for the first glimpse of the new royal.
And the birth wasn't initially announced in the traditional royal way of being posted on a placard outside Buckingham Palace. Instead, Prince Harry popped out of their home to tell the world (although the placard then followed).
The very private christening that followed just added to some media frustration that they could not, in their minds, fully report on one of the year's happiest stories. Held at Windsor Castle, the ceremony was not witnessed by any press photographers or TV cameras and the list of guests and godparents was not made public.
BBC royal correspondent Jonny Dymond surmised: "It all points to a very different royal event, part of the continuing desire by the duke and duchess to raise their son Archie out of the spotlight."
A very public departure from royal life
Amid ongoing spats with the media, increasingly through lawyers, it would soon become clear that both Meghan and her husband were becoming increasingly disenchanted with the expectations that came with their royal role.
The announcement in June 2019 that they were breaking away from the Royal Foundation charity - which had seen them work closely with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge - led to frenzied speculation about Prince Harry and Meghan's relationship with Prince William and Catherine.
Then there was the revelation that their home, Frogmore Cottage, had been renovated with £2.4m of taxpayer-funded costs.
Meghan's comments during the couple's African tour that she had not felt supported as she struggled with motherhood and her new role did not go down well with senior royals, according to sources at the time.
At the end of 2019, the couple took an extended Christmas break from royal duties, taking Archie to the Canadian province of British Columbia.
It gave them time to mull over their next move and, within days of the start of a new decade, they dropped the bombshell announcement that they planned to step back as senior royals and become financially independent.
Amid the further detail that the couple planned to split their time between the UK and North America, Buckingham Palace expressed its disappointment as palace sources revealed that that no other royal - including the Queen or Prince William - was consulted before the statement was issued.
Talks then ensued between Prince Harry and the Queen to iron out the details before it was confirmed that their couple's final duties as working members of the Royal Family would be in March 2020.
The very final engagement saw them attend the Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey. The Queen, Prince Charles and Prince William were all there although one of the abiding memories of Meghan's royal exit - by now widely renamed "Megxit" - was getting a hug from singer Craig David.
The couple will still attend some royal events in the future but these will not be classed as official duties.
A new life in LA - and fighting new battles
Although some time was spent in Canada, the couple have largely settled at a new home in California.
That does of course allow them to spend much more time with Meghan's mother Doria Ragland, who lives in the state.
But they are never completely out of the spotlight. There was a media fascination in tracking the couple's whereabouts in the early days of the coronavirus lockdown. In April 2020, they sued and eventually won an apology from a US news agency after drones were allegedly used to take pictures of their son, Archie, at their home.
The same month, the couple announced that they were ending all co-operation with four tabloid newspaper groups in the UK, blaming "distorted, false or invasive" stories.
But they do remain keen to seek publicity for the causes or issues they are interested in.
As a duchess, Meghan took on portfolio of charitable work and patronages, which included the National Theatre and charity Smart Works. She also launched a charity cookbook in September 2018 to help those affected by the Grenfell Tower fire.
After moving back to the US, she jointly wrote a newspaper article calling for the end of "structural racism" and the couple also urged US citizens to vote in the presidential election, saying that they should "reject hate".
In November 2020, Meghan wrote an article revealing her "almost unbearable grief" at enduring a miscarriage in July of that year.
A source close to the duchess confirmed to the BBC that the couple wanted to talk about what happened having come to appreciate how common miscarriage is.
As for their future career plans, a big clue came when they reached a deal with streaming giant Netflix to make a range of programmes, some of which they may appear in.
Days later, they repaid the costs of Frogmore Cottage. As BBC royal correspondent Jonny Dymond pointed out, that means "the couple may perceive themselves to be free of any of the obligations they once laboured under".
Follow us on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, on Instagram, or if you have a story suggestion email [email protected].
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One of Guernsey's main commuter roads will be closed for the next 11 weeks for electricity cable installation.
| Mount Row will be shut while Guernsey Electricity install ducts and cables to reinforce and develop the electricity supply around the St Martins area.
The work was originally due to start on 10 January but was delayed to reduce the impact on road users.
Diversions will be in place. A later phase in March will see La Ville Au Roi closed for up to 11 weeks.
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Parents know all too well how much a youngster can cost. Alongside the nappies, pocket money and school trips there are longer term costs like funding a university course, buying a first car or helping to pay for a wedding that can all seem quite intimidating.
| Money Talk by Tom StevensonInvestment director, Fidelity International
These expenses can be more manageable with careful planning but with the new government announcing that Child Trust Funds are to be scrapped, many parents will be wondering how best to start saving for their children now.
One option is child savings accounts. Many banks and building societies offer savings accounts for children. The rate of interest can vary quite significantly, though some also offer special gifts.
A second is children's Bonus Bonds. These are offered by National Savings & Investments (NS&I), which means they are backed by the government.
They provide tax-free interest for children under 16 and there is an additional bonus if the money remains untouched for five years.
'Big win'
Another option is Premium Bonds. These are also provided by NS&I and are often bought for children.
They offer the potential of a big win as well as many smaller prizes, but they do not pay any interest. This means that you may not see any growth on your investment at all.
Individual Savings Accounts (Isas) are a flexible, tax-efficient way to save for your child's future.
Isas are not available for children, but you could use your own allowance to save for them and any income or capital gains you receive will be tax-free.
A child can open a cash Isa once they are aged 16 or a stocks and shares Isa once they are aged 18.
With an Isa, you have complete control over where the money is invested, so you have access to it at any time. You can invest up to £10,200 in a stocks and shares Isa this year or up to £5,100 in a cash Isa. The value of tax savings and eligibility to invest in an Isa will depend on individual circumstances.
Another option is Investment Funds (Unit trusts/OEICS). There are thousands of funds available providing access to a wide range of differing types of investment, such as stocks and shares and corporate bonds.
Children under 18 cannot apply themselves but parents, or grandparents, can set up the investment and designate it as being for the child on the application form.
And then there are pensions. Setting up pensions for your children may sound extreme, but it could be an excellent way to save for the long term.
With this option they will also receive tax relief, even though they probably do not pay income tax. This means that if you pay £240 a month into a Self Invested Personal Pension (SIPP), it will be made up to £300 with tax relief, assuming a basic rate of income tax of 20%. As with all pension products your child can not access your money until they are aged 55.
When contributing to a pension for your child, then you can only put in a maximum of £2,880 - which, with tax relief - takes the amount up to the annual limit of £3,600.
Burden
Whichever route you choose to take, there are four principles that you should follow in order to maximise your child's investment and lessen the financial burden of life's milestones.
The best time to start investing is now. Investing for children is all about the long term, so to give your investment as much time as possible to grow, you need to start investing as soon as possible.
Secondly, invest as much as you can afford. Many people find it hard to work out how much money they will need to save to help their children. This is why we believe the best strategy is to put aside as much as you can afford.
Thirdly, think about saving each month. Unless you have a large sum to invest, a good way to build up significant savings for your children over the years is to start a monthly savings plan.
This can help you maintain a long-term investment strategy and it is a useful way of being disciplined about saving for your children's future - you will soon start thinking of your regular payment as an essential part of your budget.
If you were to put £50 a month from birth into the average UK stock market fund, it could give your child a pot worth £23,937 (based on a hypothetical investment that grows 6% a year and has an annual management charge of 1.5%, bid to bid, with net income reinvested) at the age of 21.
Of course, past performance is not a guide to what might happen in the future and the value of investments can go down as well as up and you may get back less than you invested.
Lastly, keep an eye on tax and take care if you are a parent. There is no limit on how much you can give or invest for children and they are entitled to tax-free allowances in the same way as adults.
If their total taxable income is less than the tax-free allowance they are due, a form R85 can be completed so they receive their interest without tax taken off.
However, there are some special rules if a parent or step-parent has given savings to their child. For more information contact a financial adviser or visit the HM Revenue and Customs website.
The opinions expressed are those of the author and are not held by the BBC unless specifically stated. The material is for general information only and does not constitute investment, tax, legal or other form of advice. You should not rely on this information to make (or refrain from making) any decisions. Links to external sites are for information only and do not constitute endorsement. Always obtain independent, professional advice for your own particular situation.
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Labour has suspended MP Naz Shah over comments she made about Israel. | The Bradford West MP has been heavily criticised over the Facebook posts, including one suggesting Israel should be moved to the United States.
In a Commons statement she offered a "profound apology" for the posts, which were made before she became an MP.
Earlier party leader Jeremy Corbyn warned her about the "offensive and unacceptable" posts and David Cameron called for her suspension.
Labour said: "Jeremy Corbyn and Naz Shah have mutually agreed that she is administratively suspended from the Labour Party by the general secretary.
"Pending investigation, she is unable to take part in any party activity and the whip is removed."
'Fulsome apology'
Apologising in the Commons, Ms Shah, who had already quit as an unpaid aide to shadow chancellor John McDonnell, said: "Anti-Semitism is racism, full stop. As an MP I will do everything in my power to build relationships between Muslims, Jews and people of different faiths and none."
The announcement of her suspension came after pressure mounted on the MP, with Mr Cameron saying during Prime Minister's Questions it was "quite extraordinary" that Labour had not withdrawn the whip from her over what he suggested were "racist" comments.
Analysis by Iain Watson, BBC political correspondent
Saying sorry three times didn't prevent Naz Shah's suspension.
Number 10 are taking credit - but one shadow cabinet member, Lisa Nandy, had already called for her suspension and I'm told other Labour figures had approached party officials privately to call for the same thing.
Ten days ago Labour's general secretary had reassured MPs those accused of anti-Semitism would be expelled or suspended.
Insiders say that once the Labour leader had decided to hand the matter to party officials, suspension - and an investigation - became inevitable.
Most Labour MPs recognise few members hold anti-Semitic views but that some high-profile cases have been toxic, and have been pressing their leadership to be more proactive in uncovering and rooting out unacceptable views.
And some on the party's right are keen to force a leader who has opposed "witch hunts" of party members to use disciplinary procedures to erect, however reluctantly, some walls to Labour's broad church - and to make clear that the views of some recent members and supporters aren't welcome.
Minutes before PMQs, Mr Corbyn issued a statement, saying: "These are historic social media posts made before she was a member of parliament. Naz has issued a fulsome apology.
"She does not hold these views and accepts she was completely wrong to have made these posts. The Labour Party is implacably opposed to anti-Semitism and all forms of racism."
Labour MP Lisa Nandy had called for Ms Shah's suspension, while another Labour MP, Kate Hoey, told BBC Radio 4's The World at One she should resign "right away" from the Commons Home Affairs Committee, which is carrying out an inquiry into anti-Semitism.
Who is Naz Shah?
Sabbiyah Pervez, BBC Look North
Naz Shah burst onto the political scene during the 2015 general election, where she ousted Respect MP George Galloway.
Her selection as a candidate proved controversial with divisions emerging in the local party. The candidate who was chosen first stood down four days later, before Ms Shah was imposed by the ruling National Executive Committee.
A bitter campaign followed, with Mr Galloway sparking anger by questioning Ms Shah's account of her forced marriage.
After her victory, she was celebrated locally and nationally for her unique background and life experiences.
Growing up in poverty in Bradford, Ms Shah and her family were abandoned by her father who eloped with a neighbour's teenage daughter. She has spoken openly about her experience of surviving a forced marriage and domestic violence.
In a Facebook post in 2014, Ms Shah shared a graphic showing an image of Israel's outline superimposed on a map of the US under the headline "Solution for Israel-Palestine conflict - relocate Israel into United States", with the comment "problem solved".
The post suggested the US has "plenty of land" to accommodate Israel as a 51st state, allowing Palestinians to "get their life and their land back".
It added Israeli people would be welcome and safe in the US, while the "transportation cost" would be less than three years' worth of Washington's support for Israeli defence spending.
Ms Shah added a note suggesting the plan might "save them some pocket money".
The post was brought to light by the Guido Fawkes website, which also highlighted a post in which she appeared to liken Israeli policies to those of Hitler.
In a statement, the MP said: "I made these posts at the height of the Gaza conflict in 2014, when emotions were running high around the Middle East conflict.
"But that is no excuse for the offence I have given, for which I unreservedly apologise."
She set out a more detailed apology in an article for Jewish News.
"The language I used was wrong," she wrote.
"It is hurtful. What's important is the impact these posts have had on other people. I understand that referring to Israel and Hitler as I did is deeply offensive to Jewish people for which I apologise."
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said the comments were "simply appalling", calling for an urgent meeting "for clarification of her views on Israel and the UK Jewish community".
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The Northern Ireland Executive has published a five-stage plan for easing the Covid-19 lockdown . | Unlike plans announced in England and the Republic of Ireland, NI's blueprint - Pathway to Recovery - does not include a timetable.
Progression will depend on key health criteria being met.
The executive must review its coronavirus regulations every three weeks, with the next due by 28 May.
Step one
Step two
Step three
Step four
Step five
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The mother of two sisters murdered in a park said her grief had "been taken to another place" after two officers were suspended amid allegations they took selfies next to their bodies. | By Martin BashirReligion editor
Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry were stabbed to death at a park in Wembley earlier this month.
Mina Smallman has complained about the Met's initial response - saying she had to organise a search for her daughters.
No-one has been charged with the murders.
Speaking to the BBC, Mrs Smallman, the former Archdeacon of Southend, said the pictures "dehumanised" her children.
"They were nothing to them and what's worse, they sent them on to members of the public," she said.
Senior officers from the Met and the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) personally visited the family to explain what had happened after they were made aware of the alleged photographs.
Mrs Smallman said she was told the photos showed the girls' faces and she fears the images will appear on the internet.
"This has taken our grief to another place," she said.
"If ever we needed an example of how toxic it has become, those police officers felt so safe, so untouchable, that they felt they could take photographs of dead black girls and send them on.
"It speaks volumes of the ethos that runs through the Metropolitan Police."
The IOPC said the pictures were allegedly "shared with a small number of others", adding the Met was "handling matters involving those members of the public who may have received those images".
Yesterday evening, the Met said two officers had been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office and suspended from duty.
Met Commissioner Cressida Dick said she was "disgusted" with the allegations against the officers.
Mrs Smallman said she had coordinated a search operation on weekend her daughters died and it was Nicole's boyfriend, Adam, who found the sisters' bodies and the murder weapon.
She says the police were "making assumptions" when they didn't immediately respond when the sisters were first reported missing.
"I knew instantly why they didn't care. They didn't care because they looked at my daughter's address and thought they knew who she was.
"A black woman who lives on a council estate."
Ms Smallman, 27, had been with friends celebrating Ms Henry's 46th birthday at the park on the evening of 5 June.
Detectives believe they were killed by a stranger who repeatedly stabbed them in the early hours of 6 June - their bodies were not found until the following day.
Forensic officers have since been searching a large area of the park including a pond and have trawled through hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rubbish that was accidently cleared from the scene.
Detectives believe the killer received injuries in the attack "which caused significant bleeding".
The IOPC is also separately investigating how the Met handled calls from worried family and friends of the sisters after they went missing.
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"We've come here to show our faces, to tell the truth, to walk the streets with you so you can tell us your problems, and we can solve them," hollered candidate Nicolás Maduro Guerra, addressing a crowd of about 500 on the Caribbean coast of La Guaira. | By Katy WatsonBBC News, Venezuela
"I'm not coming here to promise you castles and mansions, I can promise though that we will come through this."
But coming from "Nicolasito" as he's known, might be hard for some to swallow. For Nicolasito is the president's son and under Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela's once oil-rich economy has crumbled.
Every day, millions of people in Venezuela struggle to access enough food, annual inflation is above 5,000% and about five million people have fled the country in search of jobs and more stability. The pandemic has just compounded the problems here.
Despite his family links, Nicolasito is pretty assured of victory. He's set to gain one of 277 seats in the National Assembly on Sunday, made all the easier because the opposition is boycotting the vote.
"It's the duty of all Venezuelans to exercise their vote," says supporter Darwin Quintero. "We have to fix our problems and hope the people we vote in can solve them. That's why we have elections."
Plenty in the crowd, though, are taking part begrudgingly.
"I have to vote because I have a government job," one woman said. She didn't want to be identified.
"I don't want to vote because I'm not happy with what is happening - I have two jobs, four kids and I am practically dying of hunger - I work to eat."
And what of the opposition?
"There's no opposition here, just God," she says.
Disillusioned with politics
Rewind nearly two years, and Venezuelans were hopeful of change.
It was January 2019 when Juan Guaidó, as speaker of the opposition-led National Assembly, said that he would be the man to end President Maduro's reign and lead the country to free and fair elections.
As he was citing the constitution as allowing him to take over, many countries were quick to back him as Venezuela's legitimate leader.
Tens of thousands of people came out onto the streets to support him - he had approval ratings of more than 60%. But in the time since, Juan Guaidó's popularity has plummeted to around 25%. President Maduro is still in Miraflores Palace, and the country is going nowhere. It's stalemate.
Read more on Venezuela:
"We all wish the transition was quicker," says Mr Guaidó, defending the criticism he's failed to make things better.
"When you don't have water, when you have to queue three days for petrol … when your family is far from you… evidently survival is a full-time job."
But he insists he's doing what he can. Instead of participating in Sunday's vote, the opposition has decided to hold its own "consulta popular" between 7 and 12 December.
It's effectively a referendum, asking people about the country's political future.
But few seem enthusiastic - many don't really know much about it. And experts question its legitimacy as much as they do the elections.
"This is probably the worst situation for leaders and political parties of the opposition since the times of Hugo Chavez," says historian Margarita López Maya, referring to Nicolás Maduro's predecessor and man who began the leftist 'Bolivarian revolution' in Venezuela. "We are finishing the cycle of Guaidó."
So what next? Come 5 January, when the new National Assembly is inaugurated, Juan Guaidó will no longer be an elected official.
But Mr Guaidó insists that the international community continues to support him. It's the importance of the international community, though, that troubles some analysts.
"You don't resolve an internal political problem with international politics unless you're talking of an invasion," says Luis Vicente Leon, President of Caracas-based polling firm Datanalisis.
"The main issue is the internal fight and that was weakened to such a point that the opposition ended up being totally dependent on international politics."
Going nowhere… for now
In the new year, Mr Guaidó runs the risk of being jailed by the Maduro administration if he continues to lead a parallel government. But he says he's not going anywhere.
"I will stay in in Caracas to defy the regime," he says. "We know the main objective of Maduro and the dictatorship is to annihilate the democratic alternative."
And what of passing the baton?
"I was chosen by the people, and then by parliament," he explains. "The important thing is the objective, not who sits in the chair. It's not just about one person, it's a movement."
López Maya is doubtful. She says the opposition and government are so far apart, most Venezuelans don't want anything to do with either side now.
"They have to understand they need to leave the polarised discourse because it's a zero-sum game in which they have lost all the time they've played."
Additional reporting by Vanessa Silva
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About 200 jobs could be created at a Shropshire engineering firm after it won a £15m contract to supply car parts to Jaguar Land Rover. | Stadco said the jobs would be at its factories in Shrewsbury and Telford which would have new assembly lines and machines installed.
It said its total workforce at sites in Shropshire, Powys in Mid Wales and Castle Bromwich would be 1,100 by 2016.
Shropshire Council described it as a "massive boost" for the local economy.
Leader Keith Barrow said: "It is a huge vote of confidence in the Shropshire workforce and will increase the number of highly skilled and high tech jobs locally."
Stadco makes panels for vehicles built by Jaguar, Land Rover, Ford, General Motors and BMW.
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Sherry Huang, a retired accountant and grandmother, is not someone you would expect to get worked up over international arms sales, but ask her why Taiwan needs advanced fighter jets from the United States and she will give you an earful. | By Cindy SuiBBC News, Taipei
"Without them, people are worried. If China gets stronger, we won't even have the strength to protect ourselves. It's like you have a thug living next door, with guns pointed at you, threatening you not to speak or he'll shoot you," she says.
The US has provided weapons to the Republic of China, now in Taiwan, since World War II.
It is the only country which has sold arms to Taiwan in recent years and is required by US law to provide the island with weapons to help it maintain a sufficient self-defence capability.
But in the past year there has been growing concern that the US resolve to help Taiwan defend itself may have weakened, as Washington increasingly needs good relations with China.
What Taiwan wants in particular are 66 F-16 C/D fighter jets to upgrade its ageing fleet.
This week, three air force personnel were killed when two older generation aircraft crashed into a mountain.
An investigation is under way, but officials told the BBC that problems caused by ageing equipment are one of the main causes of accidents involving fighter jets.
Pressured by some US politicians, the Obama administration has agreed to announce its decision on the sale by 1 October.
It is not a topic that comes up in casual conversation, but most Taiwanese people agree that the island needs more weapons to defend itself in case of an attack by China.
That is not to say they expect a war to break out between Taipei and Beijing - who have enjoyed warmer relations in recent years.
But China still has 1,500 missiles targeting Taiwan, and has not renounced the threat of force to take back the island, which it still claims as its province.
Taiwanese people know they must be prepared.
Foot-dragging
Critics have blamed US President Barack Obama and Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou for not agreeing a new package of arms.
Some critics say Mr Obama has been dragging his feet and that Mr Ma has not actively sought the weapons.
But the last time a significant package of weapons was approved was in 2001 - including Patriot missiles, Black Hawk helicopters and equipment for Taiwan's existing F-16 fleet, but no submarines or new fighter jets.
Some sort of weapons sales and military personnel training have occurred every year, according to analysts, but most of the weapons are parts replacements and not more advanced weaponry.
Alexander Huang, a professor at Taipei's Tamkang University specialising in China-Taiwan defence issues, says the US changed its handling of weapons sales to Taiwan after the 11 September attacks.
At that time, President George W Bush scrapped annual weapons talks between Taipei and Washington.
"After 9/11, and [with] the rise of Chinese influence and the lack of the annual talks vehicle, it gave Washington a way to postpone Taiwan's [weapons] requests," he said.
"When China exerted pressure over the US government, there were times when the US asked Taiwan not to file a request."
Mr Huang believes the Obama administration's hands are tied.
"The US does not want to antagonise China. China has made arms sales to Taiwan the number one irritant of the US-China bilateral relationship," he says.
"This kind of dilemma is bothering the Obama administration. You can cite various reasons: China's large holdings of US treasury bonds, collaboration on North Korea, Iran; there are a lot of issues over which the US doesn't want to antagonise China."
In recent days, China has issued a stern warning to the US, through the Communist Party's People's Daily newspaper, that US-China relations will be damaged if Mr Obama proceeds with an arms sale to Taiwan.
However, analysts say China's reaction is not likely to be as severe as its threats.
In the past, the most China has done is react angrily and cancel military exchanges between Washington and Beijing, as well as not allowing US ships to make calls at the Hong Kong port.
It did just that after a $6.4bn (£4bn) weapons deal authorised by Mr Bush was approved by Mr Obama in 2010, but Beijing has since resumed high-level military exchanges with the US.
Analysts say they do not believe Beijing will cancel economic contracts, as a worsening US economy will also hurt China.
'Wrong message'
Taiwan's air fleet currently consists of two-decade-old F-16 A/B fighters (there are few countries still flying them), French Mirage 2000-5 fighters that are also about 20 years old, and 35-year-old F5 fighters that it wants to retire soon.
The fighters Taiwan seeks - F-16 C/Ds - can carry more bombs for each sortie and conduct more efficient attacks against ground targets.
Taiwan's deputy defence secretary Andrew Yang says a US refusal to sell advanced weapons to Taiwan could send the wrong message to China, and affect regional security.
"It encourages China to stop Taiwan's self-defence activity," he says.
Since the 1950s, Taiwan has patrolled the region, including areas of the East China Sea and South China Sea bordering China, and shared information it collects with the US, Mr Yang said, adding that this role is little known and often taken for granted.
"We're not just protecting the island itself, we conduct daily patrols of a much bigger region, beyond Taiwanese territory," Mr Yang says.
"If we don't get replacement or new aircraft, we don't patrol these areas. They will see there's a vacuum here. Of course it will give more leverage to whoever wants to cause problems. Then the US will have to make extra effort to fill the gap."
In recent days, local and international media have reported that the US is more likely to help Taiwan upgrade its fleet of F-16 A/B fighter jets, rather than selling the more advanced F-16 C/D fighters.
This week, US Senators Robert Menendez and John Cornyn introduced a bill in an attempt to force Mr Obama to approve the deal on the argument that the US is bound by a 1979 law to sell the island sufficient weapons for its defence.
They argue that the sale would benefit the US economy and save jobs. The deal is estimated to cost $8bn.
Another politician, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, has introduced similar legislation in the House of Representatives, arguing China must not be allowed to dictate US policy in the Pacific.
Earlier this year, American politicians including 45 senators and 181 members of the House of Representatives wrote to Mr Obama to support a sale of F-16C/Ds.
Sherry Huang is hopeful the US will come through for Taiwan, but she cannot contain her scepticism.
"We believe Americans have a sense of public welfare, but that often loses in the face of economic considerations," she says.
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The third and final instalment of Peter Jackson's Hobbit series, The Battle of the Five Armies, has topped the UK box office in its opening weekend. | The film made £9.7 million, marginally outperforming the previous two chapters in the saga.
An Unexpected Journey took £9.5 million on its debut in 2012, while last year's Desolation of Smaug took £9.3 million.
Paddington, which had been at the top of the charts for two weeks, was bumped into second place with £2.9 million.
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, which has now earned more than £27 million in the UK alone, came in third.
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A series of public consultations on Aberdeen FC's proposals for a new stadium on the outskirts of the city are getting under way. | The stadium and training facilities would be built at Kingsford, close to the Aberdeen bypass, near Westhill.
The Yes to Kingsford Stadium group believes it would be a vital step forward for the club.
The Say No To Kingsford Stadium group argues it is green belt land and would have a negative local impact.
The group previously told BBC Scotland it had been inundated with abuse from some fans. Aberdeen FC condemned any abuse.
Club chairman Stewart Milne has described Kingsford as "an ideal location for supporters".
The Dons had previously been considering a relocation to Loirston, to the south of Aberdeen, a proposal that had been marred by planning difficulties.
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Thirty years ago Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, which had been held by Britain for 150 years, leading to a short but bloody war.
| In the two months of fighting that followed, 255 British and about 650 Argentine servicemen were killed, along with three Falklands civilians, before Argentine forces surrendered.
Argentina still claims sovereignty over the islands, which it calls Las Malvinas.
Here are the key dates in the conflict.
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A 46-year-old woman is in hospital after being knocked unconscious when a stone hit her on the head at Alton Towers.
| Staffordshire Police said they were unsure if it was deliberate or "an act of mischief with an unintended result".
The woman, a coach driver, was walking in a coach park when the stone was thrown on Thursday afternoon.
She was in a stable condition in the University Hospital of North Staffordshire. on Friday.
Staffordshire Police said hundreds of people were walking through the area at the time and appealed to anyone with information to contact the force.
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As the Cites meeting in Johannesburg ends, Matt McGrath asks whether celebrities are having a bigger impact on saving species than the international body tasked with regulating the trade in threatened animals and plants. | Matt McGrathEnvironment correspondent@mattmcgrathbbcon Twitter
The poor old peregrine falcon must feel like a total loser at this point.
Driven to the edge of extinction in the 1960s and 70s thanks to the use of pesticides based on DDT, the world's fastest predator has made a remarkable recovery over the past 30 years. So much so that there is hardly a cathedral in the UK that doesn't have at least one of these high flying raptors.
All that progress though, hasn't made a difference here at the Cites meeting in Johannesburg, which has just drawn to a close. Cites (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) aims to ensure that the trade in specimens of wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival.
Despite plenty of data to say the falcon has recovered and that restrictions on trade should be loosened, the countries meeting here decided to keep it on the highest level of protection.
"The peregrine falcon met the criteria for down-listing to Appendix II," said Heather Sohl, with WWF-UK
"The parties discussed it but didn't agree to follow that, sometimes the science isn't always followed."
Many here would say the peregrine falcon was an unfortunate exception. It would appear that science rather than politics is becoming a stronger factor in these discussions on which species to protect and which to reject.
For instance, at the last meeting in 2013 in Thailand, a number of shark species were up-listed after a huge political battle that succeeded by just one vote.
This time round, new safeguards for other sharks and devil rays, sailed through with huge majorities. Experts say this is because the regulations have been seen to work.
But while there were science-based victories for Barbary macaques, African grey parrots and a host of other species, politics does still play a part in some of the biggest controversies.
The decision to allow the EU to vote as a bloc had a major impact on one of the key debates about elephants.
With about 130 countries actually voting on the floor, the EU group of 28 stopped the proponents of greater protection for elephants from securing the two-thirds majority needed to change the Convention.
The EU argued that the science wasn't strong enough. Many campaigners thought it was plain old dirty politics.
"It just doesn't make sense biologically, it's a political decision," Dr Roz Reeve, an adviser to the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation, who thinks the EU sided with South Africa, which was against the proposal.
"South Africa is the dominant voice on the continent, it's the largest economy on the continent, that's the only thing I can think of that might be driving this position."
South African ministers were delighted that the up-listing of all African elephants was defeated.
They see it as a justification of their policies that have seen their elephant populations less affected by poaching than almost anywhere else in Africa. They argue that imposing greater protection on their elephants would have been an insult to ordinary South Africans.
"Had we taken this elephant to Appendix I, our people would have been denied the opportunity to benefit from them," said Edna Molewa, South Africa's minister for water and environmental affairs.
"What's making the Southern African elephant population thrive is that the people are utilising them and benefiting and they feel that they are protecting them, they are part of them.
"We feel that the rest of the continent and the rest of the world should go that way."
This question of the uneasy relationship between humans and animals was a strong undercurrent at this meeting.
Country after country argued that more needed to be done to give people living next to threatened species a cash-in-hand reason for keeping them alive.
But perhaps there's another way, and what's really needed is a massive injection of celebrity power.
There is growing evidence that the impact of sports stars, artists and well-known business people are making a big difference in educating people about the impacts of consuming products based on threatened species, and the positive benefits from their protection.
In China, the popularity of former NBA basketball star Yao Ming has made a huge difference on awareness of species - not just with the public but with the government too.
"He proposed to the National People's Congress the ban on ivory sales, which was later adopted by the Chinese government," said Peter Knights from Wildaid, who worked with Yao Ming on a documentary designed to raise awareness of the impacts of consumption on elephants and rhinos.
"That is actually the only non top-down process in China, through the Congress- and the ivory trade ban is an example of that happening."
Connecting celebrities to the Cites process could be a key step forward in forcing countries to take action.
It already seems to be having an impact. Take, for example, pangolins.
"A few years ago most people didn't know what a pangolin was, probably most still don't but a lot more do know something about these scaly anteaters," said Heather Sohl from WWF-UK.
"But there have been campaigns where Prince William has been working with Angry Birds to get the youth understanding that these are the most heavily traded mammals in the world - and from that we've seen at this conference, proposals to give them greater protection successfully passed."
This Cites conference has done much good work to protect threatened species. Apart from the peregrine falcon and perhaps the elephants, governments listened to the science and acted on it. For all its limitations, Cites remains the only safeguard for species that has real teeth.
But there is only so much you can do with regulations. To really ensure the survival of species, you need hearts and minds. And that's where celebrities really can connect the Convention to the public. Some think this combination could make the peaceful co-existence of man and beast a reality.
"It is this whole attitude to wildlife consumption, it is a once and forever societal change," said Wildaid's Peter Knights.
"We used to do this in the UK and US, and then society kind of moves away from it, and this is where Asia is right now - this is a tipping point right now."
Follow Matt on Twitter @mattmcgrathBBC and on Facebook.
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A fire has broken out at a Sheffield outdoor ski centre, nearly a year after a series of fires shut down the site. | South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue said the service had received more than 120 calls about the latest blaze at Ski Village on Vale Road, which started at about 20:30 BST.
A spokesperson said a large wooden shed and outbuildings were alight, and 21 firefighters were at the scene.
The main building of the Ski Village was destroyed by fire on 29 April 2012.
That fire was ruled to be an accident but investigations showed two further fires on 1 May and 21 May were started deliberately.
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Photographs of loved ones taken after they died may seem morbid to modern sensibilities. But in Victorian England, they became a way of commemorating the dead and blunting the sharpness of grief. | By Bethan BellBBC News
In images that are both unsettling and strangely poignant, families pose with the dead, infants appear asleep, and consumptive young ladies elegantly recline, the disease not only taking their life but increasing their beauty.
Victorian life was suffused with death. Epidemics such as diphtheria, typhus and cholera scarred the country, and from 1861 the bereaved Queen made mourning fashionable.
Trinkets of memento mori - literally meaning "remember you must die" - took several forms, and existed long before Victorian times.
Locks of hair cut from the dead were arranged and worn in lockets and rings, death masks were created in wax, and the images and symbols of death appeared in paintings and sculptures.
But in the mid-1800s photography was becoming increasingly popular and affordable - leading to memento mori photographic portraiture.
The first successful form of photography, the daguerreotype - a small, highly detailed picture on polished silver - was an expensive luxury, but not nearly as costly as having a portrait painted, which previously had been the only way of permanently preserving someone's image.
As the number of photographers increased, the cost of daguerreotypes fell. Less costly procedures were introduced in the 1850s, such as using thin metal, glass or paper rather than silver.
Death portraiture became increasingly popular. Victorian nurseries were plagued by measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, rubella - all of which could be fatal.
It was often the first time families thought of having a photograph taken - it was the last chance to have a permanent likeness of a beloved child.
But as healthcare improved the life expectancy of children, the demand for death photography diminished.
The advent of snapshots sounded the death knell for the art - as most families would have photographs taken in life.
Now, these images of men, women and children stoically containing their grief in order to preserve the likeness of a taken-too-soon loved one, continue to live up to their name.
Memento mori: remember, you must die.
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Pregnancy is a huge, life-changing period in a woman's life and there is no shortage of advice about what is best for your unborn child. But in this week's Scrubbing Up, Linda Geddes, the author of Bumpology, argues this can sometimes be misleading and scaremongering. | Expectant parents are bombarded with advice about what they should and shouldn't be doing.
Pregnant women mustn't eat too much as it may raise the baby's risk of obesity or diabetes, but they mustn't diet as that could have a similar effect.
Neither should they exercise for fear of triggering a miscarriage, or get too stressed out because that's bad for the baby too. And if they do get stressed, they can't drink alcohol or go for a spa treatment to relax.
You might start to think that staying at home would be the sensible thing to do, only this too is ridden with potential dangers for your unborn child: from ice-cream, to pet shampoo, to hair dye. Even lying down or your back can allegedly cut off your baby's blood supply.
When I fell pregnant three years ago, I felt paralysed and somewhat patronised by all the conflicting advice out there.
I was also obsessed with the little life that was growing inside me, and desperate for more information about what it was doing in there.
Could it taste the curry I was eating; hear the songs I was singing; or sense when I took a swim in the freezing outdoor swimming pool near my home?
So I began a quest to investigate the truth behind the old wives' tales, alarming newspaper headlines and government guidelines, and to probe deeper into the inner world of the developing child. So Bumpology was born.
Booze and breastfeeding
Some of what I discovered while researching the book amused and amazed me: I learned that parents who already have a couple of boys are statistically more likely to go on having boys, though no-one really understands why; that the shape of a woman's bump provides no clues as to the gender of the baby within, but that women with severe morning sickness are slightly more likely to be carrying a girl; and that contrary to the received wisdom, babies actually can focus on objects further than 30cm away (even if they often under- or overshoot).
I also learned that much of the research underpinning medical advice on things like alcohol consumption - and even the health benefits of breastfeeding - is far from clear-cut and often aimed at the general population, rather than taking the individual into consideration.
In the case of alcohol, there's clear evidence that heavy drinking is harmful -- and even a daily glass of wine may increase the odds of a baby being born underweight, which carries additional risks to its health.
However, below this level, there is a massive grey zone where scientists simply don't yet have an answer to whether or not alcohol causes harm.
When it comes to breastfeeding, it's quite true that breast milk is best for babies, or at least better than formula milk in terms of protecting them against infections in the short term.
But when it comes to the much-touted long-term benefits of breastfeeding, such as protection against obesity, diabetes or allergy, the research is less convincing.
Certainly women who can't breastfeed for whatever reason, and who live in countries with a decent standard of health care, shouldn't waste too much time worrying that they are causing long-term damage to their baby's health.
'Overblown'
However, what alarmed me the most was the realisation that much of what women are told about the risks of medical interventions during labour - things like induction, epidural anaesthesia and undergoing a c-section - are overblown.
At the same time, statistics about the odds of needing medical assistance or on complications like tearing during a vaginal birth are frequently not talked about.
I believe that access to this kind of information could have a big influence on women's expectations of labour and on some of the decisions they make when planning for the birth of their child.
I also think it could help women to come to terms with things if labour doesn't go according to plan and they need additional help getting their baby out.
Having a baby can be one of the greatest joys that life bestows. However, it is also hard work and new parents can do without the unnecessary guilt, anxiety and doubt that misleading pregnancy advice brings.
It is also a time of great wonder and through my research I have learned things about my own children that will never cease to amaze me. I believe it's time to push aside the scaremongering and allow parents the freedom to enjoy this precious period of their lives.
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A syndicate of teachers from a school in Guernsey has scooped the £695,000 top prize in the Christmas lottery. | The teachers from La Mare de Carteret school have decided to remain anonymous but said in a statement it was "a wonderful Christmas surprise".
The prize was lower than previous years, where first prize regularly topped £1m.
There was a second prize of £50,000 in addition to five lots of £10,000 for third prizes.
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The Bishop of Tewkesbury is to take up the duties of the Bishop of Gloucester, who withdrew from his role last week "for personal reasons". | The Right Reverend Michael Perham is due to retire in November.
The diocese said "the process is under way to enable the Right Reverend Martyn Snow to take up the duties of the Bishop of Gloucester in his absence".
It said Mr Perham had "stepped back from his role as Bishop of Gloucester".
The Diocese of Gloucester has not given any more details about the move. A spokesman said: "It follows standard procedure set out in church legislation and is a process used on other occasions. It is expected to be formally ratified in the near future."
A special service had been due to take place on 8 November to celebrate Mr Perham's time as Bishop of Gloucester. Church officials said they "did not know" whether this was still going ahead.
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There are fears the justice system could collapse as victims and defendants wait years for trials during the coronavirus pandemic. | By Rachel FlintBBC News
While jury trials have resumed, a backlog of cases means some trials have been pushed back to 2023.
Now those representing victims and defendants in Wales have told the BBC trials could collapse due to the waits.
The UK government said it was investing record sums in justice, and opening temporary courts to clear cases.
By the end of February 2020, pre-Covid, the number of outstanding cases in crown court in England and Wales had reached 39,331, official figures show.
But by the end of October this backlog had increased to 51,595 - a rise of 31% in eight months.
HM Courts and Tribunal Services (HMTS) said the number of cases being resolved in crown courts had trebled since lockdown in April, and it was investing £110m to boost capacity.
While criminal trials have resumed after the initial lockdown, those working in the courts say a lack of open court rooms able to hold socially-distanced trials means the backlog in cases was growing almost daily.
Now, some barristers and solicitors and those supporting victims, witnesses and defendants across Wales have warned lengthy waits could see cases collapse.
They fear criminals who may have been convicted at trial could walk free as witnesses and victims lose faith, while innocent defendants could spend years - sometimes in custody - waiting to have their names cleared.
James Rossiter, of the Criminal Bar Association (CBA), said: "Delays are going through the roof, there is a risk in rape cases that complainants will give up and walk away.
"I've heard that this is already happening, people are wanting to get on with their lives.
"It is impacting everybody, defendants' lives are on hold. It's not great for justice, it means that people who might have been convicted will walk free and could harm someone else."
So what's the issue?
Jury trials across England and Wales were halted at the end of March, as the pandemic hit, with almost half of courts shut and hearings being held via video link.
But those working in the justice system say a backlog of cases existed before coronavirus, with the virus only serving to exacerbate a growing "crisis".
In February, more than 9,000 cases were being brought before crown courts for hearings and trials, but judges were only able to dispose of around 8,400, while in the last week before lockdown 292 trials were delayed.
The CBA, which represents barristers in England and Wales, said budget cuts leading to court closures, usable court rooms remaining shut and a lack of staff led to cases piling up in recent years.
In May, the first jurors were sworn back in at Cardiff Crown Court as jury trials resumed.
But like most aspects of life, the court system had to adjust.
One of the major challenges of clearing the backlog during the pandemic is making sure no-one comes into contact with anyone with coronavirus.
Major efforts have been made to make courts safe, with glass screens installed in over 400 courts and jury deliberation rooms, with over 250 courtrooms assessed as "capable and able to hold trials", HM Courts and Tribunals said.
The use of video links is also helping, with new video technology being used for 70,000 hearings in magistrates' and crown courts during the pandemic.
Jury trials in England and Wales involve 12 jurors, court staff, barristers and legal teams, and while some can give evidence via video link, many still need to attend court.
"If one person goes down the whole thing collapses," Scott Bowen, a solicitor in Cardiff and Newport, said.
Ahead of courts reopening, Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett said radical measures would be needed to restart trials, as many old court buildings were not suitable for social-distancing.
In England and Wales, 16 temporary courts - known as Nightingale Court buildings - were opened to free up court rooms for trials needing cells and secure docks.
Only one is currently operating in Wales, in Swansea, and the CBA said, with few courts acting at capacity, at least 60 extra criminal court rooms would need to be opened to deal with the rising cases.
"The government assured us we would have over 255 court rooms ready to hear trials, which were secure, safe, but that is nowhere near enough," Mr Rossiter said.
Some courts have trialled extended opening hours, and HMCTS wants to extend this to crown courts as officials tackle the backlog.
But Mr Rossiter warned this move would be against the human rights of advocates and would discriminate against those with caring responsibilities, as well as causing issues for witnesses, defendants and court staff.
Since March, the backlog of cases has widened, with hundreds of trials being pushed back every week.
In the last week of October, just 99 crown court trials took place across England and Wales, while 465 trials were postponed.
Trials involving several defendants - mostly serious crimes including trafficking, gang violence, human slavery, and sex offences - are particularly problematic due to social distancing, and many simply cannot be held.
The CBA estimates at least 120 "multi-hand" trials are sitting in the system without a date. These are known as "orphaned trials".
"It means the date given for some of the bails are unacceptable, we are seeing people being given provisional trail dates for late 2022 and 2023, for offences that might have happened two or three years ago," Mr Rossiter said.
"There is a bigger risk of people getting anxious, or being intimidated the longer you wait. There are greater risks of self-harm. It is miserable."
However, where additional courts have been sitting on a Saturday, HMTS said it had been "consistently completing more cases than they received" and the case load was falling.
'Don't give up hope'
In February, Alice - who is partially sighted - was attacked by a stranger and dragged along a crowded street in south Wales.
Her attacker only fled when a woman stopped her car and challenged him.
Alice (not her real name) did not want to contact the police, having not being believed by officers in the past, but after approaching Victim Support for help she reported the hate crime.
"It was clear when he grabbed me he wasn't trying to rob me, he really wanted to hurt me. I believe that it could have been death," she said.
The man was identified but Covid-19 complications and a skipped court date led to delays. However, he eventually admitted common assault by battery and was jailed for 12 weeks.
While Alice believes she was lucky not to have faced a lengthy wait, she has been left traumatised and shaken by the attack.
"He may be free now, but I am still suffering," she said.
Alice said she she was speaking out to encourage others not to lose hope in the system.
"Don't give up hope, sometimes justice does prevail, you will get through it," she said.
'People are locked up for 22 hours a day'
On four occasions, Mr Bowen's client packed a bag and said goodbye to his family, ready to go to prison.
But each time the man, who was arrested in December 2018 for supplying Class A drugs and waited 22 months to be sentenced, had his case adjourned.
He was eventually given a suspended sentence due to the impact of the delays, which the judge said was a form of punishment.
"Some people are waiting so long, by the time they get to court they have pretty much had a mental breakdown," said Mr Bowen, a solicitor in Cardiff and Newport and member of The Law Society.
He added that, with only four courtrooms able to run trails at Cardiff Crown Court, cases were being pushed back months.
"It's chaos, there are cases being moved left, right and centre."
During the pandemic, the UK government extended the amount of time a defendant could be held in custody before trial, from six to eight months, before applications have to be made to extend the time in custody if the trial is delayed.
And with fewer people going to trial, the number of people in prison who are yet to be convicted is growing.
By September, the latest data available, the number of people in prison on remand - either awaiting trial or sentencing - had reached 12,274, equating to around one in six prisoners, the highest level since 2014.
Meanwhile, the number of prisoners serving sentences has fallen below 62,000, a 10% fall since 2019. As less people are being sentenced.
"People can serve two years on remand, that's the equivalent of a four-year sentence," Mr Bowen said, adding the prisons were on lockdown with people confined to their cells for all but two 45-minute slots a day.
"They could be in custody for eight months and be acquitted. There are defendants who know their cases will take 18 months and are taking a chance the witnesses will just give up.
"A few weeks ago, they had a whole wing in isolation in Cardiff prison, it meant none of the defendants could go to court, we couldn't have conferences with them.
"It is a crisis. If we want it to work it needs investment, we are now at a breaking point," he added.
'People are suicidal, they have nowhere to turn'
Those accused of a crime are waiting longer and longer for their day in court, to clear their name or to be convicted.
Now a couple, who were both wrongly accused, have set up a charity which aims to help defendants and their families left in "limbo" as cases drag on.
Liam Allan, who was falsely accused of 23 counts of rape and sexual assault as a student, and Hannah Arkwright, set up the helpline during lockdown.
Ms Arkwright said a lot of defendants were being given trial dates that were years away, and many were feeling suicidal, isolated and alone.
"We get a lot of people feeling like there's never going to be an end," she said.
"Once you've lost your job, your family, your friends, so what's the point anymore... people have no where to turn."
Ms Arkwright said, once arrested, there was little people could do but wait to be charged. Once charged, they had to wait for their day in court.
"One friend's case was postponed for two weeks because they had to air jury bundles, they need to print them off 24 hours beforehand and air them," she said.
"Someone I know was meant to have his trial in March and it's now been pushed back to September 2022.
"It's impossible not to think about it, you are constantly thinking, 'there's no point me doing this because I might spend years in prison'. Even before people have been charged, they have literally lost everything."
What do those in charge of courts say?
A HMCTS spokeswoman said the backlog in magistrates' courts was continuing to fall and the number of cases resolved in crown courts had increased since April.
"To drive this recovery further we are investing £110m in a range of measures to boost capacity, including recruiting 1,600 new staff and shortly opening several more Nightingale Courts," she said.
"These efforts will be bolstered by an extra £337m the UK government is spending next year to deliver swifter justice and support victims, while £76m will further increase capacity in family courts and tribunals."
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New film Gravity promises to rekindle the debate over how "hard" - or accurate - science fiction should be. Should film-makers adhere to basic scientific principles, or should audiences just feel the magic instead, asks Peter Ray Allison. | The relationship between science and science fiction has always been tempestuous.
Gravity focuses on two astronauts stranded in space after the destruction of their space shuttle. Since Gravity's US release (it comes to the UK in November) many critics have praised the film for its scientific accuracy.
But noted astrophysicist Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, had several issues with the accuracy of Gravity's portrayal of space.
Through a series of posts on Twitter, Tyson - who later emphasised that he "enjoyed the film very much" - highlighted various errors.
He noted the Hubble space telescope (orbiting at 350 miles above sea level), the International Space Station (at 250 miles), and a Chinese space station could never be in line of sight of one another. On top of that, most satellites orbit west to east, yet in the film the satellite debris was seen drifting east to west.
Tyson also noted how Sandra Bullock's hair did not float freely as it would in zero-gravity. This is arguably not so much an error in physics, but a reflection of the limitations of cinematic technology to accurately portray actors in zero-gravity. That is, of course, without sending them into space for the duration of the film.
There has always been a drive for scientific accuracy within science fiction, especially within the "hard science fiction" literary sub-genre. But sci-fi, especially in film, tends to have a more flamboyant approach, where realism is often dispensed with in favour of visual flair.
The Michael Bay film Armageddon is known for its woeful number of inaccuracies, from the space shuttles separating their rocket boosters and fuel tanks in close proximity to each other (risking a collision) and to objects falling on to the asteroid under a gravitational pull seemingly as strong as the Earth's. More than one interested observer tried to work out how big the bomb would have to be to blow up an asteroid in the way demanded in the movie. Answer: Very big indeed.
Nasa is reported to have even used Armageddon as part of a test within their training programme, asking candidates to identify all the scientific impossibilities within the film.
Despite the presence of physicist Prof Brian Cox as a scientific adviser on Danny Boyle's Sunshine, artistic licence seeped in. There's a communications "dead-zone" around the Sun - not something easily explicable using real world rules.
Despite claims to the contrary, Red Planet was riddled with scientific implausibilities, from the compatibility between modern equipment and 30-year old Russian technology (imagine attempting to connect a modern PC with a Sinclair Spectrum), to the Martian "nematodes" which had been eating algae that had been sent from earth for the past 30 years. The nematodes should have been worms but looked closer to beetles. And there was no explanation as to how they had evolved to eat non-Martian algae nor what they had eaten before.
The science across the film was so "creative" that Nasa refused to act as scientific adviser on the film.
But perhaps the biggest example of scientific licence occurs in a plethora of space-based dramas.
"The most commonly lauded example of 'bad science', intentionally placed into science fiction, is that of sound," says Ed Trollope, spacecraft operations engineer at technology firm Telespazio VEGA Deutschland. "Because space is a vacuum, there is no sound, which means all those explosions and engine noises shouldn't be there."
There's a simple cinematic reason for having the sound of an explosion when a spacecraft blows up - it feels right to the viewer. But other conventions are more difficult for scientists to accept.
"My pet peeve is inertia," says Trollope. "There are many good reasons for keeping your engines on in space, but 'maintaining speed' is not one of them. If you turn your engines off, you don't stop."
Some do it slightly better than others. "I'd prefer not to single out a single film/book/series for this particular error, because it's so common - but I will laud the old television show Babylon 5, for doing a wonderful job of representing the mechanics of spaceflight inertia so nicely," explains Trollope.
2001: A Space Odyssey's silent scenes of space craft, with their rotating Stanford torus design, were closer than many later examples to the reality of travelling in space.
"A classic case of scientific inaccuracy was the first edition of Ringworld by Larry Niven, a novel which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1971," suggests science fiction author Charles Stross. "The author inadvertently set up a series of scenes which implied that the Earth spun on its axis in the wrong direction." Niven fixed it in the second printing.
The Duncan Jones film Moon was lauded for a reasonably accurate portrayal of what lunar mining for Helium-3 could look like in the future. Helium-3 is rare on Earth but less rare on the Moon, and using an automated method with a human overseer might be possible. But the economics behind the mining is not explained.
The alien signal in Contact is a prime example of what Seti (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) is looking for. This is perhaps not surprising as Contact was written by astronomer Carl Sagan. The use of mathematics in the transmission of the message seems reasonable and the time lag in the sending and receiving of the signal is also accurately represented in the film.
Science fiction is not just expected to accurately portray science but also to anticipate future developments.
"Science fiction hits some predictive targets," says science fiction author Neal Asher, "but rather in the way that a clip fired from an assault rifle will hit some of the enemy hidden in the jungle, but mostly hits trees and leaves."
"One of the past criticisms of science fiction has been that it's all 'zap-guns and rocket ships'," suggests Asher. "Now the science fiction writer can smugly point out the LaWs - the US navy laser system - knocking down drones, and then wax lyrical about the X Prize, Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk's SpaceX."
Richard Blott, principal consultant at Space Enterprise Partnerships, recalls an early episode of Star Trek ("Spock's Brain", 1968) where the latest space ship is described as having an "ion drive".
"Nowadays most new communications satellites have ion engines and they have powered missions to Vesta and Ceres," says Blott.
"In the end," Asher concludes, "science fiction is not there to make accurate predictions about the future, it is there to entertain and stimulate the imagination. There is absolutely no doubt that many of the imaginations it stimulates belong to scientists. To some extent it drives and directs science."
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In 2000, President Robert Mugabe launched Zimbabwe's controversial fast-track land reforms, seizing the majority of the 4,500 farms held by mostly white commercial farmers. More than a decade on, while some of the new farmers are doing well, others have found that if they cross the ruling party, they face losing their new land. | By Martin PlautWorld Service Africa editor
Shadrack Rwafa stands outside the home he has built.
He is one of Zimbabwe's 170,000 new farmers, the proud owner of Land Hunger Farm.
A short, muscular man, he has worked hard to grow crops on this dry, unforgiving soil, which used to be a cattle ranch.
It took two months just to dig the well, and he is proud of the clean, fresh water it produces.
"It's like milk," he tells the BBC.
Mr Rwafa is no ordinary farmer.
He is a war veteran who fought against the white minority rule which ended in 1980, when Robert Mugabe replaced Ian Smith as the country's leader.
In the intervening years he has been a sculptor, painter and miner.
But after Mr Mugabe inaugurated the Fast Track Land Reform Programme in 2000, Mr Rwafa saw his chance.
'Life-long dream'
He joined the invasion of a white-owned farm in the area in the south-east of the country.
Many of the commercial farms were seized violently, but Mr Rwafa says his case was different.
"We didn't just come without talking to the then farm owner.
"We asked 'can we share the land' and that's how we came here," says Mr Rwafa.
"He accepted and there was no violence at this place.
"We even helped him to put his sheep on the truck and he left us some fertilizers and we parted nicely."
The farm is the fulfilment of his life-long dream.
Today he grows peanuts, beans and maize and says his life has improved dramatically.
A ranch that once raised cattle has been split into 252 separate units, each farmed by a family growing a range of crops as well as raising some cattle.
Mr Rwafa says it is far more productive than it was when it was commercially farmed.
The farm's former owner was not available for comment.
The progress of Mr Rwafa and his fellow new farmers in Masvingo Province has been recorded by a 10-year research project, conducted by the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University, which followed 400 new farmers.
It is one of a number of studies which challenge popular perceptions that Zimbabwe's land reform programme has been an unmitigated disaster.
The Sussex University study does, however, accept that the process has had setbacks.
Only just over a third of the new farmers are doing well, about a fifth are supplementing their income by other means, and the rest are struggling, are not using the land for active production, or have given up altogether.
Even this sober view is challenged.
Economic consultant John Robertson suggests that agricultural output is only around 50% of the level it was before the land invasions began in 2000.
"Most of the new people involved who are farming the land that was confiscated from the large-scale farmers are producing enough for themselves and not much more," says Mr Robertson.
Land invasions have not ended.
Just as we were visiting new farmers like Mr Rwafa, a white farmer lost the land he was born on.
Political patronage
He did not want his name to be mentioned - the whole issue is too politically sensitive - but he seemed almost resigned to what had taken place.
"You didn't have to be a genius to work out that we weren't going to be there for the rest of our lives.
"One supposes they could stop it now, but I think they do not want to see a white on the land, and don't need to see any whites left," he says, more in sorrow than anger.
Mr Robertson believes the entire land redistribution exercise was meant to create a system of patronage, through a pool of voters who were dependent on the ruling Zanu-PF party.
"If you display your loyalty to the ruling party, you will get a free piece of land. If you show any disloyalty to the party, guess what… you'll lose it," he says.
Not even high-ranking Zanu-PF members are necessarily secure.
Tracy Mutinhiri was deputy minister of labour and social welfare until the middle of this year. She was also a beneficiary of land reform, with one of the biggest farms in the country.
Then she began to get too close to the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the former opposition, which is now in an uneasy government of national unity with President Mugabe's party.
"When we got into the inclusive government, I wanted to work with everybody. That's how it started: building up and building up, and then one day they decided to come and invade my farm," says Ms Mutinhiri.
"If it could happen to me, it could happen to anybody else," she adds.
But the real losers in this process have been the 500,000 workers who were once employed on the commercial farms.
Many were seen as potential MDC supporters, and were therefore not allocated any of the redistributed land.
I spoke to some of these workers who were too fearful to be named.
"Sometimes we are getting by on just $10 (£6.40) a month," says one woman, a former farm worker, now living in a disused tobacco barn.
The farm workers' official minimum wage is $44 (£28.80) per month.
"We are really suffering, and we don't know how we're going to live.
"This land reform must be reversed, and maybe our life can change."
President Mugabe's land reforms have had a mixed outcome, with at least as many farm workers losing their livelihoods as there are new farmers working their own land.
The country is also now a net food importer where it once exported grain to the region.
The United Nations World Food Programme is appealing for $42m (£27m) to help more than one million Zimbabweans get through to the harvest early next year.
Crossing Continents is on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday 1 December at 11:00 GMT and Monday 5 December at 20:30 GMT. Listen via the Radio 4 website or download the podcast.
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Grace Holden was just 13 years old when her mother, Shirley, died of cancer. After years of struggling to articulate her grief, Grace finally felt able to give voice to her pain in the most unlikely of settings - in front of millions of people on primetime television. Why? | By Charlotte BallBBC News Online
"Talking about it always scared me," says 18-year-old Grace, who just a few weeks ago finished runner-up in The Voice UK.
"But after being on the show and opening up about it a little bit, it opened my eyes to how talking about it, as much as it's scary, once you've done it that first time, it gets so much easier.
"It's kind of like a weight lifted off your shoulders."
Grace's mother was the root of her passion for singing.
Growing up in the family home in Thurrock, Essex, a young Grace would watch her mum singing at home.
And when the family discovered Grace too had an aptitude for singing, it was Shirley who encouraged her to audition for a production of Annie.
Grace landed a role in the ensemble. She was six years old.
"It all started from there," says Grace. "Mum just looked at me and asked if I fancied giving it a go."
One performance turned into another and for the past 12 years Grace has been with the same theatre school, becoming one of its teachers after she turned 16.
"Mum was always backstage, chaperoning, helping out with costumes," says Grace.
"She was the one they'd come to with costume ideas and stuff like that, which was always quite fun.
"Everybody knew her and loved her which is always really nice."
Shirley would be there at every show and audition from those earliest days with the theatre group to, eventually, the bigger performances in London.
Shirley was diagnosed with cancer when Grace was two years old.
"It was just a thing we dealt with," says Grace. "We got on with normal life, everything that me and my brothers ever wanted to do, she got us there.
"Even if she was feeling ill, she got us there. We just got on with it as normal life, because to us it was normal, we didn't know any different.
"It definitely impacted how she threw herself into everything, I think because we knew it was always going to be there we just thought to ourselves, let's make the most of everything we have together. Just throw ourselves into anything we can."
About a week before her death, Shirley gave Grace some instructions from her hospital bed.
"She said to me 'make sure you carry on going. I know what you're like, you'll know it's a place that we went and you won't want to do it. So please, carry on. Because I know you love it'.
"So I carried on for her, and after a while I just thought, 'I'm so glad I did'.
"Every time I'm on stage she's the person I'm thinking of.
"My family and friends have been by my side through every knock-back," says Grace.
"I literally could not have asked for better support throughout this process and I know my Mum would have been right there with them.
"It was hard to talk about her on the show [The Voice], but I think the fact that they didn't know her made it easier. I love talking about my mum and keeping her memory alive.
"So when a stranger says, 'tell me about your mum', I'm like 'I will, no worries, I love talking about her'.
"She was such an amazing woman and if she can inspire someone, or help someone, even though she's not here, I will do that at any opportunity."
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The coronavirus pandemic made this year's series quite unlike any other.
Contact between contestants and their teams was limited and they were performing to the judges and the cameras rather than hundreds of people in a packed audience.
One highlight was a powerful duet she performed with her mentor Olly Murs.
"It was so weird to do such an amazing performance, we did it and that was the best we'd ever done it - and it was kind of like we just wanted to congratulate each other," Grace says.
Because of the coronavirus restrictions on set, Grace was unable to celebrate by sharing a hug with Murs.
"But they made sure that everyone felt amazing no matter what happened. And even though there was no contact with anyone, you still felt like it was normal," Grace says.
Their performance of "Rule the World" by Take That was broadcast as part of the live final on Saturday 20 March to more than 4.5m viewers.
She says the contestants are now planning their first ever get-together once restrictions allow.
"We kind of missed out on the social side of it," she says. "But it was just incredible anyway.
"And the fact that we did it during the lockdown, I think it kind of upped how proud we all were of the show and how incredible it came across."
"Right now, I think my plan is to push social media and get myself out there that way.
"One day, hopefully soon, I'll be able to release my own music," she says.
"The dream would be to one day have an album out there, but I'll start with a single, maybe an EP, and build from there."
When it comes to opening up about grief, Grace's advice is to "feel how you need to feel".
"There's no right or wrong way or specific order you need to feel things.
"And if you need to talk about it, talk about it, with whoever that is. Whether it's a teacher, parent, friend, counsellor - just talk about it," she says.
"Because as much as it never goes away, and the grief will always be there, it gets easier the more you talk about it and the more you open up."
What would Shirley have made of Grace's appearance in The Voice?
"My mum would have been the same as all my family - just so proud of me. Knowing that definitely helped me to get through the competition," she says.
"Just knowing that she'd be happy with who I've become and where I've got to, it made the experience so much better."
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The winners of this year's Golden Globes Awards, celebrating the best in film and television as voted for by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, have been revealed at a glittering ceremony in Los Angeles hosted by Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. | Here are the winners and nominees in full:
FILM AWARDS
Best motion picture - drama
Argo
Django Unchained
Life of Pi
Lincoln
Zero Dark Thirty
Best motion picture - musical or comedy
Les Miserables
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Moonrise Kingdom
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Silver Linings Playbook
Best director
Ben Affleck, Argo
Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty
Ang Lee, Life of Pi
Steven Spielberg, Lincoln
Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained
Best actor - drama
Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
Joaquin Phoenix, The Master
Richard Gere, Arbitrage
Denzel Washington, Flight
John Hawkes, The Sessions
Best actor - musical or comedy
Hugh Jackman, Les Miserables
Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook
Ewan McGregor, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Bill Murray, Hyde Park on Hudson
Jack Black, Bernie
Best actress - drama
Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
Marion Cotillard, Rust and Bone
Helen Mirren, Hitchcock
Naomi Watts, The Impossible
Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea
Best actress - musical or comedy
Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
Emily Blunt, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Judi Dench, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Maggie Smith, Quartet
Meryl Steep, Hope Springs
Best supporting actor
Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained
Alan Arkin, Argo
Leonardo DiCaprio, Django Unchained
Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master
Tommy Lee Jones, Hope Springs
Best supporting actress
Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables
Amy Adams, The Master
Sally Field, Lincoln
Nicole Kidman, The Paperboy
Helen Hunt, The Sessions
Best screenplay
Django Unchained
Zero Dark Thirty
Argo
Silver Linings Playbook
Lincoln
Best original score
Life of Pi
Anna Karenina
Argo
Cloud Atlas
Lincoln
Best original song
Skyfall, Skyfall
Safe and Sound, The Hunger Games,
Suddenly, Les Miserables
Not Running Anymore, Stand Up Guys
For You, Act of Valor
Best foreign language film
Amour
Rust and Bone
The Untouchables
A Royal Affair
Kon-Tiki
Best animated feature
Brave
Frankenweenie
Rise of the Guardians
Wreck-It Ralph
Hotel Transylvania
Cecil B DeMille lifetime achievement award
Jodie Foster
TELEVISION AWARDS
Best TV Series - Drama
Homeland
Breaking Bad
Downton Abbey
The Newsroom
Boardwalk Empire
Best TV Series - Comedy
Girls
The Big Bang Theory
Episodes
Modern Family
Smash
Best Miniseries or Motion Picture made for TV
Game Change
The Girl
The Hour
Hatfields & McCoys
Political Animals
Best Actor - Drama
Damian Lewis, Homeland
Steve Buscemi, Boardwalk Empire
Bryan Cranston, Breaking Bad
Jeff Daniels, The Newsroom
Jon Hamm, Mad Men
Best Actress - Drama
Claire Danes, Homeland
Connie Britton, Nashville
Glenn Close, Damages
Julianna Margulies, The Good Wife
Michelle Dockery, Downton Abbey
Best Actor - Comedy
Don Cheadle, House of Lies
Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock
Louis CK, Louie
Matt LeBlanc, Episodes
Jim Parsons, The Big Bang Theory
Best Actress - Comedy
Lena Dunham, Girls
Zooey Deschanel, New Girl
Tina Fey, 30 Rock
Amy Poehler, Parks and Recreation
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Veep
Best Actor - Miniseries or Motion Picture made for TV
Kevin Costner, Hatfields & McCoys
Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock
Toby Jones, The Girl
Woody Harrelson, Game Change
Clive Owen, Hemingway & Gelhorn
Best Actress - Miniseries or Motion Picture made for TV
Julianne Moore, Game Change
Nicole Kidman, Hemingway & Gelhorn
Sienna Miller, The Girl
Jessica Lange, American Horror Story
Sigourney Weaver, Political Animals
Best Supporting Actor
Ed Harris, Game Change
Max Greenfield, New Girl
Danny Huston, Magic City
Mandy Patinkin, Homeland
Eric Stonestreet, Modern Family
Best Supporting Actress
Maggie Smith, Downton Abbey
Sofia Vergara, Modern Family
Sarah Paulson, Game Change
Archie Panjabi, The Good Wife
Hayden Panettiere, Nashville
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A man has been arrested on suspicion of the murder of a man who was shot in Wolverhampton. | Dwaine Haughton, 24, died in hospital on 20 July after being injured in Valley Road, Park Village, West Midlands Police said.
A post-mortem examination confirmed he died from a gunshot wound to the chest.
A 21-year-old man was arrested on Tuesday and has been released on bail. Detectives believe the shooting was a targeted attack.
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Apple is not a company famed for listening. After all, it prides itself on knowing what consumers want before they do, so why should it care what they think? All the more surprising then, that it should have listened to one angry customer, a Ms T Swift of Beverly Hills, California. | Rory Cellan-JonesTechnology correspondent@BBCRoryCJon Twitter
It helped, of course, that Taylor Swift is probably the biggest name in the recording industry right now. But her more in sorrow than anger Tumblr post about Apple's "shocking, disappointing" plan to pay artists nothing for the first three months of its Apple Music service certainly had an instant impact.
Within hours Apple's Eddy Cue - he of the rather embarrassing dad-dancing sequence at the launch of Apple Music - had reversed the policy. And even more surprisingly, this executive at a company which has until recently been very shy about using social media took to Twitter to do it.
"#AppleMusic will pay artist for streaming, even during customer's free trial period" said @cue in only the 81st Tweet he had ever sent.(Presumably more than one artist will benefit.) Warming to his theme he fired out his 82nd: "We hear you @taylorswift13 and indie artists. Love, Apple".
Now, cynics may say that Apple listened to Taylor Swift, after ignoring the plight of thousands of those indie artists. They had been making a fuss ever since it emerged that during the three-month free trial period of Apple Music they would get nothing.
For Ms Swift - as she acknowledged in her Tumblr post - this was going to be only a minor inconvenience. But for less well-known artists and their labels, there was the prospect of all their revenue just drying up quite suddenly on 30 June when Apple Music launches. After all, 800 million people have iTunes accounts and must be quite likely to at least try this new service for three months - and while they do, they are unlikely to spend much on downloads or other ways of consuming music.
At least one boss of an independent record label was grateful for the superstar's intervention. He's still in the middle of complex negotiations with Apple so didn't want to go on the record but he said of Taylor Swift "she's a very smart cookie. There was a huge worldwide unhappiness and she picked a very effective moment to speak". He still thought there was plenty of detail to be sorted out with Apple but said "they blinked".
The question is why they did that. Sure, the money that will now be paid out to artists over the next three months will hardly be more than a rounding error, so this is not a costly u-turn. But it is still unusual for the company to back down in negotiations with much weaker parties.
Perhaps the veteran music producer Jimmy Iovine and Dr Dre, inside Apple since their Beats business was purchased, are making their voices heard on behalf of artists. Or maybe Apple has realised it's found a way of wrong-footing the current leader in the music streaming market.
Spotify has also had its problems with a number of artists over what it pays out for every stream, and Taylor Swift has been among the fiercest critics, keeping all of her music off the service. If Apple can now boast that it will be the place to stream Bad Blood and other hits you can't get on a certain Swedish service, then an embarrassing climb-down may turn into a brilliant coup.
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Residents in two areas of Suffolk are being asked to vote on whether their councils should be abolished and a single authority created.
| Babergh and Mid Suffolk councils said a single authority could save £1.8m-a-year, by 2014.
More than half the voters in each council will need to vote yes before the Boundary Commission can seek approval from the Secretary of State.
A single council would then be created from April 2013.
If more than 50% vote no, the councils will remain separate.
However, the vote will not affect the continuing process to integrate staff and services at both authorities into a single operation, under a newly-appointed chief executive.
Voting will be open until Monday 6 June, and people can vote by post, phone, text or electronically.
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Developments in imaging technology, genetics, brain chemistry and computing are promising fresh insights into the workings of the mind and mental illness. Our science correspondent Tom Feilden asks what neuroscience has to say about what it means to be human. | By Tom FeildenScience correspondent, Today programme
"So this is it. This is our new toy. Not bad for eight million quid."
I'm standing in the control room at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences's Brain Imaging Centre at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. Looking through a plate glass window with me, and gesticulating enthusiastically, is the centre's director, Professor Irene Tracey.
On the other side of the glass is one of the most powerful imaging machines anywhere in the world. Weighing in at 40 tonnes - and generating a magnetic field strength of 7 Tesla - its central component, a huge cylindrical magnet, is so big they had to take the roof off the building to get it in.
"There are only two of these ultra high field whole-body imaging systems in the UK" Professor Tracey explains.
"It's just so much more powerful than anything we've had before, and the detail you can see and the resolution of the images is just fantastic. It's taken us to the next level in terms of brain imaging."
It's at about this point that it dawns on me why Irene Tracey was quite so keen that I should come and see the scanner for myself.
The magnet was only lowered into position in July, and since then staff have been working hard to connect it all up, ready for the first patient studies - the science - to begin in the autumn.
All that remains is for a few human guinea pigs to have their brains scanned to help calibrate the machine.
"Don't worry you'll be fine," says a smiling Professor Tracey. "You like roller coasters don't you? I'm told it feels a little like your brain is going round a corner inside your head - something to do with the iron in your blood and the powerful magnetic field probably. Anyway the nausea will soon pass."
But it's not just about pretty pictures. Similarly rapid advances in our understanding of the genetics and basic chemistry of the brain have raised the prospect of genuine breakthroughs across a range of previously intractable neurological disorders, and are promising fresh insights into psychological conditions like schizophrenia and autism.
"We're on the cusp of a series of major breakthroughs in our understanding of the brain" according to the head of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust, Dr John Williams. "We have a range of tools available now that will allow us to ask very profound questions of the central nervous system. Questions we were unable to ask even five years ago. Not just about how the brain functions under normative conditions, but what might happen when things go wrong."
It's a positive view that's warmly endorsed by the professor of Neuroscience at Oxford University, Colin Blakemore. "Undeniably brain research is going through an extraordinary phase of development" he says, "a golden age of discovery fuelled by a combination of all the new knowledge coming from genetics, and the dramatic improvements in imaging technology".
So much so that these days a brain scan is a fairly routine procedure. It's easy to forget that because functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) allows researchers to see what's happening, as its happening in the brain, it's transformed our understanding of the biochemical basis of neural activity.
Dr Belinda Lewis is using fMRI to study bipolar disorder at Cambridge University's Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre.
As her patients lie in the scanner they are shown a series of images conveying a range of human emotions - from fear and sadness, to joy and laughter.
The study shows both that the brains of those suffering from bipolar disorder are excessively stimulated by these images, and that they are less able to process, or interpret, that information accurately.
But perhaps the important aspect of the research, Dr Lennox claims, has been to demonstrate the presence of bipolar disorder in the brain.
"Fundamentally it shows that bipolar disorder, and in fact all mental illnesses, are brain disorders of a biological nature that warrant proper investigation including scanning. And that that will be of clinical utility in the near future."
It's a biological determinism that Leonard Mlodinow takes to the extreme in Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behaviour. The invention of fMRI, he suggests, has finally elevated psychology to the status of a proper empirical science.
"Suddenly scientists could look into the brain and watch it at work. That's caused a revolution in our understanding of the unconscious mind."
What this new, evidence based, understanding of the unconscious mind tells us Leonard Mlodinow argues is that there's no hidden meaning or emotional value attached to the subliminal processing that goes on in the brain.
"You don't consciously think about it every time you take a breath, or when sound waves hit your eardrum, your brain just processes the information. In the end we're just - admittedly complex and wonderful - biochemical machines. Freud is bunk," he explains.
"What we've found is that the unconscious mind doesn't really work the way Freud, Jung and others in the 20th century thought," he said. "They didn't have access to these new technologies, and in fact they weren't really scientists because they would extrapolate and form ideas and theories based on talking to their patients. But the unconscious is not hidden from us for emotional or motivational reasons, and it can't be revealed through introspection or therapy".
Understandably perhaps psychoanalysts reject what many regard as a narrow and deterministic interpretation of development in neuroscience.
The professor of Psychology at University College London, Rachel Blass, argues that it's quite wrong to dismiss people's feelings or emotions simply because these don't show up well in an fMRI scan.
"It's an extreme materialist position. One that says mental illness is all about identifying some chemical imbalance in the brain and developing a quick-fix drug to correct it. That does nothing to help the patient address the issues or problems they might be facing and come to terms with them in their life."
Whether or not the psychological aspects of human behaviour can be adequately described in terms of biochemical activity in the brain, it seems clear that neuroscience is going to play an increasingly important role in our lives. That was certainly the conclusion reached by the Royal Society's Brain Waves project, chaired by Prof Blakemore earlier this year.
"Everything we do must be the result of all of the influences on the state of our brain at the moment we do it," he said.
"You can include family background, genetics, our social circumstances, how much money we earn, memories of particular events. All of that's in our heads, and we will get some kind of mechanistic description of that in time."
And the brain scan? In the end, the hardest part turned out to be trying to keep still and not to scratch my nose. And while it was quite a snug fit in the centre of one of the most powerful imaging machines in the country, the only sensation I felt was a weird warming at the top of my head.
Not bad for an experience that allows me to boast - like Hooke or Faraday - about putting my body on the line for science.
The Today programme is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 06:00 BST Monday to Friday and 07:00 on Saturdays.
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An Aberdeen engineering company which went into administration with the loss of more than 50 jobs has been bought by oil services company Wood Group.
| Enterprise Engineering Services called in administrators last month following a significant drop in orders.
A total of 54 people were made redundant at its Aberdeen base, with four more in Caithness.
The remaining 10 employees will transfer to Wood Group and remain based at the company's Craigshaw Road HQ.
Enterprise Engineering Services, which has been trading since 1966, offers engineering services including design, fabrication, assembly, installation and inspection.
Administrators KPMG said that orders had dropped due to the "sustained drop in the price of oil".
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Whether you take pictures purely for your own pleasure or have ambitions to build a career for yourself through photography, there comes a time when you have to stop snapping and start making pictures. Here, professional photographer, writer and lecturer Grant Scott explains how you can take your photography to the next level. | Phil CoomesPicture editor
We all take more photographs than we have ever done or were able to in the past. We post images on social networks, share them with friends and use them as a form of visual shorthand to communicate where we are, what we are doing and often how we feel. Yet few of us would describe ourselves as photographers. Even fewer would describe themselves as professional photographers or understand what that job description means.
So how can you begin to understand what a professional photographer is or does? And start to move your own work into an area of professional photography?
The answer is actually very simple. You need to use photography to document your passions and explore the work of professional photographers who are already doing so.
For example, if you enjoy cooking, look towards food photography. If you enjoy sports, look at the photographers documenting your favourite sport. If you enjoy styling and decorating your home, interiors photography could be the area for you.
These are just a few examples of genres of professional photography, and there are many more such as:
By focusing on your passions, you will bring insight and commitment to your photography that will show in your pictures.
Thanks to the advancements in camera technology, most of us can take technically good pictures to what many consider to be a professional standard, but the professional photographer can and has to do this consistently and to order. They also need to understand the importance of telling a story with a series of images and having an area of photographic specialisation that a potential client needs for their business.
Every decision you make in your life from what you wear, what you eat, how you vote, how you decorate your home, where you visit, what you listen to, what you watch and what you believe are influenced by professional photography and professional photographers. They don't just shoot weddings.
Here are 10 tips to help you get started in taking your photography to a different level:
Grant Scott is a professional photographer and senior lecturer in editorial and advertising at the University of Gloucestershire.
He is also the writer of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained and The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography.
You can read more of Grant's articles on his website United Nations of Photography and follow him on Twitter @UNofPhoto.
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The sentencing of a convicted criminal with an eyeball tattoo in an Alaskan court has drawn attention to an unusual form of facial decoration - one that is less than a decade old, but winning new converts all the time. | By Joanna JollyBBC News
Jason Barnum, 39, who pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of a policeman, has ornate tattoos on his head and part of his face - teeth on his cheek, an eyeball in middle of his forehead. But even more dramatically, the white of his right eye has been tattooed jet black.
Arguing for the prosecution, Anchorage Police Department Chief Mark Mew urged the judge to take a look at Barnum's face which, he said, showed the convicted criminal had "decided a long time ago that his life was about being hostile to people".
But, in tattooing his eyeball, was Barnum really expressing hostility to the rest of society? And if our eyes really are the window to our soul what else might a tattooed eyeball say about its owner?
The man who first experimented with injecting ink into an eyeball is a US tattoo artist who goes by the name of Luna Cobra. Far from wanting to look evil, the original goal was to look like the blue-eyed characters from the cult science fiction film, Dune.
"There used to be a private body modification convention that happened every few years in Canada," Luna Cobra says.
"That year, an old friend had Photoshopped a picture of his eyes to look blue like in Dune. I told him, 'I think I can do that for real.'"
The next day, Luna Cobra took a syringe and practised on three brave volunteers.
"I'm aware of how insane that sounds, but I've been doing this type of thing for my whole life so I wasn't coming from nowhere with this," he says.
His technique, which he has modified over the years, involves injecting pigment directly into the eyeball so it rests under the eye's thin top layer, or conjunctiva.
A single small injection has enough ink to cover about a quarter of the eye. It takes several injections to completely cover the sclera, which is then coloured for life. He has done it for hundreds of people - in blue, green, red and black - from Singapore and Sydney to London and the US.
"If you want to amuse yourself by decorating your eyeball, why not do it?" he says. "I do a lot of things that look like tie-dye or 'cosmic space'. I think it brings a realm of fantasy into everyday life."
Looking a little out-of-this world is something that appealed to Kylie Garth, a body piercer who works in Luna Cobra's Sydney studio. Before deciding to change the colour of her eyeballs, Garth had experimented with a number of body modifications including face tattoos, piercings, elf-like pointed ears and a bifurcated tongue.
"It was mentally intense," she says of the several injections needed to colour her eyeballs a delicate blue-green, a colour she refers to as sea foam.
"It feels like somebody is poking at your eye, then it feels like strange pressure and then it feels you have a bit of sand in your eye, but there's no pain."
One customer who might disagree with this is a Polish rapper, Popek, who was filmed having his eyes tattooed green by Luna Cobra in London. A couple of days later he experienced a painful burning sensation in his eyes that prevented him sleeping.
Fortunately, it was temporary - he was later reported to be considering going back under the needle to darken the tattoos - but opticians warn about a risk of damage to the eyes, and even loss of vision.
Garth says the reaction to her eyes has been universally positive.
"It's thinking about getting a needle in your eye that makes people say, 'I can't believe you did that.' But I've never had anyone say my eyes look scary," she says.
The same can't be said of darker tattoos, however.
"I try to keep people away from it, especially if they have a dark iris," says Luna Cobra.
About one person a week contacts him to inquire about eyeball tattoos - and many want black.
"I tell them you're going to look frightening forever to the majority of people you encounter. You might find people have trouble connecting with you or looking at you because they can't follow your iris."
Luna Cobra says he urges young people to wait until they have a job before getting a black eyeball tattoo, because otherwise they may never get hired.
"I was living on the streets, and I tried to get a job, but of course my beautiful face didn't allow me to do that," Barnum said at his sentencing in Anchorage.
But whether or not Barnum intended to shock, many of Luna Cobra's clients are hoping to do just that. Some dismiss his warnings saying it would be "cool" to frighten people. Others say they don't care.
Over the past few years, some US prison inmates, who already use tattoos to signal their crimes and gang affiliations, have attempted to colour their own eyeballs.
An episode of the US reality TV programme, Lockup, shows two inmates who try to tattoo their eyeballs blue and red using smuggled-in instruments.
"Everybody's got tattoos, everybody's got stretched ears [but] you never see anybody with the whites of their eyes tattooed," says prisoner David Boltjes, explaining why he took a huge risk to inject himself.
Luna Cobra says that what started as an experiment between friends, and fans of Dune, has run out of control. He's also heard that it's fashionable among Brazilian teenagers and in some Russian sub-cultures - and worries that people could be being harmed.
"It's shocking. We had no idea anyone else would do it. And now everyone's obsessed with it," he says.
"We often felt like we released a beast into the world and now all these people will be damaged," he says referring to the many ways the tattooing process can go wrong - from using the wrong ink and needle to injecting too much pigment or going too deep.
"It's a shame because I think it's something really beautiful, but it's taken an odd course."
For its part, the American Optometric Association unequivocally condemns the practice, saying it puts the patient at risk of infection, inflammation and blindness.
"My advice is not to do it as there's not enough benefit to even warrant considering that risk of potential pain and loss of vision," says Jeffrey Walline, the chair-elect of the association's Contact Lens and Cornea Council.
Such is the concern that several US states have debated banning eyeball tattoos.
Garth, who says she is one of only a handful of women in the world with both eyeballs tattooed, says anyone considering the procedure needs to be absolutely sure they are making the right choice.
"It's not like you're going to get a little tattoo on your wrist," she says. "This is the most permanent body modification you can get, you can't take the ink out of your eye."
That may explain why eyeball tattooing is still rare art.
But, despite the risks, its popularity is growing. Before long it may not be that uncommon to come face to face with a stranger whose appearance is literally eye-popping.
Colouring the iris
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A disturbing, decades-old letter sent to Martin Luther King Jr by the FBI is serving, for many, as a reminder of the scope and history of US governmental surveillance programmes - and their potential for abuse. | By Echo ChambersOpinion and analysis from around the world
Heavily redacted versions of the 1964 letter have been available for years, but an uncensored copy was recently discovered by Yale historian Beverly Gage. Now revealed are brazen threats to smear King by making details of his numerous extramarital affairs public and hints at an audiotape that may have accompanied the letter.
While the letter is unsigned, a Senate Committee confirmed a decade after it was sent that it had come from the FBI during then-Director J. Edgar Hoover's five-decade-long leadership of the bureau.
In a piece for the New York Times, Gage writes that the FBI had originally started monitoring King because of suspected ties to the US Communist Party. But after King began criticising the government for failing to enforce civil rights in the American South and his participation in the 1963 March on Washington, Gage says the range of the FBI's surveillance spread.
While they failed to link King to communism, the wiretaps and bugs in his home, office and hotel rooms did discover a number of extramarital affairs, which many civil rights leaders already knew about.
When FBI officials brought information about King's personal life to journalists, though, the story was largely ignored. In 1964 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, and King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. That year, Hoover condemned King, calling him "the most notorious liar in the country". A few days later, William Sullivan, a deputy to Hoover at the FBI, sent the letter.
"King, like all frauds your end is approaching," the letter, crafted as a message from a disillusioned supporter, reads. "You could have been our greatest leader. You, even at an early age, have turned out to be not a leader but a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile."
The correspondence ends with a vague threat.
"King, there is only one thing left for you to do," it reads. "You know what it is."
Many, including King at the time he received it, see this as a suggestion that King should kill himself.
Gage writes in her piece that the odd thing about this time period is that the FBI's campaign against King was a spectacular flop. While today King is looked at as a moral ideal, Hoover is wildly unpopular.
"In this context, perhaps the most surprising aspect of their story is not what the FBI attempted, but what it failed to do," she writes.
Although the FBI's attempts to discredit King were unsuccessful, that doesn't mean modern intelligence agencies have given up on similar tactics.
Nadia Kayyali, writing for the Electronic Frontier Foundation's blog, Deeplinks, says the King letter could be a page out of the handbook of the British online intelligence unit dubbed the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group - a group whose mission is to "destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt enemies by discrediting them".
Today, she writes, that translates into rummaging through Facebook chats, embarrassing internet browsing history and emails in order to discredit any leader who threatens the status quo or to blackmail someone into becoming an informant.
"These are not far-fetched ideas," she says. "They are the reality of what happens when the surveillance state is allowed to grow out of control, and the full King letter, as well as current intelligence community practices, illustrate that reality richly."
Salon's Marcy Wheeler writes that there are a lot of unknowns when it comes to the intelligence community - including who today's targets are, if they are at the same level of importance as King or how exactly the National Security Agency or the FBI is getting information about them.
But, she writes, we do know that today's spies are more powerful than ever because of technology, and they have more access because so much of our lives are spent online.
"It may take a half-century, as it has with King, to see the fruits of the surveillance the NSA and FBI direct at leaders of groups perceived to be a threat, whether it be Muslims fighting to defend their legal rights or overseas preachers criticising American expansion," she writes. "But we should still be vigilant in insisting that the tactics used with King have no place in this day and age."
And when it comes to what Americans do and don't know, Nick Gillespie says that it's important to consider a wider scope.
"The more we learn about the government these days, the less we can trust it," he writes for the Daily Beast.
He adds that it's fitting that the full details of the government's surveillance of King are coming to light in the age of Wikileaks, NSA leaker Edward Snowden and a White House that promised to be the most transparent administration in US history.
"There's a real opportunity for the politicians, the parties and the causes that dare to embrace real transparency - about how legislation is being crafted, about our surveillance programs at home and abroad - as a core value and something other than a throwaway slogan," Gillespie writes. "But as an unbroken thread of mendacity and mischief binds the present to the past, a future in which the government can be trusted seems farther off than ever."
Gage closes her piece by noting that James Comey, the current director of the FBI, keeps a copy of the agency's King wiretap request on his desk "as a reminder of the bureau's capacity to do wrong".
On Tuesday night, the US Senate narrowly voted down a measure that would have curtailed the government's ability to search through private phone records. The King request may be a potent symbol of government intrusion, but campaigners today would say it is dwarfed by the thousands of similar orders and warrants being issued by the FBI each year.
(By Kierran Petersen)
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Voters will go back to the polls in the Scottish Borders in February after an MSP resigned from her council role. | South of Scotland Conservative Michelle Ballantyne announced earlier this month that the "time was right" to leave her local authority position.
She took up the seat in the Scottish Parliament vacated by fellow Tory Rachael Hamilton who quit to fight a constituency seat which she won.
The Selkirkshire ward by-election will now be held on 22 February.
A report to the council said the cost of the vote was likely to be somewhere between £25,000 and £28,000.
It said the local authority should be able to meet it from the budget set aside for the elections held in May this year.
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In a city where masks are now compulsory in public places, it can sometimes be hard to understand exactly what someone's saying to you. Or to work out exactly what they mean. If you can't read their lips, how can you begin to read their mind? | By Nick BeakeBBC Brussels correspondent
Despite rising cases of Covid-19 seeing Belgium being added to the UK's quarantine list, the teams who are striving to bridge considerable differences and deliver a trade deal between the EU and the UK were still able to meet face-to-face this week - albeit from a safe distance.
Unlike those on the squares and boulevards outside, the negotiators wore no masks, but it seems this advantage did little to reveal any new understanding of where the other side was coming from.
I'm told the latest round of discussions were courteous and friendly - with a warmth between the two chief negotiators facing each other - even when each was delivering an uncomfortable message.
As ever, the EU and UK are hardly seeing eye-to-eye though.
Michel Barnier cut a despondent figure ("disappointed, concerned and surprised" to use his words) at his conference once he'd finished his working breakfast.
What he evidently found harder to digest was what he said was the British side's ongoing disregard for the terms of the political declaration both sides agreed last year.
It's been a while since the refrain beloved of Theresa May has been invoked, but Mr Barnier wanted to tell us that he understood "Brexit means Brexit".
What he couldn't fathom though was the UK's insistence on cherry-picking access to the single market without wanting to play by EU rules.
He cited the British demand for wide-ranging access for UK lorries travelling across Europe but the refusal to agree to EU rules on, for example, drivers' rest times.
'Frustration'
David Frost, the man who reports directly to the prime minister, issued his own public reaction to the latest talks through a press statement, rather than press conference.
His frustration was fuelled by what he sees as the EU's insistence that the UK accept current EU rules on state aid and fisheries, before any wider deal can be committed to paper.
These areas remain the two defining stumbling blocks in the negotiations.
The way coronavirus has battered European economies has given a new perspective on how governments may want to support struggling business, especially for the Johnson government which says it's committed to a "levelling-up" agenda to boost poorer parts of the UK.
But it's the so-called 'level playing field' for industries across member states that the is EU worried about - the fear that British firms get an unfair advantage.
The British side believes this itself is unfair and says it has a commendable record on abiding by EU rules, certainly in comparison to some of its neighbours, including France and Germany.
There's also no sign of agreement on the access EU vessels will have to British waters. As we know, fishing is an industry which forms a relatively small part of the economy but has a much larger symbolic and cultural significance.
Despite their public declarations of frustration, both sides still say a deal can be reached but it must happen by October to allow time for ratification by the European Parliament.
Downing Street has ruled out an extension to this year's transition period. So, if no deal is done, the UK would trade with the EU on World Trade Organization terms for the first time in decades.
Next month, the talks return to London. The negotiating teams arriving in the UK from Belgium or France will not have to quarantine for two weeks, unlike the rest of us.
The whole Brexit drama for the past four years has been characterised by extra scenes that weren't in the script.
It seems both sides are locked into another last-minute power-play. In what is the theatre, the negotiation, the art of the deal, the EU and UK are holding out for the best possible arrangement in the new socially-distanced, face-covering world that Covid-19 has created.
Each denounces the other side as unreasonable, unfair and uncompromising. A tough tactic which increases the chances of another cliff-edge of sorts. As time runs out, and the coronavirus crisis continues, will they keep up the act or will the mask slip?
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You are reading this right - the Conservatives are arguing for spending tens of billions of public money without certain results, while the Labour Party is arguing for a much more precise use of taxpayers' pounds. | Laura KuenssbergPolitical editor@bbclaurakon Twitter
Of course, over decades, some Tory governments have been big spenders. And of course, Labour has always cared about spending public money wisely.
But while coronavirus has had a profound impact on our health, it is also having an enormous impact on our economy - and on the political debate around it.
The reason for that is not that Labour has suddenly turned into a flock of fiscal hawks - as one party source joked today.
Perhaps, the uncertainties around how the pandemic affects people's ability to make a living are so profound, traditional instincts are being blurred.
The numbers of job losses are cranking up every day.
Announcements from John Lewis and Boots were both proof the government would have no choice but to act to stem unemployment, but also a reminder that for many businesses, and many workers, it's too late.
Decisions that were made public today were likely made in board rooms weeks ago.
And, on the day after the big statement from the chancellor, it's become increasingly clear how uncertain the outcome of Rishi Sunak's big ticket schemes will be.
That's not just because one of the government's top officials felt he had to put on the record doubts over the outcome of the scheme.
'Significant level of doubt'
A "direction" like this is not unprecedented, but it is certainly unusual.
And that was compounded when the Tories made plain there had been such "directions" over all of the flagship schemes - like the furlough scheme - that have been introduced during the crisis.
That does not mean ministers have acted foolishly. It does not even mean officials believe the plans are a mistake.
But it does mean there is a significant level of doubt about how effective the plans that are meant to protect millions from the misery of unemployment will really be.
For one former Tory cabinet minister, the directions are an alarm bell.
"Reading between the lines," they told me, "basically Treasury officials suggest that the money is a PR stunt with taxpayers' money that won't really save jobs.
"No wonder they wouldn't sign them off."
For government ministers ,the priority is to act big and to act fast. And if some of the money doesn't end up in the right place, they believe that's a price worth paying for the jobs that might be saved.
But it is notable how uncertain they are of the outcome too.
I understand the Treasury doesn't have modelling of how many of the nine million workers on furlough's jobs they expect to survive.
The offer to employers who take them back at a £1,000 each could cost up to £9bn - if every single one of them returns to work and is still on the pay roll by the end of January.
But several different Treasury sources told me today they haven't been able to model how many jobs they expect to protect that way, or how many workers they expect to return to their previous roles.
Few expect, however, for the number to be anything like the nine million - with perhaps less than half of those jobs returning in their previous form.
'Too much unknown'
The government is trying to find ways of protecting jobs quickly, and preserving employment after a huge shock.
But they are trying to stimulate the behaviour of businesses and consumers that they don't control.
It may seem surprising that ministers have no firm expectation of how many people will participate in a huge scheme that is designed to minimise the misery of unemployment.
But, like it or not, it seems there is just too much unknown to be sure.
The government can manufacture big levers and pull them hard, but what happens at the other end is not just up to them.
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At the Labour conference, among other elements, a day to commemorate, a day to reward. Not, to be clear, that this was purely or even faintly an occasion dominated by congratulations and nostalgia. | Brian TaylorPolitical editor, Scotland
Indeed, far from it. Even the awards spoke obliquely of the contemporary problems the party faces. Edinburgh South Constituency Labour Party was honoured for its efforts. Yes, that CLP. The one that returned Labour's sole MP north of the Border in May.
Presenting those awards, Kezia Dugdale emphasised the D word. Nobody, she said, was in denial about the scale of Labour's defeat in May or the concomitant challenge of the Holyrood elections next year.
But, still, there was a slight sense of a party summoning up its history, its origins, with delegates drawing these elements around them like a warm cloak to ward off the inclement political weather.
They staged a mini-drama, with party members quoting the sayings of James Keir Hardie, Labour's founder who died a century ago. The talk was of solidarity and socialism.
Later the conference rewarded another delegate, a first time speaker at this Scottish gathering, with a standing ovation. But then Jeremy Corbyn is the leader of the party.
Like Hardie - whom he quoted - the talk was of solidarity, both global and domestic. The talk was of Socialism. The talk was of an explicitly Left-wing offer to challenge the Tories and counter the SNP offer.
In the hall, delegates - mostly - loved it. It was as if their intrinsic enthusiasms were stirred rather than suppressed as they had been in relatively recent times.
Yes, they had felt obliged to applaud Tony Blair's New Labour pronouncements. After all, the guy had rather a habit of winning elections. They tolerated a lot in order to achieve that prize through him.
But they - or, more precisely, those who were here - really prefer the old-time messages: support the unions, protect jobs, defend welfare, reach out to Socialists round the world.
Jeremy Corbyn gave them - this defeated, subdued party - what they wanted. Perhaps what they needed at this stage. He spoke of Allende and Chile. He spoke of Mandela and apartheid. He offered "the sunshine of Socialism", a phrase borrowed from Keir Hardie.
What of the economy?
His predecessor, Ed Miliband, landed in trouble because he failed to mention the deficit in a conference speech. Jeremy Corbyn scarcely mentioned the economy.
Or, more precisely, his economic references were entirely about redistribution and poverty. Not about business or economic growth. It was left to the Shadow Scottish Secretary Ian Murray to make the point - in a thoughtful speech - that public spending requires a buoyant economy and business sector.
But the audience seemed unconcerned at the economic dog that declined to bark in Mr Corbyn's speech. They loved his insistence that the Scottish party will have relative autonomy over their own affairs, while remaining in the wider Labour family. To be clear, his speech went down very well in the hall.
In which respect, there was another interesting development today. Members were asked to select topics to debate on Sunday. They voted to give top billing to the issue of Trident.
It is plainly the expectation that the conference will vote to oppose Trident's renewal. Both Kezia Dugdale and Jeremy Corbyn emphasised that any money saved from scrapping Trident would be used to help redeploy workers on the Clyde.
But, I asked Ms Dugdale in a webcast interview, is this real policy autonomy for the Scottish party? I pointed out that Scottish Labour had routinely voted against Trident in the 1980s and 1990s, only for that verdict to be overturned by the UK leadership.
Her answer was that she was responsible for autonomous Scottish policy. Any disputes would be resolved through a reconciliation mechanism: details of which are currently under scrutiny.
This debate, of course, already reaches beyond Scotland. Left-supporting delegates plainly indicated that they would use a Scottish vote against Trident - if it occurs - as a lever to apply pressure to the party across the UK.
Indeed, one senior figure recalled that the abolition of Class Four by Tony Blair had first been carried by the Scottish party conference, prior to a UK vote. Ditto Trident, I was told.
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Curry has become as much a staple of British cuisine as fish and chips or the roast dinner. An exhibition is celebrating some of the earliest curry houses in Birmingham, a city synonymous with the cuisine. | By Alpha CeesayBBC News
Birmingham has long-been considered the birthplace of the balti - a fusion dish popularised in the 1980s and 1990s by the city's Pakistani community.
But some 50 years before that, in the 1940s, it was settlers from Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, that introduced residents to their native dishes, by cooking milder versions of curry to suit British taste buds.
The Knights of the Raj exhibition tells the story behind Birmingham's burgeoning curry business and was curated by artist Mohammed Ali, whose father was in the restaurant trade.
He said he was in part inspired by his own "personal quest" to tell the stories of his father's generation.
"They deserve a voice and this exhibition will help immortalise their story," he added.
The 'first' Birmingham curry house
It was during World War Two that the man credited with opening the first fully-fledged Indian restaurant in Birmingham arrived in the city.
Abdul Aziz had been working as a labourer on a British Navy ship in about 1940. He jumped ship when it arrived at Newcastle-upon-Tyne and made his way to Birmingham, becoming one of the first Bangladeshi settlers in the city.
It was there he met Violet, an Irish waitress at a cafe in Coleshill Street, and it was she who became his "rock" after they married, teaching him English and the ways of British culture, said their son David Aziz.
The couple lived on Ladywood Road with Mr Aziz working in factories to save up enough money to buy and run John's Restaurant, on Steelhouse Lane, in 1945.
Within a decade, curry and rice had been introduced to the menu and the restaurant became known as The Darjeeling.
His son said: "A lot of my dad's friends were coppers from the Steelhouse Police station across the road.
"They were always in the restaurant in uniform. He also knew a lot of solicitors from the courts and doctors as they all used to eat in the restaurant."
The Darjeeling flourished from its humble beginnings and went on to play an important role in the growth of the curry trade in Birmingham, training later generations of the city's curry restaurateurs.
The businessman's kindness extended to other Bangladeshi migrants who he helped settle, giving them jobs as chefs and waiters and often housing them in rooms above the restaurant.
And as the profile of The Darjeeling grew, so did that of Mr Aziz.
He was often found front-of-house getting to know diners and he became friends with notable people in the community.
As a figurehead of the Bangladeshi community, he received invites to events at Birmingham Council House and featured in the local press - his success apparent by his sharp dress sense, his son added.
But away from the limelight, he was a family man at heart, ensuring he ate with his loved ones, no matter the hour.
"He used to come home from work or wherever and get us out of bed at three or four in the morning," Mr Aziz said.
"He would phone his chef to cook at the restaurant and he would bring the food to the house.
"We would have to sit on the floor and eat with him.
"There was a lot of love in the house."
'I would bring curry to them'
It was a happy accident the Jinnah became what is believed to be the first in Birmingham to offer a curry takeaway and delivery service.
Mozamil and Rachel Kazi had been serving up the likes of steak, eggs and chips at Rae's Cafe in Bristol Street since the early 1950s.
But it was only later, when they put curry on the menu, that its popularity forced a move to a larger site in Moseley Road in 1957, which became the Jinnah.
Diners feasted on chicken, beef, prawn, lentil and potato curries, with legendary drummer John Bonham among the clientele before he joined Led Zeppelin.
But when regulars were unable to make it to the restaurant, son John came up with the novel idea of taking it directly to their door.
"Customers would say to me 'I can't make it to the restaurant' for whatever reason, so I said if they gave me a ring, I would bring a curry to them," he said.
"More and more people started to ask me to take curries to them. I started to spend more time delivering than I did at the restaurant."
The takeaway concept was such a hit people would take along their own pots to be filled with curry and rice for 25p.
Bangladeshi migrant Mr Kazi proved a savvy businessman, taking care of the finances. But it was Mrs Kazi who was the face of the business and ran its day-to day affairs.
"She was a bubbly character that everyone loved," said son Steve Kazi.
"She was a little Geordie lass but she ruled with an iron rod.
"There was one instance where a guy had already thrown me across the room but mum came along, got under his arm and punched him on his chin through the window."
'We used to chase after them'
Nurujuman Khan arrived at Heathrow airport from Bangladesh in the summer of 1957 and promptly followed in the footsteps of his cousin by moving to Birmingham.
Within a year, he managed to save enough money to go into the restaurant trade, co-owning restaurants in Wolverhampton and Worcester before selling his stake and moving back to the city.
During an 18-month spell at The Plough restaurant in Monkspath, Solihull, he was trained in silver service - a skill which would help him transform Birmingham's Bengali restaurant trade.
Mr Khan had become good friends with Abdul Samad, owner of the Bombay restaurant in Essex Street, and was offered a job as the restaurant manager.
He introduced a hot food trolley to serve customers from and invented new dishes with Mr Samad, including the chicken mossman - bhuna chicken topped with sliced egg.
The service helped attract people already accustomed to the exotic dishes as well as first-timers, though some needed gentle encouragement with their choices.
"The majority of people that came to the restaurant were expats who had served in India, [so] they had a taste for Indian food," recalls Mr Khan.
"English people did not eat a lot of Indian food at the time. We would have to educate them [by] asking them to try this and that."
The restaurant was also occasionally blighted by people who would eat and run, known as "khasrah kastomar" - troublesome customer - by the staff.
"When you said khasrah kastomar, everyone would know to be on alert," remembered Mr Khan.
"We used to have to chase after them."
The Knights of the Raj exhibition runs at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery until 14 January.
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The Church in Wales has elected its first woman bishop. | Canon Joanna Penberthy said she is "immensely humbled" to become the 129th Bishop of St Davids in Pembrokeshire.
An electoral college of 47 people from across Wales spent two days locked in St Davids Cathedral before coming to their decision.
Canon Penberthy, 56, who was appointed the cathedral's first woman canon in 2007, will take over the role from the retiring Wyn Evans.
The decision to allow women bishops was made following a landmark vote in September 2013.
The Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, called it "an historic moment" for the church.
"What is really important to stress is that Joanna wasn't elected because she was a woman but because she was deemed to be the best person to be a bishop," he said.
"She has considerable gifts - she is an excellent preacher and communicator, can relate to all sections of the community, is a warm, charismatic, caring priest and someone who is full of joy."
Women bishops are also allowed in Scotland, Northern Ireland and England, where plans were formally approved in November 2014.
The first woman in England the Right Reverend Libby Lane, was made Bishop of Stockport in January 2015.
St Davids' new bishop was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge and St John's College, Nottingham, she undertook ordination training at Cranmer Hall, Durham, in 1983.
Canon Penberthy was then a Deaconess in the city, before working in the role in Cardiff between 1985 and 1989.
She also served as a non-stipendiary minister in Cardiff, St Asaph and St Davids, between 1987 and 1995.
In February 2007, while vicar of Cynwyl Gaeo, Llansawel and Talley, she became the first woman appointed canon at St Davids Cathedral, a role she remained in until 2010.
She is currently the rector of the parish of Glan Ithon, near Llandrindod Wells, Powys.
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More than 100,000 fans have descended on San Diego in California for this year's Comic-Con, the largest event dedicated to film, TV and pop culture. | By Genevieve HassanEntertainment reporter
Stars including Ryan Gosling, Channing Tatum, Charlize Theron and the cast of the new Justice League film are expected to attend.
There will also be looks at the new seasons of Stranger Things, Westworld, Walking Dead and Game of Thrones.
The four-day fan fest concludes with a special Doctor Who session.
With hundreds of events going on, here's a guide to the main things to look out for each day, along with who is likely to turn up.
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
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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Wikileaks has released almost 400,000 secret US military logs , which suggest US commanders ignored evidence of abuse, torture, rape and murder by the Iraqi authorities. | The documents also detail how "hundreds" of civilians were killed at US military checkpoints after the invasion in 2003.
And the files show the US kept records of civilian deaths, despite previously denying it. The death toll was put at 109,000, of whom 66,081 were civilians.
Below are edited extracts of some of the logs as published by Wikileaks or the Guardian newspaper, one of several newspapers given early access to the documents.
VIDEO OF DETAINEE APPARENTLY EXECUTED BY IRAQI SOLDIERS
View the full Wikileaks document.
Date: 2009-12-23 21:01:00
Type: Non-Combat Event
Category: Other
Tracking no.: 20091223210038SMB3878781772
Title: (NON-COMBAT EVENT) OTHER RPT : 1 CIV KIA
Summary: 14 DEC,09, MND-N reported (1) instance of alleged detainee abuse. The allegation involves ISF. This allegation has been forwarded to the appropriate command for initiation of inquiry/investigation and subsequent tracking. ///CLOSED 23 dec 09///
/// CLOSED 23-Dec-09 ///
ALCON,
Please find the attached SIR (Execution of Detainee)
WHO: Detainee
WHAT: Execution by Iraqi Soldiers
WHEN: 14 DEC 09
WHERE: TALL'AFAR
SUMMARY: HCT 702 received a video from one of their sources. The video contains footage of Iraqi Army soldiers executing a detainee. The footage shows approximately 12 IA soldiers involved. Ten IA soldiers were talking to one another while two other soldiers held the detainee. The detainee had his hands bound. An officer the source identified as Maj. Ali Jadallah Husayn Al-Shamari, an intelligence officer for the 4-9/3 IA, was in the video. The footage shows the IA soldiers moving the detainee into the street, pushing him to the ground, punching him, and shooting him. The detainee has not been identified. There is no further information at this time. This corresponds to MNC-I PIR #5 and MNC-I PIR #6. This is an initial report; more information will be rendered when it becomes available.
DETAINEE FOUND DEAD WITH EXTENSIVE INJURIES - IRAQI CAPTORS SAY IT WAS SUICIDE
View the full Wikileaks document.
Date: 2009-08-27 09:00:00
Type: Suspicious Incident
Category: Other
Tracking no.: 20090827090038SLB413998
Title: (SUSPICIOUS INCIDENT) OTHER RPT RAMADI IRAQI CTU : 1 UE KIA
Summary: WHO: RAMADI PGC TT
WHAT: Reports possible detainee abuse
WHEN: 270900C AUG 09
WHERE: Iraqi CTU in Ramadi IVO (38S LB 413 998)
HOW: At 270900C AUG 09, the PGC TT reports possible detainee abuse IVO (38S LB 413 998). On 26 Aug 09, a PGC TT (which included a USN Corpsman) conducted a post mortem visual examination of JASIM MOHAMMED AHMED AL-SHIHAWI, an individual arrested in conjunction with a VBIED interdicted NE of Camp Taqaddum (SIGACT Entry DTG: 241130CAug09). The detainee was transferred from the IHP in Saqlawiah to the Iraqi CTU in Ramadi for questioning and while in custody, reportedly committed suicide. The PGC TT personnel conducting the post mortem examination found bruises and burns on the detainee`s body as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs, and neck. The PGC TT report the injuries are consistent with abuse. The CTU/IP have reportedly begun an investigation into the detainees death. An update will be posted when more information becomes available. The SIR is attached.
CLOSED 20091019
DETAINEE FOUND DEAD WITH WOUNDS FROM "UNKNOWN SURGERY"
View the Guardian document and the Wikileaks document (incomplete).
Date: 2008-12-03 12:00:00
Type: Suspicious Incident
Category: Other
Tracking no.: 20081203120038SMC6333039016
Title: (SUSPICIOUS INCIDENT) OTHER RPT (SUSPECTED SOI DETAINEE ABUSE) LN : 1 CIV KIA
Summary: 1/25 11:203
FINAL REPORT:
WHO: B/1-5 IN
WHAT: Death of Sheik
WHEN: 031200DEC08
WHERE: 38SMC 63330 39016
HOW: CMD/B/1-5IN reports: while talking to Tahrir local IP chief, he was informed that Sheik Bashir had died of bad kidneys while in custody of the MCU. IP released the body from the morgue on COL Faris orders so the cause of death could be determined. Post mortem revealed no apparent direct cause of death and the doctor concluded there would be no clear results until lab test came back in approximately one month.
SUMMARY: Sheik Bashir , a SoIZ leader, died while in custody of the MCU.
CF Assessment: There was evidence of some type of unknown surgical procedure on Bashir\'s abdomen. The incision was closed by 3-4 stitches. There was also evidence of bruises on the face, chest, ankle, and back of the body.
///CLOSED///031247DEC08
APACHE HELICOPTER HUNTS AND KILLS "ANTI-IRAQI FORCES" AFTER MORTAR ATTACK
View the full Wikileaks document.
Date: 2007-02-22 11:47:00
Type: Friendly Action
Category: Small Unit Actions
Tracking no.: 20070222114738SMC2443013390
Title: SMALL UNIT ACTIONS BY 1-7 CAV IVO AT TAJI: 2 AIF KIA
Summary: WHO: 1-7 CAV
2 X AIF KIA
0 X WIA
1 X AIF TRUCK AND 1X MORTAR TUBE, MULTIPLE MORTAR RDS DESTROYED.
221131FEB07: CRAZYHORSE 18 SENT TO CHECK ON BDA OF COUNTER MORTAR FIRE VIC 38S 24720 11580.
221134FEB07: CRAZYHORSE 18 GAINED CONTACT WITH 1X BONGO TRUCK LEAVING POO SITE AND HAS PID A TRIPOD AND MORTAR TUBE.
221147FEB07: CRAZYHORSE 18 CLEARED TO ENGAGE WITH 30MM.
221201FEB07: CRAZYHORSE 18 REPORTS TRUCK WITH MORTAR TUBE DESTROYED, 2 AIF LEFT AREA PRIOR TO APACHE FIRING.
221205FEB07: CRAZYHORSE 18 REPORTS THE TRUCK WITH MORTAR RDS STILL COOKING OFF MORTAR ROUNDS.
221233FEB07: CRAZYHORSE 18 REPORTS AIF GOT INTO A DUMPTRUCK HEADED NORTH, ENGAGED AND THEN THEY CAME OUT WANTING TO SURRENDER.
221235FEB07: CRAZYHORSE 18 REPORTS THEY GOT BACK INTO TRUCK AND ARE HEADING NORTH.
221239FEB07: CRAZYHORSE 18 CLEARED TO ENGAGE DUMPTRUCK. 1/227 LAWYER STATES THEY CAN NOT SURRENDER TO AIRCRAFT AND ARE STILL VALID TARGETS.
221250FEB07: CRAZYHORSE 18 REPORTS THEY MISSED WITH HELLFIRE AND INDIVIDUALS HAVE RAN INTO ANOTHER SHACK.
221303FEB07: IH6 APPROVES CRAZYHORSE 18 TO ENGAGE SHACK.
221303FEB07: CRAZYHORSE 18 REPORTS ENGAGED AND DESTROYED SHACK WITH 2X AIF. BDA IS SHACK / DUMP TRUCK DESTROYED.
221325FEB07: CRAZYHORSE 18 CONTINUED TO OBSERVE FOR APPROX 20 MINUTES WITH NFTR. CRAZYHORSE 18 IS OFF STATION TO REFUEL AND REARM ATT.
SUMMARY:
1X ENGAGEMENT WITH 30MM
2X AIF KIA
1 X MORTAR SYSTEM DESTROYED
1 X BONGO TRUCK DESTROYED WITH MANY SECONDARY EXPLOSIONS.
1 X DUMPTRUCK DESTROYED
1 X SHACK DESTROYED
-CLOSED-
CIVILIANS KILLED BY US MARINES AT CHECKPOINT
View full Wikileaks document.
Date: 2005-06-14 15:30:00
Type: Friendly Action
Category: Escalation of Force
Tracking no.: attlemaj-38797356
Title: SCALATION OF FORCE BY 1-5 IVO HURRICANE POINT: 7 CIV KILLED, 2 CIV INJ, 0 CF
Summary: AT 1530D, THE HURRICANE POINT ECP ATTEMPTED TO STOP A VEHICLE WITH HAND AND ARM SIGNALS BEFORE THE VEHICLE GOT CLOSE TO THE CORDON THAT HAD BEEN ESTABLISHED AFTER THE SVBIED ATTACK. A MAROON 4-DOOR OPEL DISREGARDED ALL HAND AND ARM SIGNALS AND CONTINUED AT A HIGH RATE OF SPEED. THE HP ECP ENGAGED THE VEHICLE WITH WARNING SHOTS AS IT APPROACHED FROM THE EAST ON MICHIGAN. THE VEHICLE DISREGARDED THE WARNING SHOTS AND ACCELERATED TOWARD THE CORDON SET AT THE S. BRIDGE VCP. THE CORDON AT THE S. BRIDGE CONSISTED OF HMMWV GUN TRUCKS IN THE CENTER OF THE ROAD, AND DISMOUNTED MARINES PROVIDING SECURITY IN AND OFF TO THE SIDE OF THE ROAD, AND SIX LARGE ORANGE CONES IN THE ROAD ON THE NORTH SIDE OF THE S. BRIDGE. S. BRIDGE ECP ENGAGED THE GRILL OF THE VEHICLE WITH WARNING AND DISABLING SHOTS AT APPROXIMATELY 150 METERS FROM THE CORDON. THE VEHICLE CONTINUED TO DISREGARD THE SAF FROM THE OP AND CONTINUED TOWARD THE ESTABLISHED CORDON. THE DISMOUNTED MARINES SAID THE VEHICLE ACCELERATED AS IT APPROACHED THE CONES AT THE NORTH END OF THE S. BRIDGE. WHEN THE VEHICLE DID NOT STOP, THE S. BRIDGE OP AND 1/5 JUMP WHICH WAS PART OF THE CORDON ENGAGED THE FRONT GRILL OF THE VEHICLE AT APPROXIMATELY 100 METERS BUT THE VEHICLE CONTINUED TO APPROACH AT 40-45 MPH. WHEN THE VEHICLE DID NOT STOP AFTER ALL THE WARNING SHOTS, THE MARINES ENGAGED THE DRIVER TO STOP THE VEHICLE. THE VEHICLE WAS STOPPED DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF THE ORANGE CONES. THERE WERE A TOTAL OF 11X CIVILIANS IN THE VEHICLE. THE ENGAGEMENT RESULTED IN 7X CIV KILLED (2X WERE CHILDREN) AND 2X CIV INJ. THE LARGE NUMBER OF CIVILIAN KIA RESULTED FROM THE FAMILY HAVING PLACED THEIR CHILDREN ON THE FLOOR BOARDS OF THE VEHICLE. THE DISABLING SHOTS AIMED AT THE GRILL ARE BELIEVED TO HAVE TRAVELED THROUGH THE VEHICLE LOW TO THE FLOOR BOARDS CAUSING THE LARGE NUMBER OF KIA. NO CF INJ/DAMAGE.
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As the conviction of Sgt Alexander Blackman for shooting an injured Afghan fighter in 2011 is reduced from murder to manslaughter on the grounds of his mental illness, Royal Marines who fought alongside him have spoken for the first time - offering new insights into the killing. | By Jonathan BealeDefence correspondent, BBC News
In interviews for BBC Panorama, the men from 42 Commando said they wanted the insurgent dead and their comrade "took one for the team" when he faced a court martial.
His colleagues said they also suffered from post-traumatic stress and one marine believes such incidents occurred elsewhere during the conflict.
There is much public sympathy for Blackman, 42, but few people who have watched the full video of the killing - recorded by another marine's helmet-mounted camera - would describe him as a hero.
The footage has not been made public but Blackman can be heard trying to cover up his actions, making sure a helicopter above is out of sight before he delivers the fatal shot.
Perhaps more understandable though is the sympathy of the men who fought alongside him and endured the same hardships.
'Sending out a signal'
Colleagues suggested there were other pressures on Blackman, who was known as Marine A during the original trial process and was only fully identified when he was convicted.
Rob Driscoll, who was at a nearby patrol base at the time of the killing, told Panorama: "Everyone that was speaking on that radio was sending out a signal to Al... everyone wanted that guy to be dead."
He said no-one would have wanted to send out a medical team to help the insurgent because the ground could have been littered with roadside bombs, while a helicopter might have been targeted in the air.
They would have done it for one of their own, but risking British lives for a wounded Taliban fighter "who has been shooting at them for the last four months" was less appealing, he said.
Sam Deen, who was on the patrol, said: "I do remember saying, 'yeah I would shoot him'... and I do think I influenced what happened".
"A few of the other lads said that," Mr Deen said.
The killing, on 15 September 2011, took place after a patrol base in Helmand province came under fire from two insurgents.
'Successful day'
One of the attackers was seriously injured by gunfire from an Apache helicopter sent to provide air support, and the marines found him in a field.
The footage from the helmet-mounted camera showed Blackman shooting the Afghan prisoner in the chest at close range with a 9mm pistol.
Blackman, from Taunton, was convicted of murder in November 2013 and jailed for life. He lost an appeal in May of the following year, but his 10-year minimum term was reduced to eight years.
Five judges at the Court Martial Appeal Court in London have now ruled the conviction should be manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility, not murder.
A further hearing will now decide what sentence Blackman should serve.
Filmmaker and anthropologist Chris Terrill was embedded with Blackman's unit at the time of the shooting.
His film for Panorama tries to look beyond the narrow focus of the helmet camera that led to Blackman's conviction and questions whether, in the slow attrition of war, they began to think as a pack and lose their moral compass.
Speaking about Blackman's decision to kill the insurgent, Sam Deen says: "I do think he took the responsibility for the younger lads… he thought it was his responsibility to do it, and then move on."
Rob Driscoll admits to some sleepless nights but adds: "I'm glad Al did what he did because all my guys went home".
Louis Nethercott, another Royal Marine on the patrol, tells Panorama: "I think it was just another day in Afghanistan and that's the way it goes out there.
"And none of us got hurt so it was a successful day as far as I'm concerned".
Chris Terrill asks another Royal Marine who was on that tour whether he thought this was the only time such an incident occurred during the Afghan war.
His answer - "No".
Panorama, Marine A: The Inside Story will be on BBC One at 22:50 GMT, and available later on iPlayer.
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Parliament resumes with two major announcements in the pipeline. | Mark D'ArcyParliamentary correspondent
The prime minister is due to set out his plans to lift the lockdown, as the rollout of the vaccines continues.
The following week Chancellor Rishi Sunak will deliver his Budget, providing some inkling of how the government plans to pay for the pandemic.
The first probably eclipses the second in terms of public impact, but between them, the two announcements will set the domestic agenda right up to the next election,
The pre-pressuring around the lockdown announcement began before the half-term break, with some blunt warnings from the Conservative backbench Covid Recovery Group setting out its expectations, in a letter signed by 63 MPs.
Its shopping list includes the return of schools on 8 March, followed by the re-opening of shops, pubs and restaurants for Easter, and the lifting of legislative restrictions by the end of April.
That is the yardstick against which a significant section of his troops will judge the PM's plans. If they're unhappy, the need to renew the Coronavirus Act, (the next six-monthly renewal is due in March) would provide an opportunity to register their discontent.
This raises the possibility that the government might attempt to placate internal critics by modifying or replacing the legislation, which covers all kinds of issues, from the management of dead bodies to restrictions on the movement of potentially infected people.
'Pitch-rolling'
The second theme of the week is the build-up to the Budget, during which MPs make last-minute pitches for particular causes, issue warnings against rumoured proposals they don't like the look of, and scrutinise every ministerial word for hints of the policies to be unveiled - and in particular for any "pitch-rolling" ahead of tax increases.
And Europe, always Europe. The appointment of Brexit negotiator Lord Frost as a Cabinet Office minister, inheriting Michael Gove's Brexit responsibilities, has sent eyebrows skywards across Westminster.
In the past, cabinet ministers in the Lords have sometimes had special question times allocated to them (the Lords does not have Commons-style departmental question times) and while Lord Frost is not a full secretary of state, his ministerial brief is so critical that there may be moves for some similar arrangement.
Here's my rundown of the week ahead.
Monday 22 February
The Commons opens 14:30 with Housing, Communities and Local Government (including topical questions), with the expectation that the prime minister will then deliver that lockdown statement and take questions on it for a couple of hours.
That will then feed into the day's main business, one of the regular series of General debates on Covid-19, which will allow further reaction to whatever had been announced. These debates are normally led by the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock.
The day's committee action includes Public Accounts taking evidence on supporting the vulnerable during lockdown (14:30) with Sir Chris Wormald, permanent secretary at the Department of Health and Social Care, Jeremy Pocklington, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and a supporting cast of senior officials.
And, deprived of its normal Westminster Hall debates because of the pandemic, the Petitions Committee takes evidence on the movement of goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in response to an e-petition.
In the Lords (13:00) ministers field questions on the proportion of teaching posts in London, and elsewhere in England, which are currently provided by supply teacher agencies, ensuring the government provides timely answers to written questions, plans to increase the permitted spending limits for political parties at general elections, and the level of food-related crime.
Peers will then give a second reading to the Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Bill - the special measure to allow the Attorney-General, Suella Braverman, to take maternity leave. They should have the bill through all its Lords stages by the end of the week.
The day's real meat, at least for peers themselves, is the debate on the latest report from the Procedure and Privileges Committee, which will probably be quite lively. A number of peers are already unhappy at the suspension of the hereditary by-elections, which top up the contingent of 92 hereditaries who still sit in the House, when one of them leaves or passes away.
The much-mocked by-election process, in which hereditary peers of a particular party vote on a successor, has sometimes seen the candidates outnumber the voters. It has been suspended since the start of the pandemic, and the vacancies are beginning to pile up. But the Committee recommends that the suspension should continue, arguing that an online election would be unsatisfactory, because virtual hustings would disadvantage lesser-known candidates.
This is something of a proxy for the continuing row over the presence of any hereditaries in the Lords, (the legacy of the "Weatherill Amendment" compromise over Lords reform, in the late 1990s) which has produced some unusually sharp debates in the past, and true to form, the Conservative ex-minister Lord Trefgarne has put down a regret motion. Bring popcorn.
Tuesday 23 February
The Commons meets (11:30) for an hour of Health and Social Care questions. It's an Opposition Day, so the government will normally not make a ministerial statement, unless there's something very urgent to deal with.
Then comes a Ten Minute Rule Bill from Conservative Rob Butler. His Youth Courts and Sentencing Bill aims to prevent someone who commits an offence under the age of 18 being tried as an adult, because the matter doesn't come to court until they are over 18.
At the moment the system treats defendants according to their age at the time of their first court appearance - which could mean they are not dealt with by specially trained magistrates or judges, or subject to the youth courts' central aim of preventing reoffending. Mr Butler, an ex-JP, says the court delays resulting from the pandemic have made this anomaly even more of a problem.
The main debates will be on Labour Opposition Day motions, yet to be announced.
The day ends with an adjournment debate on the death of WPC Yvonne Fletcher, who was shot while policing a demonstration outside the Libyan embassy in 1984, led by Conservative Bob Stewart.
On the Committee Corridor, Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has a session on firms' Brexit preparedness (10:45).
Defence takes evidence from academic experts on China's military ambitions (14:30) and Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (15:15) continues its investigation into the economics of music streaming with witnesses from Amazon, Spotify and Apple.
There's also a rare meeting of Parliament's Ecclesiastical Committee (10:00), the body which processes changes in the law dealing with the established Church. The cast includes the bishops of Bristol and Durham and dignitaries from the General Synod.
In the Lords (12:00) ministers field questions on providing laptops and tablets to school pupils, and on democracy in Belarus
The main event is the consideration of Commons amendments to the Trade Bill, following the (indirect) rejection of the latest incarnation of the anti-genocide "Alton amendment," which had attempted to provide a mechanism for determining whether a state is complicit in genocide, to allow Parliament to consider whether the UK should have a trading relationship with it.
MPs did not get the chance to vote directly on the Alton amendment, perhaps reinforcing the determination of Lord Alton and his supporters to press it again.
Wednesday 24 February
The Commons opens (11:30) with a new fixture, which will remain on the parliamentary calendar until November - questions to Alok Sharma in his new role as President of COP26, the international climate change conference, due to be held in Glasgow in November. So all-embracing is the topic that there could be questions on almost anything, and Mr Sharma may end up referring many of them to other departments.
Prime Minister's Question Time at 12:00 is followed by a Ten Minute Rule Bill from Labour's Holly Lynch on regulating the renting of high-performance vehicles.
The main legislative action is consideration of Lords Amendments to the Fire Safety Bill, where the fallout of the Grenfell Tower disaster continues. The government is facing pressure to ensure that leaseholders of flats in unsafe tower blocks do not face huge bills for safety work, and excessive insurance premiums.
Watch out for the Conservative duo Steve McPartland and Royston Smith, who have been mustering backbench Tories in support an amendment to the bill.
Mr McPartland dismissed the solution offered by the Housing Secretary, Robert Jenrick, as "all smoke and mirrors," and says he now has 40 supporters on the Conservative benches - enough to defeat the government in a vote. One of the government defeats on this bill in the Lords inserted a clause preventing building owners from passing on the costs of safety work to leaseholders - so there could be resistance to overturning that.
But as the experience of the Trade Bill demonstrates, the government's control over what is voted on in this kind of Commons proceeding could make it difficult to bring rebel votes to bear.
Next. MPs consider Lords amendments to the Telecommunications Infrastructure (Leasehold Property) Bill, where peers inserted a requirement for regular reports on progress towards universal access to 1 gigabyte-capable broadband.
On the Committee Corridor, Home Secretary Priti Patel is before the Home Affairs Committee (10:30) for what promises to be a robust encounter. Committee chair Yvette Cooper has been critical of the operation of pandemic border controls, among other issues.
Northern Ireland Affairs (09:30) takes evidence on Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol and Treasury (14:30) hears evidence on the February 2021 Monetary Policy Report, with Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey.
In the Lords (12:00) question time ranges across progress towards Covid-19 vaccination programme delivery targets and objectives, the relationship between the emergence of pandemics and environmental degradation, and barriers to using the Channel Tunnel for transporting rail freight.
Then peers turn to the detail of the (spectacularly uncontroversial) Non-Domestic Rating (Public Lavatories) Bill.
Thursday 25 February
The Commons opens (09:30) with International Trade questions, followed by the weekly Business Questions to the leader of the House.
Then come two debates chosen by the Backbench Business Committee - first on the proposal for a national education route map for schools and colleges in response to the pandemic, and then the annual St David's Day debate on Welsh affairs.
In the Lords (12:00) ministers field questions on ensuring all eligible electors prevented from voting by medical advice and restrictions to address Covid-19 can participate in elections on 6 May, and supporting coastal communities to improve the capacity of the fishing sector.
Finally, peers polish off the detail and administer a final rubber stamp to the Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Bill.
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Terence Malick's latest movie, Knight of Cups, sees Christian Bale play Rick, a Hollywood writer who finds himself spiritually lost and questioning himself at the peak of his success. Recollections of the past are provided by Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett and Freida Pinto, who play women who have been significant in his life. | By Emma JonesEntertainment reporter
A three-time Oscar nominee, Malick is famous for his multiple narrations and stream of consciousness film-making, as well as his improvisations on set - so much so that Sean Penn, one of the stars of Malick's 2011 film Tree of Life, confessed he had never been quite sure what he was doing.
However, Rick's crisis, and the women he's loved, are as much as Bale got in terms of a script, as according to the actor, "the nice thing about Terry is that he doesn't tell you what it's about, really".
Bale, the star of the Dark Knight franchise, as well as earning his own third Oscar nomination this year for financial drama The Big Short, worked with Malick a decade ago on the film The New World, and says they had discussed doing this project for some time.
"I think he had a 10-year period of gestating this character," he says. "But I wasn't given a conventional script. I worked on the character a great deal, worked out his back story.
"I never had lines to learn, but I would see other actors on set and sometimes they had pages of notes, and I'd try and sneak a look at them.
"Terry calls it 'torpedoing' the protagonist. What would happen is that other actors and even non-actors in the film would know to present me with different scenarios and I would just give a real response, based on knowledge of the character.
"I had no nerves about improvisation at all. Terry has this motto: 'Start before we're ready and see what happens.' We just discovered what was going on as the film developed."
Knight of Cups was made over a few weeks in Los Angeles in 2012, and Natalie Portman, who has a small part in the film, says that she felt "blessed" to have collaborated with Malick before directing her own first film last year, A Tale of Love and Darkness.
"Terry just tears up the rules of film-making and throws them away," she says. "He allows you to make mistakes, and what most directors would see as a problem, he just embraces the opportunity. There was no sense of executing a script at all."
"Knight of Cups" refers to a parable of a young prince on a quest to find a pearl - but is given a sleeping draught by his subjects, and "forgot that he was the son of a king, forgot about the pearl, and fell into a deep sleep".
The film shows, with a dreamlike quality, an endless round of Hollywood meetings and parties, including one over-the-top lavish affair hosted by Antonio Banderas, making a cameo appearance. Rick appears to be sleepwalking through the experience.
Bale refers to "a spiritual sense of sleeping" in the film, but doesn't believe it only applies to the entertainment industry.
"In the goldfish bowl of Los Angeles, that kind of emptiness is all too obvious," he observes.
"But I don't think it's any different from any other walk of life.
"It refers to anyone who's seen all the acclaim, knows all the right people, has all the right party invitations - but they can still have a great void within themselves."
The actor says he himself is "lucky and fortunate in my family", but in the past has spoken out about the pressures of becoming a child star so young - he was a teenager when his first film, Empire of the Sun, was released in 1987.
"You can reach a peak, the top of the mountain," he says.
"You realise when you're living it, it's not as you imagined. That's what the film explores and I think a lot of people can relate to that.
"There may have been an awful lot of laughs along the way, but there's still a silence when you are left by yourself, wondering, 'is that it?' There's a cycle of good times, but never anything truly joyous at the end. It's not satisfaction or wholeness."
After starring as Moses in Ridley Scott's 2014 biblical epic, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Bale says he relates to Malick's "broader brush of spirituality - one with less doctrine, less organisation, something that's innate to every single person and that doesn't need to be taught.
"This story is very much about the search for something the character has within himself all along but he's somehow missed and neglected. He's on a quest for something, but he's not sure what it is, even though the world would say, 'you've achieved'."
The film's reclusive director, who rarely gives interviews, continues to attract star names to his projects - he has previously worked with Ben Affleck, Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, and both Bale and Portman have since worked with Malick on the forthcoming Weightless.
Bale thinks it's "the guerrilla style of film-making that keeps attracting me to him [Malick]," describing how he would stop to record a narration for Knight of Cups "just on the side of the road, sitting in my pick up truck, just doing it as we went along".
"Sometimes he would just hand me a go-pro camera and say 'go into the ocean and shoot a scene' and at the end of the day I would give all the footage back to Terry, and perhaps it would end up in the film. And perhaps it wouldn't.
"Ultimately nobody else is doing what he is doing and has his experience. The sense of trust we all have in him is overwhelming."
Knight of Cups is released in the UK on 6 May.
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The coronavirus outbreak has been followed by a massive decline in economic activity in many countries, often blamed on the lockdowns aimed at stopping the spread of the disease and limiting the deaths it causes. | By Andrew WalkerBBC World Service economics correspondent
In fact, there are two forces at play.
Government rules being one, and voluntary action taken by individuals and businesses is the other.
If you want to know how quick the recovery will be, you need to know the extent of each.
To the extent that it's driven by official restrictions, lifting them would do the trick.
But it will take more than that to reverse personal choices and habits.
Consumer bounce-back?
That would need real progress to be made in reducing the risk of infection. Consumers, workers and employers would also have to be confident in that progress.
There is ample survey evidence of a reluctance to go back quickly to the pre-pandemic way of life.
IPSOS-Mori found a majority of Britons said they were still uncomfortable about a wide range of activities, including going to a bar or restaurant, large public gatherings, using public toilets or public transport.
This may be one reason why some venues that could reopen are choosing not to - although the restrictions they would have to operate under make it harder to earn a profit even if the customers were to return.
A substantial amount of what consumers spend is what is called social consumption, where buyers are physically close to each other - eating out, live entertainment and travel, for example.
When the virus is circulating those activities expose people to the risk of infection.
The Oxford economist Simon Wren-Lewis, who looked at the possible impact of a pandemic more than a decade ago, says the sectors concerned covered more than a third of consumer spending.
There is ample anecdotal reporting that as restrictions have eased this social consumption has resumed to a significant degree.
Declining cases
But is it just because the measures have been eased?
The reason they have been eased in many countries is because cases, hospital admissions and deaths have declined.
Some people - though not all - will have concluded that it is relatively safe to go out. So that might be the reason that economic activity is picking up.
Some economists have tried to disentangle the two elements.
There are some strikingly different conclusions about the balance between the two.
Research done at the investment bank Goldman Sachs looked at the relationship between stricter lockdown measures and the impact on economic activity.
Tougher lockdown measures did correlate with evidence pointing to sharper economic declines, although that research did not separate the contribution from fear of infection.
In the US one group from the Universities of Texas, California and Chicago concluded that it was mostly the lockdown.
Infection rate
They used data from a series of household surveys. They found that spending by the average American household fell by $1,000 between January and April.
They came to the view that lockdowns accounted for 60% of the decline in employment and that households under lockdown were spending on average 31% less than others.
They concluded "the declines in employment and spending can be largely attributed to lockdowns rather than to the share of the population infected by the coronavirus."
But others, looking at different evidence, have come to different conclusions.
Two economists at Chicago University looked at mobile phone data on customer visits to more than two million businesses.
The fact that different state and county authorities imposed different restrictions gave them a way of estimating how much of the downturn was due to those rules.
Denmark and Sweden
They found overall a decline in consumer traffic to these businesses of 60%.
But their analysis suggested that a little more than a ninth of that was due to legal restrictions.
They also found that the extent of the declines was linked to the number of coronavirus deaths in the area.
Their overall conclusion: "Individual choices were far more important and seem tied to fears of infection".
Others at Copenhagen University used data on bank transactions to compare Denmark and Sweden, which they say were similarly exposed to the pandemic, with only the former imposing significant restrictions.
They estimated that total spending fell by 25% in Sweden and by 29% in Denmark.
They write: "This implies that most of the economic contraction is caused by the virus itself and occurs regardless of whether governments mandate social distancing or not."
Global Trade
More from the BBC's series taking an international perspective on trade:
All that said, Sweden was one of the few developed countries to manage some economic growth in the first quarter of 2020, albeit just 0.1%.
Denmark's economy shrank by 2.1% in that period.
In spite of the differences these studies all point to a contribution from both rules and choices that is substantial.
To take the Sweden-Demark study - the four percentage-point additional fall in spending attributed to the lockdown in Denmark even on its own would be seen as a substantial downturn.
Perhaps we will get a clearer picture as more data emerges with, probably, different patterns of recovery.
So far it seems clear that both factors, fear and lockdown, have contributed to the undoubted economic damage.
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Edinburgh has fallen silent amid the nationwide lockdown designed to reduce the spread of Covid-19.
| Normally bustling Princes Street is nearly empty and only grocery stores and chemists are open.
For the few pedestrians about, there are new signs urging them to stay home and others celebrating NHS staff.
BBC Scotland's Christopher Bobyn spent an afternoon documenting the city's eerie new landscape.
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Dr John Wright of Bradford Royal Infirmary had tests in the summer which implied that he probably had Covid without symptoms early in the pandemic. But last week he had a swab test that came back positive. So were those earlier test results misleading, or has he now had it twice? | Last weekend I was due to visit my 89-year-old dad. I had seen him only once this year, during the summer lull, and we were both excited to be reunited. He had a heart attack during the first wave of the pandemic and is now about to have cancer surgery during the second wave, so my visit was a precious one. The omnipresent virus, however, had other plans.
All NHS front-line workers now self-test for Covid-19 twice weekly, to screen for asymptomatic infection. So on Thursday evening, the day before my visit, I undertook the self-testing ritual - scraping the delicate swab at the back of my throat to elicit a gag reflex, then twiddling it high up in each nostril, dissolving it in buffer solution and then anointing the lateral flow kit. A hollow emptiness grew as the positive line grew stronger. I didn't believe it. In denial, I quickly repeated the test - but with the same result. The next morning I had my PCR swab and at 04:50 on the Saturday was notified that this too was positive.
The visit to my dad was now definitely off and I began a 10-day isolation, together with my wife, Helen. Also a front-line medic, Helen had been vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine on Thursday, at almost exactly the same time as my two positive self-test results. Immunity with the Pfizer vaccine takes off reasonably quickly, with some protection occurring by day 12 after the first dose, but the full immune effect isn't felt until a week after the second dose.
So here we are: I have the SARS-CoV-2 virus and she has the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine - disease and cure, villain and hero, yin and yang living under one roof. But she still needs to isolate as she could be infected by me before her immunity builds up.
One reason my result was such a surprise was that I thought I had already had Covid-19. Having worked at the hospital during the first wave, when the virus was circulating at such high levels, it seemed unlikely that I could have avoided it. Many of my colleagues fell ill with Covid-19 in those early weeks, some of them seriously, so I assumed that I had just dodged the bullet and had the virus without symptoms, which is not unusual.
At that stage we had no way of testing for infection. Later, when antibody testing became available as a way of revealing a historic infection, I had a positive test result. That positive result was admittedly followed by two negative antibody test results, but this could have been due to the fact that Covid antibodies fade quite quickly.
When I had a T-cell test and it came back positive, that seemed to clinch it. I had been exposed to the virus, I had had a positive antibody test and a positive T-cell test; it seemed likely that I had had Covid-19, and I felt reassured by this. A number of my colleagues who had negative antibody tests and hadn't been fortunate enough to have a T-cell test, remained nervous about the inevitable risk.
But now I definitely have Covid-19. On top of the PCR test, I have symptoms, including anosmia (loss of smell).
So have I had it twice in nine months?
Front-line diary
Prof John Wright, a doctor and epidemiologist, is head of the Bradford Institute for Health Research, and a veteran of cholera, HIV and Ebola epidemics in sub-Saharan Africa. He is writing this diary for BBC News and recording from the hospital wards for BBC Radio.
Cases of people having Covid-19 twice appear to be rare. The first confirmed case was recorded in August, when a patient in Hong Kong tested positive for a second time.
Since then, a Dutch news agency has counted only 27 other cases of reinfection from Qatar to Brazil. Although it's likely that many cases have gone unrecorded this is an extremely small number, which tends to suggest it doesn't happen often.
My first instinct was therefore to conclude that I didn't actually have Covid in spring and that my first antibody test was a false positive.
To seek advice, I rang my colleague Prof Paul Klenerman, from the University of Oxford, who is leading one of the major national immunity studies on Covid-19. It was as part of his research that I had one of my two subsequent negative antibody tests and my positive T-cell test in June.
"It's really interesting," he explained. "Your antibody results were negative but they could have faded naturally by the time we tested you. However your memory T-cell assay was very suggestive of SARS-CoV-2 infection."
I had begun to wonder whether the T-Cell test was in fact registering my immune system's memory of infection by a different coronavirus, perhaps the common cold, but Prof Klenerman thought it was too early to draw this conclusion.
He emphasises that we don't yet know how long immune protection will last, either for those who have had Covid-19 or those who have had the vaccine. His research should fill in the gaps.
In my case, Prof Klenerman and his team will arrange for follow-up testing, to investigate further.
If I have been reinfected, one possibility is that I have picked up the new variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus circulating in the UK, the "escape mutation" that we have heard about in the last few days.
I quite like the idea of being a scientific curiosity and I will keep you posted if the answer becomes clear.
Let me take you back to my unexpected positive self-test. There is much debate in the medical journals about the evidence for rapid, asymptomatic, mass testing. If a negative test provides false reassurance it could have unintended consequences, as was pointed out in an opinion piece in the British Medical Journal, describing the programme as a "costly, underdesigned, under-evaluated mess". As an epidemiologist I shared some of this scepticism and thought the £100bn bill seemed excessive.
However, this week it may well have saved my dad's life.
And now that he has had the vaccine, my visit to see him may be back on - if restrictions on travel and mixing permit it - early in the New Year.
Follow @docjohnwright and radio producer @SueM1tchell on Twitter
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The electoral statistics suggest the Conservatives have enjoyed a significant if gradual improvement in fortunes since 1999 - but the numbers only tell part of what has been a sometimes bumpy and often colourful journey back to the front line of Welsh politics. | By Tomos LivingstoneAssistant political editor, Wales
Having opposed devolution in 1997 and having lost every one of their Welsh MPs in that year's general election, expectations were low for the Conservatives in the first devolved elections two years later. The party won nine of the 60 seats - a modest total, but a platform from which to rebuild.
The group was led by former MP and Welsh Office Minister Rod Richards, whose pugnacious style enlivened the assembly's early proceedings. But Mr Richards stepped down as leader after being accused of assaulting a young woman. Subsequently cleared, he stood down as an AM in 2002.
His successor, law professor Nick Bourne - these days a peer and UK government minister - set about healing the rifts caused by the devolution referendum.
He saw little point in retaining the party's anti-devolution stance, gradually moving the party (despite some internal resistance) to the position it now holds - in favour of a Welsh parliament with the fiscal powers to reduce taxes and boost enterprise.
So committed was Mr Bourne to his project that he came within a whisker of leading the Conservatives into government in Cardiff Bay in 2007.
Having increased the party's share of the seats to 11 in the 2003 election, the Tories went one better four years later, winning 12.
A three-way coalition with Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats was on the cards - years of behind-the-scenes work meant a joint programme for government was put together relatively easily. But reluctance in the other two parties meant the grand plans eventually came to nothing.
There was a silver lining - Plaid Cymru's decision to form a coalition with Labour instead meant the Conservatives cemented their position as the main opposition party in Cardiff Bay and, with the party's fortunes reviving across the UK, the 2011 assembly election saw the Conservatives win 14 seats, overtaking Plaid as the second largest party.
The gains came at a cost, as Mr Bourne lost his seat on the regional list for Mid and West Wales.
The subsequent leadership contest saw Andrew RT Davies defeat Nick Ramsay; Mr Davies continued Mr Bourne's direction of pushing for greater devolution as a means of implementing a Conservative vision for the economy and public services, albeit in a larger-than-life style than that favoured by his predecessor.
Having enjoyed some success in highlighting perceived failures in Welsh Labour's record on the NHS, and making dramatic gains in last year's general election, the Welsh Conservatives are hoping for further gains in May.
But with relations with Plaid Cymru having cooled considerably since 2007, it seems that getting into government will remain a tall order.
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A builder has denied ripping apart five new-build homes with a digger causing £4m of damage. | Daniel Neagu, 30, of Athelstone Road in Harrow, north-west London pleaded not guilty at St Albans Crown Court of causing criminal damage.
He is accused of damaging homes at the McCarthy & Stone retirement home complex in Ermine Street, Buntingford in Hertfordshire on 11 August.
Mr Neagu was remanded in custody ahead of a trial next February.
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Calls for English devolution raise a thorny but age-old question - how might England be broken up into regions? | Mark EastonHome editor@BBCMarkEastonon Twitter
Bubbling beneath the surface of England's green and pleasant land is a thick soup of confusion, foaming with indignation and threatening at moments to erupt in volcanic anger. It is a quiet fury born of an ancient conflict between personal identity and public administration.
For those politicians offering to devolve power in England - beware.
My social media accounts have been overflowing with the outrage of Englishmen and women, indignant that I should have even considered options for constitutional reform that are at odds with their particular viewpoint.
For some, the historic counties of England represent the authentic divisions of the land. Others fervently press for the creation of an English parliament for the first time in centuries. There are voices in favour of regions that chime with the ancient Heptarchy, while influential lobbies are pushing the notion of power to cities.
The prime minister's promise of a "new and fair" constitutional settlement has roused profound passions and familiar arguments. A Commons debate on new local government boundaries a couple of years ago revealed something of what is at stake.
"One of the most tragic cases is in the west of my county where a small number of people find themselves, for administrative purposes, in Lancashire," an MP complained. "Can anyone imagine anything worse for a Yorkshireman than being told that he now lives in Lancashire?" Well, no.
"There was local civil disobedience," a man from Bridlington reminded everyone. Members from all over England were stirred from the green benches of the House of Commons to explain how history and geography were being disrespected.
"There is confusion about exactly where Cleethorpes is," one Lincolnshire MP complained. A political opponent sympathised, revealing that some of his constituents "think that they live in Dorset - they do not know that they live in Somerset".
These disputes over lines on maps have been running since the Romans first divided Britain into regions, trying to impose some kind of order on the warring tribes that squabbled over territory. They built walls, laid roads and drew charts in an attempt to contain the locals but it proved a futile exercise.
Roman Britain
Find out more
When the legions departed, the neatly defined "civitates" quickly frayed as rivalries resurfaced. The arrival of Angles, Saxons and Jutes, formidable warriors from Germany, intensified the struggle and added to the general confusion in much of England.
Public administration is a struggle between the precision of maps and the fuzziness of real life. Historians attempting to make sense of the past prefer to focus on the exactitude of the former rather than the vagueness of the latter, so it is predictable that the 12th Century chronicler Henry of Huntingdon described an Anglo-Saxon England divided neatly into seven kingdoms from 500 to 850 AD. The Heptarchy was made up of Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex. But his precision glossed over centuries of fierce arguments over boundaries.
In the end, bloody territorial skirmishing between the kingdoms proved an irrelevance in the face of a far greater external threat - the arrival of the Vikings in 793.
Within a decade the Heptarchy was no more. Only the kingdom of Wessex held firm, from where King Alfred began assembling an army. England's destiny was decided in early May 878 upon blood-soaked turf close to a settlement called Ethandun. Alfred was victorious and upon that grim battlefield England was born.
Alfred was responsible for spreading the West Saxon style of administration, dividing areas up into "shires" or shares of land, each shire with a nominated "reeve" responsible for keeping the peace - the title "shire-reeve" becoming shortened over time to sheriff.
It was a shared terror of the Vikings that held the nation together, but a far greater test of Englishness was imminent. Another army of bureaucrats was on its way, an invasion of administrators, clerks, cartographers and planners with designs on the new kingdom. The Normans were coming.
If William the Conqueror had had access to clipboards and those pens you hang round your neck, he would have negotiated a bulk purchase. He sized the place up an then published England's intimate details in the Domesday Book, introducing a bit of Norman styling to the process. The Anglo-Saxon shires were designated counties - the Saxon sheriff often replaced by a Norman count. Both names, however, survived.
Domesday Book
The County of Gloucestershire, for example, incorporates the Roman name for the main town (Glevum) attached to an ancient British fort (ceaster) then adding the Anglo-Saxon shire (scir) and capping the whole lot with a Norman count (comte). A thousand years of history is scrambled into names that often confound logic and sensible spelling, geographical relics that have come to be regarded as the essence of England.
Industrialisation when it came was no respecter of ancient boundaries, disgorging giant smoking cities that squatted noisily across the countryside without a care for traditional county ways. By the beginning of the 20th Century some influential voices were asking whether the old system really made sense any more.
In 1913, Winston Churchill wondered aloud about the idea of a federal system "in which Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and, if necessary, parts of England, could have separate legislative and parliamentary institutions". He suggested that great business and industrial centres including London, Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Midlands might be allowed "to develop, in their own way, their own life according to their own ideas and needs in the same way as the great and prosperous States of the American Union and the great kingdoms and principalities and States of the German Empire".
But parliament had other matters on its mind, not least increasing Irish agitation for Home Rule, and a world war. A moment when English regionalism might have been seriously considered was lost.
Unlike Scotland, Ireland and Wales, which revelled in their separateness, England's cultural identity was based on the opposite - its importance within the wider United Kingdom and Empire. While the Scots, Irish and Welsh tended to look within their borders to describe themselves, the English looked beyond - identifying themselves, as often as not, as "British" and lamenting the devolution which diminished their sense of imperial centrality.
After World War Two, however, the landscape looked very different. Britain's global influence had declined and many of the industrial regions that had prospered in the 19th Century were struggling in the 20th. In the early 1960s, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan appointed the Conservative leader in the House of Lords, Viscount Hailsham, as his minister for the North East. Donning a cloth cap, the Tory peer hoped an offer of regional regeneration might swing some votes.
It was not enough to save the Conservatives. Labour's Harold Wilson crept over the political finishing line first in the 1964 election and increased his party's majority two years later with promises to help the industrial regions whose voters had handed him the key to Number 10. He was persuaded something needed to be done about England's local government structure, a historic system that appeared increasingly archaic in the white heat of the technological age.
Any answer was going to be controversial, so Wilson did what politicians in Britain traditionally do with a problem too toxic for elected parliamentarians - he set up a Royal Commission headed by a dependable member of the House of Lords.
Lord Redcliff-Maud, a Whitehall mandarin known for his impressive intellect and safe hands, answered the riddle of urban conurbations sitting on a structure designed for rural life by proposing new local councils based on major towns - so-called unitary authorities.
However, members of the Rural District Councils Association (RCDA) were horrified at the idea of being subsumed into modern and soulless metropolitan inventions. They started a national campaign under the slogan "Don't Vote for R.E. Mote" - a play on "remote".
The president of the RCDA, the 5th Earl of Gainsborough and the largest landowner in England's smallest county, Rutland, was dismayed by the prospect of being absorbed into neighbouring Leicestershire. "We are not going to lie down at that," he proclaimed. "People in rural areas do not want decisions made by people 40 or 50 miles away in large towns."
Rutland exemplified the political dilemma - a historical anachronism, famous for the World Nurdling Championships, didn't make sense to the prosaic minds of public administrators, but its very eccentricity played directly to rural England's sense of itself.
When the Tories returned to power in 1970 they battled to find a compromise. Their Local Government Bill was debated 51 times in four agonising months as MPs argued over boundaries, place-names, geography and history. The result was an act of parliament that, in attempting to satisfy everyone, infuriated millions.
The act created metropolitan counties that trampled all over ancient allegiances. So it was that Greater Manchester included both parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, while South Yorkshire included parts of Nottinghamshire. Somerset and Gloucestershire became Avon, parts of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire were designated as Humberside, while bits of Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancashire and Yorkshire were cobbled into Cumbria. Bournemouth went to bed in Hampshire and woke up in Dorset. Rutland ceased to exist.
I remember as a cub reporter in the late 70s attending classes on local government administration, a topic so complex and confused that I sensed every twinge of political pain in the reforms. I swotted over single-tier and two-tier authorities, boroughs and districts, Mets and non-Mets, trying to fix in my mind the varied responsibilities and powers of each. Throughout my time in local newspapers and radio, I kept a dog-eared copy of my public administration textbook by my desk in case of emergency.
The social and political turmoil of the 1980s saw the invention of a new and unofficial English boundary - the North-South divide. The Yorkshire Evening Post newspaper is thought to have coined the phrase. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dismissed it as a myth.
Two things happened - northern England became increasingly resentful at the London-based government, while the Labour opposition became more interested in regional devolution. The party's leader Michael Foot asked an MP with impeccable northern working-class credentials, John Prescott, to produce an "Alternative Regional Strategy", a task he undertook with enthusiasm.
To many UK Tories, this looked like the "slippery slope" to Euro-federalism and a threat to British sovereignty. So the politics of English administration became sharply polarised between the traditionalist instincts of the Conservative Party and the devolutionary demands of the Labour heartlands.
When New Labour came to power in 1997, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott created the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, which gave him licence to dust off his "Alternative Regional Strategy". With Scotland and Wales granted devolution, the first step in England was the creation of nine Regional Development Agencies (RDAs).
Prescott wanted to go further with elected regional assemblies, but he faced some formidable obstacles. Asked about his ideas for a region in the South West, the deputy prime minister lamented: "It always seemed to me that Cornwall hated Devon, they both hated Bristol and they all hated London".
(It is an attitude I encountered on my recent visit to Newlyn in Cornwall. When I suggested to locals at the Red Lion they might like to be governed by a "city-region" based in Plymouth, mouths fell open in shock.)
The deputy PM wanted to press ahead with his devolution plans but, without enthusiastic backing from Tony Blair, he was obliged to test them on the area of England he thought would be most receptive to the idea of regional government - the North East.
Possible devolution boundaries
Regions
Historical counties
Source: Globalization and World Cities Research network
On 4 November 2004, the Great North Vote was held and when the votes were counted, the result was decisive - overwhelming rejection by a ratio of almost 4 to 1. His regional dream was over.
The current government abolished the RDAs and has sought to banish any regionalist ideas in England to the extent that civil servants resorted to the use of an acronym when discussing the issue: TAFKAR - the areas formerly known as regions.
What is revealed in all of this is an important facet of the English personality. After 2,000 years of administrators trying to bully the population into neatly defined blocks, England has developed a natural distrust of straight lines on a map. They prefer the quirkiness of a complicated back-story, they like things to be irregular and idiosyncratic, revel in the fact that Americans cannot pronounce, never mind spell, Worcestershire.
Devolution to England is firmly back on the political agenda, but as the politicians toy with ideas of city-regions, regional assemblies and an English parliament, they should prepare themselves for seriously impassioned reaction to whatever they propose.
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An oil firm has been served with an improvement notice after a worker suffered a serious injury on a North Sea oil platform. | The incident happened on the Alba Northern installation on 6 May during lifting operations.
It is claimed operator Chevron failed to ensure that lifting operations on the platform were properly planned and carried out in a safe manner.
Chevron said it would work with the Health and Safety Executive.
It said it would implement the recommendation "in a constructive and timely manner".
The oil giant added: "We have created and defined agreed work scopes which address the areas covered within the recent notice and will continue to communicate our progress to the HSE until the matter has been resolved."
The Alba field lies about 130 miles (210km) north east of Aberdeen.
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A 27-year-old man has been arrested after a car was driven into a crowd of people outside a bar in Cardiff, injuring a man. | The arrested man from the Ely area of Cardiff was held at Gatwick Airport and is being transferred to Cardiff for questioning.
The incident happened outside the Miss Jones bar in the Whitchurch area of the city in the early hours Saturday.
As a result of the incident, a 34-year-old man suffered a serious leg injury.
He is recovering at home following surgery at the University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff.
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A wildlife trust says fly-tipping cases in Gloucestershire woods and nature reserves have doubled in the past year.
| Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust (GWT) also said it has seen a significant rise in vandalism on its land.
A spokesman said people who have camped on its nature reserves have chopped down trees, smashed glass and set tents on fire and left them behind.
Forest of Dean District Council says it has seen a 22% rise in fly-tipping since 2011.
A spokesman said: "It's a shame that a small number of people decide to spoil the enjoyment of the countryside for others by dumping rubbish."
The authority said it is investigating every case that is reported.
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The Business Secretary Vince Cable has said a variable graduate tax, with higher earners paying higher rates, could be a fairer way for students to help fund their university education. What do university bodies, staff and unions think of the idea?
| National Union of Students
The NUS sees the graduate tax proposal as a milestone in a lengthy campaign by students to ensure fairer university funding. The current system of top-up fees is regressive, it says, because top earners pay the same rate as those on lower incomes. Graduate contributions should be based on actual earnings in the real world, the union says.
NUS president Aaron Porter said: "A graduate tax is preferable to a market-based system of fees. We are keen to work with the government. If there are more tuition fee rises there could be a seismic backlash. Further detail of this plan is crucial to ensure that the system truly is a progressive alternative and not simply tuition fees by another name. Students and their families are not fools and will not be conned by rebranding exercises or marketing drives. A progressive graduate tax would be a signal of a just society, where people who benefit more pay more.
University and College Union
The union says the key test for students and their parents will be whether or not graduate debt goes up. It says the government should not rebrand student debt as a graduate tax and expect students to pick up the bill for its "punitive cuts agenda".
The UCU has called for business to pay its fair share towards higher education by raising corporation tax to the G7 average. It is concerned about government plans for the future of university funding.
UCU general secretary Sally Hunt said: "We were a little concerned to hear that Vince Cable was only now asking Lord Browne to look at graduate tax ideas. It certainly raises the worrying question of exactly what the review has been doing up until now."
UCU is the largest union for lecturers and other academic staff in the UK.
Russell Group of UK universities
The group does not agree that a pure graduate tax would be a better or a fairer system. Graduates, employers and society all benefit from higher education, it says, but taxpayers currently foot the lion's share of the bill and that is unsustainable.
The group says graduates should contribute more because they benefit significantly. It sees the current system as similar to a graduate tax, with no up-front payment by students and graduates only paying back a small fraction of their income when their earnings exceed £15,000. The current system has all the positive features of a graduate tax without the downsides, it says.
Director general of the Russell Group Wendy Piatt said: "We are particularly concerned that it would be many years before revenue from a graduate tax becomes available, so until then there would be a requirement for a very major up-front investment in universities by government - a very costly solution."
The Russell Group represents 20 of the UK's research-intensive universities, many of them older institutions including Oxford and Cambridge.
Universities UK
The body says because graduates benefit personally from their degrees, it is right that they make a direct contribution to the costs of study. Its submission to Lord Browne's review argued that the current tuition fee and loan system could more accurately be described as a "graduate contribution". It could be made more progressive, it says, with reforms such as charging a real rate of interest on student loans, which would reduce the taxpayer subsidy for higher earners.
President of Universities UK Professor Steve Smith said: "With proposals for 'variable graduate contributions tied to earnings', the sector would want assurances that proceeds from such a system would be re-distributed to universities".
Any changes to the system would have to promote student choice, secure the quality of the student experience and maintain the reputation of the higher education system, the group says.
Universities UK is made up of more than 100 executive heads of UK higher education institutions.
1994 Group
The 1994 Group says it wants to see a sensible and robust system of funding based on a "transparent, simple and fair system of graduate contributions tied directly to the education received". This should provide a long-term sustainable environment to ensure that UK's world-class universities can continue to deliver a very high quality academic experience to all students and meet business needs, it says.
The group's chief executive director Paul Marshall said: "It is crucial that all students with the ability to go to university are able to access the top universities."
The 1994 Group is made up of 19 research-intensive universities, including Exeter, East Anglia, St Andrews and Reading.
University think tank Million
Million+ say the most important challenge facing the secretary of state is ensuring that students and graduates "do not pay the price of cuts to universities".
Chairman Les Ebdon said: "Regardless of whether the current system of graduate contributions is reformed or a graduate tax introduced, Vince Cable gave every indication that graduates would pay more. This has to be squared with the coalition government's commitment to social mobility.
"A graduate tax may satisfy the left hand of the coalition and his proposals to introduce private providers may suit the right hand but the real question is what happens to people of all ages who want to study at university if student numbers are cut."
Million+ is a think tank which grew out of an organisation for new universities.
Pro vice-chancellor of Roehampton University Chris Cobb
"Generally I welcome the introduction of a 'graduate contribution' as it is a more progressive approach than loan and is less off-putting to applicants. However, I'm still not certain whether it is intended to simply replace the tuition fee income or whether it will additionally replace the Hefce block grant which is currently resourced through general taxation. In other words: where will the balance of funding fall between state and student?
"Also, does this spell the end of a market for domestic undergraduate students and variability of pricing - or will universities be able to charge fees in addition? If universities are restricted from charging fees thenwill some elite institutions question whether they should remain in the state sector?"
Shadow universities minister David Lammy
"This a PR exercise from a man whose party have just completed the biggest U-turn in their history. At the last election, and for the last decade, the Liberal Democrats have opposed any graduate contribution as an article of faith. Now they are in favour of an unlimited graduate contribution paid over the course of a life-time.
"He's trying to pacify his party's MPs and membership and prepare the ground for them to accept higher fees."
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Africans are willing to give up their freedom to move around where they like and say what they think, and are willing to be watched if it means they get more security, according to a survey by research group Afrobarometer. Here are five of the key findings: | 1. Many Africans are willing to trade freedom for security
Afrobarometer suggests that giving an option of either freedom or security is a strategyused by governments to persuade people to accept restrictions on freedom.
And, the survey suggests, it has proven a powerful argument - as more and more people are prepared to trade freedom to move where they like for a safer country.
The majority of those surveyed - 62% - are willing to accept curfews and roadblocks in the interests of greater security.
This is illustrated most starkly in Madagascar. Some 83% of those surveyed agreed with the statement "When faced with threats to public security, the government should be able to impose curfews and set up special roadblocks to prevent people from moving around".
The motivation for answering this way, the research argues, may be because the country is "still trying to emerge from years of political turmoil and instability".
2. Fewer Africans feel free to say what they think
In nearly all the countries surveyed, there has been a decline in the number of people who feel they can say what they think.
Roughly two-thirds (68%) of those surveyed said that people must "often" or "always" be careful of what they say about politics.
The country where there has been the biggest rise in cautiousness is Mali which, the research explains, has been in political crisis since a 2012 coup and an Islamist takeover of the north.
The research also picks out Zambia and Tanzania as two countries where there has been a significant decline in the number of people who say they are free to say what they think. These two countries, the research explains, are "watched due to increasingly authoritarian behaviour by their current governments".
3. A significant number of Africans are willing to allow their private communications to be monitored
Some 43% of those surveyed are willing to accept government monitoring in the interests of security.
Mali stood out.
Some 75% of those surveyed in Mali agreed with the statement that the government should be able to monitor private communications, for example on mobile phones, to make sure that people are not plotting violence.
The research suggests that "violent extremists... may be taking a toll on popular commitment to individual liberties and civil rights".
4. Fewer Africans care about the right to join groups
The survey reveals a decline in support for "the right to associate freely".
This is the right to form and be part of a trade union, a political party or any another association or voluntary group.
Or, to put it another way, the context needed in order to start a protest group, such as those which have recently ousted long-time authoritarian leaders in Sudan and Algeria.
Some 61% of people surveyed agreed with the statement that "We should be able to join any organisation whether or not the government approves of it".
That is a "modest" decline in support for freedom of association - from 66% a decade ago across 20 countries.
But Zimbabwe saw a "significant" decline in support for the freedom of association.
Since taking office in 2017, President Emmerson Mnangagwa's government has cracked down hard on protesters, especially in the main cities, who are opposed to his austerity policies.
However, people in Zimbabwe, and its neighbours South Africa and Mozambique, were generally less supportive of trading freedom for security than residents of the other countries surveyed.
5. Support for religious freedom is evenly divided
People are evenly divided on freedom of religious speech, with 49% backing complete freedom and 47% willing to tolerate government limits on religious speech.
The lowest levels of support for freedom of religious speech were in Tunisia and Mali.
More than 70% of people surveyed in these two countries agreed with the statement that "government should have the power to regulate what is said in places of worship, especially if preachers or congregants threaten public security".
The research notes that these are both Muslim-majority countries that have been attacked by extremists - another example, perhaps, of people choosing security over freedom.
More about the survey
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The Eden Project is celebrating its 10th anniversary. | The site was originally a china clay pit called Bodelva near St Blazey in mid-Cornwall.
It was 160 years old and its resources had been exhausted.
A few miles down the road at the former Cornwall home of the Tremayne family, now internationally known as the Lost Gardens of Heligan, Tim Smit was coming up with a plan that would make the dormant pit world famous.
The idea was established as one of the Landmark Millennium Projects to mark the year 2000.
But in the first two months of construction, building work was hampered by constant rainfall.
More than 40 million gallons of rain water drained into the pit.
This early incident prompted the engineers to come up with a subterranean drainage system.
It now collects all the water coming on to the site and uses it to irrigate plants.
The centre-piece of Tim Smit's dream were the biomes. You could fit the Tower of London in the Rainforest Biome.
The biomes were built using hundreds of hexagonal and pentagonal, inflated, plastic cells supported by steel frames.
The biomes entered the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest conservatories in the world.
With the help of students from Reading University Eden made more than 83,000 tonnes of soil for the thousands of tropical plants held in and around the biomes.
The Eden Project Visitor Centre opened to the public in May 2000, showing how Tim Smit's dream was becoming a reality. In March 2001 the full site opened for the first time.
In the same year Brit-Pop band Pulp played the first ever Eden Sessions. Over the years several bands have used the biomes as their unique backdrop including Oasis, Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse.
The Eden Project hosted the 'Africa Calling' concert of the Live 8 musical fundraiser on 2 July 2005.
It was also used as a filming location for the 2002 James Bond film, Die Another Day.
In December 2010 the Eden Project received permission to build a Geothermal electricity plant which will generate enough power for Eden and about 5000 households.
In the last ten years 13m people have visited the Cornish attraction.
When asked about the next ten years, founder Tim Smit, who received an honorary knighthood in January, said: "Eden should simply create constant memorable moments that inspire others to have the confidence to make their own."
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A British man of the minority Ahmadi sect is appealing to the UK for help after being jailed in Pakistan on blasphemy charges. Human rights activists say laws in Pakistan, where Ahmadis are considered heretics, are being increasingly used to persecute the community, as the BBC's Saba Eitizaz reports. | It was a home video that turned a man viewed as the old neighbourhood doctor into a prisoner without bail.
Masood Ahmad shuffles through the dank prison corridor, smiling when he greets me. He looks weak and speaks little. And he worries - but not for his freedom.
"I just want you to tell my children that I am fine. It grieves me more that they must be so worried."
He asks me to convey this message to his seven children living in Britain and Australia.
Last month Mr Ahmad, 72, was arrested at his homeopathic clinic in Lahore on blasphemy charges.
Two people posing as patients came to him for treatment and had a conversation about religion instead.
They used mobile phones to secretly film him reciting a verse from the Koran, and then called the police to have him arrested.
The homeopathy practitioner belongs to the Ahmadi minority sect that a large number of Pakistanis view with suspicion because of a law declaring them to be non-Muslims.
Ahmadis, whose holy book is also the Koran, believe their own founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, was a prophet, which most Muslims say contradicts mainstream Islamic teaching.
Ahmadis can be jailed for up to three years in Pakistan for "behaving like Muslims", having Muslim names or using Islamic terms for their places of worship or religious rituals.
Human rights activists say the law is now being used to push the Ahmadi community into a legal corner by right-wing religious groups in Pakistan. They are also open targets for sectarian violence by extremists.
"When you formalise persecution of minorities, you should expect extremist elements to take advantage of that, because that is what they thrive on," says human rights lawyer Asma Jehangir, who has raised the issue at several international forums.
Masood Ahmad says he felt "marked" even before he was picked up.
"Somebody had painted a black mark on my car and outside my house a few weeks before I was arrested, so I knew I was being watched."
He still did not see his arrest coming. After all, he had lived in the old neighbourhood of Anarkali since the late 1980s and had close ties with the community.
He is a Pakistani-British dual national who says he returned with a desire to raise his children with Pakistani values and to help people through his medicine.
According to police sources, almost 10 of his neighbours gave eyewitness testimony against him for preaching his faith.
He tells me that many of them also came to see him in jail, concerned for his wellbeing.
"I do not partake in religious debate. I am a doctor, a professional," he says.
The official complaint registered is in the name of a local cleric who refused to speak to the BBC - but the phone number on it was traced to an activist called Mohammad Hasan Moawwiya, whose name appears in several similar cases against Ahmadis.
He is associated with an emerging group called The Khattam-e-Nabuwwat Lawyer's Forum - an extended legal wing of Khattam-e-Nabuwwat - a right-wing religious group that has also been associated with distributing hate literature and actively campaigning against the Ahmadiyya community in the past.
Mr Moawwiya says it is his legal and constitutional right to do so.
"After the law of 1984 was made, it doesn't mean that it should be neglected, it should be implemented actively," he says. "They [Ahmadis] should name their religion and names as separate to us Muslims, otherwise it's a violation and we are allowed by the law of the country to carry on our work."
However, huge mobs were reported outside the police station when Mr Ahmad was arrested, chanting "Be Qadri! Be Qadri!"
This was a reference to Mumtaz Qadri, the bodyguard of former Punjab Governor Salman Taseer who he killed for speaking out against the blasphemy laws in 2011. He is currently in jail but revered by many.
"The danger is not inside jail, the danger to me is outside," says Mr Ahmad, who is being kept under tight security in Lahore's District Jail.
The same angry crowds are seen at every court hearing and Mr Ahmad fears the judges may feel pressurised while reaching a verdict. His lawyers have applied for bail twice, due to his old age and illness - but their attempts have failed. The court has cited "insufficient grounds for bail".
Mr Ahmed is now appealing to the British High Commission. "Have I killed or robbed anyone? I request the British government to help me ensure a fair trial. That is all I ask."
His daughter in Australia, Sophia Ahmad, says she is corresponding with the British High Commission and international legal charities to help her father.
"He is recovering from cancer, he is sick and needs medication. We are very worried for him," she told the BBC in Skype conversation.
According to Ahmadi groups, more than 20 cases have been registered against Ahmadis this year alone.
Many others remain in jail.
Another member of the community, Faisal, is still waiting for his 60-year-old father's release after he was jailed earlier this year for reading an Ahmadi newspaper.
The complaint was filed by Mohammad Hasan Moawwiya.
Faisal prays for his father at the Ahmadi mosque in Lahore that was violently attacked by militants with grenades and guns in 2010, killing more than 80 people.
Two of the gunmen arrested at the scene have still not been convicted.
The mosque now resembles an army barracks, with concrete blockades and volunteers from the community patrolling the area at Friday prayer time, shotguns and walkie-talkies at their sides, in order to protect worshippers.
Close by is the Ahmadi graveyard, but you cannot tell from the outside.
High walls and barbed wire are all you can see, as well as a sniper on the rooftop.
Earlier this year, the entire western portion of the graveyard was destroyed by gunmen who broke through the walls, demolishing many gravestones.
Now a fortress has been built to protect the Ahmadi dead.
Meanwhile, Masood Ahmad waits for his verdict.
"I used to read about minorities being targeted in the newspapers," he says. "Now I'm in the news."
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Allegations that Conservative chief whip Andrew Mitchell called some police officers plebs during a row in Downing Street cost him his government job. | But the scandal has since embroiled the police in accusations that they have not been sufficiently robust in disciplining officers accused of trying to discredit the MP as part of a campaign to "toxify" his party.
BBC News looks back at how the row unfolded.
19 September 2012
Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell, then the government's chief whip, has a row with police officers who would not let him cycle through Downing Street's main gate.
20 September 2012
The story is revealed in the Sun newspaper, which reports that he swore at the officers and called them "plebs" who should learn their place.
21 September 2012
Mr Mitchell denies using the word "plebs" but apologises for being disrespectful.
24 September 2012
Mr Mitchell says he wants to "draw a line" under the incident, telling reporters: "I did not use the words that have been attributed to me."
But speculation about the exact words he did use continues. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg urges him to explain "fully and in detail his version of events".
25 September 2012
A police log of the incident, appearing to confirm previous reports and contradict Mr Mitchell's position, is leaked to the Daily Telegraph.
7 October 2012
Mr Mitchell remains in his job, but members of the Police Federation wear "PC Pleb" T-shirts at demonstrations against police funding cuts at the Conservative Party conference.
12 October 2012
Three local representatives of the Police Federation meet Mr Mitchell at his Sutton Coldfield constituency office for 45 minutes, telling reporters afterwards that he had still not disclosed the precise words he used in the incident.
They criticise him for implying that the Downing Street officers' accounts are not accurate. The chief whip has "no option but to resign", one representative concludes.
17 October 2012
David Cameron tells Parliament that what Mr Mitchell "did and said" was wrong, but since he had apologised and the officer involved had accepted his apology, he should be allowed to get on with his job.
But opposition leader Ed Miliband says that, despite the apology, Mr Mitchell is "toast".
19 October 2012
Mr Mitchell resigns, claiming the "damaging publicity" means he can no longer do his job.
In his resignation letter to the PM, he writes: "The offending comment and the reason for my apology to the police was my parting remark 'I thought you guys were supposed to f***ing help us.'
"It was obviously wrong of me to use such bad language and I am very sorry about it and grateful to the police officer for accepting my apology."
16 December 2012
A police constable with the diplomatic protection group is arrested on suspicion of misconduct in a public office, and suspended from his duties in connection with accounts of the Downing Street incident.
18 December 2012
CCTV footage, broadcast on Channel 4 news, casts doubt on the police officers' version of events.
The police log said Mr Mitchell's use of a number of expletives had left members of the public looking on "visibly shocked". But the footage suggests that no-one other than the officers involved were within earshot.
Mr Mitchell says he has fallen victim to a "stitch-up".
19 December 2012
Scotland Yard says it is opening an investigation into claims that an officer gave false evidence.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe says: "The allegations in relation to this case are extremely serious. For the avoidance of doubt, I am determined there will be a ruthless search for the truth - no matter where the truth takes us."
In the ensuing months, eight people are arrested and bailed under the investigation, codenamed Operation Alice, including five police officers.
7 March 2013
Mr Mitchell launches libel action against the Sun over its reporting of the "plebgate" incident.
19 September 2013
A year after the original incident, former home secretary Jack Straw criticises the "inordinate and unjustified" length of time the investigation has taken.
15 October 2013
Independent Police Complaints Commission deputy chair Deborah Glass says the IPCC disagrees with police chiefs' decision not to hold misconduct hearings on the three Federation officers involved in the October 2012 meeting with Mr Mitchell.
The IPCC releases a transcript of the meeting - from a recording made by Mr Mitchell - which shows that, while he admitted swearing, Mr Mitchell denied using the word "pleb" or insulting the police.
However, after the meeting the three officers said he had refused to elaborate on what had happened and should resign.
Home Secretary Theresa May says it would be "quite wrong" to take no action against those officers. The chief constables of their forces say they will welcome the opportunity to appear before the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee to explain why no action was taken against them.
16 October 2013
David Cameron says Mr Mitchell is "owed an apology" by police over the row.
It also emerges that an internal report which ultimately found no misconduct case to answer by the three officers who met Mr Mitchell at his constituency office had initially proposed disciplinary action.
21 October 2013
The three officers, Ken MacKaill, Stuart Hinton and Chris Jones, apologise for their "poor judgement" in talking to the media following their meeting with Mr Mitchell. They say they did not "plan or intend to mislead anyone about what occurred".
But friends of Mr Mitchell tell the BBC the statement is "a regrettable non-apology".
23 October 2013
The three Federation officers insist to the Home Affairs Select Committee that they do not owe Mr Mitchell an apology. They say they stand by their "accurate" account of the meeting and Mr Jones says he is "not convinced we have done anything wrong".
But the head of West Mercia Police tells the committee the handling of the affair was "clumsy" and the internal report and its recommendations should be independently reviewed.
27 October 2013
Sir Hugh Orde, head of the Association of Chief Police Officers, says the conduct of the three officers fell "below that required" and they should apologise.
31 October 2013
Three civilians and five police officers on bail over the plebgate affair are re-bailed to a date in late November.
3 November 2013
The IPCC says it is conducting its own investigation into the conduct of the three Federation officers - Ken MacKaill, Stuart Hinton, and Chris Jones - saying there were "procedural irregularities" in the earlier internal police probe.
It also emerges that the trio will be called back before the Home Affairs Select Committee. Its chairman, Labour's Keith Vaz, says MPs were "appalled" by the officers' original evidence and that if they did not "correct the record" they would be in contempt of Parliament.
6 November 2013
Stuart Hinton apologises to the the home affairs committee for an "inadvertent error" in his earlier evidence. He also says he regrets the "distress" felt by Mr Mitchell and his family during the whole saga. Chris Jones, also appearing before the committee, insists he did not mislead MPs over his disciplinary record.
26 November 2013
PC Keith Wallis is charged with misconduct in a public office, accused of falsely claiming to have witnessed the incident in an email to his MP. But prosecutors say there is insufficient evidence to show an officer in Downing Street lied in his account of what happened.
Separately, the Independent Police Complaints Commission says five members of the Metropolitan Police's Diplomatic Protection Group will face gross misconduct proceedings linked to the subsequent row, meaning they could lose their jobs. The BBC understands that the officer at the Downing Street gates on the night of the incident is not one of the five.
4 December 2013
PC Toby Rowland, the police officer who was on duty at Downing Street, says he is going to sue Mr Mitchell for libel over comments he made to the media following the incident.
16 December 2013
PC Keith Wallis appears at Westminster Magistrates' Court charged with misconduct in a public office, accused of falsely claiming to have witnessed the incident. He did not enter a plea.
10 January 2014
PC Keith Wallis admits misconduct.
5 February 2014
Metropolitan Police chief Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe meets Mr Mitchell to apologise for PC Keith Wallis's role in the affair.
6 February 2014
PC Keith Wallis is sentenced to 12 months in prison. Passing sentence, Mr Justice Sweeney said Wallis had been guilty of "sustained, and in significant measure, devious misconduct which fell far below the standards expected of a police officer".
26 February 2014
PCs Keith Wallis and James Glanville are sacked for gross misconduct. The Met said Mr Glanville was dismissed for passing information about the incident to the Sun newspaper.
27 April 2014
It emerges that PC Toby Rowland is seeking up to £200,000 in damages from Mr Mitchell for suggesting he was not telling the truth about the September 2012 altercation by the Downing Street gates.
In documents submitted to the High Court, lawyers for PC Rowland justify the claim on the grounds that his reputation has been damaged by Mr Mitchell's remarks and he suffered "great distress, humiliation and upset".
30 April 2014
PC Gillian Weatherley is dismissed for gross misconduct by the Metropolitan Police over leaks to the press about the "plebgate" affair.
21 May 2014
PC Susan Johnson, a Metropolitan Police officer serving with the diplomatic protection group, is sacked for gross misconduct over the press leaks.
6 October 2014
A High Court ruling finds there was no proper final report prepared for the investigation into the three Police Federation officers who met Mr Mitchell. That probe was conducted by West Mercia Police but supervised by the IPCC.
The High Court also quashed the IPCC's decision to investigate the case itself. An IPCC spokesman said it "welcomed" the ruling that the decisions of the three police forces had been "invalid" and said it would make a "fresh assessment" of the case.
3 November 2014
The IPCC again says it is to investigate three Police Federation officers over the "plebgate" affair, having re-assessed the case.
17 November 2014
The libel trial involving Mr Mitchell and former PC Toby Rowland gets under way in the High Court in London. Lawyers for Mr Mitchell tell the court that the police spun a "web of lies" that led to a "vitriolic" campaign against their client.
19 November 2014
Musician and aid campaigner Sir Bob Geldof is cited as a character witness for Mr Mitchell, a former international development secretary. In a written statement submitted to the court, Sir Bob describes Mr Mitchell as a "good man" and "an advocate for the less fortunate", adding that he had never heard him "use the ridiculous and archaic expression 'pleb'".
20 November 2014
A former police officer who was on duty during the "plebgate" incident denies wishing to harm Mr Mitchell or the government. Gillian Weatherley, who was sacked over leaks of alleged details of the row, tells the court that text messages she sent suggesting she could "topple the Tory government" were meant to be sarcastic.
24 November 2014
A police officer who accompanied Mr Mitchell on two foreign trips says the former cabinet minister was "unpleasant until he got what he wanted". Insp Duncan Johnston, who travelled with the then international development secretary in 2011, tells the court Mr Mitchell would "erupt" but later be charming. Separately, two former Conservative whips state in written evidence that Mr Mitchell had been unable to recall the exact words he had used in the days and weeks after the event.
27 November 2014
Former government chief whip Andrew Mitchell loses his High Court libel action. Mr Mitchell had sued News Group Newspapers over the story in the Sun in 2012 which claimed he called PC Toby Rowland a "pleb". Mr Mitchell acknowledged that he had used bad language but maintained he had not used that word. Delivering his ruling, Mr Justice Mitting said he was satisfied that the MP did say the word "pleb"
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Narendra Modi has scored a resounding victory in the Indian general election, securing a second five-year term. The BBC's Soutik Biswas looks at the main takeaways. | Soutik BiswasIndia correspondent
1. The second landside is all about Narendra Modi
India's polarising prime minister made this an election all about himself.
He should have faced some anti-incumbency. Joblessness has risen to a record high, farm incomes have plummeted and industrial production has slumped. Many Indians were hit hard by the currency ban (also known as demonetisation), which was designed to flush out undeclared wealth, and there were complaints about what critics said was a poorly-designed and complicated uniform sales tax.
The results prove that people are not yet blaming Mr Modi for this.
On the stump, the prime minister repeatedly told people that he needed more than five years to undo more than "60 years of mismanagement". Voters agreed to give him more time.
Many Indians seem to believe that Mr Modi is a kind of messiah who will solve all their problems. A survey by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), a Delhi-based think tank, a third of BJP voters said they would have supported another party if Mr Modi was not the prime ministerial candidate.
"This tells you how much this vote was for Mr Modi, more than the BJP. This election was all about Mr Modi's leadership above all else," Milan Vaishnav, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, told me.
In a sense, Mr Modi's second successive landslide win echoes Ronald Reagan's abiding popularity as US president in the 1980s, when he somehow escaped blame for his country's economic woes. Reagan was called the Great Communicator and for being a "teflon" president whose mistakes never stuck to him. Mr Modi enjoys a similar reputation.
Many say Mr Modi has made India's elections more presidential. But strong prime ministers have often overshadowed their parties - Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Indira Gandhi are some obvious examples.
"There is no question that Mr Modi is the most popular politician in India since Indira Gandhi. He is peerless when it comes to the national stage at the present," says Dr Vaishnav.
The 2014 win was partly a vote in anger against the corruption-tainted Congress party. Thursday's win is an affirmation for Mr Modi. He has become the first leader since 1971 to secure a single party majority twice in a row. "This is a victory for Modi and his vision of a new India," says Mahesh Rangarajan, a professor of history at Ashoka University.
2. A cocktail of development and nationalism worked
A combination of nationalist rhetoric, subtle religious polarisation and a slew of welfare programmes helped Mr Modi to coast to a second successive win.
In a bitter and divisive campaign, Mr Modi effortlessly fused nationalism and development. He created binaries: the nationalists (his supporters) versus the anti-nationals (his political rivals and critics); the watchman (Modi himself, protecting the country on "land, air, and outer space") versus the entitled and the corrupt (an obvious dig at the main opposition Congress party).
Aligned to this, deftly, was the promise of development. Mr Modi's targeted welfare schemes for the poor - homes, toilets, credit, cooking gas - have used technology for speedy delivery. However, the quality of these services and how much they have helped ameliorate deprivation is debatable.
Mr Modi also mined national security and foreign policy as vote-getters in a manner never seen in a general election in recent history.
After a suicide attack - claimed by Pakistan-based militants - which killed more than 40 Indian paramilitaries in disputed Kashmir and the retaliatory air strike against Pakistan in the run-up to the election, Mr Modi successfully convinced the masses that the country would be secure if he remained in power.
People having no obvious interest in foreign policy - farmers, traders, labourers - told us during our campaign travels that India had won the respect of the outside world under Mr Modi.
"It is all right if there's little development, but Modi is keeping the nation secure and keeping India's head high," a voter in the eastern city of Kolkata told me.
3. Modi's win signals a major shift in politics
Mr Modi's persona has become larger than his cadre-based party, and a symbol of hope and aspiration for many.
Under Mr Modi and his powerful aide Amit Shah, the BJP has developed into a ruthless party machine. "The geographical expansion of the BJP is a very significant development," says Mahesh Rangarajan.
Traditionally, the BJP has found its strongest support in India's populous Hindi-speaking states in the north. (Of the 282 seats the party won in 2014, 193 came from these states.) The exceptions are Gujarat, Mr Modi's home state and a BJP bastion, and Maharashtra, where the BJP has governed in alliance with a local party.
But since Mr Modi became PM, the BJP has formed governments in key north-eastern states like Assam and Tripura, which are primarily Assamese and Bengali-speaking.
And in this election, the BJP - where it contested more seats than the Congress - has emerged as a force to reckon with in non-Hindi speaking states like Orissa and West Bengal in the east.
The party's modest presence in southern India still doesn't make it a truly pan-Indian party like the Congress of yore, but the BJP is moving towards it.
Twenty years ago when it was in power under Atal Behari Vajpayee, the BJP seemed content being the first among equals - the largest party in a group of parties which tried to run a stable government.
Under Mr Modi, the BJP commands an overwhelming majority in parliament as the first party, and there are no equals.
He and Amit Shah have adopted an aggressive take-no-prisoners style of politics. The party is not a seasonal machine that comes alive during elections. It appears to be in permanent political campaign mode.
Political scientist Suhas Palshikar believes India could be moving towards a one-party dominant state like the Congress in the past.
He calls it the "second dominant party system", with the BJP leading the pack, and the main opposition Congress remaining "weak and nominal" and the regional parties losing ground.
4. Nationalism and yearning for a strongman played a key role
Mr Modi's strident nationalism as a main campaign plank seems to have overruled the more pressing economic problems facing voters.
Some analysts believe that under Mr Modi, India could be inching towards a more "ethnic democracy", which requires the "mobilisation of the majority in order to preserve the ethnic nation".
This would look more like Israel which sociologist Sammy Smooha characterised as a state that "endeavours to combine an ethnic identity (Jewish) and a parliamentary system drawing its inspiration from Western Europe".
Will Hindu nationalism become the default mode of Indian politics and society?
It will not be easy - India thrives on diversity. Hinduism is a diverse faith. Social and linguistic differences hold India together. Democracy is an additional glue.
The BJP's strand of strident Hindu nationalism, conflating Hinduism and patriotism, may not appeal to all Indians. "There's no other place in the world where diversity is so spectral and a drive to homogenise so fraught," says Prof Rangarajan.
Also India's shift to the right is not unique to India - it's happening with the new right in the Republican Party in the US, and the central ground of French and German politics has shifted rightwards.
India's rightward shift is clearly part of a wider trend where the nature of nationalism is being redefined and cultural identity is being given renewed emphasis.
How valid are fears that India is sliding into a majoritarian state under Mr Modi?
He is not the first leader to be called a fascist and authoritarian by his critics; Mrs Gandhi was called both when she suspended civil liberties and imposed the Emergency in the mid-1970s. People voted her out after two years.
Mr Modi is a strongman, and people possibly love him for that.
A 2017 report by the CSDS showed that respondents who supported democracy in India had dropped from 70% to 63% between 2005 and 2017. A Pew report in 2017 found that 55% of respondents backed a "governing system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts".
But the yearning for a strongman is not unique to India. Look at Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Hungary's Viktor Orban, Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro or Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.
5. India's Grand Old Party faces an existential crisis
The Congress has suffered a second successive drubbing but for now is likely to remain the second largest party nationally.
But it's way behind the BJP and is facing a major crisis: the shrinking of its geographical space.
In Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Bengal, India's most populous region, the party is virtually non-existent. The party is invisible in southern states like Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. In the industrially developed west of India, the party last won a state election in Gujarat in 1990, and hasn't been in power in Maharashtra since Mr Modi became PM.
Several questions are going to be asked after a second successive general election debacle. How can the party become more acceptable to more allies? How will the party be run? How does the party reduce its dependence on the Gandhi dynasty and open itself to younger leaders? (The Congress is still a party of second and third generation leaders in several states.) How does Congress build a grassroots network of workers to take on the BJP?
"The Congress will likely muddle along, as it has in the last several election cycles. It is not a party known for deep introspection. But there are enough two-party states in India where the Congress is at odds with the BJP to create a floor for the Congress," says Milan Vaishnav.
Political scientist Yogendra Yadav, who's also a politician these days, believes the Congress has outlived its utility and "must die". But parties are capable of reinvention and renewal. Only the future will tell whether the Congress can rebuild itself from the ruins.
6. A mixed future for India's regional parties
In the bellwether state of Uttar Pradesh, which sends more MPs to parliament than any other, the BJP is looking at a repeat of its stunning 2014 performance when it won 71 of 80 seats. It is one of India's most socially divided and economically disadvantaged states.
This time, Mr Modi's party was expected to face stiff competition from a formidable alliance of powerful regional parties, the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party, which was aptly named the "mahagatbandhan" or grand alliance.
Mr Modi's charisma and chemistry appear to have triumphed over the hard-nosed "social arithmetic" forged by these two regional parties who have always counted on the faithful votes of a section of lower caste Indians and untouchables (formerly known as Dalits). That faith is now broken, and it also proves that caste arithmetic is not immutable.
India's regional parties must now rethink their strategies and offer a more compelling economic and social vision. Otherwise, more and more of their own voters will abandon them.
Read more from Soutik Biswas
Follow Soutik on Twitter at @soutikBBC
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Cuba has faced more than 50 years of US sanctions. Now, for the first time, a unique drug developed on the communist island is being tested in New York state. But some American cancer patients are already taking it - by defying the embargo and flying to Havana for treatment. | Judy Ingels and her family are in Cuba for just six days. They have time to go sightseeing and try out the local cuisine. Judy, a keen photographer, enjoys capturing the colonial architecture of Old Havana.
And while she is in the country, Ingels, 74, will have her first injections of Cimavax, a drug shown in Cuban trials to extend the lives of lung cancer patients by months, and sometimes years.
By travelling to Havana from her home in California, she is breaking the law.
The US embargo against Cuba has been in place for more than five decades, and though relations thawed under President Obama, seeking medical treatment in Cuba is still not allowed for US citizens.
"I'm not worried," Ingels says. "For the first time I have real hope."
She has stage four lung cancer and was diagnosed in December 2015. "My oncologist in the United States says I'm his best patient, but I have this deadly disease."
He does not know she is in Cuba. When she asked him about Cimavax, he had not heard of it.
"But we've done a lot of research - I've read good things," Ingels says. Since January, Cimavax has been tested on patients in Buffalo, New York state, but it isn't yet available in the US.
Ingels, her husband Bill and daughter Cindy are staying at the La Pradera International Health Centre, west of Havana. It treats mostly foreign, paying patients like Ingels, and with its pool complex, palm trees and open walkways, La Pradera feels more like a tropical hotel than a hospital.
This trip from their home in California, together with a supply of Cimavax to take back to the US, will cost the Ingels family more than $15,000 (£12,000).
Cimavax fights cancer by stimulating an immune response against a protein in the blood that triggers the growth of lung cancer. After an induction period, patients receive a monthly dose by injection.
It's a product of Cuba's biotechnology industry, nurtured by former President Fidel Castro since the early 1980s.
Ironically, Cuba's biotech innovations can partly be explained by the US embargo - something Castro continually railed against. It meant Cuba had to produce the drugs it could not access or afford. And medications like Cimavax - low-tech products that could be administered in a rural setting - were developed to fit the Cuban context.
Now the industry employs around 22,000 scientists, technicians and engineers, and sells drugs in many parts of the world - but not in the US.
And although the Cubans will not reveal the cost of producing Cimavax, it is cheaper than other treatments.
For Cuba's residents, all health care is free. One beneficiary is Lucrecia de Jesus Rubillo, 65, who lives on the fifth floor of a block of flats in the east of Havana
Last September she was given two or three months to live. What began as pain in Lucrecia's leg, was diagnosed as stage-four lung cancer that had spread.
She had chemotherapy. "That was really very hard," she says. "It gave me nausea, and it hurt. But my kids asked me to fight, so I did."
After radiotherapy, Lucrecia began Cimavax injections. Now she is strong enough to walk up the five flights of stairs to her home, and her persistent cough has diminished. She feels better, more hopeful, and is thinking about what to do next.
"Perhaps I'll go to Spain to visit my kid," she says. "I feel happy, and I'm still dreaming of the future, but I also feel sadness. I've had a lot of friends who've died of cancer, and they never had the chance I'm having with these injections. I feel privileged."
Her doctor is Elia Neninger, an oncologist at the Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital in Havana. Neninger is one of the principal clinicians to trial Cimavax on patients since the 1990s.
"Lucrecia arrived incapacitated by her disease in a wheelchair," Neninger remembers. "Now the tumour on her lung has disappeared, and the lesions on her liver aren't there either. With Cimavax, she's in a maintenance phase."
In Cuba, specialists like Neninger do not talk about curing cancer - they talk about controlling it and transforming it into a chronic disease. She has treated hundreds of patients with Cimavax.
"I never thought I'd work on something that would improve the lives of so many people," she says. "I have stage-four lung cancer patients who are still alive 10 years after their diagnosis."
But mostly Cimavax is proven to extend life for months, not years. And it does not help everyone. In trials, around 20% of patients haven't responded, Neninger says, often because the disease is very advanced, or they have associated illnesses that make treatment more difficult.
Nonetheless, Dr Kelvin Lee is impressed. He is the Chair of Immunology at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, where the American trials of Cimavax are taking place.
It is the first time a Cuban medication has been trialled in the US, and required special permission because the embargo prohibits most collaboration and trade.
Cancer immunotherapy is getting more expensive in the US, Lee says. A cheap vaccine that can be administered at primary care level is very attractive. And he thinks it is possible that Cimavax could be used to prevent lung cancer, too.
"If we could vaccinate the high-risk smokers to prevent them from developing lung cancer, that would have an enormous public health impact both in the United States and worldwide."
This has not been proven, however, and the initial US trials of Cimavax only began in January.
There is political uncertainty, too. On the campaign trail before his election, President Trump said he would reverse the thaw with Cuba that began under the Obama administration, unless there was change on the island, which is governed as a one-party state.
"Our demands will include religious and political freedom for the Cuban people, and the freeing of political prisoners," Trump said on the campaign trail in Miami.
So far, Cuba has not made it to the top of his in-tray. There is a large constituency of Americans who believe that Cuba does not deserve the kind of recognition and status the association with the Roswell Park Cancer Institute brings.
Find out more
But Lee thinks political arguments against US-Cuba collaboration are misplaced.
"The gas we put in our cars, the iPhones we tweet from, the shoes we buy our kids - all come from countries that the United States has fundamental differences with regarding women's rights, freedom of speech, personal liberties. Yet that has never stopped us from working with them in areas that benefit the people in both countries."
For now Bill Ingels, Judy's husband, isn't worried about falling foul of US authorities.
"I told them I was coming for educational purposes," he says. "And I am learning about cancer and medication! I'm basically a very honest person, but if I have to, I will lie."
Ingels will not know if the vaccine has made a difference until she has a scan in three months.
"We feel pretty positive, and we thought this would be a great experience and journey for my family to take together. It's the first time I've felt up since I was diagnosed."
Cindy Ingels, Judy's daughter, is a nurse - she will administer the Cimavax shots to her mother back home in California.
"Even if she remains stable - that it maintains the tumour size, and it doesn't worsen - we'd be happy with that," she says. "If the tumour decreases from what it is now, that would really be a miracle."
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The UK's largest warship marks "a new phase in our naval history", the Queen has said, as the vessel was officially named in her honour at a ceremony at Fife's Rosyth Dockyard. | A bottle of whisky was smashed on the hull of the 65,000-tonne HMS Queen Elizabeth - the first of two new Royal Navy aircraft carriers being built.
The Red Arrows flew over the dockyard before the ship was officially named.
First Sea Lord Admiral George Zambellas said the ship was "fit for a Queen".
"HMS Queen Elizabeth will be a national instrument of power and a national symbol of authority," he said in a speech.
"That means she will be a national icon too, all the while keeping the great in Great Britain and the royal in Royal Navy."
'Inspiration and pride'
Addressing the audience, the Queen said the "innovative and first class" warship, the largest ever to be built in the UK, ushered in an "exciting new era".
"In sponsoring this new aircraft carrier, I believe the Queen Elizabeth will be a source of inspiration and pride for us all," she said.
"May God bless her and all who sail in her."
About 3,500 people involved in the design and construction of the carrier watched the celebrations, alongside dignitaries and politicians including Prime Minister David Cameron, First Minister Alex Salmond and former prime minister Gordon Brown.
Mr Cameron said it was a "very proud day" for Scotland and the UK, while Mr Salmond said it was a "huge day" for the workers and their families.
Ian Booth, of the Aircraft Carrier Alliance which is overseeing the ship's construction, said it was a "historic occasion".
"The ship truly reflects the very best of British design and ingenuity," he said in a speech.
The Red Arrows flypast was followed by a procession of three generations of Royal Navy aircraft, including a historic 1950s de Havilland Sea Vixen fighter - the last and only flying aircraft of its kind in the world.
The Queen oversaw the ceremony by pressing a button to release a bottle of Islay malt whisky - suspended at the front of the ship - to smash on to the hull.
The naming ceremony, a naval tradition dating back thousands of years, marked the first time in more than 15 years that the Queen has christened a Royal Navy warship.
Six shipyards in the UK including Tyne, Rosyth and Appledore have been involved in building parts of the carrier.
More than 10,000 people at more than 100 companies have worked on HMS Queen Elizabeth, which has been beset by construction and design delays.
The estimated cost of the vessel and its sister ship is £6.2bn, well over the initial projected cost of £3.65bn.
The warship is as long as 25 buses and can carry 40 jets and helicopters at a time. It will have a permanent crew of almost 1,600 when it enters service in 2020.
Mr Booth described it as a "floating military city that can deploy aircraft, that can act as a disaster relief centre".
Analysis
Glenn Campbell, BBC Scotland political correspondent
It so happens that the Royal Navy has chosen to name and float its new aircraft carrier on American Independence Day.
Yet this ceremony signals the UK's intention to continue to independently project military power in the world for decades to come.
Albeit that the largest warship ever built in Britain will carry fighter jets made largely in the US.
But one question that arises is: in whose name will HMS Queen Elizabeth and its air crews operate when they come into service in 2020?
Will it be the flagship of the UK as it currently exists or only for England, Wales and Northern Ireland if Scotland chooses its own independence in September's referendum?
The UK government argues that the union offers Scotland greater security as well as greater job prospects for thousands of Scottish defence workers.
The Scottish government believes NATO would guarantee an independent Scotland's defence and that shipyards such as Rosyth and Govan would continue to prosper by winning orders from both the UK and Scottish defence ministries.
The huge choice that Scotland faces looms large at the naming of a very big ship.
Major construction
The carrier has still to be fitted out and floated, to make way for the assembly of its sister ship HMS Prince of Wales.
Assembly of HMS Prince of Wales is set to begin at Rosyth later this year.
The naming of the first of the two ships comes five years after the first metal was cut on the vessel and 33 months after the first section entered the dry dock at Rosyth for assembly.
Firefighters had to be called to a fire on board HMS Elizabeth last month. A small fire had started in one of the vessel's hull compartments but fire crews only reported minor damage.
The US last month grounded all of its F-35 Lightning II fighters, the type of aircraft due to fly operationally from HMS Queen Elizabeth, after one caught fire on a runway.
The US Department of Defence (DoD) said all 97 stealth fighters would face additional engine inspections following the incident at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida on 23 June.
The F-35 is due to make its international debut at the Royal International Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford from 11 July but the DoD said it would make a final decision on whether it attends early next week.
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A river near Wrexham has been polluted with what may be a dairy product, Natural Resources Wales has said. | Environmental officials are investigating a "white substance" which can be seen in the Gwenfro river near Coedpoeth.
A spokesman said: "Our officers are investigating a pollution in the Gwenfro river near Coedpoeth.
"The pollutant may be dairy product."
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A pastoral theologian who combines a lifelong affection for traditional liturgy with a desire to commend the Christian faith to the unchurched, Stephen Cottrell has been appointed the 98th Archbishop of York, the second most senior cleric in the Church of England. | By Martin BashirReligion editor
Currently the Bishop of Chelmsford, he succeeds John Sentamu, the highest ranking BAME cleric, who retires as Archbishop of York next summer.
Educated at a non-selective secondary school in Essex, Stephen Cottrell went on to to secure a BA at the Polytechnic of Central London before undergoing ordination training at St Stephen's House in Oxford.
He was ordained priest in 1985 before beginning his ministry at Christchurch, Forest Hill in south east London, and then moved onto the dioceses of Chichester and Wakefield.
His emphasis upon evangelism and outreach to the unchurched brought him to the attention of senior clergy and he was nominated area Bishop of Reading in 2004 after Jeffrey John controversially withdrew his nomination to the post.
John was pressured to stand aside by then Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who feared that elevating an openly gay priest to the position of bishop was likely to split the Anglican Communion. Stephen Cottrell had supported Jeffrey John's original appointment.
After serving as Bishop of Reading for six years, he became Bishop of Chelmsford in 2010 and will take up his new post in June 2020.
'Nurture your inner slob'
He has written widely on evangelism, discipleship and spirituality, including a series of meditations on Holy Week entitled The Things He Carried (2008) and a book of reflections on the paintings of Stanley Spencer, called Christ In The Wilderness (2012).
His approach to prayer and contemplation was emphasized in his book Do Nothing To Change Your Life (2007) in which he challenged the notion that meaning and value can only be found in activity and productivity.
Instead, he offered a blunt alternative.
"Switch off the TV," he wrote, "put this book down; shut your eyes; breathe deeply; do nothing but listen to the things you can't hear. Nurture your inner slob. You might even find you begin to pray - by enjoying the intimacy of God's presence and the fragile beauty of each passing moment."
One area in which he has been outspoken is the issue of nuclear weapons. During the General Synod last year, Bishop Stephen said there were "no circumstances" in which the use of modern-day Trident missiles could be justified given the destruction they would cause.
"The argument," he said, "that they have worked as a deterrent is no argument at all. Our holding them only makes them seem more attractive to other nation states."
In April this year, he was signatory to a letter signed by 25 priests and bishops who opposed a service at Westminster Abbey, designed to mark 50 years of constant patrols by the UK's nuclear deterrent.
Bishop Stephen said: "While I do not doubt Westminster Abbey's good intentions to make this a celebration of those men and women who serve in the Royal Navy… it is impossible not to view this service as appearing also to celebrate the weapons themselves."
Despite protests, the service went ahead as planned.
Bishop Stephen says he's humbled and honoured to have been appointed Archbishop of York. But friends say that, when he takes up his post at York Minster, he is likely to regret the increased distance from his other favourite place of worship. He is a lifelong supporter of north London's Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.
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Pizza can now be bought using the bitcoin virtual currency. | The Pizza for Coins service has been set up by two programmers as a way to boost use of the digital cash.
The service acts as a middleman and converts bitcoins into US dollars that are used to pay for food. It charges a small fee to do the currency exchange.
Paying via bitcoins can also delay an order, warn the site owners, saying the conversion can mean pizza takes up to 80 minutes to be delivered.
While orders for pizza are placed on the Pizza for Coins site, once payment is made they are funnelled to the website of Domino's pizza to be made and delivered. Links to other pizza companies, such as Pizza Hut and Papa John, would be added soon, said programmers Matt Burkinshaw and Riley Alexander in an explanatory note on the site.
The site, which only works with US addresses, currently offers a limited range of pizzas and toppings. A medium pizza with two toppings costs about 0.71 bitcoins (£12).
Paying via the digital currency also adds a 0.09 bitcoin (£1.50) premium to the price of a pizza to convert the digital money to real dollars. The service's owners said this conversion charge might change as exchange rates for bitcoins had fluctuated widely. If the service proved successful, charges would be reduced, said its creators.
Bitcoins first appeared in 2009 and are closely linked to the global network of computers that supports the currency and its users. Many people generate or "mine" the coins by participating in that network and a growing number of web stores and online firms accept bitcoins as payment.
They have become a very widely used alternative payments system and one bitcoin is currently worth about £17 ($26).
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Central Berlin is bristling with police officers. | By Jenny HillBBC Berlin correspondent
Bemused tourists stop at security cordons to stare at the armoured police vehicles and rooftop snipers around the capital's luxury Adlon hotel.
Germany's security services are taking no chances with its controversial guest.
This will be a stormy state visit.
Even before Recep Erdogan's plane descended - through airspace closed to private aircraft - the protests had begun.
Tens of thousands of people are expected to take to the streets during the course of his visit.
Reporters without borders were the first to stage a demonstration. Mr Erdogan has infuriated the German government - and enraged many Germans - by locking up journalists and critics of his regime. Among them are five people with German passports.
The plight of reporters like Deniz Yucel who was jailed for a year without charge has strained relations between Ankara and Berlin.
But Mr Erdogan and his wife stepped down from their plane to a red carpet welcome.
He carries with him high ambitions: to reset the Turkish-German relationship and smooth over profound differences of opinion and policy.
Don't expect too much.
A difficult start
On Thursday morning Mr Erdogan urged Berlin to designate the Fethullah Gulen movement a terror organisation - he blames the group for a coup attempt in 2016. The call, published in a German newspaper, serves to highlight existing tension.
Germany has said it needs more proof linking supporters of the US based preacher to the attempt to overthrow Mr Erdogan's government.
Mr Erdogan will also open a new mosque in Cologne, run by the Turkish organisation Ditib. The movement is controversial in Germany, where there are concerns about radicalisation and anti-Semitism in some of its mosques, and the city's mayor Henriette Reke has already said she will boycott the event.
And perhaps it's rather telling that there isn't a rush for places at a state banquet due to be held in the Turkish leader's honour at the presidential palace.
Chancellor Angela Merkel won't be at the dinner hosted by Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
Neither will most of her ministers.
Three million reasons to get along
Mrs Merkel will, however, hold three meetings with Mr Erdogan.
Her government is conscious of the huge Turkish diaspora in Germany, which is home to some three million people with Turkish heritage.
While he continues to be a controversial figure among the community, two thirds of those who voted remotely in this summer's Turkish election supported Mr Erdogan.
His role in the Middle East, particularly with regard to Syria, matters here too. The conflict will be high on the agenda.
Mr Erdogan may be in the weaker position: a struggling economy, exacerbated by a diplomatic fallout with the US, means he is after help and support. Germany is an important trading partner for Turkey but that economic relationship goes both ways.
And, of course, the EU's migrant deal with Turkey, facilitated largely by Mrs Merkel, is still at stake.
Under the 2016 agreement, people arriving in Greece to seek asylum are sent back to Turkey in return for billions of euros in aid. Mrs Merkel still views Turkey - and the deal - as playing a vital role in reducing migration into the EU.
Mr Erdogan says he wants closer ties for what he says is the "sake of prosperity and the future of both countries."
It is a relationship which matters to Angela Merkel, despite the conflicts.
But given her own diminishing power and the contempt in which Mr Erdogan is held here, her welcome will be a cautious one.
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A man who fell and broke his hip while on his way to buy a lottery ticket in New Jersey has scooped the $1m jackpot - after buying a ticket at the hospital he was taken to for treatment. | Earl Livingston, 87, from Blackpool, was given the chance to join Jefferson Stratford Hospital's lottery pool.
He entered the state's Mega Millions pool with 141 other people.
Mr Livingston will need a hip replacement but is said to be coping well with the surprise news.
He thanked hospital staff who had helped him join the pool after hearing his story, and wished them a "happy long life".
His niece, Bobbie Mickle, said she had thought her uncle was "confused" when he told her of his $1m win while she was visiting him in hospital.
She told NBC10 TV that it was only when hospital staff came in to congratulate him that she accepted his story.
"I was, like, 'Wow, he really did win!'" she said.
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A second boy has been arrested in connection with a fire that badly damaged a primary school. | The nursery and a classroom used by Year 3 pupils at Rift House Primary School in Hartlepool were destroyed in the blaze on Sunday.
A 14-year-old boy has been arrested on suspicion of arson, police said.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion of arson on Tuesday. Both have been released with no bail conditions.
Police have appealed for anyone with information to contact them.
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Cuba has long been renowned for its medical diplomacy - thousands of its doctors work in healthcare missions around the world, earning the country billions of dollars in cash. But according to a new report, some of the doctors themselves say conditions can be nightmarish - controlled by minders, subject to a curfew and posted to extremely dangerous places, James Badcock reports. | For Dayli Coro, medicine was a calling.
"I studied medicine out of vocation. I used to sleep between three and four hours because I studied so hard. I worked hard in my first year of practice, I took on a lot of extra shifts. And now here I am. I cannot be a doctor in Cuba. It's very frustrating."
Dayli, now 31 years old, wanted to be an intensive care specialist. She says that after graduating, she was told that if she went on a medical mission to Venezuela, she would gain experience in her chosen field and that it would count as her three years of obligatory social service, which all graduates have to complete in Cuba before gaining full-status posts.
She agreed to join what Havana calls its "internationalist missions", following a path trodden by hundreds of thousands of Cuban doctors. Since 1960, their medical work overseas has been held up by the communist government as a symbol of its solidarity with people all over the world. Fidel Castro described the medics as Cuba's "army of white coats".
As well as a source of great pride and prestige, it is also an economic lifeline for the regime. The scheme earns Cuba much-needed foreign currency.
With more than 30,000 Cuban doctors currently active in 67 countries - many in Latin America and Africa, but also European nations including Portugal and Italy - Cuba's authorities draw up strict rules in an attempt to prevent citizens defecting once abroad.
The wages on offer were another strong incentive for Dayli, who is originally from the small Cuban city of Camagüey, to join up. Going from a doctor's salary on the island of just $15 a month in 2011, she says she was paid $125 monthly for the first six months in Venezuela, a figure that rose to $250 after six months and $325 during her third year. Her family in Cuba also received a bonus of $50 a month.
According to a report by Prisoners Defenders, a Spain-based NGO that campaigns for human rights in Cuba and is linked to the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) opposition group, doctors on average receive between 10% and 25% of the salary paid by the host countries, with the rest being kept by Cuba's authorities.
Dayli says she voluntarily signed a contract for a three-year stint, but she neither had time to read it, nor was she given a personal copy.
In October 2011, the young doctor was posted to a clinic in the Venezuelan town of El Sombrero. The placement was part of the Barrio Adentro (Inside the Neighbourhood) scheme, which has distributed Cuban doctors around disadvantaged parts of the South American country since 2003 as a symbol of Cuban support for the regime of the late President Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro. Venezuela pays for this and other services by Cuban workers with oil.
Dayli says she found herself in a virtual war zone - one in which she became accustomed to having a gun pointed at her.
Venezuela was at that time in the midst of a crime rate spiral that has led to a murder rate of 92 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2016, according to the NGO Venezuelan Observatory of Violence. World Bank figures put the 2016 figure at 56 per 100,000, topped only by El Salvador and Honduras.
"There were many criminal gangs," says Dayli. "When they fought, they brought their injured to us, because the local Venezuelan hospital had a police presence, and we didn't. These kids would bring in a patient with 12 or 15 bullets in his body, point their guns at you and say you had to save him. If he died, you would die. That kind of thing happened on a daily basis. It was routine."
The gang members she treated were often just teenagers of 15 and 16, she says.
"I had one with a bullet through the heart, another with five in the head. Some would be alive but you knew that if they were not operated on in 20 minutes, they would die, and we didn't have the necessary conditions. We didn't even have basic medicine to treat patients there. There were supposed to be four intensive care doctors, and normally there was only one on shift."
These patients would often be transferred by ambulance to a general hospital 45 minutes away. Sometimes the gang members would order Dayli to get in the ambulance with them, she says.
"Once an ambulance was shot up by another gang and a Venezuelan doctor and the driver were killed," Dayli adds. "There was always the possibility that the rival gang might try to finish off the patient during the transfer. I had a situation where a rival gang came in and shot the patient dead.
"I was 24, a tiny, skinny girl. But in a place where there is so much violence, you develop an incredible emotional coldness."
The medical missions came under the spotlight following decision to withdraw Cuban doctors from Brazil in the wake of President Jair Bolsonaro's election last year. Bolsonaro questioned the qualifications of the Cuban doctors in the country and described their contractual situation as "slave labour", pointing out that they only kept 25% of the pay with the rest going to the Cuban government. In response, Cuban authorities strongly rejected the characterisation and said it was "not acceptable to question the dignity, professionalism and altruism" of its international medical staff.
Doctor's orders?
According to a report by the opposition-linked Cuban Prisoners Defenders, based on direct testimony from 46 doctors with experience of overseas medical missions, plus public-source information from statements by 64 other medics:
The BBC made repeated requests for a response from the Cuban government but received no reply. However, After the Cuban Prisoners Defenders report was published, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel tweeted: "Once again the empire's lies are trying to discredit Cuba's health cooperation programs with other countries, labelling them as "modern slavery" and "human trafficking" practices. They are upset about #Cuba's solidarity and example."
Last December, he offered his support for "the heroes of Cuban and Latin American medicine" to mark Latin American Medicine Day.
"To those who fight for life, it is all the same in a modest Cuban neighbourhood or a village in the Amazon. More than doctors, they are guardians of human virtue," Cuba's leader tweeted.
While Dayli at least managed to escape becoming a victim of violence in Venezuela, a compatriot and fellow woman medic was less fortunate. The 48-year-old family doctor wishes to be identified by the pseudonym "Julia" to spare her family knowledge of her ordeal.
During her five-year mission in Venezuela, Julia was stationed in Bolívar state. "I was unfortunate in that the mission co-ordinator took a shine to me, and I didn't agree to his repulsive insinuations. He had me sent away to a series of out-of-the-way locations in rural areas."
At one point, along with another Cuban woman doctor, she was posted to a shack with a clear plastic roof. One day when they saw a door had been forced open, they called the co-ordinator - but Julia says he did nothing.
Then, she says, "I woke up one night, with someone holding my mouth shut. The doctor in the other room was screaming. There were two men in balaclavas, armed with guns." Julia says she was raped by both men.
The mission co-ordinator came to take the two women away from this location, but, Julia says, he suffered no apparent consequences or official reprimand for having exposed members of his team to such danger.
Julia was taken to Caracas where she was given anti-HIV medicine and sessions with a Cuban psychologist. "Her treatment was not the best. The focus was basically 'Don't tell anyone this has happened.'"
While on a mission in Bolivia, Julia defected across the border into Chile, and now lives in Spain, where she has asked for asylum and works as a surgeon's assistant.
María (not her real name) is another female Cuban medic who says her gender made her a target. She was a 26-year-old family doctor when she was deployed to Guatemala on her first international mission in 2009.
During her journey into the state of Alta Verapaz, the mission co-ordinator began telling her about a rich man in the area, whom he referred to as an "engineer". Maria says: "He insinuated that he liked Cuban women." She says she was given a mobile phone, on which the "engineer" began calling her every day.
"I didn't answer, and I even changed the number, but still he called," Maria says. "The co-ordinator told me I would be sent home as a punishment if I didn't got to see this man, and I said that was fine with me.
"My principles were on the line. I went with the idea of helping poor people on a mission for my country. It was so frustrating - I felt scared but could not run away." María says that her passport was taken from her by her Cuban minders as soon as she arrived in Guatemala.
After two months of resisting pressure to see the man, María was switched to another mission. Some months later she heard that the "engineer" had been arrested in an army raid, accused of being a drug trafficker. María completed two years in Guatemala, and later absconded from her next mission in Brazil by signing up to a US medical parole program, aimed at persuading Cuban doctors to defect.
Dayli says she and her team in Venezuela had to meet weekly targets set by the Cuban mission leaders related to the number of lives saved, patients admitted and treatments for certain conditions.
She says she rejected what she considered unethical interference in honest medical care principles: "That is where my problems began because I wasn't going to lie. If a patient is ready to go home and take medicine orally, I am not going to have them admitted for five days on a drip. I can't say how many heart attack patients I am going to have in a given week."
According to the Prisoners Defenders report, more than half of 46 doctors with experience of overseas missions who were interviewed reported having to falsify statistics - inventing patients, patient visits and pathologies that did not exist. By exaggerating the missions' efficacy, the Cuban authorities can, the report says, demand greater levels of payment from the host country, or justify the enlargement of the operation.
Dayli says the conflict she had with her senior medical colleagues at El Sombrero over the instructions to boost treatment statistics led to her being posted in lower-level destination in the calmer, more rural town of San José de Guaribe. But the twin pressures of working without sufficient medical equipment and orders to hit artificial or impossible targets remained.
Once a woman arrived mid-labour, Dayli recalls, but the clinic did not have the right set of instruments for delivering a baby. Another time, she says she had to inset a tube into a patient by the light of her phone as there was no fuel for the generator.
She alleges her request to transfer a man with lung cancer to Caracas was denied so he would count towards her clinic's statistics.
"The health of Venezuelans is not important to the mission," she says. "I had an 11-year-old die in my arms when I was trying to put him on a breathing apparatus that was not working."
Carlos Moisés Ávila tells a similar story. The 48-year-old doctor joined one of the first missions in Venezuela in 2004.
"We each had to report a life saved every day, so sometimes I had to grab someone who was healthy and stick them on a drip," Carlos says.
"Medicines arrived from Cuba out of date, so we had to destroy and bury them before including them in the inventory as used so they could be charged for. We would get our pay from soldiers, who were sometimes months late in coming, and would also take medicines from the hospital," recalls Carlos.
Carlos says he signed up for the medical mission to improve his financial situation. Instead of getting around $20 a month in Cuba at that time, he started earning $300 in Brión, in Venezuela's Miranda province, although he says that the Cuban government was paid more than 10 times that amount for each doctor on the Barrio Adentro programme.
Dayli says that all fraternising with Venezuelans outside of work was prohibited. The Cuban doctors lived together and had to respect a 6pm curfew. The mission co-ordinator was a Cuban security service official.
"He would ask you about your roommates in weekly interviews," Dayli says. "He had network of paid local informers who would pass on any information about you in order to detect possible deserters. We weren't allowed to have a drink with a Venezuelan, or go to their house because you saved their life and to see how they're doing. If you fraternised with a dissident, you could have your mission revoked."
Carlos says during the seven years he spent in Venezuela, he saw the way medicine was used as a political tool for propaganda purposes, sometimes at the expense of physicians' ethical code.
"During the 2004 campaign for the recall referendum, we doctors were sent out door to door to give out gifts and medicines to boost support for President [Hugo] Chávez," he says. "We also had lists of patients according to their political tendencies. Chávez regime supporters were put down as having hypertension, while opposition people were listed as diabetics. The former got better treatment, and any information we gathered on locals was passed on to the mission co-ordinator, a Cuban woman who controlled all of our personal relationships and who we were allowed to meet."
A New York Times report in March quoted Cuban doctors stationed in Venezuela describing how they had worked to persuade patients to vote for the country's ruling Socialist Party, including by refusing treatment for opposition supporters and canvassing on doorsteps with gifts of medicine to bribe waverers.
In response, the Cuban government denied the claims, saying that its "honourable" doctors had saved nearly 1.5m lives in Venezuela, as well as citing their participation in the fight against Ebola in Africa and cholera in Haiti, among other examples.
Carlos also made the move from a Brazilian mission to the US, where he is now rebuilding his life in Houston, working as a medical assistant.
He is now unable to visit Cuba for fear of being imprisoned on the island for desertion. In 2018 he applied for a humanitarian visa to visit his mother who had cancer. It was denied, and he could not see her before she died. "That's the way they play it, dangling permissions and gifts in front of you so people play ball. I soon realised our mission was more political than humanitarian."
Dayli eventually came to a similar conclusion.
She returned to Cuba in 2014 where she was posted to a hospital without an intensive care unit - a clear sign, she says, that she was out of favour. Later she was suspended from medical practice for alleged absences from work - an allegation she rejects. She says she began to be treated as a dissident, with a state security agent posted outside her house who followed her everywhere. Her family and friends were harassed. Eventually, she could take it no more and is currently visiting relatives in Spain, where she may decide to try and settle.
"I wanted to be a doctor in Cuba but I have given that up now. I don't want to be a risk to my family. I spoke my mind and this is the consequence. They want soldiers, not doctors."
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Cuba has faced more than 50 years of US sanctions. Now, for the first time, a unique drug developed on the communist island is being tested in New York state. But some American cancer patients are already taking it - by defying the embargo and flying to Havana for treatment.
Why an American went to Cuba for cancer care
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The first rule when writing opinion pieces is: don't be boring. Judging by its content and the reaction it has provoked, the anonymous op-ed by a senior White House official published by the New York Times has passed this test. | Amol RajanMedia editor@amolrajanon Twitter
But has it passed the test justifying anonymity?
Journalists grant anonymity to sources on two grounds: first, to protect them; second, because there is an editorial justification for conveying their views. This applies to news reports and opinion pieces alike. Many US newspapers obey a church and state approach to news and opinion, in which the editors of news pages at the New York Times don't know what is going to be in the opinion pages. This is done for high-minded reasons, though it strikes many journalists in other countries, such as Britain, as naïve, ludicrous, undesirable and impractical.
Even if there is a separation between the news and opinion pages, the approach to anonymity is informed by those same two principles: protection of sources, and editorial justification. A reporter could have used the words in the op-ed to inform a news story; but sometimes there is so much the source wants to say that presenting it in op-ed form is better. Wrapping it in a news story doesn't necessarily add much.
This begins to address one of the criticisms made of the article. In the Washington Post, which has this week been carrying the reporting from inside the White House of its associate editor Bob Woodward, Erik Wemple argues that reporters have been getting this kind of detail from sources regularly since Trump's election. Therefore, Wemple says, the op-ed has "not a lot of news value".
That is a bad call. As Wemple goes on to say, undermining his argument, the section of the op-ed in which this senior official says members of Trump's cabinet have discussed mechanisms for removing him is clearly of tremendous interest, even if it is just confirmation of something that has been known. The fact that the "early whispers" referred to by the author are not made explicit isn't a problem. Perhaps we'll find out more about them. Just getting a whisper of these whispers is good enough.
Wemple suggests that the New York Times editors may have "missed the approximately 10,000 quotes from anonymous administration officials raising questions about Trump's capabilities". This sarcasm misses the point: readers of the New York Times may indeed have missed that. For the likes of Wemple, a media critic, news about Trump has come in a hourly deluge. For many newspaper readers and subscribers, their daily dip into a paper means they will not necessarily be aware of the 10,000 quotes that Wemple, luckily for him, has had the chance to see.
Another criticism made by Wemple is that this is "a PR stunt". Is it? And if it provided positive publicity for the New York Times, so what? There is nothing innately wrong with opinion pieces making a noise and raising the profile of a particular organ. It would only be a stunt, in the pejorative sense of that word, if the sole purpose was to boost that organ's brand. That's not the case here.
A more intriguing argument is that made by David Frum in The Atlantic. He says that the author of the op-ed has provoked a "constitutional crisis". They have "throw[n] the government of the United States into even more dangerous turmoil. He or she has enflamed the paranoia of the president and empowered the president's wilfulness".
President Trump himself has accused the author of cowardice.
But nobody should conflate the journalistic motivation of the New York Times with either the personal morality of the individual or the political duty of White House officials. A newspaper's job isn't to deny cowards a platform, or make sure a department of government functions well. It is to find things out, analyse them, and inform the citizenry, the better to conduct a democracy.
The author of this op-ed may be a coward. The White House may now be marginally closer to full-blown crisis, though for now, I doubt it's any worse than after the publication of Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury.
The questions for the New York Times are: has this taken the story on, aided our understanding of the Trump administration, and given readers useful information? Yes, yes, and yes.
Has it undermined reporters? Is it a mere PR stunt? And is it boring? No, no, and no.
"Publish and be damned," said Wellington, in 1824 - but the principle is timeless.
If you're interested in issues such as these, please follow me on Twitter or Facebook; and also please subscribe to The Media Show podcast from Radio 4. I'm grateful for all constructive feedback. Thanks.
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Marathon Oil is no longer looking to sell its UK offshore assets, it has been announced.
| Marathon operates the Brae complex, and also has stakes in the East Brae and Braemar fields as well in the Foinaven project west of Shetland.
The company is putting more resources into its shale gas projects in the US.
However, Marathon said it had not received an acceptable offer for its UK interests, which went up for sale in December.
The company's UK base is located in Aberdeen.
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Van Gogh painting L'Allee des Alyscamps has sold for $66m (£43.5m) as the star of a $368m (£242m) impressionist and modern art sale at Sotheby's New York. | It was painted in 1888 while the artist worked with friend Paul Gauguin in Arles, France, just one month before he famously cut off his ear.
The piece had been expected to fetch $40m (£26.4m) and drew several bidders, going to an Asian private collector.
One of Monet's iconic water lilies from 1905 also sold for $54m (£35.6m).
This particular painting of the famous lily pond in the artist's garden at Giverny, France, had not been viewed in public since 1945.
It was one of five Monet works sold at the auction, which together fetched a total of $115m (£75.6m), with a sixth painting failing to sell.
Van Gogh's L'Allee des Alyscamps achieved a record for a landscape by the artist at auction, and is the highest price achieved for any work by Van Gogh since 1998.
"To have a canvas from Arles by that very self-taught artist at the height of his work marks the sale as momentous," said Clifford Edwards, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, who is a Van Gogh expert.
David Norman from Sotheby's said the same painting "struggled to make $12 million" when it was last auctioned in 2003, which only provided evidence of the "tremendous bidding power we see in the market right now".
The Spring art sale was Sotheby's second-highest impressionist and modern sale ever, with the auction house finding buyers for 78% of its 65 lots.
Half of the works in the sale had never been auctioned before, with three of the top lots being purchased by Asian collectors.
Monet's 1908 painting of Venice with a view of the Palazzo Ducale on the Grand Canal fetched more than $23m (£15m). It was one of the artworks the Nazis confiscated from collector Jakob Goldschmidt which was reclaimed by his son in 1960. It had descended to a grandson, who died last year.
Two other highlights of the sale came from the collections of Hollywood film moguls Samuel Goldwyn and his son, who died in January.
Pablo Picasso's Woman with a Chignon in an Armchair, a portrait of the artist's lover Francoise Gilot, sold for $29.9m (£19.6m), almost double its presale estimate of $18m (£11.8m).
Henri Matisse's Anemones and Pomegranates sold for more than $6m (£3.9m), having been bought by Goldwyn Sr just two years after it was originally painted in 1948.
Giacometti sculpture Femme de Venise VI sold for $16.2m (£10.6m).
The Spring sales continue next week when four auctions will be held at Christie's and Sotheby's. They include works by Picasso and Giacometti, which are expected to set records.
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Indoor and outdoor social gatherings of more than six people will be banned in England from Monday as coronavirus restrictions are tightened. Although larger households are able to gather within their bubbles, some can no longer meet up with friends and family. | By Riyah CollinsBBC News
Before the pandemic hit, Alison Keen had planned a big party for her 40th birthday on 21 September. When lockdown happened, she postponed it until 2021 and instead had hoped for a family gathering. But now that too cannot go ahead.
She and her husband have four children, meaning the new "rule of six" applies solely to their family.
"I can't meet up with anyone just because I've got kids," said Mrs Keen, from Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire.
"Mum's upset that she can't see me on my birthday and really annoyed that she could have come to see the kids last week, but not next week."
Mrs Keen said allowing her children, between six and 11, to go back to school but not have family gatherings "seems daft".
The family had thought her parents, who live in Birmingham, would be able to see Mrs Keen's two sisters, who both have fewer children. But from Tuesday additional restrictions in Birmingham will prevent this.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the new rules "to avoid a second national lockdown" as the rate of infection climbs across the country.
It applies both indoors and outdoors and to all ages - although there are some exemptions, such as gatherings for work or school.
The new rules will be enforced by police who will have powers to issue fines and make arrests.
"I get they're trying to simplify the rules, but that's not how viruses work," said Mrs Keen.
"At the end of the day it's a new virus and as you learn, policies have to evolve. But it feels awful."
Dee Jones, a mum of six from Telford, in Shropshire, said the new restrictions means she won't be able to see all of her children, five of whom have moved out and married.
She works two jobs and so only has one weekend off each month - the family would normally use that weekend to get together for a big meal.
"We can't do that now, unless my son-in-law sits out in the garden and eats his dinner there."
The "rule of six" will make it almost impossible to arrange seeing her family and already they are having to do so "almost on a rota".
She said a turkey, bought for the family's Easter meal, had been "stuck in the freezer all throughout lockdown - if I didn't laugh about it I would have cried", adding she was finding the restrictions "quite depressing".
"Honestly, it's ridiculous. I'm frustrated. We've done what we've been advised and there are clearly people out there who haven't."
Stephanie Raheel, from Yardley in Birmingham, has three children, Alina, Amaya and Arissa.
Her husband's parents are at the heart of their family and they would usually meet them regularly with extended family members.
To go back to stricter measures will be hard, she said, "especially for the children - it's hard for them to understand".
Mrs Raheel's children, aged between three and six, have returned to school and nursery but she worries the restrictions will mean the older people in her family will miss out on special moments with her young daughters.
"Within our family we've had two babies born in lockdown," she said. "The key moments, you want to celebrate with your loved ones.
"The grandparents too, they love to see the little ones."
Mrs Raheel said her mother-in-law is due to have an eye operation next week, something her husband and his six brothers are keen to support her with.
"We'll all just want to go and see her and check she's OK - when people are in need, it's difficult."
She is not sure how the family will be able to keep checking in on loved ones without breaking the new restrictions, but thinks they will just have to take it in turns to visit.
"Everyone is just a little bit puzzled about why it is six people, and they're not shutting restaurants and pubs - it just doesn't make any sense.
"There are so many different things you're allowed to do and not allowed to do, we just have to accept that's the way it is."
Additional reporting by Joanna Tidman
Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: [email protected]
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A man has been arrested on suspicion of murder after a woman was found dead in a flat in Cardiff Bay. | Christine James, 65, was found dead by police on Wednesday, 2 March, after relatives became concerned about her whereabouts.
The man, 36, is currently in custody at Cardiff Bay Police Station.
South Wales Police has referred the matter voluntarily to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
A 66-year-old man who was arrested on Wednesday has been released on police bail.
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Police are looking for a driver who fled the scene after a car crashed into a house in North Tyneside. | The silver vehicle ploughed in to the home in Goathland Avenue, in Longbenton, at around 07:10 GMT.
Northumbria Police said the car came off the road, crossed a garden in front of the property and then hit a wall. Nobody in the house was injured.
Officers said they had received reports that there were three people in the vehicle who all fled.
Related Internet Links
Northumbria Police
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Emergency workers are searching for as many as 150 people after a piece of a Himalayan glacier is believed to have fallen into a river, triggering a huge flood in northern India and killing 26. | The floodwaters burst open a dam and a deluge of water poured through a valley in the state of Uttarakhand on Sunday.
Most of the missing are believed to be workers from two hydropower plants.
The rescue effort is focused on several sites, including a tunnel more than 200 metres (656ft) long.
More than 30 people were apparently trapped inside when the torrent of icy water swept down the valley, carrying rocks and earth as it gathered speed.
According to India's NDTV broadcaster, the tunnel is blocked with slush and debris.
There has been no contact with the workers since Sunday, and officials say it is hard to tell where in the tunnel they are and whether they are together.
Hundreds of troops, paramilitaries and military helicopters have been sent to the region to help with rescue efforts.
Rescue workers and locals have been using shovels and mechanical diggers to try and clear the entrance to the tunnel.
NDTV reported that rescuers had also been seen with wooden planks to help them wade through the mud.
An investigation is continuing into what caused the suspected glacial burst.
Speaking from hospital, one man described the moment the tunnel flooded.
"We heard screams, 'get out, get out'. We didn't know what was happening. We started running to escape when the force of the water gushed in through the mouth of the tunnel. We couldn't get out because of that," he said.
"We held on to the [roof] of the tunnel. We held on for about an hour. As the water receded, we slowly climbed onto the big rocks that flowed in, to take a breath. We had lost hope. We didn't think we would survive."
Uttarakhand police said an avalanche struck at about 11:00 local time (05:30 GMT) on Sunday, destroying a dam known as the Rishiganga Hydroelectric Project.
Police said the impact catapulted water along the Dhauliganga river, damaging another power project downstream in the Tapovan area.
Senior police officials said a bridge in the Tapovan area that connected 13 villages was washed away in the avalanche. Food packets were air dropped in some of these villages.
One witness compared the flash flood with "a scene from a Bollywood film".
Video showed the floodwater barrelling through the area, leaving destruction in its wake.
Emergency workers had earlier evacuated dozens of villages, but authorities later said the main flood danger had passed.
Emergency crews rescued 16 workers who had been trapped inside a tunnel filled with debris.
Officials told the BBC that between 35 and 40 others were thought to be trapped in a second tunnel.
Emergency crews have reached the mouth of the 2.5km (1.5 mile) tunnel and are in the process of clearing the area with heavy equipment.
"We are trying to break open the tunnel," said Ashok Kumar, the state police chief, told the Reuters news agency. Rescuers had gone 150m inside, he added.
The director general of the National Disaster Response Force told ANI news agency that rescue operations could take up to 48 hours.
Uttarakhand, in the western Himalayas, is prone to flash floods and landslides.
Some 6,000 people are believed to have been killed in floods in June 2013 which were triggered by the heaviest monsoon rains in decades.
What caused the flood?
Navin Singh Khadka, BBC World Service environment correspondent
The remoteness of where this happened means no-one has a definitive answer, so far.
Experts say one possibility is that massive ice blocks broke off the glacier due to a temperature rise, releasing a huge amount of water.
That could have caused avalanches bringing down rocks and mud.
"This is a strong possibility because there was a huge amount of sediment flowing down," said DP Dobhal, a senior glaciologist formerly with the government's Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology.
Experts say an avalanche could also have hit a glacial lake that then burst.
Another possibility is that an avalanche or landslide may have dammed the river for some time, causing it to burst out after the water level rose.
Sunday's disaster has prompted calls by environment groups to review power projects in the ecologically sensitive mountains.
"Avalanches are common phenomena in the catchment area," MPS Bisht, director of the Uttarakhand Space Application Centre, told AFP news agency.
"Huge landslides also frequently occur."
Uma Bharti, a former water resources minister, said she had spoken out against power projects on the Ganges and its tributaries.
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China and India have their eye on the energy potential of the vast Brahmaputra river. Will a new wave of "megadams" bring power to the people - or put millions at risk? The BBC World Service environment reporter Navin Singh Khadka reports from Assam, India. | On the banks of the Brahmaputra it is hard to get a sense of where the river starts and ends. It begins far away as a Tibetan mountain stream. On the floodplains of Assam, though, its waters spread as far as the eye can see, merging with the horizon and the sky.
From here it continues through north-eastern India into Bangladesh, where it joins with the Ganges to form a mighty river delta.
For centuries the Brahmaputra has nourished the land, and fed and watered the people on its banks.
Today, though, India and China's growing economies mean the river is increasingly seen as a source of energy. Both countries are planning major dams on long stretches of the river.
Source of Yarlung Zangbo
Guwahati city
Icy source
Zangmu dam
Great Bend
Tea gardens
Subansiri dam
Guwahati city
Zangmu dam
Great Bend
Subansiri dam
Assam tea gardens
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Source of the Yarlung Zangbo
The river, known as the Yarlung Zangbo in China and as the Brahmaputra in India, starts its 1,760 mile (2,840 km) journey beneath Mount Kailash, high in the Tibet region of the Himalayas.
Zangmu dam
China is constructing the Zangmu dam to provide hydro-electric power. The project began in 2009 and has caused concern downstream in India. Three other dams are planned nearby.
The Great Bend of the Yarlung Zangbo
Before the Yarlung Zangbo leaves China to flow into the Arunachal Pradesh region of India and become the Brahmaputra, it makes a dramatic turn to the south, known as the Great Bend.
Assam tea gardens
Many of Assam's tea gardens are irrigated by the Brahmaputra. They are vulnerable to flooding and erosion by river water.
Subansiri dam site
India is also building dams on the river – many more than China. The Lower Subansiri Dam, on a tributary of the Brahmaputra, has been stalled by protests for several years.
Guwahati - city on the river
In Guwahati, Assam's biggest city, anti-China sentiment is growing and some say the river level has dropped in recent years.
In Assam the plans are being greeted with scepticism and some fear.
The fear is that dams upstream could give China great power over their lives. And many in Assam worry whether China has honourable intentions.
Brahmaputra voices: What next for their river?
After a landslide in China in 2000, the river was blocked for several days, unknown to those downstream.
When the water forced its way past the blockage Assam faced an oncoming torrent. There was no advance warning. There are concerns this could happen more frequently.
Some also believe that China may divert water to its parched north - as it has done with other southern rivers.
India's central government says China has given them assurances about the new Tibetan dams.
"Our foreign ministry has checked with China and we have been told that the flow will not be affected, and we will make sure that the people's lives are not affected by the dams," Paban Singh Ghatowar, minister for the development of north-eastern India, told the BBC.
Beijing says the dams it is building on the Tibetan stretch of the river will ease power shortages for people in that region.
"All new projects will go through scientific planning and feasibility studies and the impact to both upstream and downstream will be fully considered," China's foreign ministry told the BBC.
It said three new dams at Dagu, Jiacha, and Jeixu were small-scale projects: "They will not affect flood control or the ecological environment of downstream areas," the foreign ministry said.
Despite the statements, there is no official water-sharing deal between India and China - just an agreement to share monsoon flood data.
Experts and interest groups remain as sceptical as local residents.
'Rivers unite us, but dams divide us," says Peter Bosshard, of the International Rivers Network.
He criticises India for ignoring the rights of Bangladesh even as it deals with China's claim on the river.
"By engaging in a race to dam the Brahmaputra as quickly as possible, China and India will cause cumulative environmental impacts beyond the limits of the river's ecosystem, and will threaten the livelihoods of more than 100 million people who depend on the river."
It is hard to know where the truth lies. The dams are hidden from view, on remote valleys and in deep mountain gorges. It is there that the never-ending tension between politics, development and environment is now being played out.
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Free transport for pupils at non-local faith schools could be scrapped under plans by Northumberland County Council. | The authority proposes charging for buses to faith schools which are not a pupil's closest or in their catchment area.
The current system costs nearly £870,000 a year for about 800 pupils, it said.
Charges could be introduced from September 2015, but would only apply once a child starts a new school.
The authority said pupils who qualify for free school transport for any reason other than religion or belief would not be affected.
Consultation on the plans runs until 10 June.
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Car-hire service Uber will not be allowed to operate in Australia's Northern Territory (NT), reported the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. | The NT government announced reforms to the taxi industry but said it would not be making legislative changes authorising ride-sharing services.
US-based Uber currently operates in several other parts of Australia.
It has expanded aggressively around the world and faces regulatory battles in several countries.
Comments from the public on the ABC's Facebook page questioned the decision, with one person saying Uber was needed in Darwin, particularly for evening transport to and from the airport.
The writer said local taxis often refused to pick up passengers at night.
Transport Minister Peter Chandler told the ABC the move could be reconsidered later. His office did not responded immediately to questions from the BBC.
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A man and a woman have been charged with manslaughter over the death of a 75-year-old man in Dorset. | The body of John Cornish was found at an address in The Esplanade, near Alexandra Gardens, Weymouth, on 7 September.
Aaron Brown, 38, from Weymouth, and Hannah Day, 28, of no fixed abode, have been charged with manslaughter and robbery.
They are due to appear at Poole Magistrates' Court on Thursday.
Ms Day has also been charged with theft and five counts of fraud by false representation.
Two men from Weymouth, aged 37 and 66, arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender, have been released under investigation.
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Former Falkirk MP Eric Joyce is to stand trial accused of attacking two teenagers and causing £200 worth of damage to groceries in a London shop. | The 54-year-old ex-Labour MP is accused of scuffling with two boys aged 14 and 15 during the confrontation in Camden on 17 October, 2014.
Joyce was not present at Westminster Magistrates' Court, but denies two counts of actual bodily harm and one of causing criminal damage.
He will appear on 1 May for trial.
Mr Joyce formerly represented Falkirk as a Labour member and later as an independent, but announced in 2012 that he would not seek re-election in May.
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A teacher has appeared in court charged with assaulting a four-year-old boy. | Ian Webber, 54, of Fairfields Hill, Polesworth, north Warwickshire, denies a charge of assaulting the youngster by beating in May last year.
A pre-trial hearing at Birmingham Magistrates' Court was told he denies an allegation he "smacked" the boy, whose identity cannot be reported, at a West Midlands school.
Mr Webber is due to face trial on 26 February.
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When Maddy Hopson was a day old, her parents were told to prepare for her funeral. When she was two, they were told she would never walk or talk. When she was seven years old, they were told she would never go to university. | Now 22, Maddy, who lives in Sheepstor, Devon, has defied the odds, recently graduating with a degree in sport development.
From her dramatic entrance into the world, to navigating her way through school and becoming the UK's first diving coach with cerebral palsy, Maddy explains how the challenges she has faced have helped shape the person she is today.
'I was given a 25% survival rate'
I was born in Germany at 27 weeks, weighing less than a bag of sugar.
I was supposed to be born on 22 July but I arrived on 22 April and had a rocky start to life.
When I was born I had sepsis - which is why I was born so early - and a bleed on the brain resulted in me having cerebral palsy.
I was given a 25% survival rate and a day later my dad was told to plan for my funeral.
In the beginning I was on 100% pure oxygen because I couldn't breathe on my own.
The doctors in Germany were really good, they were amazing.
But when I was two, my parents took me to see a children's doctor and they basically said I'd never walk or talk and my parents would have a spastic child.
That's when they decided to move back to the UK.
'School didn't know what to do with me'
I went to PACE which is a UK-registered charity and special school based in Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire.
It helps children and young people with motor disorders such as cerebral palsy and the people there helped me to walk and talk.
Then when I was four, I started primary school.
The head teacher at the time was really supportive but that was the school that didn't really know what to do with me.
It was here where joining in on sports day meant putting out bean bags and other equipment.
Then my support assistant left, the head left and another teacher told my parents that I'd never go to university.
My parents took me out of the school when I was eight or nine and I went to Beachborough Prep School in Northamptonshire.
That was the best school I've ever gone to and I was there for five years.
A change of school, where inclusion was high on the agenda, opened up a world of sport to me.
'I was dragged by my school tie in the rain'
At primary school, the other kids knew I was different and knew I had something wrong with me but I don't think any of us really understood and that was sort of OK.
When I went to Beachborough though, I obviously understood then. I did have some good friends who were really supportive but some were just horrible.
On one occasion, I had the whole of my games locker emptied and my games kit thrown all over the floor. I also had lies made up about me.
The bullying was aimed at my disability.
The one I mostly remember is this girl who had started when I was 11.
One Friday, after rehearsing the school play, she and and another girl decided to corner me outside when it was chucking down with rain and scream at me.
I tried to run but they got hold of me and dragged me by my tie. I managed to get away and saw the head girl who took me to my mum.
The two girls and their parents got called in. They were sitting on the floor crying, saying sorry. But you don't forget it.
A couple of years later, weeks before I was about to have major hip surgery, the same girl decided to imitate how I walked. I ran out of the room crying.
I had the operation and had to learn to walk again. It was just before my 13th birthday. I was home schooled for a month, before gradually going back to full time at school.
'My love of sport began'
Despite some bullying at Beachborough, I did lots of sport including hockey, rounders and netball and went with friends on matches to different schools.
I started horse-riding when I was seven but it wasn't until I moved to Devon when I was 14 that I started competing in dressage regionally and nationally.
I did stuff like Ten Tors and the Duke of Edinburgh award while at Stover School.
My love of sport had begun.
Then in 2012, I saw Tom Daley win the bronze medal at the London 2012 Olympics.
He had a competition in Plymouth a year or so later so me and my friend went to meet him.
It was then, while watching where I thought 'I'll give this a go'.
It had taken me 10 years to learn how to swim a length of the pool. I wouldn't jump in off the side, I was so scared.
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In September 2014, I started my A-levels and I did COPE - Certificate of Personal Effectiveness - a bit like life skills.
I was able to do my diving as part of that and complete targets. That was when I started to do it every week.
My coaches were great and got me doing tuck rolls off 1m and 3m boards.
I'm starting to try and jump off 5m before moving to 7m, my next target.
Whilst having lessons, I saw a local diver coaching and I thought that might be fun to do. I did the level-one course in June 2016 and started coaching in the September, when I started university.
I did the level two last June but I didn't pass because I didn't have that much confidence talking to people. But I now have a mentor and am constantly improving.
When I dive into the water, it can make me feel like I'm no different to anyone else. I can be like everyone else in the water.
My aim is to try and get diving in the Paralympics. Southampton is the only place in the UK that does disability diving classes and I'm the only diving coach with cerebral palsy in the country.
I've had interest from California, Denmark and Australia to try and get disability diving on the agenda.
I really want to work in either Germany or Austria. In Germany, they have the International Paralympic Committee, which is where I'd really like to work.
We have a friend out in Austria who organises sporting events including ski shows.
He said he'd offer me a job if I learnt German, so that's what I'm doing now.
'University has made me more resilient'
Getting into university was amazing.
It enabled me to achieve something I was led to believe was impossible for me.
Even at Stover, I didn't think they thought I could get A-levels or even GCSEs but I got through them.
If you can't do the exact same thing as others you can do it a different way. You can adapt to anything.
Diving and going to university have definitely been big moments in my life.
If I hadn't have gone, I wouldn't have had the confidence to be student speaker, something I was honoured to be asked to do.
Going to university has made me a more resilient person.
There have been highs and lows, all of which have taught me not to give in, and especially not to be beaten by disability.
My aim is to help people who deserve to have sport in their lives, but due to being born different or because of their living environment, have not been given the same opportunities as everyone else.
My own sporting journey is and will probably always be tough.
I hope I can make a difference in some small way to underprivileged and disabled people as well as pursuing my own personal challenges and dream of joining the Paralympic movement.
As told to Hayley Westcott
What is cerebral palsy?
Source: NHS Choices
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India Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for a new capital for the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh on Tuesday, amid much fanfare. But although Amaravati is being touted as a city that can "make India proud", a number of concerns, including its impact on the ecology, have been raised. Sriram Karri finds out more. | When Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the inauguration stone for Amaravati on Tuesday, he said the new city represented the spirit of a state which would lead an economic revolution in India.
The Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu added that his aim was to create a capital city that would make India proud and the world envious.
The south Indian state was forced to look for a new capital after it was split in two to create India's 29th state, Telangana. The current capital Hyderabad went to the new state, although both will share it for 10 years.
The plans for Amaravati are ambitious to say the least.
The city will be developed on a land area of 7,500 sq km (2895 sq miles) over the next 10 years, and is envisaged to be 10 times bigger than Singapore, which is helping the state government construct it.
'Opportunity, not challenge'
Instead of using the Land Acquisition Act, which has often led to litigation and agitation, to build his city, Mr Naidu has proposed a scheme where farmers will voluntarily surrender their land, in exchange for developed land in the city.
Mr Naidu, who is widely held to be responsible for converting Hyderabad from a sleepy historic town into a global software destination during his previous term as chief minister between 1995 to 2004, is brimming with confidence.
"Some people would have seen a challenge, but I saw a great opportunity. Amaravati will not only be India's best new city and capital, but a leading global destination. I want to build it with people's participation. I want everyone to own a part of it," Mr Naidu told the BBC.
The lore surrounding what Mr Naidu did for Hyderabad is legendary.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates' decision to build the company's biggest development centres outside the US in Hyderabad was made because he was so impressed by a power point presentation made by Mr Naidu, or so the story goes.
But not everyone is impressed.
'One-sided development'
Farmers are angry because they feel the plans for Amravati exclude them.
"Mr Naidu has gone back to his one-sided development talk that benefits corporates and businesses at our expense. He is taking away land from the most fertile agrarian belt in India, which yields three crops a year," Mallela Harindranath Chowdary, a farmer leader, told the BBC.
Mr Chowdary also alleges that the government is using police force to pressure farmers to surrender their land to the state.
Mr Naidu has however dismissed the allegations as being politically motivated.
"Some political leaders are perpetually dissatisfied and obstruct development, which is crucial to remove poverty. Farmers have most given us land because they know the benefit of owning land in a developed city," said Naidu.
The government has also imposed a law that prohibits gatherings of people in and around the area where Amravati is being constructed, to "prevent political agitations".
But it's not just farmers who are protesting against Amaravati.
Ecological disaster?
India's environment body, the National Green Tribunal (NGT), has also expressed concern that the state government did not complete a mandatory environmental assessment before deciding on the location of the city.
Environmentalists say the state has not followed any of the procedures or complied with requirements to carry out a project of this scale.
Adding to concerns is the fact that Mr Naidu has asked the central government to release over 20,000 hectares (49,240 acres) of additional reserved forests around the capital region.
"It violates the Conservation of Forests Act. By law, they are supposed to create forests in double the land - 40,000 hectares in wasted forest lands - and plant twice the number of trees cut," a forest officer who wished to remain anonymous, told the BBC.
"In the next few months, Andhra plans to cut over 10 million trees. Not only is it against all norms, it is an invitation for an ecological disaster.
"They will cut forests within no time, but take decades to plant that many trees. They will destroy forests with diversity and plants standard forestation saplings like teak, eucalyptus, neem and Red Sanders.
"What will happen to water bodies, smaller trees and plants, shrubs, animals, birds and insects?" he said.
"It is not a people's capital but a contractor's capital," a senior Andhra Pradesh opposition official, Ummareddy Venkateswarlu, told the BBC. "We are not opposed to Amaravati, but the illegal ways adopted to create it."
Sriram Karri is author of the best-selling, MAN Asian Literary Prize longlisted novel, Autobiography of a mad nation
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Plans to install a 10m (33ft) high mobile phone mast near a Guernsey football pitch have been approved. | Six objections were made to the plans concerning possible health risks and the visual impact.
The mast at the Northerners Athletic Club field will be made of timber and painted green to reduce its visual impact.
Cable and Wireless asked for planning permission in a move aimed at improving mobile phone coverage in the area.
It was the second time it had applied for the installation, after an earlier attempt failed.
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More and more of our waking hours are spent in spaces sprinkled with electronic devices - a digital camera here, an electronic book reader there and smart phones as far as the eye can see. But what part did the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology play? | By Matthew DanzicoBBC News, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Welcome to MIT's Media Lab - an academic institution that looks for a breed of student who is one part engineer, two parts futurist and three parts tech-savvy brainiac.
The programme has just celebrated its 25th anniversary by drawing together its alumni and others, including Google CEO Eric Schmidt, to MIT to partake in a day chock-full of techno nerd-oriented talks and an open house featuring the students' research projects.
Walk through the hallways of the elite Cambridge institution any day of the week, and one will see students with thick-rimmed glasses scampering past with stacks of paper containing advanced algorithms, meshes of wires attached to robotic heads, the beginnings of self-propelled prosthetic limbs or even blueprints for the first fleet of foldable cars.
The Media Lab has been behind both technological breakthroughs and social campaigns - the electronic ink used in the Amazon Kindle and Sony e-Reader, the educational programming language Scratch, the One Laptop Per Child initiative and even video games Guitar Hero and Rock Band.
Much of the lab's funding comes from roughly 80 corporate sponsors - though those companies are not allowed to support or direct any of the research.
The lab is divided into 23 research groups, including the eyebrow-raising Lifelong Kindergarten and Opera of the Future, which is aimed at revamping musical theatre using robots, among them. They sit alongside more easily digested group concepts, like Biomechatronics and Synthetic Neurobiology.
The lab focuses on the ways technology can impact on us at a human level, says programme director, Frank Moss.
"That might mean how we entertain ourselves, how we take care of our health, our finances, how we live, how we socialize, work and play."
And Mr Moss says innovation at the lab is achieved by taking the students, who he calls natural "builders", and teaching them how to "make almost anything" - which is also the name of a six-month class students at the Media Lab take during their first year, How to Make (Almost) Anything.
"By the time they are halfway through their first year, they can build any piece of software, any circuit board, they can use the laser cutter and build any kind of object out of metal or aluminium, foam, wood, you name it."
'Crazy' students
The idea for the Media Lab was conceived in 1980, and it opened its doors five years later under the direction of Greek-American architect and technologist Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner, former MIT president and science adviser to President John F Kennedy.
Mr Negroponte, 66, brother of former US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, describes the Media Lab's inception as having had "perfect timing". When it opened the PC had recently been developed, telecommunications would soon be deregulated and the internet was just beginning to stretch its legs as a medium.
Mr Negroponte says a person strolling through the doors of the Media Lab in its infant stage would have been quickly encircled by a maze of computer-controlled balloons, holograms and faculty who had been exiled from other departments - what he calls the "real Salon des Refuses", alluding to French 19th century painters whose work was rejected by the establishment of the day.
And although the programme - now bursting with research projects focused on autism, prosthetic limbs, robots and, well, robotic opera singers - is now getting the attention it deserves, Mr Negroponte says it still attracts like-minded individuals.
"If you are considered crazy in your field, you come to the MIT Media Lab," he says of the students today.
"After about 15 years, it morphed into a style of thought, a way of doing research and into a program that was friendly to risk," Mr Negroponte added.
And the themes of risk and creativity are obvious when looking at some of the projects on display during the programme's open house.
Medical Mirror
The Medical Mirror is a project being developed to allow individuals to check their pulse, respiration and heart rate simply by looking at their own reflection.
Electrical and medical engineering student Ming-Zher Poh implanted a simple web camera into a two-way mirror, which tracks a person's face when he or she peers into the rectangular looking glass.
The camera then analyses the slightest variations in brightness in the person's complexion caused by blood flow from blood vessels and returns figures on what it calculates.
"People look at the mirror everyday, and people pay attention to their outward appearance - but this [Medical Mirror] also reminds them about their physiological information," he adds.
The Cornucopia
Marcelo Coelho and Amit Zoran of the school's Fluid Interfaces group may have also created a product that could one day aid in personal health - a personal, automatic food factory.
Armed with clear tubes containing an array of ingredients, the Cornucopia is a food printer of sorts that mixes elements of a dish together to produce starters, main courses and desserts.
The current Cornucopia prototype can produce a programmable snack from tubes of chocolate and nuts.
Mr Coelho says the machine offers up the potential for a better understanding of what ingredients go into your food and how healthy the foods you put into your body are.
BiDi Screen
Let's be honest for a moment - is it or is it not starting to seem just slightly archaic to use a remote control, a video game controller or even a mouse to manipulate objects on a monitor or television screen?
Professor Henry Holtzman and student Matthew Hirsch in the Information Ecology group at the Media Lab have been working in collaboration with the Camera Culture group on a screen that allows you to control objects on a screen using only your hands.
The bi-directional display interface (BiDi) uses embedded optical sensors to capture both touch and hand gestures in front of a screen.
Mr Hirsch says the technology could be helpful in a range of areas but particularly with gadgets like mobile touch-screen mobile phones, on which displays can sometimes appear cramped.
Powered ankle-foot prosthesis
Hugh Herr and his students in the Biomechatronics group have developed a prosthetic ankle capable of propelling a person wearing the device forward in the same way a biological one would.
The prosthesis uses strings that work like tendons and an electric motor to push the wearer forward and vary the ankle's stiffness, which could help individuals move over varying terrains.
Student Michael Eisenberg says conventional prosthetic limbs, which typically use a passive springs, can make an amputee exert significantly more energy and even cause back problems in the person wearing the ankle.
"Some of the more recent prostheses [on the market] can be in a sense quasi-passive, in that they can move around but cannot provide active energy to the wearer. But it turns out especially in the ankle - that functionality is not sufficient. The ankle is responsible for much more functionality than just that," Mr Eisenberg says.
The Future
Frank Moss feels that during the next 25 years, as Media Lab continues to grow, the public may be hearing more from students like Mr Eisenberg.
"I think we'll see it [technology] around health, around aging, around how we can better control and make decisions in our lives that are in our best long-term interests - it's a level of empowerment that goes beyond shopping, searching, and socializing, to really a deeper agency," Mr Moss says.
And Mr Negroponte says we may even witness significant changes as soon as 10 years from now.
"Every surface will be a display. Everything will be linked to every other thing. Things will know where they are and some may know who they are," he says.
If Mr Negroponte's prediction that technology could soon be conscious of itself proves to be true, it raises one very peculiar but important question: Is the world ready for an opera-singing robot with attitude?
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As floodwater in Pakistan displaces tens of thousands of people from their homes every day, some are turning up at camps without the documentation necessary to receive aid, adding to the humanitarian crisis. The BBC's Jill McGivering reports from a camp in Sukkur, Sindh province. | Sukkur is overwhelmed.
Along the river banks and canals, on patches of dry ground and alongside the roads, homeless families are sitting or lying in the open air, their possessions piled at their side.
They fled their homes with whatever they could carry as rising floodwater inundated their towns and villages.
Most, unless they find shade under a tree, have no shelter from the scorching sun.
A fraction have places inside the relief camps which have sprung up all across the city.
They consist of rows and rows of tents with simple latrines, and access to these areas is strictly controlled.
Tension high
I entered one camp shortly before a food distribution was about to start.
The World Food Programme was bringing in several trucks with fortified biscuits, flour and cooking oil.
A screening process had already taken place within the camp to decide which families were eligible to receive it.
Many people here are desperate and tensions are running high.
Recently there have been incidents of crowds mobbing aid trucks and people being hurt in the crush and confusion.
So this time the chosen few were regimented, sitting on the ground in neat lines in the glare of the sun, men and women segregated, as armed police officers and rangers stood guard around them.
Jealously watching
Abdul Hamid Bulo, one of the camp organisers, explained why such discipline was being imposed.
"Otherwise people rush over and don't listen," he said.
"People just see there's a distribution of food and they come rushing."
As the trucks rolled in and the distribution began, the recipients were allowed forward one by one to show their identity card and registration papers to officials sitting behind a desk, then have their name ticked off on a printed list.
Beyond the guards, watching jealously, other homeless people had gathered.
An elderly lady tried to press forward and was herded back by guards wielding sticks.
She started to sob and wail, her hands clawing at her face. I went across to talk to her.
"For god's sake, help us," she said.
"We don't have breakfast in the morning or food at night. I don't know why they won't issue me with papers so I can get food."
Documentation
Nearby two frail elderly women, their clothes filthy, were clinging to each other.
They were walking with the help of sticks and they were both blind. They too had been turned away by security and were now in tears.
"We lost everything in the flood," they told me.
"We don't have any food. Please help us to get aid."
They too had fled from their homes without any documentation.
But it seemed that, because they didn't have identity cards, they weren't eligible to register at the camp and gain inclusion among the aid recipients.
The aid agencies and local charities are doing the best they can, trying to maintain security in the face of rising tension and growing desperation.
But at the moment, there simply isn't enough food to go round.
Every day, more people in Sindh are being forced from their homes - and the gap between what is needed and what's available is steadily increasing.
A number of governments and aid organisations are appealing for donations to help those affected by the flooding in Pakistan.
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Twelve Israelis have been arrested in Ayia Napa in Cyprus over an alleged rape of a British woman, reports say. | Local media said police were called in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
Cypriot police confirmed that 12 arrests were made and said the suspects would appear in court in Paralimni on Thursday morning.
A spokesman for the Foreign Office said it was "supporting a British woman who was assaulted in Cyprus and are in contact with local police".
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman confirmed that 12 Israeli citizens were arrested and their families notified.
The Times of Israel said some of those involved in the alleged attack were boys, and that the alleged victim was 19.
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Maintenance work on a Wrexham aqueduct means the towpath will be closed for six hours a day. | The Canal & River Trust said the path at Pontcysyllte Aqueduct would close between 09:00 GMT and 15:00 from Monday until 17 February.
The towpath will be open outside these hours from Monday to Saturday and will be open all day on Sundays.
Repair work is needed on the parapet of the 126ft (38m) tall structure.
The Canal & River Trust said said: "These measures are to protect the public whilst we undertake these important works, allowing them to be undertaken safely by our operatives."
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The latest pictures of Pluto show it to have a beautiful blue-tinged atmosphere. And analysis of the scientific data sent back by the New Horizons spacecraft so far indicates that it has one of the most diverse landscapes in the Solar System. | By Pallab GhoshScience correspondent, BBC News
To date, Nasa's New Horizons probe has sent back just a tenth of the data it collected as it flew past the Pluto system on 14 July.
The information reveals a surprisingly varied terrain: mountains, dunes, cratered areas and ones that are smooth. The head of the mission, Prof Alan Stern, told BBC News that what he has seen so far is "amazing" and has already transformed our notions of the far-flung world:
"The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected. Pluto itself displays (such a diverse) range of geological landforms that it is unprecedented in the Solar System," he explained.
"It certainly rivals the Earth and Mars, perhaps even occupies the number one spot for complexity of all the planets in the Solar System."
So what are the discoveries so far?
A thicker atmosphere in the past
A colour image from New Horizons shows that Pluto has atmospheric hazes that have a blue tinge. The startling view is caused by weak sunlight scattering off soot-like particles called tholins in the dwarf planet's thin, nitrogen atmosphere.
Prof Alan Fitzsimmons of Queens University in Belfast says that the initial data suggests the atmosphere may have been thicker in the past.
"Perhaps Pluto did have a thicker atmosphere and its atmosphere probably does significantly change once in its orbit," he said.
"Right now, Pluto is receding from the Sun, having been closer to it a few years ago - and it has been speculated that at some point as it moves out to the furthest point from the Sun, the atmosphere and planet may get so cold that the atmosphere may actually collapse on to the surface and freeze out only to be regenerated again as it approaches the Sun."
That theory is borne out by the observation of dunes on the surface not unlike those in the deserts of Earth. If these were made by the action of wind, it implies there might once have been a thicker atmosphere.
Pluto may be active
There is a large area named Sputnik Planum hundreds of miles across that is devoid of craters. That means that something is happening to smooth over the holes left by impacts.
"If that is the case, it is really perplexing because, as a small planet, geophysicists would have expected that it should have cooled off long ago and not have present day activity - yet it does," Prof Stern says.
However, in the equatorial region, there are lots of old, large, craters where other objects have struck over the history of the Solar System. The question is why the terrain is so diverse. Prof Stern doesn't have the answer - at least not yet.
"My head hurts looking at the data," he confesses.
"The flyby continues and the data comes down every week, and we continue to get data and we continue to get surprises and it just gets better and better and it gets more and more perplexing."
How the heart was formed
That is going to be one of the outstanding questions that scientists are going to look at over the coming months and years. It is thought to be made up of fresh, relatively recent deposits of nitrogen ice. But why are other areas not like this?
There are also differences in the composition of the nitrogen ice between the left and right lobes of the "heart".
One theory is that there are two geysers at the centre of each lobe that shoot material up above the surface which is then blown by a light wind into the heart shape as it comes back to the surface.
Pluto's size
Pluto was stripped of its status as a planet in 2006 after the discovery of similar objects in the Kuiper Belt region of the outer Solar System - notably the dwarf planet Eris, which was in many ways like Pluto.
The New Horizons mission suggested Pluto might be larger than Eris, so a case could be made to reinstate the former planet. Prof Stern has in the past argued for reinstatement - but seems to have grown weary of the discussion.
"From a planetary science point of view, and as an expert in the field, I should tell you planetary scientists consider it as a planet," he told BBC News.
"The fact that astronomers do not is of little concern to me. The astronomers are not experts in the field and what they say doesn't carry very much weight.
"It's the equivalent of asking a divorce lawyer about tax law; its immaterial. The fact that they are studying things in space like black holes and galaxies has no credence with respect to planets, and what they do just doesn't matter to planetary scientists."
But Prof Andrew Coates, who is a planetary scientist at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London, respectfully disagrees.
"There seemed to be a great feeling of victory that it was a little larger than Eris," he said.
"This would lead people who would like to call Pluto a planet to think 'great'; and I think that bit was over-egged. For me, that's a non-argument. What we are interested in is what this object is like, the science and its relationship to other Kuiper Belt objects, rather than the size.
Prof Coates added: "Pluto was characterised a few years ago as not a classical planet but an ice dwarf object. That is a good classification because we are seeing something that is different to the rest of the objects in the Solar System."
Nitrogen cycle
There appears to be a possible nitrogen cycle through the atmosphere. Initial observations indicate that glaciers are transporting fresh nitrogen from the mountains across the surface, down to the lower plains where the nitrogen may be heated by the Sun and rises back into the atmosphere where it then precipitates on to the mountains again.
Scientists speculated before the flyby that there would be evaporation and condensation of nitrogen as the surface warmed and cooled. But most thought it would be a gentle process, and the apparent flows of nitrogen glaciers were a surprise.
"If that actually holds up - that is an absolutely fantastic thing," says Prof Fitzsimmons. "No-one had really predicted this."
What's next
The New Horizons spacecraft will send back higher resolution images, which will show exquisite new details of a world that is more beautiful than anyone had ever imagined.
There will also be new information about Pluto's moons. We have received only a glimpse of its largest moon, Charon, but it is a breathtaking one. It is a third the size of Pluto and yet the pictures shows canyons that are several kilometres deep and some signs of geological activity.
In just a few months, our knowledge of Pluto has already been transformed. And, according to Prof Coates, there is much more to come.
"The data from New Horizons is rewriting the text books about the outer Solar System. It is a real voyage of exploration to look at this mini solar system of Pluto and its moons."
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