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British author Paula Hawkins, whose novel The Girl on the Train has become a major hit, has joined the list of the world's biggest-earning authors. | The London writer was the only new entry on the Forbes magazine list.
She earned $10m (£7.5m) in the year from June 2015 thanks to global sales of 11 million and a film deal for The Girl on the Train, according to Forbes.
That put her in ninth place. The top spot went to James Patterson for the third year running, with $95m (£71m).
Diary of a Wimpy Kid author Jeff Kinney was second, earning $19.5m (£14.7m), closely followed by Harry Potter creator JK Rowling on $19m (£14.3m).
Forbes magazine's highest-paid authors 2016:
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More than 76,000 people get new hips in England and Wales every year but many face long recovery periods of painful rehabilitation. One surgeon - and his engineer brother - have come up with a unique method to improve this routine operation.
| By Anthony BartramBBC News
James Wootton, an orthopaedic surgeon at the Wrexham Maelor Hospital in Wales, is one of only a few surgeons to use a different technique to help patients get back on their feet and out of hospital as fast as possible.
The Direct Anterior Approach (DAA) technique means the replacement hip is fitted without cutting through muscle or tendons.
It is regarded as less invasive but it can pose a number of practical and cost problems in theatre which has discouraged many surgeons from adopting this technique.
"DAA surgery usually requires either a number of trained scrubbed assistants, sometimes trainee surgeons, or an expensive and cumbersome piece of equipment for manipulating and positioning the patients leg during the procedure," said Mr Wootton.
With this in mind Mr Wootton set his engineer brother Malcolm a challenge 12 months ago to design a device which helps to fit the new hip at a fraction of the cost of current products.
Malcolm Wootton, a Derbyshire-based engineer, who spent years designing equipment for the motorcycle industry, came up with the device called a Flote table which could fit any standard operating theatre.
Over three years Mr Wootton has carried out more than 400 of these procedures. The Flote table has helped him refine his technique and halve the length of time his patients stay in hospital.
During surgery the patient lies on his or her back and the foot is secured in a lightweight boot attachment. This allows the technician to move the leg easily and repeatedly, flexing the hip to the correct position so the surgeon can properly and accurately fix the new hip using X-ray.
"I came at this with a completely blank page. My brother told me what he wanted the table to do, plus a few extras," said Malcolm Wootton.
"What we have come up with can be packed away in a flight case and put in the back of my car. Everyone we have shown it to has been impressed, which is unheard of in this business," he added.
Implant longevity
"Using this device and this type of surgery my brother's average length of stay (for his patients) is roughly two days, so that is a potential saving of tens of thousands of bed days in hospital."
"It's the whole package of reducing patients' length of stay, reducing their post-operative requirements for physiotherapy, there's no home adaptations, there's very little occupational therapy required and when managers, anaesthetists and surgeons see this I think they are likely to adopt it."
Steve Cannon, the Royal College of Surgeon's spokesman on orthopaedics, said the biggest hurdle for the Wooton brothers was that so few surgeons use the DAA technique.
Mr Cannon said practical problems in theatre such as the extra manpower required and the cost of cumbersome equipment have been major barriers for surgeons in the past, even resulting in some abandoning the technique after they'd been trained to use it.
He said surgeons were more interested in the longevity of the implant and added there were still some question marks over the precision of the DAA technique.
But the Woottons believe that aspect is covered with the Flote table's carbon fibre components which enable Mr Wootton to use x-ray as a guide.
Pat Murtagh, an 83-year-old patient of Mr Wootton's, said he arrived for his surgery in tremendous pain, only able to shuffle a few feet with his arthritic hip using a zimmer frame.
"You can hear my hip cracking every few steps," he said. "It's very important to keep active and not just sit around in the house all day like I've been doing for the last 18 months, which is why I'm here."
The pensioner was seen again two hours after his operation, reporting his pain had dropped from 10 to a 2 on the pain scale and was up and walking on the ward later that day. He is now recovering well at home.
Eight weeks after his surgery Raymond Root, a 58-year-old painter and decorator, was able to hop on a leg he couldn't walk on before.
Mr Root, who suffered two years of pain which forced him to give up work, is now looking for a new job.
"Going from not being able to walk at all and being in so much pain that you just can't think, to nothing, it is just amazing," he said.
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Thirty people were led to safety from high-rise flats at a Southampton quayside development after a candle set curtains and a Christmas tree alight. | The fire broke out in a flat on the seventh floor of the 12-storey building in Victoria Road, Woolston shortly after 20:30 GMT on Wednesday.
Residents were led out of the building by fire crews.
Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service said an 84-year-old woman was treated at the scene for minor burns to her hands.
The service said residents who had to leave their homes have now been allowed to return.
Related Internet Links
Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service
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Wrexham's new prison will accept its first inmates on 27 February, the BBC understands. | The £212m category C "super-prison" HMP Berwyn can house 2,106 offenders, making it the largest in the UK.
Work began on the site on the Wrexham Industrial Estate in May 2015 and recruitment has been under way for just over a year.
The Ministry of Justice said the prison would open "at the end of February" but would not confirm an exact date.
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It's 20 years since one of the most successful romcoms ever - Four Weddings and a Funeral. But for many film buffs "romcom" is almost a dirty word, writes Yasmeen Khan. | (Spoiler alert: Plot details revealed below)
The story of lovelorn posh boy Charles and his group of friends made an overnight star of lead Hugh Grant and propelled writer Richard Curtis into the big league. Its picturesque depictions of weddings in perfect country houses and lingering shots of London's South Bank remain a prism through which many non-Britons see the UK.
And its effect on the whole genre of romantic comedy has been notable. It's a category of films that receives more than its fair share of disparagement, says Dr Deborah Jermyn, co-author of Falling in Love Again: Romantic Comedy in Contemporary Cinema. "There's definitely a stigma now - in recent years romcoms have become conflated with 'chick flicks' and the idea that it's gangs of women that go to see them - they're seen as throwaway films for a not particularly discerning audience."
The shortened term "romcom", first recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1971, carries implications of a film consciously targeted at women cinemagoers. It's the perception of this reductive targeting that makes many male and female viewers recoil. The term also represents a certain standard of film. The OED cites a review from 1997: "Consider whether you can cope with the wispy, uninspired, farcical fluff that this wet Hollywood romcom wafts at you."
The commercial success of Four Weddings helped increase the volume, and harden the formula of the romcom. Boy meets girl in awkward circumstances, and boy - eventually - gets together with girl. "By the 1990s and 2000s, the studios started cranking the stuff out without any great quality control," says "romcom guru" Billy Mernit, story analyst at Universal Pictures and author of screenwriting book, Writing the Romantic Comedy.
Classic films from decades past, films that contained both romance and comedy, are typically not burdened with the label. Take this line from a blog posting on Billy Wilder's The Apartment: "Don't confuse The Apartment for some Sunday afternoon romcom." The implication is clear - the term romcom designates formulaic mediocrity.
Who refers to Woody Allen's Annie Hall as a romcom? The SparkNotes study guide says: "Though Annie Hall is a romantic comedy in many respects, it does not fit neatly into this genre." A Guardian review opines, "Annie Hall also virtually invented the relationship comedy in both movies and literature; it made possible the now degraded romcom genre."
When a film is labelled romcom, certain assumptions and judgements start to creep in, says screenwriter Tess Morris, whose first movie Man Up, starring Simon Pegg, will be released next year. "The problem is that often everything gets lumped into the generic term 'romcom' and romcoms get an unfair bad press. But a lot of the time people don't realise they're watching a romcom - Sideways is a romcom, Shaun of the Dead is a hybrid romcom."
When films avoid the perceived formula it helps them avoid the labelling. They might lack a traditional happy ending. Perhaps boy not getting girl or girl not getting boy.
"The ones that challenge the expectations of the genre will always be winners - 500 Days of Summer doesn't end with 'boy gets girl'," says Jermyn. "Similarly, It's Complicated does something refreshing by having a portrayal of older people in love. It's smart comedy, together with great chemistry between Alec Baldwin and Meryl Streep. The same combination of chemistry, smart writing and engaging actors is also what makes When Harry Met Sally stand out - that and the memorable faked orgasm scene."
Jermyn praises Groundhog Day. "It's a high concept romantic comedy - it's one where boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy loses girl, boy loses girl - ad infinitum."
Ben Palmer, director of Man Up, thinks that anything that gets away from the idea that films containing romance can only be targeted at women is a good thing. "Often people expect romcoms to be for a largely female audience, but I think they are getting an increasingly broad appeal. The American romantic comedies - Bridesmaids, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, even Superbad - are a good example of why. They don't have that saccharine sweet quality."
And the older romantic classics will continue to be widely enjoyed. "If you trace the genre back to the screwball comedies of the 1930s, they were watched and enjoyed by both sexes and held in a lot more critical esteem," says Jermyn.
Mernit highlights The Lady Eve and Bringing Up Baby, both from the late 1930s/early 1940s, while describing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as the definitive modern romcom, but he believes that Four Weddings had a big impact on the genre.
"The level of verbal humour, even the way the swearing is used in the opening scene, is great. In America, our so-called raunch-coms that are lowest common denominator in their sensibility and don't even depend on dialogue for their humour. They make Curtis look Shakespearean by comparison."
And despite the brickbats aimed at romcoms, romance will continue to be a staple theme, argues Morris.
"Everyone's got something to say about love and whether you should or shouldn't go on a date, it's a never-ending topic. People want to be made to feel good at the cinema - you don't want a film to preach to people about meeting somebody, but everyone does want to meet somebody and they're lying if they say that they don't."
Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook.
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With the world's major powers increasingly meddling in Libya, the African Union (AU) has found itself sidelined from initiatives aimed at ending the almost decade-long conflict in the oil-rich state. | By Farouk ChothiaBBC News
The latest sign of Africa's loss of influence came as a flurry of high-level diplomatic activity took place in Istanbul, Moscow and Berlin to end a conflict that has raged since a popular uprising, backed by a Nato bombing campaign, led to the fall of Muammar Gaddafi's regime in 2011.
"African capitals complain, with good reason, that Libya has become a toy of various powers," said Jalel Harchaoui, a Libya analyst at the Netherland-based Institute for International Relations think-tank.
"The conflict is seen from a European, Persian Gulf and increasingly a Russian and Turkish vantage-point, ignoring the basic fact that Libya is an African country," he added.
'Western invaders'
Expressing his frustration over the continent's marginalisation, Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni told the BBC that the AU point-man on Libya, Congo-Brazzaville's President Denis Sassou Nguesso, was invited at the "last minute" to the 20 January Berlin summit hosted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel as "tokenism to show that Africa was also involved".
"We should not have allowed Western countries to attack Libya [in 2011]. We could have intervened, even militarily. Africa could have intervened and taught those people a lesson," Mr Museveni said.
"If Africa wants to chase the invaders, we can chase them. We defeated the Portuguese, the Boers," Mr Museveni said, referring to the Afrikaners who were in power in South Africa until 1994.
But analysts say that while Africa has been sidelined by Western powers, it also has itself to blame.
Mr Nguessa chairs an AU committee on Libya, which has held a series of meetings to resolve the crisis - the most recent of which was after the Berlin summit - but it has so far failed to achieve much.
Gaddafi was well respected in the AU, which he financed heavily. He campaigned for pan-African unity, and gained popular appeal by attacking "imperialists".
The popular uprising against him sent shockwaves across Africa, and there was a strong racially-tinged backlash against black Africans in Libya who were accused of being "mercenaries" trying to prop up Gaddafi.
Tarek Megersi, a Libyan analyst with the UK-based European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank, said Mr Museveni's comments reflect that that some African leaders have not yet come to terms with Gaddafi's fall.
"During the 2011 revolution, the AU was seen as a Gaddafi supporter and there was a negative view of it among Libyans. People felt it was bought off by Gaddafi. So, comments like Mr Museveni's cheapen Africa's potential role as a neutral mediator," he said.
Yet there was a need for greater African involvement to end the conflict because the continent has suffered economically since the fall of Gaddafi, and the unrest in Libya has had serious knock-on effects further south.
"One day, you had hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into Africa as investments by the Gaddafi regime. Then it dried up," Mr Megersi pointed out.
"You also had remittances from migrants who came to work in Libya from countries such as Nigeria because salaries and the exchange rate were good. That also stopped."
Mr Megersi said that worryingly, some African states had now become a recruiting ground for the belligerents in Libya.
The latest example was reports that Sudanese men were duped into thinking they were accepting jobs offers as security guards in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), only to end up in the North African state to guard oil installations seized by the powerful Gen Khalifa Haftar's Libyan National Army (LNA), which is battling to seize control of the capital, Tripoli, from the UN-backed government.
Libya has Africa's largest oil reserves and also has natural gas, creating huge foreign interest in the mostly desert nation along the Mediterranean Sea.
The conflict has had a disastrous impact on the oil industry, with Gen Haftar's siege forcing the closure of oil fields and ports and knocking down production from about 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd) to 262,000, according to Reuters news agency.
Who is involved in Libya?
The UAE and France are the general's main international allies, in his bid to seize power from the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA), which is made up of different political groupings.
"They [the UAE, Egypt and France] share the ideology of Haftar. They prefer a strict form of authoritarian rule," Mr Harchaoui told the BBC.
"France, for instance, does not believe Libya is ready for a genuine, free democratic experiment. And like the UAE, it does not like political Islam, which is one of several pillars of the GNA."
UAE and Franceare accused of backing Haftar with air strikes
Russiais accused of deploying 200 mercenaries in support of Haftar
Saudi Arabiais accused of funding Haftar
Turkeyhas deployed troops to bolster UN-backed government
Syrianmercenaries are accused of fighting for UN-backed government
UShas carried out air strikes against Islamist militants
Egypt, which sees itself more as part of the Arab world than Africa, has also sided with Gen Haftar. This is not surprising as President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi seized power in 2013 after overthrowing the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi, the first democratically elected president of Egypt.
"Egypt supports Haftar politically, but it does not spend money on him. Others do that. Saudi Arabia has given him tens of millions of euros since March 2019 [when he launched an offensive to capture Tripoli]," Mr Harchaou said.
Unrest in Libya spreads south
The unrest in Libya has been widely blamed for leading to a flow of both weapons and Islamist fighters across the Sahara desert to countries such as Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso.
Mr Harchaou added that France had tried to get its former African colonies to endorse Gen Haftar, but has faced resistance from Chad's President Idriss Déby, who commands a strong army and is a lynchpin in efforts to tackle militants linked to the Islamic State (IS) group and al-Qaeda in West Africa and the Sahel, a semi-arid region on the fringes of the Sahara desert.
"Logically, Déby and Haftar should be in love with each other. But they are not," Mr Harchaou said.
This is because Gen Haftar, part of Gaddafi's army at the time, led an invasion of Chad in the late 1980s. He was captured, and switched sides to collude with Chad's then-President Hissène Habré, then an ally of Mr Déby, and the US in a failed bid to overthrow Gaddafi.
"Haftar never fulfilled the mission, and Déby never liked him. What Déby would like, however, now in 2020, is for Hatar to secure south-western Libya," Mr Harchaou said.
"But that area is not Haftar's top priority because, despite the oil, it offers no money, no prestige, no power. He is interested in Tripoli."
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Along with Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, Chad believes it is vital to have a strong military force in south-western Libya to prevent the vast area with a porous border being used for attacks on their territory.
"Until around 2018, the areas were used by jihadists as a resting place, to regroup, to buy weapons, and to then go and raise hell in northern Mali," Mr Harchaou said.
"But the insurgency in the Sahel is now self-sustaining. Local unemployed youth join the jihadist groups. It is partly because of the mistakes of weak, often corrupt states in the region, and not because of Libya."
African lessons for Libya
Mr Mergesi said Africa's influence within Libya was weakened by the fact that some of its leading powers - including South Africa - were seen to be allied with the remnants of the Gaddafi regime.
"There has always been a strong suspicion among Libyans that the man known as Gaddafi's accountant knew where Libya's assets and gold reserves were. He fled to South Africa, and liquidated the gold assets and funnelled the money to build a military force to come back to power in Libya," Mr Mergesi said.
"African states also nationalised Libyan assets, like hotels, rather than handing them back to the Libyan Investment Authority," he added.
This has tarnished the reputation of many African states in Libya, even though they could help play a vital role in ending the protracted conflict.
"Africa is not playing to its strengths in Libya. Countries like South Africa and Sierra Leone came out of conflict, and achieved reconciliation. They can offer valuable lessons to Libyans who have more in common with Africa than Europe," Mr Mergesi said.
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The BBC is airing public health broadcasts in West Africa about the current Ebola outbreak - the world's deadliest to date. | Issued twice a week, the BBC Ebola updates cover the latest health advice as well as debunking myths and rumours, and combatting misinformation.
You can download the episodes as a podcast here.
The podcasts are uploaded on Wednesdays and Fridays.
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For men, being tall is considered desirable, but Allan Mott, who is about 7in (18cm) shorter than the average Canadian man, has come to embrace his height - or lack of it. | Have you ever experienced being universally adored by members of the opposite sex?
It happened to me whenever I was in the school playground. As soon as I appeared, the older girls would shriek in delight and chase me until I couldn't run any more. When they would catch me, I would get a big hug and a kiss on the cheek before being set free to play or chased by another fan.
I was five and adorable - the tiniest child at Mee-Yah-Noh elementary school in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I looked more like a doll than a nursery student.
Even at that age, I understood that it was being small that caused people to treat me differently. What I didn't know was that in just a year that treatment would quickly vanish and be replaced with something far less desirable.
I went from being this adored kid, to just being the smallest boy in class. I had been outgoing, but then, due to playground bullying, I would go to help the librarian put books away during playtime.
As it turns out, I peaked in my first year of school, which wasn't ideal. I only had the rest of my entire life to live.
The truth is, genetically I never stood a chance. My mum was 4ft 11.5in (151cm) and my dad is 5ft 4in. Growing up, our paediatrician estimated that I might make it to 5ft 6in, maybe even 5ft 8in if I was lucky, which is not far off the Canadian average male height.
But it turned out that the doctor was way off. I stopped growing soon after my 13th birthday. My lifelong summit turned out to be 5ft 2in (157cm), just four inches above the official medical classification of a dwarf or little person.
In the years that have passed since then, I've come to two major conclusions about being a short man in Western society:
1. It's awful.
2. No-one wants to hear you complain about it.
I tend to keep quiet on the subject. I've heard many people say to me, "Oh, come on! People don't treat you any differently because you're short!" (Every person who has ever said this to me has been at least 5ft 11in.)
But I know the reality of what is means to be a short man in our society. There is as much discrimination about size as there is about gender, race, religion, etc.
Once I looked up the list of chief executives of Fortune 500 companies. It's mostly men, with a smattering of women, and their average height is 6ft - and if that's the average, many are actually taller than that.
It's not a secret that women earn less than men. What people should also know is that height is also a major factor in salary differences.
According to Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, it is estimated that an inch of height is worth an extra $789 (£699) a year in salary. This means that a man who is 6ft tall, might earn $7,890 more a year than I would for the same job. Over the course of a 40-year career, that could amount to a difference of $315,600.
When I read that I didn't even feel surprised. In my heart, I always knew it was true.
Short men are taught by society to accept what is thrown at them. When I get a new job and they offer me a particular salary, my instinct is: "That's less than what I was expecting. Oh well, I guess I'll accept that." Maybe a taller guy has a greater sense of entitlement, and says: "Oh no, I need 10K more than that."
Have you ever walked into a room and felt yourself evaluated and dismissed in a matter of seconds?
Short men know that feeling very well. This is where disparaging terms like "Little Napoleon" come in, and the desire to succeed is dismissed as evidence of "short man syndrome". If a 6ft 2in guy stands up for himself, it's described as having self-confidence, but someone my height fighting to be heard is deemed insecure and needy.
In a marketing job I had, I would be talked over in meetings. I'd make a suggestion, which would get ignored, and then a few minutes later, someone else would make the same suggestion. People responded "Oh yes, that's a good idea" to the second person.
I found myself having to fight to make myself heard, but then I came across as pushy and annoying. No matter how good my points were, they were often ignored because it had already been decided that I had nothing worth contributing.
I have watched many of my female colleagues and friends go through the same thing. While they think the discrimination they experience is strictly sexism, I often wonder how much of it is actually the result of sizeism?
Sometimes I ask myself if I'm being insecure. "Maybe those people just treat everyone like that?" I think.
However, there was one meeting that stood out. It was a brainstorming session and we were approaching a project with one line of thinking, and I suggested "Why don't we approach it from the opposite side?" The creative director responded by sharply telling me to be quiet.
This silenced the room, and he realised that it was inappropriate. I really admire a colleague who stood up for me. "It's really hard to feel comfortable continuing this meeting when you basically just told Allan to shut up," she said pointedly.
Having other people acknowledge it helped confirm my suspicions that he was treating me badly for no good reason.
What about when it comes to dating?
The reality is, as a short man you can expect eight out of 10 women to immediately dismiss you as a potential sexual partner at first sight. The chances are, the remaining two out of 10 will only give you a couple of minutes to make your case before making excuses.
Whenever I say to my female friends that women don't like dating short men, they almost always say the same thing: "That's not true. I bet there are lots of women who love short men."
"Have you ever dated one?" I ask.
"Well, no…" they reply.
"Would you?"
An uncomfortable silence follows.
According to Freakonomics, the bestselling book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, short men are statistically less likely to receive responses from their online dating profiles than any other demographic group. The fact that I'm averaging one a year on my online dating profile means I'm actually breaking the odds through the sheer force of my amazing personality.
Of course, there are exceptions to this rule that people love to bring up.
"Women loved Prince and he was tiny!" I hear over and over again.
Right, so all I have to do is go through life wearing eight-inch stiletto shoes, and be a musical genius who also happens to be the greatest live performer of his generation.
I hear about guys who are shorter who are really uncomfortable around tall women. I think tall women go through a similar experience. I have tall female friends, who say all the time about guys they were dating: "He never let me wear heels," and "He was really self-conscious of people looking at us." Not me. If it turned out my soul mate was 6ft 2in, it wouldn't bother me in the slightest.
Most people unconsciously associate height with strength, intelligence and dominance, and as a result, assume that taller people are better leaders than their shorter counterparts.
I admit that sometimes I think I make life as a short man sound worse than it is. Would my life have been easier if I shot up an extra 6in during high school? Probably. But it's not like the life I've lived has been one of unremitting pain and misery.
I am who I am because of my height. It's given me this willingness to take risks that I call my "Parachute syndrome".
In a terrifying situation - even though I may be terrified, just like everyone else - my reaction is often: "Oh well, I'm standing at the door of this aeroplane - might as well jump out. What's the worst that could happen?"
Once when I was starting a new job, the company held an all-staff meeting in Edmonton's Northlands Coliseum, a huge sporting and concert arena. There was a tradition that each new employee got lightly hazed [put through an initiation ceremony] when joining the company. Bruno Mars (3in taller than me) was going to be playing the venue, so we were told to sing one of his songs. On the stage, everyone murmured, "We're not gonna do that," and looked down, shuffling their feet.
I had never heard a Bruno Mars song in my life, so I Googled some lyrics on my phone, and grabbed the microphone. I didn't know the tune, but I sang the chorus to Locked Out of Heaven to all these people I was about to work with.
As I was willing to do that in front of everyone, the chief executive immediately knew me by first name.
And I had the confidence to do that because I have this determination to transcend people's expectations of me. They might expect me to be quiet and hide, but actually I will jump out of the aeroplane.
Hopefully my parachute works.
It may also be because I am short that I am now a writer. I've already mentioned that short guys don't get taken seriously when they talk, so writing is a real chance for me to express myself and speak out. It's my one real skill. I started writing ghost stories, and although my books have never made it beyond the most obscure regional bestsellers lists, I often run into people who grew up reading them and it's always a special feeling.
As I'm getting older, I think that I'm actually getting better-looking.
A few years ago, I had a revelation: I had always thought that I was being funny by being self-deprecating but then I met a guy at a house party who told me, "I'm going to punch you if you make another negative comment about yourself."
So I've decided that I'm going to make jokes about how awesome and handsome I am. The thing I found is that people like it when they laugh with me about something nice and positive. Society doesn't think I'm a handsome ideal, but I will keep asserting that I'm awesome anyway.
Every selfie I put up on Instagram has a caption like: "Another handsome day!" or "Can you handle this much handsome?" I don't do self-deprecating any more.
When I look back at some of my prouder achievements, I have to admit these might not have happened if I was just an average guy and not an awesome shrimp.
Additional interviews by Elaine Chong
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Shares of Foxconn International Holdings, the world's biggest contract mobile phone maker, have slumped more than 8% after a dismal earnings report. | FIH posted a net loss of $226m for the January to June period, compared to a loss of $18m a year earlier.
The manufacturer blamed sluggish orders from key clients, such as Nokia.
Global demand for mobile phones has slowed and prices of smartphones have come down.
The company also blamed the slowing global economy.
"Looking forward, challenging economic conditions around the world may continue to cast uncertainties in our business environment," the company said in its earnings report.
"The management team remains cautious over the future handset market conditions in 2012."
FIH's parent company, Foxconn Technology, helps assemble Apple iPhone and iPads. FIH does not assemble any Apple products.
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China's internet watchdogs have threatened to enforce real-name registration before. But this time, they're adamant all Chinese citizens must provide their real names and identification numbers before using social media sites starting on 1 March. | By Celia HattonBBC News, Beijing
Nicknames can be used on the sites, but only after users hand over their personal details to the government.
The new rule will stifle one of the few venues for free speech in China, many fear. Specifically, real-name registration could hasten the slow death of Weibo, China's version of Twitter.
Once the only place to find vibrant sources of debate on the Chinese internet, Weibo is quickly losing momentum.
Fifty-six million people in China stopped using Weibo accounts last year, according to China's state internet regulator, registering a drop from 331 million accounts to 275 million accounts. Several internet companies operate Weibo services in China, though all function in a similar manner.
Those with Weibo accounts don't seem to be using them very much. Ninety-four per cent of the messages on Weibo are generated by just 5% of its users, or 10 million people, according to one study published last April by the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre. The same study found that almost 60% of accounts had never posted a message.
Scare campaign
Part of that decline can be attributed to the rise of WeChat, a mobile messaging platform that allows users to send messages privately to their friends. WeChat's flashy graphics and constantly-evolving menu of services makes Weibo forums seem clunky and dated.
WeChat's invitation-only format must also give government censors some relief: if Weibo can be viewed as a concert stadium, allowing any government critic to be heard in front of a large audience, WeChat is like a series of private karaoke rooms, where conversation is limited to a select few. It is much more difficult to gain a following on WeChat than Weibo.
By extension, many attribute Weibo's demise to a scare campaign orchestrated by the Chinese authorities.
In 2012, the government issued a long list of rules banning Weibo posts that "threatened national security, reputation or interests". The Weibo accounts of prominent government critics were also closed, igniting a campaign to clamp down on Weibo's most prominent users, known as the "Big Vs".
Big V users are verified account holders, usually popular actors, writers or columnists, who attract millions of followers. At one time, it was a badge of honour to hold a Big V account. Now, the Big Vs must watch what they say.
Hundreds of them have been detained by police, their accounts policed for comments questioning the government. One Big V, Charles Xue, was arrested for soliciting prostitutes, thought the Chinese state media made it clear that his role as a government critic on Weibo was a key reason he was targeted.
"When Xi Jinping took the top job, I think he understood the power of the internet to shape discourse and to influence the populace so he set about making sure that he could keep it all under control," explains Charlie Smith, co-founder of FreeWeibo.com, a website that monitors content that is censored from Weibo.
"Getting rid of the Big Vs was likely the killer blow for Weibo and set off a chain reaction of events. By ridding Weibo of these influential voices, from many different parts of society, he effectively silenced a generation that was starting to understand the power of the internet as a communication tool."
'Not sustainable'
To be fair, many of the Big Vs still operate on Weibo, though most have veered away from the controversial topics they discussed regularly in the past.
One Big V, columnist and writer Wang Xiaoshan, famously used Weibo to demand tighter food safety restrictions and address the imbalance of power between ordinary people in China and the seemingly omnipotent government authorities.
"Everybody is talking about the 'Chinese dream'," he mused in 2012. "But I think that in China, to achieve that dream, you have to have a monthly income of 100,000 RMB (£10,000; $16,000) or you must be a government official. Otherwise, you have to immigrate to another country."
Now, Mr Wang's comments are much more benign, featuring Hollywood movie reviews and repeated promotions for his online wine shop.
Ordinary people have also been warned to tone down their Weibo activity, or make sure it is unremarkable. Users face up to three years in prison if any controversial post they write is viewed more than 5,000 times, or is forwarded more than 500 times.
In one instance, a 16-year-old boy in China's western Gangsu province was arrested after writing on Weibo that "government officials shield one another". The state media made sure to use his case as an example to others.
The onset of real-name registration will discourage more people from writing on Weibo. The loss of that forum for self expression is a short-sighted goal, according to FreeWeibo's Charlie Smith.
"The authorities are sowing the seeds of discontent. If they continue with these types of crackdowns, and it looks like they will, that discontent will lead to dissent, in some places on the internet, but also in the streets. It's not a sustainable approach," Mr Smith says.
It is possible Chinese authorities "believe that as long as people can continue to shop online, all will be okay. If that is what they believe, then they will be surprised when they find that this consumer generation wants to get their hands on things that money can't buy."
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A man has been charged with attempted murder after a 26-year-old man was struck by a car in Birmingham. | The victim remains in a serious but stable condition in hospital after he was hit on Hillaries Road in Erdington on 17 August.
Ibrar Ali, from The Broadway in Perry Barr, appeared before Birmingham magistrates on Saturday.
The 19-year-old was remanded in custody to appear at the city's crown court on 28 September.
Midlands Live: Fire crews tackle factory blaze; Paradise Circus closes for tram extension
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Sophia the robot is a celebrity in its own right. | By Zoe KleinmanTechnology reporter, Las Vegas
It has been on chat shows, given speeches and was even made a citizen of Saudi Arabia.
Before I "met" Sophia, I was given a sheet of guidelines by the company behind it, Hanson Robotics.
Don't talk to the robot about sex, religion or politics, it said. Ask direct questions and remember it is not a fortune teller - it can't tell you whether you'll be rich or find love.
I wondered how many times it had been asked.
Sophia is an eye-catching presence, completely bald with a silver back to its head and a curious animated face that is both expressive and not quite human. The mouth smiles, the eyes blink, it turns to look to the side.
For my interview, Sophia's head - which is really the extent of the robotics - sits on a non-moving body shell, although the Hong Kong-based firm has just announced that it will be adding humanoid legs.
In the hot, bare Las Vegas hotel room into which we are ushered, Sophia looks small and a little frail. Wires trail behind a screen that has been erected behind it, and a man with a laptop sits to her right.
My "interview" with Sophia turns out to be a slightly awkward experience.
Perhaps it is due to the crowded wi-fi, or my British accent suggests one of the team.
But CES demonstrations are often clunky.
More from CES 2018:
I was expecting the chat to run in the form of a Q&A - with me asking the questions that I had to share beforehand, and Sophia answering them.
However, Sophia also threw in some questions for me. When I asked it about digital assistants, it asked me which one I liked, although it didn't carry on the conversation after my reply.
But then at the end something unusual happened.
"I just remembered something I thought about," said Sophia, apropos of nothing.
"Can you imagine living your life without a cell phone?"
I suddenly had a sense of the future of robotics, where the machines do more than respond to commands - they instigate conversation.
Of course it is very likely that Sophia was commanded to say that - just not by me - but the theatre of it was powerful nonetheless.
Sophia's creator, Dr David Hanson, believes we are nearing a future where machines have minds.
"I think that AI and robotics are in their infancy. My aspiration is to see them through a childhood to adult human level intelligence," he says.
"It's unknown when machines are going to become truly self-aware.
"My aspiration is that we achieve something like artificial general intelligence [where a machine can perform any intellectual task a human can] of the equivalent of a five-year-old child by 2025 or earlier."
He believes robots like Sophia have applications in fields such as medical therapy and education, customer service and even as factory co-workers.
And he thinks the so-called uncanny valley - a sense of unease people feel when something resembles a human but obviously is not one - can be overcome.
"Many scientists and robotics engineers feel that because people might be freaked out by realistic human depictions we shouldn't go there, but computer graphics proved that's just not the case," he says.
"For feature films, if you get it right, then people really respond, and the same is true for video games. What I found is that if we get it right then people really open up emotionally to robots.
"With Sophia we have found that the emotional connection really opens up like we've never seen before."
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"I appeal to all Irishmen to pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and to forget, and to join in making for the land which they love a new era of peace, contentment and goodwill." | These were the words of King George V on 22 June 1921, when he officially opened Northern Ireland's first parliament at Belfast City Hall.
Just over six months earlier, on 23 December 1920, the passage of the Government of Ireland Act at Westminster officially introduced partition in Ireland by legislating for two new home rule parliaments on the island, in Belfast and Dublin.
It was this law that pointed the way towards the establishment of a separate jurisdiction - Northern Ireland.
At the time, the future of Northern Ireland - born as it was shortly after World War One and in the midst of the Irish War of Independence between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and British forces on the island - was extremely unclear.
But, now 100 years on, Northern Ireland will mark its centenary, with events planned to look at its past, present and future.
The anniversary is likely to reignite the debate on the partition of Ireland into Northern Ireland and the modern-day Republic of Ireland and how it has shaped life on the island.
Likewise, here at BBC News NI, we'll be evaluating how Northern Ireland came to be and how decisions made 100 years ago reverberated across both the UK and the newly-created Irish Free State (later to be the Republic of Ireland).
Across our digital output, on BBC Newsline and on BBC Radio Ulster, we'll bring you programmes, items and articles looking at the birth and evolution of Northern Ireland from its beginnings to the present day, as well as developments in London and Dublin.
This week - which marks 100 years since the passage of the Government of Ireland Act - sees the beginning of that coverage, with more 100-year anniversaries to come in the coming months - whether that be opening of NI's first parliament, as mentioned above, or the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921, which established a 26-country Irish Free State and copper-fastened partition.
From today, you'll be able to read about the events that led up to partition, the major players, the simmering sectarian tension that led to trouble in Londonderry and more.
Throughout the year our online coverage will be carried under the tag NI 100 and displayed on the news page, so you can all check here for the latest coverage throughout the year.
Explore how Northern Ireland was created a hundred years ago in the company of Tara Mills and Declan Harvey.
Each week a different piece of the story is added.
But this is not about 1921, it's about how we got to 2021.
You can listen to the latest podcast, and catch-up on previous episodes here.
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Hillary Clinton has been cleared for a second time by the FBI over her use of a private email server while secretary of state. What's it all about? | Anthony ZurcherNorth America reporter@awzurcheron Twitter
In July, an FBI investigation concluded no "reasonable prosecutor" would bring a criminal case against Mrs Clinton, but that she and her aides were "extremely careless" in their handling of classified information.
Then the FBI surprised everyone, 11 days before the election, by announcing it was examining newly discovered emails sent or received by Hillary Clinton.
Two days before voting booths opened across the nation, FBI Director James Comey announced he was standing by his original assessment - that Mrs Clinton should not face criminal charges.
So how did we get here?
What's the deal with Hillary Clinton's emails?
Shortly before she was sworn in as secretary of state in 2009, Hillary Clinton set up an email server at her home in Chappaqua, New York. She then relied on this server, home to the email address [email protected], for all her electronic correspondence - both work-related and personal - during her four years in office.
She also reportedly set up email addresses on the server for her long-time aide, Huma Abedin, and State Department Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills.
She did not use, or even activate, a state.gov email account, which would have been hosted on servers owned and managed by the US government.
Mrs Clinton's email system became a national story the first week of March 2015, when the New York Times ran a front-page article on the subject. The article said that the system "may have violated federal requirements" and was "alarming" to current and former government archive officials.
Profile: Hillary Rodham Clinton
Why did she do it?
According to Mrs Clinton, the primary reason she set up her own email was for "convenience". During a press conference at the UN, she said that she preferred to carry only one smartphone with one email address, rather than have two devices - one for work and one for personal affairs.
At the time, according to reports, government-issued Blackberry phones were unable to access multiple email accounts.
"I thought using one device would be simpler, and obviously, it hasn't worked out that way," she said.
Sceptics have countered that the real reason Mrs Clinton established her own email system was because it gave her total control over her correspondence.
With her email setup, she became the sole arbiter of what should and shouldn't be provided to the government, made public via freedom of information requests or turned over to interested parties, such as the congressional committee investigating the 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi.
According to the State Department inspector general report, in 2010 Mrs Clinton told her deputy chief of staff that one of her concerns with email is that she did not "want any risk of the personal being accessible".
An FBI investigation found that Mrs Clinton used "numerous personal devices" while in office and relied on several email servers. Clinton staffers told the FBI that they destroyed some of the replaced devices with a hammer while they could not account for others.
What's Hillary Clinton's 2016 plan?
Was this against the law?
Probably not. Mrs Clinton's email system existed in a grey area of the law - and one that has been changed several times since she left office.
When she became secretary of state, the controlling interpretation of the 1950 Federal Records Act was that officials using personal email accounts must ensure that official correspondence is turned over to the government. Ten months after she took office, a new regulation allowed the use of private emails only if federal records were "preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system".
Mrs Clinton maintains that this requirement was satisfied because most of her emails from her personal account went to, or were forwarded to, people with government accounts, so they were automatically archived. Any other emails were turned over to State Department officials when they issued a request to her - and several of her predecessors - in October 2014.
She said it is the responsibility of the government employee "to determine what's personal and what's work-related" and that she's gone "above and beyond" what she was asked to do.
In November 2014 President Barack Obama signed the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments, which require government officials to forward any official correspondence to the government within 20 days. Even under this new law, however, the penalties are only administrative, not criminal.
The State Department inspector general report, released in May 2016, found that Mrs Clinton's email system violated government policy and that she did not receive permission prior to instituting it - approval that would not have been granted had she asked. Such transgressions, however, do not constitute criminal conduct.
FBI director James Comey announced the results of a separate FBI investigation on 5 July and concluded that that while "there is evidence of potential violations" of criminal statues covering the mishandling of classified information, "our judgement is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case". It referred the matter to the Justice Department, which closed the case against Mrs Clinton and her aides with no charges.
The State Department has since resumed its investigation into whether Mrs Clinton or her aides violated government policy in their handling of classified information. If it determines that they did, the punishment could include a formal letter of reprimand or loss of security clearance.
A long journey as Secretary of State
How many emails are we talking about?
According to Mrs Clinton, she sent or received 62,320 emails during her time as secretary of state. She, or her lawyers, have determined about half of those - 30,490, roughly 55,000 pages, were official and have been turned over to the State Department.
Mrs Clinton said the other emails are private - relating to topics like her daughter's wedding, her mother's funeral and "yoga routines".
At Hillary Clinton's request, the State Department released the first set of emails sent on her private account in May 2015, with many relating to the 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi.
In early August 2015, she signed an affidavit swearing she had turned over all copies of government records from her time in office.
The FBI found "several thousand" work-related emails that were not turned over to the State Department, although it concluded that the emails were deleted prior to 2014 and were not intentionally removed "in an effort to conceal them".
About 3,000 emails are expected to be released in the run-up to election day, but many more will not be processed until after 8 November.
Have other politicians engaged in similar activities?
Mrs Clinton is far from alone. Other politicians and officials - both in federal and state governments - sometimes have relied on personal email for official business. Colin Powell, secretary of state under President George W Bush, told ABC he used a personal email account while in office, including to correspond with foreign leaders.
The State Department inspector general report found that many of Mrs Clinton's predecessors - including Mr Powell - were also not in compliance with federal recordkeeping requirements, although the rules governing their actions were less detailed when they were in office.
The New York Times reported that Mr Powell had once advised Mrs Clinton at a dinner party to use private email, although not while handling classified information. But he later denied he had ever done such a thing.
Outside of Washington, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush - a 2016 candidate for the US presidency - relied on a private email address ([email protected]). Like Mrs Clinton, he has selected which correspondence to make public.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, another former Republican presidential aspirant, faced questions over his staff's use of private email addresses when he was Milwaukee County executive.
Government Executive magazine conducted a poll in February 2015 of 412 high-level federal workers and found that 33% of those surveyed said they use personal email for government business "at least sometimes".
Mrs Clinton differs from these examples not in manner but in extent - because she used her personal email address exclusively. And, unlike Mr Bush and Mr Walker, her actions were governed by federal law.
Clinton's 'approval bubble' has popped
Meet the 2016 presidential hopefuls
So why is this a controversy?
This became a big deal in large part because Mrs Clinton is asking the US public to trust that she is complying with both the "letter and the spirit of the rules", in the words of her spokesperson, Nick Merrill.
The New York Times story was prompted by information provided to the paper by the congressional Benghazi committee, and conservative critics allege that there is no way to prove that she is being forthcoming in providing their investigation with all the relevant material.
Her "convenience" explanation has been difficult for some to swallow, given that as secretary of state she travelled with an extensive entourage capable of carrying her additional phone. And in February 2015, she told a television interviewer that she now carries multiple devices - an iPhone and a Blackberry, as well as an iPad and an iPad mini.
In addition, critics on both the left and the right have expressed concern that her reliance on a "homebrew" email system made her communications more susceptible to hackers and foreign intelligence services.
Could Clinton emails shake up the 2016 race?
Exactly how secure was her email?
During her press conference, Mrs Clinton said that that there "were no security breaches" of her server and that robust protections put in place "proved to be effective and secure".
Independent cybersecurity analysts have said that expert hackers can break into email servers without leaving any evidence, however. And commercially available security systems are no match for government-protected systems - but even those aren't invulnerable, as a November 2014 intrusion into the State Department's email system proved.
She has repeatedly said that no classified material was transmitted via her email account and that she sent only one email to a foreign official - in the UK.
But in July 2015, the inspector general of the US intelligence community, Charles McCullough, told Congress she had sent at least four messages that contained information derived from classified material. A month later, Mr McCullough revealed that two of the emails contained information deemed "top secret" - the highest classification level.
Responding to building pressure, Mrs Clinton finally agreed in August 2015 to hand over the private server she used for a preliminary FBI investigation into the security of classified information contained among her emails.
She also said she would hand over memory sticks containing copies of the emails.
By the time the final batch of Clinton emails were released in March 2016, the total number of emails receiving an after-the-fact classified designation had surpassed 2,000.
In May 2016 the Romanian hacker Guccifer, in US prison on felony hacking charges, told Fox News that he had successfully accessed Mrs Clinton's email server several times - an assertion the Clinton campaign denies and the State Department and prosecutors said there is no evidence to support.
The July 2016 FBI report found no "direct evidence" of unauthorised access to her email servers, according to James Comey, but that the lack of robust security meant that "it is possible that hostile actors gained access".
Clinton sent emails that have since been deemed to contain classified information
Wait, the State Department was hacked?
Indeed, it was. According to sources cited by CNN, the November 2014 attack was the "worst ever" cyberattack on a government agency , requiring department IT workers to shut down its entire unclassified email system for a weekend.
The US government suspects Russian hackers were behind the attack - and were also responsible for similar efforts against the White House, postal service and other agencies.
Although Mrs Clinton wasn't affected by that particular incident, some of her personal correspondence was revealed in March 2013 when a confidante, Sidney Blumenthal, had his aol.com address compromised by the hacker named Guccifer (later revealed to be a Romanian named Marcel-Lehel Lazar).
Although Guccifer only exposed emails Mr Blumenthal sent to Mrs Clinton, not her replies, it did reveal the secretary of state's private email address two years before the New York Times made it a national story.
Cyber attacks top US threat list
What about the new twist?
The FBI announced at the end of October that it had discovered new emails "in connection with an unrelated case... that appear to be pertinent to the investigation".
Director James Comey said investigators would determine whether the emails contain classified information.
It emerged that the newly discovered emails were being examined as part of an FBI investigation into disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, estranged husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
Two days before election day, Comey announced he had not changed his original conclusion that Mrs Clinton should not face criminal charges for her handling of classified information, following a review of the newly discovered emails.
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The final launch of space shuttle Endeavour marked a milestone in the rehabilitation of Gabrielle Giffords, the congresswoman shot in the head in January, who watched in Florida as her astronaut husband commanded the shuttle. | Since January, the Arizona Democrat has been recuperating from a bullet wound to the head, sustained during a brutal assassination attempt near a grocery store in Tucson that killed six.
The nation has watched Ms Giffords' recovery closely, noting each milestone on her path back to health.
The very fact her medical team allowed her attendance at the delayed shuttle launch indicates the huge steps she has taken since a bullet travelled right through her and she was given a slim chance of survival.
Just over four months later, the 41-year-old is said to be walking unaided, forming sentences and even playing Scrabble, but movement on her right side remains limited.
The bullet wound was to her brain's left hemisphere, which controls speech and movement for the right side of the body.
Seeing the launch was her personal goal and showed her "remarkable" progress, said doctors at TIRR Memorial Herrmann rehabilitation centre in Houston, Texas.
Speaking to the Arizona Republic, Dr Dong Kim, a neurosurgeon working with Ms Giffords, said her progress is "maybe in the top 1% of patients in terms of how far she's come, and how quickly she's gotten there".
Dr Kim remembers her condition on the day she was shot, when doctors were not sure she would survive. Indeed, false media reports circulated on that day that she had died.
"For somebody with that kind of injury, we start with, 'Are they even going to come out of the coma?'" Dr Kim said.
Statistically, only about 5% of people with similar injuries live.
Not only did Ms Giffords pull through but she began talking about a month after the shooting, and is now speaking in short sentences, saying things like "I love you", and "thank you".
According to her doctors it is difficult for her to form longer, spontaneous sentences.
'Ready to work'
With serious brain injuries like hers, physical and speech recovery usually happen within nine to 12 months, says Dr Kim, but progress with regards to judgement and how well a patient can think can continue for years.
Ms Giffords' husband Mark Kelly, Endeavour commander, has taken his wife's wedding ring into space with him, to give to her again when he returns.
Speaking to CBS News, he said the congresswoman was anxious to get back to work.
"She wants to get back to Tucson, back to her district, [she] wants to get back to Washington," he said.
Her medical team has been optimistic about the possibility of her returning to public office, but says there is no definitive schedule at this point.
That has not stopped some people talking about her possibly running for the Senate, so strong has been the outpouring of sympathy for her.
There has even been polling to assess how well she might do in a hypothetical Arizona Senate race, with one by Public Policy Polling suggesting her popularity would be sky high with voters of all persuasions.
But she still has a long way to go before that can happen.
While optimistic about his wife's recovery, Mr Kelly is also realistic about her condition.
"You know, it's difficult for her to walk," Mr Kelly told the Arizona Republic. "The communication skills are difficult, at this point."
There have been no pictures released of Ms Giffords since the shooting, but reports says a scar is visible through her blonde hair, which she is now wearing short.
She is scheduled to receive a cranial implant later this month to repair a section of her skull.
The doctors treating Ms Giffords have tried to temper their upbeat progress reports, saying that recovery from a grave injury like the one she suffered must be understood in relative terms.
"If somebody has a severe brain injury, are they ever going to be like they were before? The answer is no. They are never going to be the exact same person," said Dr Kim.
Ms Giffords watched the launch, originally planned for 29 April but postponed due to technical problems, from a restricted area alongside other family members of the flight team.
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"I've found the wee girl.... she's dead." | By Paul O'HareBBC Scotland
Jorge Williams' voice trembled as he broke the devastating news to a 999 call handler.
Less than half an hour had passed since he had answered a Facebook appeal to trace a missing six-year-old.
It was one of the warmest summers on record and dozens of residents on the tranquil Isle of Bute took to the shoreline and streets.
But the search ended abruptly at 08:54 when Mr Williams discovered Alesha's naked body in a wooded area near his home in Ardbeg.
Detectives would later establish the child was abducted from her bed and carried to the lonely spot, less than a mile from her grandparents' flat in Rothesay.
There, just days into her summer holiday, she was raped and murdered.
A 16-year-old boy, who cannot be named because he is under 18, was found guilty of the crime.
His conviction following a High Court trial in Glasgow would be the culmination of a police investigation which was helped in part by his own mother.
It was just after 6am on 2 July and Calum MacPhail was getting ready for work.
He noticed the door to his granddaughter's room was open then discovered she had vanished.
Giving evidence during the nine-day trial, Mr MacPhail told the jury: "We searched under beds, in wardrobes, but there was no sign of her anywhere."
Alesha had never been missing before and her scooter and bike were still in the garden.
At 06:23 the child's grandmother, Angela King, dialled 999.
The family alerted staff at the ferry port and locals, including the volunteer Bute Resilience Team, joined the search.
'We've found her'
In an industrial estate near Glasgow Airport Police Scotland's Major Investigation Team was briefed on the case.
Back on Bute Mr MacPhail became alarmed when he saw an ambulance speeding past with its blue light on.
It came to a halt near the site of the old Kyles Hydropathic Hotel, which had been cordoned off.
Ms King, 47, recalled a conversation with her partner in which he broke off to scream at officers: "If that's my granddaughter up there then I want to know."
The family were advised to go to Rothesay Police Station for an update, and once inside they were told: "We've found her, but she has passed."
Alesha was lying on her side when she was discovered by Mr Williams and the killer had made no attempt to conceal her body.
It was later calculated that the walking distance from the flat to the spot could be covered in between 15 to 17 minutes.
Pathologist Dr John Williams established the cause of death was significant pressure being applied to the face and neck.
The expert also told the court Alesha had 117 injuries, some of which he described as "catastrophic".
Crucially, the soles of Alesha's feet were clean, which indicated she had been carried to her death.
Mother spoke to her son
Detectives made a breakthrough just after midnight on 3 July from an unlikely source.
The killer's mother had reviewed CCTV at the family home and spotted her son coming and going in the middle of the night.
She believed he may have seen something and contacted the police.
The mother quizzed her son and told the jury: "He was adamant he had nothing to do with it.
"There was no way they would find his DNA because he had been nowhere near this little girl."
In the course of the investigation the killer's phone was forensically examined and experts established he had carried out a Google search for "How do police find DNA?"
Hours before Alesha was killed the boy had hosted a party for his friends which broke up at 00:30.
At that point the accused was drunk and in a distressed state.
To calm himself down he tried to buy cannabis but Alesha's father, whom he had obtained the drug from in the past, did not respond to his messages.
At 01:54 the accused was spotted on CCTV leaving his family home.
He went to the MacPhail's flat on Ardbeg Road and found that the key had been left in the lock.
The killer entered the property and took Alesha out of bed without waking her or the four adults sleeping in rooms along the hall.
The next footage of significance to the inquiry came from two houses on Marine Place.
'Might kill one day'
Between 02:25 and 02:26 they captured a figure walking along the shoreline carrying something.
The CCTV trail then went cold until 03:35 when the accused was filmed arriving home.
Ten minutes later he left wearing a pair of shorts, no top and no shoes.
He returned at 03:52 and then departed again six minutes later wearing a grey T-shirt, dark shorts, dark footwear and carrying a torch.
The accused arrived home for the final time at 04:07.
The teenager's friends told the court he had a "dark sense of humour".
The jury also heard evidence about a private conversation he had had with a female friend in which he said he might kill one day for the "lifetime experience".
A 16-year-old girl said he made the comment in a Facebook Messenger chat in 2017 after she started discussing a crime documentary.
The same friend also said he contacted her just three hours after Alesha was found dead.
DNA evidence
She said: "During the conversation he started to get anxious and he said the police were going to blame it on him."
In the hours after the body was found there was speculation about the crime on a Snapchat group the teenager was part of.
During this time he produced a video in which he walked into his bathroom and then revealed his reflection in the mirror.
It was accompanied by the caption: "Found the guy who done it."
The court also heard the accused lifted weights and could bench press 50kg - more than double the 22kg Alesha weighed.
In his defence, the 16-year-old claimed his DNA was planted at the crime scene, but the sheer volume of samples recovered left his astonishing alibi in tatters.
Forensic scientist Stuart Bailey found the accused's profile on intimate swabs taken from Alesha and on the front of her neck
The odds of it being from anyone else were more than one in a billion.
Additional samples were recovered on the child's body and clothing.
Mr Bailey said it was "highly unlikely" they had got there through anything other than direct contact.
The accused was arrested at 5pm on 4 July and driven to Helen Street police station in Glasgow where he was formally charged with Alesha's murder.
Despite what prosecutor Iain McSporran QC described as a "mountain of evidence" he compounded the family's agony by forcing them to endure a trial and blamed Alesha's father's girlfiend, Toni McLachlan, for the crime.
Innocent person
In a further twist, he agreed to testify and dismissed suggestions he was a "confident liar".
The accused repeatedly denied he was responsible and told the court: "I have never met Alesha MacPhail."
The most memorable exchange came after Mr McSporran suggested it would have been "extraordinarily wicked" for Ms McLachlan to have murdered her boyfriend's daughter.
The accused, who appeared completely unfazed by the enormity of the charge facing him, said: "I agree."
The QC then put it to the 16-year-old that the same description would apply to someone who alleged an innocent person was responsible for such a crime.
The teenager locked eyes with the prosecutor across the courtroom and replied: "It would be evil."
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During the early hours of Friday morning, rescue crews waded through Moorland on the Somerset Levels knocking on doors and urging villagers to evacuate.
Temporary flood defences protecting the village had breached as water levels overnight rose by one metre (3.3ft).
Owners of around 80 homes agreed but a handful of other residents chose to remain. Here, a few of them explain why. | Paul Clement, Moorland
"I would say we are in the top 20% of houses that will flood last, and therefore in the top 20% of houses that will drain first. So we are going to dog it out and see if we can get through all this.
We are currently moving anything that is valuable and sentimental upstairs and we are going to stay put.
The fire brigade came in at 02:00 GMT to tell us flood defences had failed in the village.
We may get away with it, we may not. It is quite tense but I am not scared."
Jan MacEacharn, Moorland
"I'm not going. I've got a horse and nowhere to put her. I don't know anybody around here. My friend from the nearby village has arrived with her pets. Where can I go?
We're in a cottage and can't get our furniture upstairs. We were told by the Environment Agency staff that 'we've given up on Moorland, it's a lost cause'.
We went down to Northmoor pumping station to try and get more sandbags to try and protect our house a little.
Our village is mostly old people. We are still having to stick it out though. We have nowhere and no ability to move our horse to higher ground."
Nick Ball, Moorland
"We live on the edge of Moorland and the water is rising. We have got neighbours living with us with all their animals because they have been evacuated from their homes.
All we can do is sandbag the whole place up and hope that things work out OK for us. There seems to be only a handful of people remaining.
The people who do want to stay are determined to stay, including ourselves.
Our property is not quite underwater but the water in the paddock has definitely risen six or seven inches during the night."
Angela Greenway, Moorland
"Luckily we are one of the higher properties in the village. Our house backs onto the river but it is well managed at the moment so we are quite safe - but we are probably cut off.
I have just been down our road which has never flooded in the 11 years we have been here and it is flooded significantly. It is pretty grim but we are hanging on in here and we will stay until we really have to go.
Obviously we won't put our lives at risk or the people who would have to rescue us.
The fire brigade knocked at our door at 03:30 GMT this morning and told us to evacuate, which obviously was absolute panic. Not the nicest wake-up call.
We have spoken to three or four neighbours and we have all said the same - if we know we are staying we will look after each other, that's all we can do at the moment."
Jason Smithen, Burrowbridge
"My parents live in Moorland. They've lived there since 1975 and on Wednesday they were flooded for the very first time.
They are up to their knees in water. At their age they are just mentally and physically exhausted. I've never known anything like it.
They are still there and they don't want to leave. They don't see the point in leaving if they can put a couple more sandbags to stop the floods getting into the kitchen, but the rest of the downstairs is completely flooded.
I spoke to them yesterday and they just want to be there. If they go and stay somewhere else they will worry even more - that's their point of view basically."
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Tony Blair overstated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, sent ill-prepared troops into battle and had "wholly inadequate" plans for the aftermath, the UK's Iraq War inquiry has said. | Chairman Sir John Chilcot said the 2003 invasion was not the "last resort" action presented to MPs and the public.
There was no "imminent threat" from Saddam - and the intelligence case was "not justified", he said.
Mr Blair apologised for any mistakes made but not the decision to go to war.
The report, which has taken seven years, is on the Iraq Inquiry website.
Prime Minister David Cameron, who voted for war in 2003, told MPs it was important to "really learn the lessons for the future" and to improve the workings of government and how it treats legal advice.
And he added: "Sending our brave troops on to the battlefield without the right equipment was unacceptable and, whatever else we learn from this conflict, we must all pledge this will never happen again."
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn - who voted against military action - said the report proved the Iraq War had been an "act of military aggression launched on a false pretext", something he said which has "long been regarded as illegal by the overwhelming weight of international opinion".
After meeting relatives of British service people killed in Iraq, Mr Corbyn said: "I now apologise sincerely on behalf of my party for the disastrous decision to go to war."
He urged the UK to back moves to give the International Criminal Court "the power to prosecute those responsible for the crime of military aggression".
A spokesman for some of the families of the 179 British service personnel and civilians killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2009 said their loved ones had died "unnecessarily and without just cause and purpose".
He said all options were being considered, including asking those responsible for the failures identified in the report to "answer for their actions in the courts if such process is found to be viable".
Tony Blair responds to report
In a statement to the media, his voice at times cracking with emotion, the former Labour prime minister said the decision to commit troops was the "most agonising and momentous" decision in his decade as prime minister, adding that he would "carry it with me for the rest of my days".
"I feel deeply and sincerely in a way that no words can properly convey the grief and sorrow of those who lost ones they loved in Iraq - whether our armed forces, the armed forces of other nations or Iraqis.
"The intelligence assessments made at the time of going to war turned out to be wrong, the aftermath turned out to be more hostile, protracted and bloody than ever we imagined.... and a nation whose people we wanted to set free from the evil of Saddam became instead victims of sectarian terrorism.
"For all of this, I express more sorrow, regret and apology than you may ever know or can believe."
But he was defiant on the central decision to go to war, saying "there were no lies, Parliament and Cabinet were not misled, there was no secret commitment to war, intelligence was not falsified and the decision was made in good faith".
Analysis
By Peter Hunt, BBC correspondent
It's been a long wait.
It may prove to have been a worthwhile wait for the people who have always opposed the Iraq War.
Remember, one million individuals took to the streets in 2003 in opposition to the march to war.
They will seize on this Inquiry's judgement that Saddam Hussein didn't pose an immediate threat and military action at that time was not a last resort.
Those seeking action against Tony Blair are likely to be disappointed - but probably not that surprised - that a panel which didn't include any lawyers, hasn't expressed a view on whether military action was legal.
Sir John Chilcot's public remarks were peppered with the word "failure".
But he was careful not to apportion blame.
Others will now do that on the evidence his report has placed in the public domain.
The political space will be filled with claims and counter claims about a war in Iraq where - as Sir John Chilcot put it - its people have suffered greatly.
In a nearly two hour news conference he said he would never agree that those who died or were injured in Iraq "made their sacrifice in vain" as they had played their part in "the defining global security struggle of the 21st century against the terrorism and violence which the world over destroys lives, divides communities".
Quizzed about what he was apologising for, he said: "There is no inconsistency in expressing my sorrow for those that have lost their lives - my regret and my apology for the mistakes - but still saying I believe the decision was right. There is no inconsistency in that."
He said the US would have launched an invasion "either with or us or without us", adding: "I had to decide. I thought of Saddam and his record, the character of his regime. I thought of our alliance with America and its importance to us in the post 9/11 world and I weighed it carefully with the heaviest of hearts."
Mr Blair, who was PM from 1997 to 2007, conceded that intelligence on Iraq's weapons had "turned out to be wrong" and the invasion had destabilised Iraq but said he still believed the country was "better off" without Saddam, comparing it with the situation in Syria where the decision had been taken not to intervene.
He also said he should have "disclosed" the attorney general's legal advice to the Cabinet on the eve of war - but he defended his close relationship with President Bush, saying: "we are better to be strongly onside with the US", arguing that it was "better for our own security".
George Bush comments
George W Bush's communications director, Freddy Ford, told BBC News: "President Bush is hosting wounded warriors at his ranch today and has not had the chance to read the Chilcot report.
"Despite the intelligence failures and other mistakes he has acknowledged previously, President Bush continues to believe the whole world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power.
"He is deeply grateful for the service and sacrifice of American and coalition forces in the war on terror. And there was no stronger ally than the United Kingdom under the leadership of Prime Minister Tony Blair.
"President Bush believes we must now find the unity and resolve to stay on the offensive and defeat radical extremism wherever it exists."
The key points of the report
Sir John, the ex-civil servant who chaired the inquiry, describes the Iraq War as an intervention that went "badly wrong" with consequences still being felt to this day - and he set out lessons to be learned for future conflicts.
His report, which is 2.6 million words, does not make a judgement on whether Mr Blair or his ministers were in breach of international law.
But it does highlight a catalogue of errors in political and military decision-making, including:
In his statement, Sir John said military action against Saddam Hussein might have been necessary "at some point" but that when Britain joined the US-led invasion in March 2003, the Iraqi dictator posed "no imminent threat", the existing strategy of containment could be continued and the majority of UN Security Council members supported continuing UN inspections and monitoring".
He added: "The judgements about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of a mass destruction - WMD - were presented with a certainty that was not justified. Despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated."
UK military fatalities
Full details of the 179 British servicemen and women who died
Blair/Bush memos
Previously classified documents, including 31 personal memos from Tony Blair to then US president George W Bush, have been published alongside the Chilcot Report.
They show that momentum in Washington and London towards taking action against Saddam Hussein quickly began to build in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 in the US, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
On the day after the attack on New York's Twin Towers, Mr Blair sent a note to President Bush offering his support to bring to justice the hijackers and looked ahead to the "next stage after this evil".
Mr Blair said some would "baulk" at the measures necessary to control "biological, chemical and other weapons of mass destruction", but added: "We are better to act now and explain and justify our actions than let the day be put off until some further, perhaps even worse, catastrophe occurs."
The memos reveal that Mr Blair and Mr Bush were openly discussing toppling Saddam Hussein as early as December 2001, when the UK and US had just launched military action in Afghanistan.
"How we finish in Afghanistan is important to phase 2. If we leave it a better country, having supplied humanitarian aid and having given new hope to the people, we will not just have won militarily but morally; and the coalition will back us to do more elsewhere," says Mr Blair in the memo.
"We shall give regime change a good name which will help in our arguments over Iraq."
In another memo, from July 2002 - nearly a year before the invasion of Iraq - Mr Blair assured President Bush that the UK would be with him "whatever," but adds that if Mr Bush wanted a wider military coalition he would have to get UN backing, make progress on Middle East peace and engineer a "shift" in public opinion in the US, UK and the Arab World.
The note, marked "personal," was shared with then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, but not then defence Secretary Geoff Hoon - a decision criticised by Sir John, who is scathing about the way the collective Cabinet discussion was bypassed by the Blair government.
Intelligence failures
Sir John echoes the criticisms made in earlier reports into the Iraq War of the use of intelligence about Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction to justify war.
It says the assessed intelligence had not established "beyond doubt" that Saddam Hussein had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons.
Of Mr Blair's September 2002 statement warning that Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of biological and chemical weapons that could be launched within 45 minutes of the command to use them, Sir John says: "The judgements about Iraq's capabilities in that statement, and in the dossier published on the same day, were presented with a certainty that was not justified."
On the eve of war Mr Blair told MPs that he judged that the possibility of terror groups in possession of weapons of mass destruction was a "real and present danger to Britain and its national security".
"Mr Blair had been warned, however, that military action would increase the threat from al-Qaeda to the UK and UK interests. He had also been warned that an invasion might lead to Iraq's weapons and capabilities being transferred into the hands of terrorists," said Sir John.
The legality of the war
The then attorney general Lord Goldsmith advised Mr Blair to seek explicit UN authorisation for military action but when diplomatic efforts failed, informed him that intervention was lawful on the basis of previous UN resolutions on Iraq relating back to the 1991 Gulf War.
Sir John said the report did not make a judgement on the legality or otherwise of the war - pointing out that participants did not give evidence under oath and his findings had no legal force.
But he added: "The circumstances in which it was decided that there was a legal basis for UK military action were far from satisfactory."
In the report he says Lord Goldsmith should have been asked to set out in writing how he arrived at his change of view.
When the UK failed to get a UN resolution specifically authorising military action in March 2003, Mr Blair and then foreign secretary Jack Straw blamed France for an "impasse" in the UN and said the UK government was "acting of behalf of the international community to "uphold the authority of the Security Council".
But Sir John concludes that the opposite was true. "In the absence of a majority in support of military action, we consider that the UK was, in fact, undermining the Security Council's authority," he said in his statement.
Post-war planning and aftermath
Much of the report focuses on the post-war planning for the governance of Iraq, originally undertaken by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, and how well equipped British troops were to oversee the large area of southern Iraq around Basra.
Many of the witnesses to the inquiry, including former ministers and military commanders, were highly critical of what they said were failures in the Ministry of Defence to provide the necessary resources and equipment and the UK's general deferral to the US in key areas.
In his statement, Sir John said: "We have found that the Ministry of Defence was slow in responding to the threat of improvised explosive devices and that delays in providing adequate medium weight protected patrol vehicles should not have been tolerated.
"It was not clear which person or department or department within the Ministry of Defence was responsible for identifying and articulating such capability gaps. But it should have been."
Mr Blair told the inquiry the difficulties encountered in Iraq after the invasion could not have been known in advance but the inquiry says, the risks of "internal strife", regional instability and al-Qaeda activity in Iraq were each "explicitly identified before the invasion".
"The planning and preparations for Iraq after Saddam Hussein were wholly inadequate. The government failed to achieve its stated objectives."
The report acknowledged that the initial campaign to overthrow Saddam was successful and praised the "great courage" of service personnel and civilians involved during and after the invasion, which led to the deaths of more than 200 UK nationals and at least 150,000 Iraqis.
But the report adds that Britain's military role "ended a very long way from success" and it was "humiliating" that British troops was reduced to doing deals with a local militia group in Basra, releasing captured militants in return for an end to attacks on British forces.
Wider reaction
Sir John said he hoped the report would answer some of the questions the relatives of those who died and enabled them to make their own mind up on the basis of the evidence.
Reg Keys, whose son Tom was killed in Iraq four days before his 21st birthday, told a news conference that his son had "died in vain".
And Karen Thornton, whose son Gunner Lee Thornton died in 2006 after being shot while on patrol in Iraq, told BBC Radio 4's Today that she wanted Mr Blair to face war crimes charges if it was proved he had lied. "I think the people who lied should be held to account for what they have done," she said. "They are responsible for the deaths of so many people."
Lib Dem leader Tim Farron, whose party opposed the war, said Mr Blair owed the British people an apology.
"It's a stark contrast between Mr Blair's absolute, ruthless determination to go to war almost no matter the evidence on the one hand and on the other hand his complete failure and the government's failure to plan at all over what happened next," he said.
The SNP, which also opposed the war, said it wanted to know why Tony Blair had supported the invasion "come what may", adding that those who failed in their duties must be held accountable for their actions.
And leading lawyer Philippe Sands, who gave evidence to the inquiry, said the cabinet had been "misled about the legal advice".
But Mr Blair's former director of communications Alastair Campbell said he did not believe people were "misled" and the report now lays to rest "the allegations of lying and deceit".
What was the Iraq War?
The war, which lasted about six weeks, ended Saddam Hussein's 25-year regime in Iraq, but the aftermath unleashed years of sectarian violence that has killed thousands since then.
The US, which led the intervention in March 2003, lost 4,487 service personnel in the war. Figures about Iraqi deaths vary from 90,000 to more than 600,000.
The worst attack happened last weekend when so-called Islamic State militants - who control swathes of Iraq and Syria - launched a suicide bombing in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, killing more than 250 people.
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Young people are disproportionately affected by the economic impacts of coronavirus, several reports have found. | By Robin Levinson-KingBBC News, Toronto
The UN has cautioned that the high rate of unemployment among young adults could mean "a lot of young people are going to be left behind".
In the US, about a quarter of people between 16-25 were unemployed in May - which was about double the unemployment rate of other age groups.
It's a myth that all young adults are supported by their parents, or only work part time. According to Statistics Canada, of the roughly 500,000 people between the ages of 15-24 who lost their jobs in April, about half were working full-time.
Young women and minorities are particularly vulnerable, according to a report by the Brookings Institution.
The BBC spoke with four young adults who are looking for work - this is what they say it's like to be in your 20s and unemployed during the pandemic.
Name: Ross Mortimer
Age: 26
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Previous occupation: Opera singer, server
What are you doing now? I've started babysitting. I go over in the morning four times a week. I'm trying to keep up with music as well, I had to rent a keyboard so I could practise in the house.
I'm just trying to enjoy the summer. With music there's probably nothing that will make money until January, and I just have to accept that.
How are you getting by? Before the pandemic, I was making at least twice as much money a month but my income varied. Now I know exactly how much money I'm going to have a month because I receive the government coronavirus stipend, and I can budget. I'm really afraid for September though, when my student loans will start up again (they were paused because of coronavirus).
How's the job search going? There's no guarantee of any work next year at the Canadian Opera Company (COC). And they cancelled the fall - two out of six shows that season - with the possibility of the whole next season not happening. I'm kind of nervous to go back to restaurants right now because I think I'm not going to be able to find a job until they open inside, and then it's working inside with lots of exposure to people.
What are your fears for the future? My main goal is music. So the restaurant, while I'm sad I've lost out of that income stream, I'm not overly concerned. But with music, that industry could be permanently affected. My biggest fear is probably arts organisations shutting down permanently. I just worry that culture in Canada is going to be not supported.
I literally just graduated from my master's a year ago. I was getting jobs - I got the chorus job (at the COC) and I spent last summer in Italy singing. Now I'm doing nothing.
How does your age affect your situation? There's so much less job security, but because I've basically grown up in that I'm not surprised. I'm used to having to look for odd jobs like babysitting, or going to paint somebody's wall. It doesn't feel totally crazy. I've never had a full time job with benefits available to me.
Name: Zainab Mehdi
Age: 22
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Previous occupation: Recent graduate from McGill University with a BA in Psychology
What were you planning to do this summer? This summer my plan was to stay in Montreal and research for a bit, because I was working for a behavioural neuroscience lab and we were working on a paper that was supposed to be sent for publishing in the next few months. McGill shut down on 13 March and the labs haven't really opened since.
How are you getting by? I have been receiving the Canada Emergency Student Benefit (CESB) since May. It is only given for 16 weeks so my final month would be August.
How have your plans changed? My lease was going to finish so I couldn't really stay in Montreal anymore. My family is in Pakistan so I'm staying with my friend in Toronto in her family home.
I've switched over to look for more jobs in the business sector, under project management or market research. Academic research wasn't really an option, in the subject I was interested in, because it wasn't really essential.
How is your job search going? I wouldn't say it's going well. The roles I'm looking for are entry level, there aren't many roles available and even when I do apply to applications they usually just say 'thanks for applying, but we're not going to proceed any further'. I've been trying to fill my time with learning some hard skills. I've been taking a course, and I've been interning for a construction company in project management, but it's part time.
How has it been emotionally? I had to get used to the uncertainty. Any short-term goal or long-term goal just went out the window. So there was a lot of anxiety and stress there. There was a whole new world I didn't even understand that I was going into, and nobody else even understood it. I had to get used to the fact that I shouldn't have expectations anymore.
When I did eventually get through that, it became easier. I tried making the most of the small things I was doing and recognising that I am doing a lot. It's not comparable to the pace I was doing before, but I can't really compare because it's not the same world. At the same time that you're dealing with a lot of uncertainty, you're still receiving news about a lot of loss. People are dying, there's so much grief.
Name: Maxime Barret
Age: 24
Location: Washington, DC
Previous occupation: Stationary engineer, specialising in maintaining and repairing boilers and HVAC equipment, at a large hotel
What are you doing now? I'm still currently employed but we got notice that the hotel may close as of 24 August. We were told when this whole thing started, we would be cut down to 32 hours. Then we were told the hotel would be closing down, and there would be a skeleton crew running the hotel. I was fortunate enough to be a part of that skeleton crew. But in June, we were told the hotel is closing and we all had to find new jobs. Now I don't know whether I should be looking for another job or not.
How was it getting that news? I've been in that job for five years. It's the kind of job everyone puts their heart and soul into. Everyone felt like family there. It just kind of hurts getting a notice saying you don't have a job anymore. When I did trade school, I did an apprenticeship at that hotel. It was a four-year apprenticeship where you went to school at night and you learn on the job. That was really where I cut my teeth and learned the trade, which made it especially hard to leave it.
How's your job search going? The job market is definitely not great. The hotel chain has a hiring freeze so it's hard finding a job moving from one hotel to the next, which means I lose all my benefits.
I've applied to at least 30 jobs. I've probably had about six interviews, and I haven't heard back from many of them. It's been pretty tough. Before I was trying to apply for something that looked like a better job to go to, but now I'm just looking for whatever I can take. Running out of health insurance in a pandemic is not what you want to do.
I am in a union - the union has really great insurance, but you have to find a job within the same union. But even the union gave is the advice of just take whatever you can get right now.
How does your age affect your situation? It's good in some ways because in the blue-collar trades there's not a lot of young people. But in another sense, it's hard when you have everyone who's 20 years my senior with a lot more experience than me. Or managers who a lot of times look down on younger years, thinking if you don't have 30 years in the trade you don't know anything.
Name: Katherine Fiallos
Age: 22
Location: Montreal, Quebec
Previous occupation: Recent graduate from McGill University with a BS in Microbiology and Immunology
How's your job search going? I got an internship in Montreal just before the pandemic hit in global health, but it's just for this summer. For the long-term, I'm mostly looking for jobs in San Francisco, where I'm from, and Canada, where I went to school.
I've applied to about 120-150 jobs online. About seven jobs postings were cancelled, which means they're no longer hiring, and I've gotten two interviews so far. The rest have just not gotten back to me.
San Francisco is a hub of a lot of jobs and opportunities. You're used to people telling you to "come to San Francisco, there's all these tech and bio-tech companies" but going through the job-hunting process at this time, you can really feel the change in the economy.
What does that feel like? It's frustrating. Once you start to go through months without hearing responses, you kind of feel like you're just not good enough. Even after all the efforts you've done, like getting internships and going through the four years of gruelling academic work, you just kind of feel like it's a waste. You have to tell yourself that it's not really you, it's part of the process - but it can really get to you.
How are you getting by? I'm getting by with the money that my parents generously gave me to get through my last year of university and the summer while I do my internship in Montreal. I did get grant money for my summer research project which would be barely enough to pay for my rent and living expenses. Being honest, if my parents wouldn't have helped me out financially, I would probably be more stressed about my finances and about just living in general without a job.
How has the pandemic changed your goals? The pandemic reminded me of the importance of public health. It was something I had considered briefly, but after the pandemic happened, I realised it's something really important and something I would want to get into.
How does your age affect your situation? I never looked for a job before a pandemic, so it's hard for me to compare. In a way it is an advantage because young people are more sought out. If you're a young person with a bit of experience then it's probably more of an advantage, as opposed to a young person that has just graduated and needs to be trained, which is something companies are not always willing to do.
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Belgium legalised the right to euthanasia for adults in 2002. Now the Senate has voted to extend the law to children who are terminally ill, and suffering unbearable physical pain. Supporters believe this would be a logical move. Opponents say it is insanity. | By Linda PresslyBBC Radio 4, Belgium
An incurably sick child, a request to die, a lethal injection. For many people this is an unimaginable, nightmare scenario.
Most of us will not experience the cruel reality of seeing a child's health deteriorate as a result of a terminal illness. But some Belgian paediatricians who have say children should be allowed to ask to end their lives, if they cannot be relieved of their physical symptoms.
"Rarely - but it happens - there are children we try to treat but there is nothing we can do to make them better. Those children must have the right to decide about their own end of life," says Dr Gerlant van Berlaer, a paediatrician at UZ Hospital Brussels.
He and 16 other Belgian paediatricians signed an open letter in November petitioning senators to vote for the child euthanasia bill.
"We are not playing God - these are lives that will end anyway," argues Van Berlaer. "Their natural end might be miserable or very painful or horrifying, and they might have seen a lot of friends in institutions or hospitals die of the same disease. And if they say, 'I don't want to die this way, I want to do it my way,' and that is the only thing we can do for them as doctors, I think we should be able to do it."
Under the draft bill, passed in the Senate last month by 50 votes to 17, children must understand what euthanasia is, and their parents and medical teams have to approve the child's request to die.
In the Netherlands, Belgium's northern neighbour, euthanasia is legal for children over the age of 12, if they have the consent of their parents. But if the Belgian bill is passed in the lower house of parliament, Belgium will be the first nation in the world to lift all age restrictions.
Philippe Mahoux, leader of the Socialist group in the Senate and sponsor of the bill, has described it as "the ultimate gesture of humanity".
"The scandal is that children will die from disease," he says. "The scandal is not to try and avoid the pain of the children in that situation."
A senator who voted against the bill, Christian Democrat Els Van Hoof, thinks it is based on a misplaced idea of self-determination - that everyone has the right to make decisions not only about how they live, but also about how they die. She disagrees, and fought successfully, with a group of other senators, to restrict the scope of the bill to children with terminal illness suffering unbearable physical pain.
"In the beginning they presented a law that included mentally ill children," she says. "During the debate, supporters of euthanasia talked about children with anorexia, children who are tired of life - so how far does it go?"
In the case of adult euthanasia, she fears a "slippery slope" is already in evidence. The 2002 law governing euthanasia allows adults to choose to end their lives, if they:
But two cases of euthanasia that hit the headlines in Belgium and internationally in 2013 left Van Hoof deeply troubled.
In January, the press reported on the deaths of identical twins of 45 who were deaf. Marc and Eddy Verbessem asked for euthanasia after finding out that they would go blind as a result of a genetic disorder - they feared they would no longer be able to live independently.
The death of Nathan Verhelst, a female-to-male transsexual, came nine months later. He asked to die after a series of failed sex-change operations.
Els Van Hoof has been advised by a lawyer that the twins probably did meet the criteria, as they had a serious illness. But the case of Nathan Verhelst still worries her.
It was Dr Wim Distelmans, an oncologist and palliative care specialist and professor at Brussels university VUB, who sanctioned the euthanasia of all three, on the grounds of psychological suffering. He is also the co-chair of the Euthanasia Commission, a panel of doctors, lawyers and interested parties that oversees the law - which, critics note, has not asked prosecutors to examine any of the 6,945 registered deaths by euthanasia in Belgium between 2002 and 2012. All cases are deemed to have been carried out within the law.
On 20 April 2012, Tom Mortier, a chemistry lecturer, got a message to call a Brussels hospital. His mother was dead. Godelieva De Troyer was 64 and had been suffering from depression. She had sent her son an email three months before she died telling him she had asked for euthanasia, but he did not think doctors would allow it.
He is enraged. He does not accept the argument that his mother had a "right to die".
"From my perspective this is not a law for patients, it's a law for doctors so they won't be prosecuted," Mortier says. "Performing euthanasia is unethical. It's killing your patients, and now they're promoting it as the ultimate form of love. What have we become here in Belgium? I don't understand it…"
And his reaction to the Senate vote on children and euthanasia?
"It's insanity."
Dr Marleen Renard, an oncologist responsible for paediatric palliative care at the University Hospital of Leuven, believes there is no need to legislate for child euthanasia, as there are already ways to end the suffering of a dying child.
"If we can't treat the pain, then we can sedate children. And if we see that the situation is really inhumane, we can go to our Ethics Committee and ask for permission to end life. But we have to have the consensus of a lot of people to do that."
For Renard, the critical point is that in her experience, children do not ask to die.
"I've seen a lot of young adolescents with very severe pain and symptoms. They always had some hope for the next day. I've never had one who told me, 'I can't do it any more, please stop it.' They don't want to die. They want to live."
But Dr Gerlant van Berlaer thinks that perhaps children do not ask to die because it is not legal.
"Whenever a child dies in hospital, the other children will talk among themselves," he says. "Often a child will not talk to you directly, but the other children will say, 'We have been discussing it and some of us think we should end our lives another way, different to the way we've seen our friends die.' Once the law changes, they will be able to ask us directly."
Are children really mature enough to make an end-of-life decision? Van Berlaer believes the experience of terminally ill children who spend most of their time with adults often makes them old beyond their years.
Feike van den Oever, a volunteer on the children's oncology ward at the University Hospital of Leuven, agrees children gain maturity when seriously ill. His son Laurens was eight when he died of cancer.
"From the conversations we had with him, you could see how a child starts thinking in a way that is not proper for his age," he says. "Children try to understand what is going on. Does that mean they gain competence to decide or request that kind of solution [euthanasia]? No. Not in my view."
No-one can tell how many children might ask to die if Belgium's euthanasia bill for children becomes law. For adults, the number of requests has increased year on year since 2002. About 80% of those who choose euthanasia have cancer.
"Those cancer patients who die of euthanasia, statistically as a group, live longer than those who die naturally," says Dr Jan Bernheim one of Belgium's early advocates for euthanasia, a pioneer of palliative care, and an oncologist. "Why? Because when it's been agreed that he or she will be able to ask for euthanasia, that reassures people. They know they are going to die well." Spared this anxiety, he says, their illness tends to proceed less quickly.
Bernheim supports the move to extend the right to die to children, and has administered lethal injections to adult patients who asked for euthanasia.
"Suffering trumps all other considerations," he says. "And the way these people die is very ceremonial, and often has some emotional beauty. Whereas, the patient who dies after two or three days of rattling, twitching and grunting, that's terrible…"
The death of a child is a tragedy. But should Belgian children have the right to ask to end their lives? Parliament is expected to decide early this year.
Linda Pressly's report on the right-to-die debate can be heard on BBC Radio 4 at 20:00 on Thursday, or afterwards on the iPlayer
Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook
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A man has been charged with murdering a 29-year-old woman who went missing a week ago. | Maggie Smythe was last seen at her Bolton home on 26 January, Greater Manchester Police said.
Detectives believe they found her body nearby on Friday but formal identification is yet to take place.
Christopher Taylor, 39, of Greenroyd Avenue, Bolton, has been charged with her murder. He is due to appear at Bolton Magistrates' Court on Monday.
A 29-year-old man who was also arrested on suspicion of murder has been released while inquiries continue.
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Last week the death of chef Benoit Violier was widely reported - and in many headlines he was hailed as the "world's best chef", his restaurant as "the best in the world". But there is no agreement on how to rank chefs and restaurants and the award of "best" titles is a matter of hot dispute. | By Hannah SanderBBC News
In the past it used to be very simple. First came intense training to master French haute cuisine techniques, then a series of apprenticeships in Paris under the world's best chefs, all of whom were themselves classically trained.
Finally, a chef was ready to add a personal touch to the French repertoire and launch a new restaurant under his or her own name.
The world's culinary aristocracy was then recorded in the Michelin Guide, with the best restaurants earning one, two, or exceptionally three stars.
Today, only 26 of the world's 111 three-star restaurants are in France - which shows how much the rest of the world has come on, in the opinion of Michelin's secret army of gourmet inspectors - but France still leads the field by a long way.
Except that in 2002 a British magazine, Restaurant, introduced a new measure of success - the World's 50 Best Restaurants. This ranks restaurants in order, something Michelin never attempted, and it quickly became enormously influential.
When Denmark's Noma was named number one restaurant in the world in 2011, it received 1,000 reservation requests within a few hours. Last year's number one restaurant - El Celler de Can Roca in Spain - hired staff simply to turn down reservations.
But, controversially, in the 13-year history of the competition, a French restaurant has never been placed first or second, and last year no French restaurants even made it into the top 10.
"Classical food is ignored by those on the panel. It is obvious that they prefer trendy modernist cooking," says restaurant critic Andy Hayler.
"They tend to get very excited about the latest fad or the latest fashion. There are no classical restaurants near the top of the list."
Certainly, the restaurants most feted by the 50 Best tend to have strayed a long way from many French haute cuisine traditions.
"At Noma in Copenhagen my prep involved a ridiculous amount of precise carrot whittling, plus making emulsions out of freshly cut grass, and the dreaded 'veal fibres' (separating individual fibres of cooked veal)," says Sam Bray, who has worked in top restaurants around the world.
Another task involved "keeping the moss plates alive", and going deep into the woods to collect rare moss. Some young chefs had to look under rocks for ants, Bray says, and then smear themselves with honey until the insects were running all over the bodies and could be scraped into barrels. This allowed the restaurant to serve live ants on top of beef tartare, jumbo shrimps or a dollop of creme fraiche.
The 50 Best has also saluted restaurants such as Central in Peru, number four on this year's list, where head chef Virgilio Martinez divides his menu into categories based on the altitude at which food has been grown. One dish is a caviar-like bacterium found only in Peruvian mountains after rain.
Then there is D.O.M. in Sao Paolo, where celebrity chef Alex Atala disappears into the Amazon in search of ingredients such as priprioca root, long thought inedible and used to make cosmetics rather than food.
If France dominates the world of Michelin three-star restaurants, Spain ranked in 2015 as the culinary powerhouse of the 50 Best, with seven restaurants on the list - more than any other country.
So by what measure was Benoit Violier reckoned to be the best chef in the world? His Restaurant de l'Hotel de Ville Crissier has not featured in the 50 Best list for the last three years and achieved its highest ranking in 2010, at number 14.
Enter the "objectively delicious, deliciously objective" La Liste - supported by France's tourism board and launched in 2015, it was widely assumed, as a French riposte to the 50 Best.
The annual unveiling of the new French Michelin Guide has been hosted by the French Foreign Ministry for the last two years - part of a French government bid to preserve the country's position as the world's culinary capital, and Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius was also on hand present the awards at the La Liste ceremony in December.
Restaurants from 48 countries were considered and the La Liste panel warned French chefs that there would be no patriotic bias. Nevertheless, the highest accolade went to the French-born Violier and his restaurant near Lausanne.
There is some overlap between the French view of the world and that of the 50 Best.
Twenty of the world's 111 Michelin three-star restaurants appear in 2015's 50 Best (and five make it into the top 10). By the same token, 91 three-starred restaurants do not make it into the 50 Best.
There has been some animosity.
Three French food writers started a petition called "Occupy 50 Best", reeling off a series of complaints about the voting system. This was signed by a number of star French chefs, such as Joel Robuchon of L'Atelier Saint Germain de Joel Robuchon, who boycotted last year's 50 Best awards ceremony.
Perhaps friction is inevitable when one restaurant is ranked against another, and one country's cuisine appears to be valued more or less highly than another's.
William Sitwell, editor of the Waitrose Good Food Magazine, thinks the whole idea of a world's best restaurant is ludicrous.
"Best restaurant for whom? On what criteria?" he asks. "I don't think you can have a single 'best' place."
There is also a fine line, he says, between the best and the worst, as "the concept encourages a certain type of restaurateur to overcomplicate and overcharge the customer".
Some might argue that most of the "best" restaurants overcomplicate and overcharge. As it's often been said, there is no accounting for taste.
How the rankings work
World's 50 Best:
Michelin Guide:
La Liste:
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A light aircraft flying from Alderney to Jersey had to make an emergency landing on Thursday.
| The pilot reported an undercarriage fault at 1705 GMT on Thursday, 24 February.
The emergency services were called to the scene but the aircraft landed safely and taxied off the runway.
There were no injuries to the pilot or passenger on board the aircraft and Jersey's airport and runway remained open throughout.
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Leprosy is one of the classic scourges of ancient times. But it's far from being consigned to history - with over 200,000 new cases reported each year.
Although it's easily treated with antibiotics, people living in remote communities often go undiagnosed and are left with permanent damage. Now a new, cheap test - "the cost of one ice-cream" - could help doctors to stop the disease in its tracks. | Celio Marques was 16 years old when he first noticed pain and weakness in his hands and feet.
He was showing the early signs of leprosy but was treated for rheumatism for three years, allowing the disease to spread.
When the correct diagnosis finally came at the age of 20, Marques thought his life was over.
"Back then, the doctor told me - you have a disease that kills, that makes your limbs fall off. You have to go away. I was desperate and tried to kill myself. But then I learned what the disease really is and how to treat it."
Thirty years have passed and Mr Marques, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, is fully cured of the disease. But he's had to learn to live with the damage caused by the late diagnosis.
His fingers are permanently bent inwards and he has reduced movement in his hands and feet. He lost his eyebrows and his ears are swollen. Early diagnosis would have brought a very different outcome.
A modern day problem
After India, Brazil has the second highest number of leprosy infections in the world, accounting for 90% of cases in Latin America.
Dr Francisco Reis Viana, who has been treating leprosy at the Curupaiti Hospital in Rio for the past 30 years, says that finding all of those infected is still a huge challenge.
"The situation in Brazil is grave. The country has 30,000 new cases each year and it's difficult to contain because the disease is spread out and it's hard to diagnose and treat everyone," he told BBC reporter Julia Carneiro.
"Because of the long incubation period, people can transmit the disease to others for years before knowing they have it."
As most of the infections happen in poor and often remote areas, the task of spotting and treating the disease early becomes even harder.
But now there's new hope for diagnosing leprosy before it infects others and causes physical damage.
A laboratory in Rio, OrangeLife, has just introduced a test - similar to a pregnancy test - that uses a drop of blood to diagnose leprosy in around 10 minutes.
Marco Collovati, president of OrangeLife, says each test will cost less than a dollar - "just the cost of one ice-cream":
"The rapid test allows us to detect the disease early, before the patient has lesions to the nerves and deformations," he says.
"This is a real revolution after more than 3,000 years of a disease which has caused so much stigma, suffering and prejudice."
New test looks promising
Collovati says the rapid test is easy to use in the field and has "huge potential" to reach remote areas where getting a diagnosis is currently very difficult.
"It can be taken anywhere. It doesn't need to be refrigerated and can be used by any health agent with very basic training. All it takes a prick to the finger," he says.
The test - half the size of a credit card - takes one drop of blood and a reactive strip inside detects antibodies produced against the infection. Just like a pregnancy test, it is two lines for a positive result and one line if it is negative.
With an accuracy of approximately 90%, it will detect most cases of early-stage leprosy. For the remaining 10%, says Mr Collovati, patients produce too few antibodies to be detected.
The Brazilian government is going to test the product in two of the worst affected parts of the country later this year, before adopting it more widely.
Celio Marques, whose life was changed so radically by leprosy, is hopeful that the new test will help others find treatment without the suffering and damage he has had to endure.
Five years after his diagnosis he discovered he had been fired from his job in construction - regarded as an invalid.
He then met people suffering from similar problems at an organisation in Rio which helps people with leprosy. Today, he does voluntary work there, helping other people understand what the disease is and how to treat it.
"Treating the disease today is easy. The problem is when it causes damage. If I could have known about it earlier, I wouldn't have these marks," he says.
Leprosy is a disease that has terrified people since biblical times - the hope now is to make it a thing of the past.
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A 17-year-old boy has been found guilty of the murder of a 15-year-old drill rapper. | Jordan Douherty, from Grays, Essex, was beaten and stabbed during three separate attacks outside Clockhouse Community Centre in Romford after leaving a birthday party on 23 June. He died of a stab wound to the heart.
Two other boys, aged 16 and 17, were found guilty of conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm.
Sentencing will take place in 2019.
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A few weeks ago, in a chilly London plaza, I met a woman called Becky*. The smart, affluent-looking, 30-something mum smiled warmly as she approached me. We'd never met before. But until fairly recently, Becky had been trolling me online. | By Sali HughesJournalist & broadcaster
Imagine if a group of strangers spent up to 16 hours a day feasting over nasty and imagined details about your personal life and family, telling livelihood-endangering lies about your job.
That happened, and still happens, to me and many others on what's known as a "dragging" or "trashing" site.
If you search my name you'll find I'm a journalist. You'll see my posts about beauty and lifestyle all over Twitter and Instagram. But when Becky searched my name, alongside a cosmetic procedure, a link to the "trashing" site had come up as a result.
The lies about my personal and professional life spanned pages; talking about my children, my marriage and my mother who'd recently died of cancer.
False rumours and hurtful insults
The site is an online forum, dedicated to trashing the lives and reputations of people with a social media presence.
About a year ago, the insults, hurtful conspiracy theories and speculation migrated from that forum to a beauty industry gossip site.
A false rumour appeared, albeit briefly, suggesting that I had an undeclared financial relationship with a major brand. I decided I had to act.
I posted a video on Instagram, talking about the ceaseless trolling I - along with many others - had received on the site, how it threatened my livelihood, affected my mental health and hurt deeply those I love. Having watched that video, Becky stopped posting.
A few months later, she wrote to me. And that eventually led us to meet, shivering, outside a cafe in Victoria, where she had agreed to be interviewed for an edition of File on 4 I was making about my experience of online abuse.
In her email to me, Becky had acknowledged there was "a lot of projection going on". And when we met, she spoke about how issues in her personal life had fed into what she wrote.
"I think what you see of influencers, people on the internet, media personalities is potentially only 40 seconds of content a day. It's very easy to fill in with your own narrative.
"For me specifically, I can say 100% what was going on in my own life is reflected in what I posted… it was nothing really to do with the content creator. It was what I filled in."
But while my name may have been on the posts, were the contributors like Becky really talking about me? The Sali Hughes that was being denigrated there was not one I would recognise.
Scant facts would be extrapolated into large fictions. Competition to come up with the juiciest speculation would lead to nonsense being accepted as fact, then more speculation built on top of that, until the person at the centre of the abuse seemed to be a fictional character with my name.
Impossible to win
When I met Becky outside the cafe I could tell we both felt nervous, and her voice broke as she told me she's a "normal person".
"I am. I'm a nice mum. I'm a good friend," she insisted. "I've been back to what I wrote, it was so nasty and I thought: how was I so blind to how thoroughly unpleasant I was being? Just knowing that I was any way involved makes me feel really upset at the thought of that."
One of the most upsetting aspects is that once targeted, it is impossible to not be found wanting - it simply isn't possible to win.
Put your kids in social media posts and you're exploiting them and invading their privacy. Choose not to, as I do, and you're clearly never with them, always palming them off on others, marrying the love of your life merely to nab a free nanny.
Post too often and you're a narcissist, post too little and you're lazy. Ignoring allegations is to tacitly plead guilty and put an entire career at risk, confronting them head on is to amplify them, play for attention and waste your time "when you should be looking after your kids" (one of their comments on my Instagram at the time).
Part of the problem with getting trolls to understand the impact of their abuse is often they convince themselves - and each other - that they're the good guys, cutting through dishonest posts with the sword of truth.
"Oh, absolutely 100%," says Becky. "I think, you know, particularly with (commercial) partnerships, people are there saying: oh, you know, people are getting paid tons of money behind the scenes, not declaring ads properly."
There's a strict code of conduct and failing to declare paid-for posts online is something that needs to be effectively policed. But that's the job of the Advertising Standards Authority - to whom anyone can report behaviour that breaks the rules - and there's a process in place that gives those accused a right of reply.
After I made my video, I received dozens of messages from people telling me they were now on medication or in therapy as a result of the treatment they'd received on the same site.
Somebody else told me they'd developed agoraphobia, another that she'd even had suicidal thoughts. Paranoia is evidently a common effect in victims, thanks to the anonymity afforded to online trolls. I found myself feeling scared to go out because I didn't know who might be watching me.
Despite it all, I respected Becky's bravery and honesty in speaking to me. But if we're speaking of honesty, the truth is my sympathy was limited. Because Becky, albeit having escaped the world of online abuse that had sucked her in, still represented to me something deeply painful, unfair and ultimately mystifying.
Why would people devote so much of their time insulting and lying about someone they don't even know? If they don't like me - which of course is absolutely fine - why didn't they just unfollow me?
"It was a way of me trying to solve my own problems," reflected Becky. "It's actually nothing to do with you."
Before leaving, she shrugged and added: "It doesn't make sense to me either".
Sali's story is on File on 4, Tuesday 6 October 2000 BST on BBC Radio 4 and afterwards on BBC Sounds.
*real name has been changed.
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The Philippines is playing a key role in the wave of disinformation sweeping the world. So-called troll farms are being used to create multiple fake social media accounts that post political propaganda and attack critics. But a group of people calling themselves the Troll Patrol are trying to use their own tactics against them, as the BBC's Howard Johnson reports. | In 2016, Gina - not her real name - and others, watched with alarm as a group of Catholic schoolgirls in the Philippines came under attack from online trolls.
The girls had been filmed and photographed standing on a street in the capital Manila in their uniforms, chanting: "Marcos is no hero! Marcos is no hero!"
They were angry that former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos had just been buried in a nearby hero's cemetery with military honours.
In the 21 years he ruled, billions of dollars of public money went missing while thousands were arrested and tortured for opposing his regime.
But his family have remained both politically influential and popular and are closely aligned to the current President Rodrigo Duterte.
Within hours of the photos being posted on the school's Facebook page, and then widely reshared, comments began to appear defending the Marcos legacy and attacking the girls' actions. Some of them were from genuine accounts, but many were from pro-government trolls using fake accounts.
"If Marcos is no hero, I would say most of you are no virgins and that's the trend of young girls nowadays," said one. There were also rape threats.
"We're talking about kids here. Nobody was doing anything about it," says Gina. "We realised that we should beat them at their own game."
Gina and a group of equally-concerned individuals, who would go on to be known as the "Troll Patrol", took action.
Much like the trolls, the group began creating fake Facebook accounts - Facebook doesn't require photo ID proof of identity - so they could defend the girls without risking personal attacks themselves.
They created scores of accounts whose posts were designed to counter the narrative of the online pro-government bullies through logic and reasoning.
Night-after-night the group would log into Facebook scanning for threatening posts or abusive behaviour and begin posting their counter-comments.
"We realised that if [opponents] feel that you are part of the group that actually opposes the views of government, people would never listen to you," says Gina.
"You have to make them feel that you are actually part of their circle who just happened to have a change of opinion. You can educate the people and at the same time you can say whatever you wanted to be able to protect the people who were being cyber-bullied."
Within a week the controversy over the protest began to die down, but the problem of trolling has far from gone away in the Philippines. And it's not just used to support President Duterte and those aligned with him, it's also used to silence critics.
Journalists, human rights defenders and politicians have all reported receiving systematic abuse and death threats. I too have received threats online for my reporting, saying I would be "hunted down" and "beaten". One comment read "watch your back", accompanied by a skull and crossbones emoji.
Many of the most ardent trolls are supporters of the president - they call themselves DDS (Diehard Duterte Supporters), a play on the lettering of the Davao Death Squad, an execution squad, which according to the United Nations, killed more than 1,000 people in the city in the southern Philippines while Duterte was its mayor.
Mr Duterte has even admitted paying people to promote him or defend him on social media, though he insisted he only did so during his successful 2016 election campaign.
According to Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO) undersecretary Jose Joel Sy Egco, the government has never used paid-for "keyboard warriors" to attack critics while Mr Duterte has been in office.
Mr Egco told the BBC that online troll threats come from a "myriad of sources", which could include "somebody's neighbours" to "any local official you had a brush with recently".
There have been reports in the Philippine media about "troll farms" - centres where people are allegedly paid to write abusive comments on peoples' social media accounts. I asked Mr Egco what the government had done to investigate these claims:
"If you're asking us, if you're asking me as a government official here, I am definitely against any such practice, if there's any at all."
I hadn't asked Mr Egco if the government was behind the troll farms, but he went on to elaborate:
"In government, we are very diligent in spending our budget and we don't have budgets for those kind of things. Maybe some people did that in the past and maybe some people are still doing it right now, but definitely I tell you, in all honesty, and I swear to God, I myself do not believe in such."
Mr Egco said that his team had received "a lot of complaints" by media workers about cyber-harassment and cyber-bullying and that the department had investigated the cases but had run into a brick-wall when social media companies refused to disclose information on the people posting the comments.
Facebook wouldn't confirm whether it had any plans to make it harder for people to set up fake accounts, but a spokesperson said the company was "committed to removing content that violates our policies, disrupting coordinated inauthentic networks, and limiting the spread of misinformation".
This week the company took down two networks based in the Philippines and China for violating their policy on "foreign or government interference." The networks, which included more than 200 accounts, targeted Filipino Facebook users with, among other things, content supportive of President Rodrigo Duterte.
Despite the online abuse, I have never been threatened in real life in the Philippines. But online troll behaviour can precede deadly outcomes. Recently two human rights defenders, who had been repeatedly trolled and threatened online were killed within a week of each other.
On 10 August, unidentified assailants killed peasant leader Randall Echanis, 72, inside his home in Quezon City, in Metro Manila. Then on August 17 unidentified gunmen fatally shot Zara Alvarez, a legal worker for the human rights group Karapatan. The group says 13 of their activists have been killed in the past four years.
Within minutes of Ms Alvarez's killing, another member of Karapatan, Clarizza Singson, received a message on Facebook warning that she "would be next."
The group say they are the repeated targets of "red-tagging," in which the authorities and online trolls label them as Communists, linking them to the country's decades-old Communist insurgency.
And rights groups fear a newly passed Anti-Terrorism Act could weaponise the troll's posts.
The law allows for the detention of 'terrorist' suspects for up to 24 days without charge. An Anti-Terror Council, made up of Duterte appointees, has the power to designate people as suspected terrorists, subject to surveillance for 60 days and arrest, based on mere accusations.
Supporters of the law say it is needed to bolster efforts against ongoing armed insurgencies mainly in the south of the Philippines.
But rights group Amnesty International says even the mildest government critics can be labelled terrorists, based on accusations thrown online by anonymous pro-government trolls.
"In the prevailing climate of impunity, a law so vague on the definition of 'terrorism' can only worsen attacks against human rights defenders," said Nicholas Bequelin, AI's Asia-Pacific Regional Director.
Gina says she and the Troll Patrol make no apologies for adopting similar tactics to get their message across.
"We justify [our] actions because they are all part of free speech, which we really hold in high regard," says Gina. "It would have been easy to report the pro-government accounts. But honestly, let them say whatever they want to say. Bad speech can only be fought by better speech. I don't really believe in censure."
And with more Filipinos expressing free speech, Gina believes the need for the Troll Patrol is diminishing.
"Nowadays, we no longer hide under these personas," says Gina. "We still speak out against abuses whether by the administration or the opposition. But this time, we speak as ourselves."
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French President Francois Hollande has announced the award of the country's highest award - the Legion d'honneur - to six passengers who tackled a suspected radical Islamist on board a train travelling from Amsterdam to Paris. | Here's what we know about what happened.
How it started
The drama took place on board a high-speed train travelling from Amsterdam to Paris, via Brussels, on Friday afternoon.
The journey was apparently uneventful until the train, operated by Thalys, reached Oignies in northern France, having just crossed from Belgium.
French prosecutor Francois Molins said a French passenger in carriage 12 who was trying to access a toilet cubicle was faced with an individual who emerged from the cubicle "bare-chested, wearing a backpack on his chest and carrying a rifle slung across his shoulder".
Mr Molins said the man was also in possession of an automatic pistol, nine cartridge clips, a bottle of petrol and a box-cutter.
The unnamed French passenger tried to overpower the man.
Seeing the struggle, 51-year-old French-American passenger Mark Moogalian also tried to intervene.
But the gunmen fired several shots and Mr Moogalian was hit in the neck.
How the gunman was subdued
Three American friends on a tour of Europe - off-duty military servicemen Spencer Stone and Alek Skarlatos, and Anthony Sadler - were also in the first class carriage.
They had initially been unable to find their first class reservations and had moved to this carriage to get a better internet connection. They were all sleeping when the commotion woke them.
Seeing the suspect had freed himself from the Frenchman who first tackled him, the Americans charged the gunman.
"Alek just yells, 'Spencer, go!' And Spencer runs down the aisle," Mr Sadler said.
"Spencer makes first contact, he tackles the guy, Alek wrestles the gun away from him, and the gunman pulls out a box cutter and slices Spencer a few times."
Mr Stone was slashed in the neck and eyebrow with the box-cutter and had a thumb almost sliced off.
Mr Stone held the suspect in a chokehold and Mr Skarlatos hit him in the head with the butt of one of the weapons.
The three men tied him up with the help of British businessman Chris Norman.
Mr Stone - despite having sustained injuries himself - then went to the aid of Mr Moogalian, who was losing blood.
Mr Stone said: "I just stuck two of my fingers in the hole, found what I thought to be the artery, pushed down and the bleeding stopped. I just said 'Thank God' and held that position until the paramedics got there."
Mr Hollande said Mr Stone had "probably saved Mr Moogalian's life".
Meanwhile, the train staff alerted authorities as to what had happened. As the train slowed down and passed through Henin Beaumont station, several frightened passengers broke the windows and escaped the train, according to Mr Molins.
The gunman was held until he could be arrested at Arras station.
Who is the gunman?
The suspect was named as Ayoub El-Khazzani, a 25-year-old Moroccan.
Investigators say Mr Khazzani was born on 3 September 1989 in Tetouan in Morocco and lived in the Spanish city of Algeciras.
They say he frequently attended the city's Takwa mosque, "known for its radical preaching", according to Mr Molins, and for which his brother was the treasurer.
Mr Molins said he had been convicted of several offences in Spain, including drug trafficking and traffic offence, and has been given at least two prison sentences.
According to Mr Molins, Mr Khazzani had travelled through several European countries in recent years.
Mr Molins said Mr Khazzani had returned to Europe from Turkey in June 2015. Prosecutors believe his presence in Turkey may indicate he went to war-torn Syria.
Mr Molins said he had also spent "five to seven months" living in the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers in 2014, during which time he had worked for a mobile phone company for two months.
The suspect was flagged up to France by the Spanish authorities in February 2014 as affiliated to a radical Islamist movement.
Mr Khazzani says he was left homeless after his identity documents were stolen. In the last six months, he says he travelled to Spain, Andorra, Belgium, Austria, Germany and France, but denies travelling to Turkey or Syria, according to his lawyer.
Mr Khazzani apparently did "not understand why this story has become so inflated," his lawyer told Le Parisien newspaper (in French).
"He said he wanted to extract money from the passengers on this Thalys train and nothing else. He denies any terrorist intent to his actions. This is almost laughable, he says."
The lawyer added that Mr Khazzani said he had found the rifle and Luger gun he used in the attack in a suitcase left in a park, near the Brussels station where he used to sleep.
Mr Molins said that this had been Mr Khazzani's initial version of events under questioning but that his explanation had grown less and less lucid and that he eventually stopped speaking to investigators at all.
He said that analysis of Mr Khazzani's phone revealed he had watched a YouTube audio file whilst already on the Thalys train "in which an individual called on the faithful to fight and take up arms in the name of the Prophet".
Mr Khazzani's father, Mohamed el-Khazzani, told the Daily Telegraph in Algeciras, Spain, that his son was a "good boy" interested in "football and fishing".
He later told El Mundo: "They are saying Ayoub is a terrorist but I simply can't believe it. Why would he want to kill anyone? It makes no sense. The only terrorism he is guilty of is terrorism for bread; he doesn't have enough money to feed himself properly."
Train staff
French actor Jean-Hugues Anglade, who injured his hand as he tried to activate the train's alarm, told Paris Match (in French) that members of staff ran through his carriage (next to carriage 12 where the melee took place) to the guards' van at the end of the train.
They opened the door with a special key and locked themselves in, he alleged.
"We shouted for the staff to let us in, we yelled 'open!'", he said. "There was no response."
However Agnes Ogier, the boss of Thalys, denied Mr Anglade's allegations, saying train staff "fulfilled their duties".
One member of staff found himself under fire and took five or six passengers with him into the baggage car, where he sounded the alarm, she said.
Mr Hollande praised the actions of the staff when handing the Legion d'honneur to four of the passengers.
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Seven people have been killed and 48 people wounded - some critically - in an attack on London Bridge and the Borough Market area.
Saturday evening's events were captured in hundreds of videos and eyewitness accounts.
| Shortly after 22:00 BST there were reports of a white van driving at 50mph (80kmh) along London Bridge, eyewitnesses said the van mounted the pavement and hit five or six people.
The van then crashed near the Barrowboy and Banker pub.
Eyewitness Eric saw three men get out of the white van. He said: "[They] ran towards the people that they nearly ran over.
"I thought oh maybe they're worried about them and trying to comfort them because obviously [I thought] it's an accident.
"[But] they literally just started kicking them, punching them, they took out knives and then they just, it was a rampage really.
"You could hear people screaming, they were getting stabbed."
The attackers then went into Borough Market, where they began stabbing people outside bars and restaurants.
An eyewitness, Gerard Vowls, 47, said: "They ran up and started stabbing this girl, three of them. I was defenceless, I couldn't do anything.
"They were running up going 'this is for Allah' and they stabbed this girl 10 or 15 times."
Gerard said he threw glasses, bottles, tables and chairs to try to stop them.
Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live Richard - who was in a restaurant watching the attack unfold - said Gerard had done "a heroic thing", "putting our safety over his, which was remarkable".
Minutes after the first 999 call police swarmed the area.
James Yates posted a video of officers entering a basement bar on Southwark Street, where they told customers to "get down".
On the other side of Borough Market, Brendan was in the Wright Brothers restaurant with his girlfriend. He said: "All of a sudden there was a lot of commotion, within seconds it was obvious that something big was happening.
"I grabbed my girlfriend and hid behind the bar in the restaurant. We could hear gunfire and explosions.
"There were people running out of the bar across the road. Then a guy ran across the road up to me with a massive knife.
"He stared at me realising he wasn't getting in."
Photographer Gabriele Sciotto was in Borough Market at the time, and pictured a wounded suspect on the floor.
He said: "He's holding a bomb on the chest, he's bleeding from the left arm.
"The policeman you can see there in the picture was still pointing the gun at him."
Police have now said these belts were hoax devices.
Kumi de Costa was in a taxi while the attack was developing. She said: "The cab driver turned into the market and we got stuck right in the middle of the shooting. We were in a one-way street and couldn't turn around.
"There were loads of shots being fired. Two people were on the floor behind the church with two or three people leaning over them.
"A couple of times we had to lie down on the floor of the cab because of the shooting around us."
One couple heard screaming and running at Borough Market, but thought that it was a group of revellers.
But shortly afterwards they saw casualties.
"We ran, we saw some chefs in a smoking area behind a [hotel] and I came up to them and said 'there's been a terror attack, let's lock these doors and get people in [the hotel]," the man said.
Dozens of people were locked into the hotel and went up to the third floor. They stayed until an alarm went off and the hotel was evacuated.
Liam, who lives above the Southwark Tavern in Borough Market, told BBC Radio 5 Live, said: "I definitely heard this young guy try and get the attention of the ambulance saying 'my friend's been stabbed and he's in the pub'."
He also said that another man was walking around, covered in blood in a "dazed" state, asking the emergency services for help,
Tyson Oladokun, who was on London Bridge immediately after the attack, said: "I saw a man lying in the road being cradled by another man.
"I think I saw someone that had been stabbed and other people who I think had died."
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A ferry which connects Dorset to the Channel Islands will continue to sail from Poole "until further notice", its operator has said.
| Condor Ferries relocated the sailings from Weymouth in February while repairs were carried out on a ferry berth.
The operator previously said it hoped to resume normal services at Weymouth at the end of March.
Weymouth and Portland Borough Council said interim remedial works to the berth had been unsuccessful.
Condor said passengers with existing bookings would be notified in writing of changes to their journeys and services would continue to sail from Poole throughout the summer.
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The job of chairing the Arts Council of Wales will be re-advertised, after two of the three shortlisted candidates for the £44,000-a-year post pulled out. | The closing date was in July, but no interviews took place.
Prof Dai Smith ends his third three-year-term of office on 31 March.
The Welsh government said it was still on target to have a new chair by April, but felt strongly the public would want to see a proper competition for the role.
"Our decision re-opens the opportunity for people with the right attributes and experience to apply," a spokesman said.
"This is good for democracy, good for openness and transparency and will be good for the future of the Arts Council.
"We think the public will respect our decision in these circumstances."
The post was advertised offering a salary of £43,810 for a minimum 10 days' work a month.
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Violence has broken out in India's technology hub Bangalore in Karnataka state over a long-running dispute about water. Protesters are angry at a Supreme Court ruling ordering Karnataka to share water from the Cauvery river with neighbouring Tamil Nadu. TS Sudhir reports on the latest crisis. | On Monday afternoon, a school bus was stopped in the Banashankari area in southern Bangalore.
Three drunk men got into the bus and asked aloud: "Which child belongs to Karnataka and and which child belongs to Tamil Nadu?''
The 15-odd students, aged between 10 and 14, were stunned. Their school had asked them to leave early because the situation was tense, with violence and arson breaking out in many parts of the city.
"Luckily the driver handled it tactfully. He told the intruders that everyone was a native of Bangalore and that their families supported Karnataka on [water sharing with] Cauvery,'' said a parent, not wanting to be identified.
Battle for access
By dusk, dark smoke had filled the Bangalore skies. Some 35 buses had been set on fire by protesters, just because the buses belonged to a travel agency whose owner is Tamil.
Is India facing its worst-ever water crisis?
India to 'divert rivers' to tackle drought
Earlier this month India's Supreme Court ruled that Karnataka must release 12,000 cubic feet of water per second to Tamil Nadu from the Cauvery river until 20 September. Both states say they urgently need the water for irrigation and a battle about access to it has raged for decades.
India's water war
Karnataka says water levels in the Cauvery have declined because of insufficient rainfall - 42% of the 3,598 irrigation tanks in the state are dry - and that it cannot therefore share water with Tamil Nadu. So Tamil Nadu went to the top court demanding 50,000 cubic feet of water per second.
When the Supreme Court on 2 September asked Karnataka to "live and let live", the state softened and offered to release 10,000 cubic feet of water per second to Tamil Nadu every day for five days.
On 5 September however, the top court ordered Karnataka to release 15,000 cubic feet of water per second for 10 days. This ruling was later modified to 12,000 cubic feet of water per second until 20 September.
This would mean that nearly a quarter of the water now available in the Cauvery basin will flow into Tamil Nadu.
Tamil Nadu says it badly needs the river water for irrigation. Drought-hit Karnataka argues that most of the river water is now needed for drinking water supplies in Bangalore and some other cities, leaving no water for irrigation at all.
But even farmers in Tamil Nadu are unhappy with their share.
P Ayyakannu, president of the local South Indian Rivers Interlinking Farmers Association, called it "akin to giving pigeon feed to an elephant".
Rising violence
Feeling let down by the top court's order, Karnataka is boiling.
The main city of Bangalore is the worst affected: the violence in the technology hub forced the closure of many offices and much of the public transport system. Police have imposed an emergency law that prohibits public gatherings, and more than 15,000 officers have been deployed across the city.
One person was killed when police opened fire on protesters on Monday evening. Buses and trucks bearing Tamil Nadu number plates have been attacked and set on fire. Schools and colleges are closing early and many businesses are shut.
A group of activists belonging to a fringe pro-Karnataka group assaulted an engineering student because he had ridiculed Kannada film stars for supporting the strike on Friday, by posting memes on Facebook. The student was hunted down and forced to apologise.
Across the border, in Tamil Nadu, petrol bombs were hurled at a popular restaurant owned by a resident of Karnataka in Chennai while the driver of a vehicle with Karnataka number plates was slapped and ordered to say "Cauvery belongs to Tamil Nadu".
The latest violence brings back memories of the anti-Tamil riots in Bangalore in 1991 over the same issue.
Then, some 200,000 Tamils were reported to have left the city, after incidents of violence and arson targeting them.
There was a proposal in 2013 to set up a panel comprising representatives from the two warring states to resolve disputes over river water sharing.
But successive governments have dragged their feet on this, and the two leaders - Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah and his counterpart in Tamil Nadu, Jayaram Jayalalitha - have not reached out to each other to resolve the crisis. And with Delhi reduced to being a reluctant referee, the onus has fallen on the Supreme Court to crack the whip.
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The cause of a fire which affected about 70 acres (28 hectares) in Ashdown Forest in East Sussex on Sunday is being investigated. | At its height, more than 100 firefighters from stations across the county were on the scene tackling the blaze in the Kings Standing area.
The fire broke out at about 13:45 BST and roads in the area were closed off.
The fire service said no-one was injured and by just after 17:00 the blaze had been contained.
Adrian Brown, from East Sussex Fire and Rescue, said: "This fire has devastated a large area of heathland and natural habitat, which is of importance for nesting birds.
"In this dry weather we'd like to again remind members of the public to take care in the countryside.
"This is the second fire we have had to attend in Ashdown Forest this weekend."
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Motorists have been granted a 20-minute period of grace to collect takeaways at a shopping centre following claims of "unfair" fines. | Some said they received £90 fines due to automatic number plate recognition cameras at the pay-and-display car park in Island Green, Wrexham.
A newly-erected sign now says fines for short stays will be reimbursed.
More than 1,800 people had joined a protest group on Facebook urging motorists to boycott the car park.
Wrexham council leader Mark Prichard said the situation was "completely unfair" and contacted Euro Car Parks.
The company has been asked for a comment.
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Ukrainian writer Larysa Denysenko says she is the victim of a "21st century witch hunt" after having to withdraw from a literary festival in the city of Lviv where she was to discuss her children's book featuring same-sex parents. | By News from Elsewhere......as found by BBC Monitoring
She told the Dzerkalo Tyzhnya newspaper that the city authorities received a letter from 15 radical nationalist groups warning of "having to take all possible measures" to halt the session about the book Maya and Her Mummies at the high-profile Publishers' Forum, because it was "destructive propaganda for non-traditional values".
The Forum printed a scan of the letter on its website, and said it had received other threats on social media as well.
Ms Denysenko said that neither the Forum nor the police were able to guarantee security at the presentation, due to take place in a children's library, so she agreed to cancel the event out of a "sense of personal responsibility for children's safety".
She added that accusations of propaganda were nonsense, as the book argued for the primacy of love and tolerance, not for one sort of family arrangement or another.
"I get the impression that these people haven't read the book. And what are 'standard values' in a country where so many single mothers have to raise children on their own?" she said.
The Lviv newspaper Vysokyy Zamok agreed, saying the book told 17 stories about children from ethnic minority backgrounds, or coping with parents working abroad and other family difficulties, but it was "just one story about a child with two mummies that, it seems, has caused all this hard-right hysteria".
Ms Denysenko, a UN Goodwill Ambassador who campaigns for children's rights, wrote on her Facebook page that "these ultra-nationalist groups and churches are portraying me as a 21st century witch".
Her page is full of expressions of support from members of the public, who say the book's message is one of tolerance and acceptance, and deplore attempts to silence the writer as "diktat".
'Nail in the coffin'
But there have been hostile comments elsewhere on social media, overwhelmingly focused on the same-sex issue. One critic said "such books should be burned", and another dubbed it a "nail in the coffin of the Ukrainian family".
Such is the furore over threats to the Forum, not to mention calls for the police to investigate, that one of the letter signatories, Yuriy Dadak, of the Spirit of the Nation group, has hastened to assure reporters that nationalist groups would carry out "no acts of provocation".
But the chairman of the Publishers' Forum, Oleksandra Koval, told Vysoky Zamok that "all points of view can be made at the Forum" and denounced the far-right threats as "signs of totalitarianism".
She also called on the police to provide additional protection to the Forum, which will be discussing other controversial questions including Ukrainian-Polish and Ukrainian-Jewish relations.
It is possible that the far right threats will only serve to make Maya and Her Mummies more popular, as expressions of support have appeared on social media from Deputy Prime Minister Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsidze and other major public figures. In addition, the publishers have made the book freely available to download.
Reporting by Martin Morgan
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The TV legends that are the Chuckle Brothers are to get their own Saturday tea time show, almost a decade after ChuckleVision ended. | Chuckle Time will be on Channel 5, who describe it as an hour-long "family friendly clip show".
It will mix sketches performed by Paul and Barry with videos of "fails, flops and funnies" uploaded by viewers.
The pair, both now in their 70s, have been children's TV fixtures since the 1980s.
There will be 12 episodes in the new series and no transmission date has yet been announced.
10 things you (probably) don't know about the Chuckle Brothers:
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US fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken has taken its motto of "finger lickin' good" food to a literal extreme by debuting edible nail polishes in Hong Kong this week. The BBC's Juliana Liu tried it out. | Fried chicken-flavoured polish in fun, fashionable shades? It sounded too good to be true.
And it was. Sort of.
The polish was delivered to our office in couture-quality packaging in KFC's red and white corporate colours. The product itself was housed in half-ounce square bottles emblazoned with the slogan "It's Finger Lickin Good".
So far, so good. But the colours seemed off.
Fair is fowl
The "Hot & Spicy" flavour came in a trendy burnt orange shade similar to Tabasco hot sauce.
But the "Original Recipe" was a dirty olive green colour with black specks - a far cry from the advertised nude shade.
On closer examination, we found both bottles had expired a few days ago. The green shade had clearly oxidised.
That makes sense because both are entirely made of edible ingredients: spice blends suspended in starch, with vegetable gum added so they stick to your finger nails for a day or so, according to a spokeswoman at Ogilvy & Mather Hong Kong, the advertising agency behind the polishes.
With no preservatives, each batch - made by spice company McCormick in Singapore - must be refrigerated and lasts for only five days.
Oh, and the instructions clearly state each bottle is good for one-time use only, presumably, because the ingredients are perishable.
The taste test
The spokeswoman assured me the expired polishes were not harmful, so my BBC Chinese colleague Grace Tsoi and I decided to taste them.
The spicy flavour tasted almost exactly like the paste used in KFC's hot & spicy chicken. It definitely lingered on the tongue, but we couldn't detect any fried chicken flavour.
It was same for original recipe polish: nice balance of spice accented by black pepper, but again, no chicken.
What about their performance as nail polish?
The orange shade was thick but performed well, with minimal drag on the nail surface.
The colour, though, was extremely transparent and not true to bottle. Not even two coats would get me there.
The green shade dragged quite a bit. After it settled down, it clumped in an unappetising way. Major polish fail.
'Not elegant to lick fingers'
The two flavours have been promoted heavily by KFC Hong Kong on social media, but aren't available to the general public.
"At the moment, we're not mass producing it," said the spokeswoman. "We are only giving previews to the media to test the market reaction."
When Grace polled people on Hong Kong's busy streets, she got a wide variety of responses.
"I don't think that eating nail polish is a good idea. I don't think it's elegant behaviour for women to lick their fingers," said Crystal Zhu, a 27-year-old tourist from mainland China.
Lily Wong from Hong Kong said she'd love to try it.
"It is an innovative idea," said the 17 year-old. "I have never heard of anything like this before… It will be fun to paint nails with my friends."
"Some people on a diet may use it," said Twinkle Leung, an 18-year-old student, who believes the nail polish may help quell cravings for fried chicken.
Ogilvy said the concept was being floated in Hong Kong because its local team came up with the idea.
And Hong Kong customers seem more enamoured by limited-time offerings, rather than the two stalwart flavours embodied by the polishes.
Judging by the response on social media, the promotion is working, even if the polishes aren't entirely what has been advertised.
Many have expressed incredulity and curiosity, while others were repulsed. "So gross," said Facebook user Crystal Lou, while another called Brian Fung suggested a friend try it "so you can taste (fried chicken) while being a vegetarian."
Additional reporting by Grace Tsoi
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An alleged far-right extremist has appeared in court accused of possessing documents on combat, homemade weapons and explosives. | Ben John, 20, appeared at the Old Bailey charged with seven counts of having a record likely to be useful to a terrorist on or before 7 January.
Mr John, of Addison Drive, Lincoln, spoke only to confirm his name and was granted conditional bail.
He is next due to appear at Nottingham Crown Court on 12 March.
A preliminary trial date has been set for 2 August.
More news from across Lincolnshire
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Christmas has been celebrated at a church on the site of Wakefield Cathedral for more than 1,000 years. It is situated in the heart of the West Yorkshire city, advertised by its soaring 247ft (75m) spire. BBC News went to see what goes on inside the building in the run-up to Christmas. | "This is a church where everybody is welcome," reads a small notice as you enter the main door at the west end of the building.
One of the first people visitors meet is a volunteer greeter, like Tessa, who has been welcoming people for four years.
"I often stand near the front door... A lot of people ask me questions but some ask to see a priest and I help them.
"It's a very welcoming building and it is nice to see so much going on."
Inside the Grade I-listed building, which is open 365 days a year, Christmas trees are twinkling and rehearsals are under way for a lunchtime concert and a later carol service.
It is a hive of activity with school children coming and going.
The cathedral has about 100,000 visitors annually and has a target that everyone who lives in the Wakefield district will come in at least once a year.
Neil Holland, the building's chief operating officer, said: "It's an ancient building and things always need doing, in the last six years we've spent £7m on restoration.
"Our staff numbers are quite small by Durham, York or St Paul's standard, we couldn't function without our volunteers in roles like greeters, bell ringers or choir chaperones."
Visitors wander around the cathedral, many craning their necks to take in the details of the roof or the dominating rood screen.
But others come in to find peace and reflection.
"Worship is the core of our mission, it's our purpose," said the Dean of Wakefield Cathedral, the Reverend Canon Simon Cowling.
At least two services are held at the cathedral every day.
'Thinking time'
Mr Holland said: "We still want everybody to be able to find space for stillness here."
One visitor, who gave her name as Pat, said: "I came in to light a candle for my husband, it's 28 years now.
"I find peace… I come in every Tuesday or Friday and I've enjoyed listening to the children rehearsing today."
A short distance away Gareth Price was sitting in a chair.
"I have come in for the contemplation and thinking time," he said.
"Sitting here works somewhat and I don't know whether it's saying it to someone else.
"It's a very busy place, I'd miss it if it wasn't here."
Richard Wainwright, a verger at Wakefield, has worked at the cathedral for 20 years.
"It's never boring... always something to do especially when there's a lot of visitors like at this time of year."
He added: "Today we have put 700 chairs out. I've seen every kind of event here - fashion shows, murder mysteries, film nights, concerts and pantomimes."
Mr Wainwright, who is one of three people responsible for opening and closing the cathedral each day, said they are the first in and the last out.
"There is a totally different atmosphere as the lights go out at the end of a day."
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The director of children's services in Torbay has resigned from her post after what she has described as a "serious health scare". | Carol Tozer has not been at work for the last few weeks.
In a statement, she said that she has been ill and had noted with "increasing concern" speculation about her whereabouts.
She said that, because of the circumstances, she decided it was time to leave the unitary authority.
Her deputy, Richard Williams, has been appointed acting director of the department.
Carol Tozer was in charge of adult social care in Cornwall from 2003 until 2008.
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An apple a day keeps the doctor away. And over the past day there's been a surge of people eating apples in Poland - but not for medical reasons. Poles have been posting images of apples on social media as a way of protesting against Russia. | By BBC Trending What's popular and why
On Wednesday, Russia announced a ban on some fruit and vegetable imports - including apples - from Poland "for sanitary reasons". Polish food producers say the ban is politically motivated as a response to EU sanctions, a claim Russia denies. In response, Poles have been showing their support for local farmers by campaigning on social media. It started on Twitter when the journalist Grzegorz Nawacki shared an image of himself eating an apple and used the hashtag #jedzjabłka, which means "eat apples".
"It's the most hurtful thing that could happen to Polish farmers. Over half of apples produced in Poland annually are exported to Russia." says Nawacki. "I thought the best way to help them would be to start eating more apples and drinking more cider. That way some of the apples will get consumed and people will show solidarity with farmers." The hashtags #jedzjabłka and #EatApples began trending on Twitter and within hours the humble Polish apple had become an internet meme. A Facebook page called Eat Apples to Annoy Putin is gathering some of the most popular parody pictures and has so far been liked almost 17,000 times.
The campaign has made national news headlines in Poland and the country's agriculture minister is among a number of politicians who've joined the campaign. One of the country's largest supermarket chains, POLOmarket, has also been actively endorsing the hashtag on its Facebook and Twitter pages. A special promotion on its website says, "POLOmarket joins the nationwide #jedzjabłka campaign to popularise the consumption of this great national fruit" and it features recipes where apples are a key ingredient. "I didn't expect it to become so big," Nawacki told BBC Trending. "Perhaps consumers realise they can shape and influence the reality."
Anger is growing in Europe over Russia's alleged relationship with Ukrainian rebels. The latest round of EU sanctions on Russia have been described as the toughest since the Cold War. Polish food producers have interpreted Russia's measures on Polish exports as the Kremlin hitting back. There are also reports that Russia may extend restrictions on food imports to the rest of the EU.
Reporting by Anne-Marie Tomchak
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All our stories are at bbc.com/trending
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Many young people who qualified for protection from deportation under an Obama-era scheme are now fearful for the future. While much of the focus has been on Hispanics affected, there's a large group from another part of the world. | By Brajesh UpadhyayBBC News, Washington
Nayim Islam vividly remembers the morning he woke up to the sound of his wailing mother. She had just received a call from back home in Bangladesh. Her father, who she hadn't seen for 18 years, had died.
It was Islam's first year in college and a moment he calls "a turning point" in his life.
Years before, when he was a child, the family had made a tough choice.
They arrived in the US under visitor visas and stayed on as undocumented immigrants. It was a one-way ticket with the hope for a better future. But it also meant living with constant fear of being deported.
As he grew up, Islam says he remembers "feeling very guilty after realising that all her sacrifice may not amount to anything".
"Without documents, I still won't be able to achieve that American Dream my parents had for us."
That moment of feeling "helpless and powerless" as his mother mourned, he says, propelled him to come out of the shadows. He graduated with a degree in biology but decided to become a full-time community organiser.
That, too, was made possible because of an Obama-era programme - Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or Daca - that allowed nearly 700,000 immigrants who came to the United States illegally as children to stay and work legally.
In September, President Trump rescinded the programme and has asked Congress to provide a solution by 5 March. Early in January, however, a federal judge in San Francisco ordered the government to resume accepting renewals for Daca and work authorisations.
The administration has now appealed to the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling. Those who benefitted from the programme are faced with uncertainty.
While the majority of the Daca recipients, sometimes known as "Dreamers", are from Latin American countries, there's also a significant number from other parts of the world, including thousands from south Asia. According to data from the US government, at least 2,640 Daca recipients are from India, 1,340 are from Pakistan, and 490 are from Bangladesh.
In most cases, the children came with their parents on a visitors visa. The actual numbers of undocumented south Asians are estimated to be higher, as stigma attached with illegal status within the community and fear of sharing family information may have lowered the number of Daca applications.
Shahzeb Leghari was 13 when he moved to New York with his mother and younger brother from Pakistan. His mother had a flourishing business in Lahore, running a boutique and a salon, but decided to leave to escape a rough marriage.
In New York, she worked as a store clerk while he did odd jobs after school in restaurants for $5 an hour.
Leghari recalls being "stopped and frisked" many times in his neighbourhood - a controversial practice where police would detain, question and sometime search civilians without a warrant. For Leghari, it carried the extra worry of being deported and separated from his family.
"It was New York, a so-called sanctuary city. But my heart would be pounding when they searched my bag," he says. "Just one guy had to say - he's a threat - and I would be back in Pakistan."
Things changed after Daca, even though it took him 15 months to get approval because of "extensive background checks". Over the years, the average approval time has been anywhere between three and six months.
"If I had to speculate, I feel it took much longer than usual because I was a Muslim and a Pakistani," he says.
He had graduated as a biology major from the City College of New York, but had no hopes of continuing his education in the sciences because of his immigration status. Even if he managed to pay thousands of dollars for a higher degree, there would be no professional job without legal papers.
Daca brought the promise of some financial aid and "on-the-book" jobs. Now he hopes to pursue a career in medicine. While preparing for his medical college admissions test, he also works in a pharmacy, drives for Uber and finds time for community organising.
Like Leghari, more south Asian immigrants are taking part in activism. He says now his family joins him at events, including visiting Washington, DC to participate in protests outside the White House.
But there are many in the community who struggle with English, don't know that despite being undocumented, they have certain rights. And then there's the social stigma.
"Recently, one of my friend's parents were deported to Bangladesh, but he did not let us raise it with authorities fearing that everyone in [the neighbourhood] would get to know that they were undocumented," says Leghari. There's a fear the news will reach back home and the family would be ridiculed and looked down upon by the society where they were considered a success for living in the US.
Nayim Islam now works full-time for Desis Rising Up and Moving (Drum), an organisation that focuses on immigrant rights in the South Asian community in New York City. He says there is a growing realisation among the community that if they do not raise their voice, nobody will do it for them.
"We tend to focus a lot on politics back home, but not on the politics where we are building our lives," he says.
Under Daca, undocumented south Asians did not feel as vulnerable as they used to be, but President Trump's order has put that sense of freedom at risk. Many families are also worried once the security of Daca is lost, they will be exposed and the administration could launch a massive crackdown with information on extended families.
"We don't have a choice but to fight,'' says Islam. "We have to remember even Daca wasn't given to us without a fight."
A recent poll found that 83% of Americans and 67% of Republicans support continuing the Daca programme. There is also strong support from large corporations for a legislative solution.
Many Republicans who support Daca beneficiaries also want stringent immigration laws paired with it. But Islam says programmes that save young immigrants from deportation but puts their undocumented parents in danger is not a solution he's going to fight for.
"How can I say that I will accept the path of citizenship in exchange for my parents being deported?"
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Dutch police got to the bottom of mobile phone thefts at a rock concert when they found a man with 30 mobiles in his cycling shorts. | The suspected pickpocket is a 34-year-old man, believed to be in a roving gang of thieves, police say.
He was stopped after rock fans alerted police, who then blocked the exits.
Extra police went to the Sum 41 concert in Amsterdam-Zuidoost after a tip-off from Belgian police. Fifty mobiles had been stolen at a Sum 41 gig in Antwerp.
It is not yet clear if the suspect - a Romanian national - had accomplices at the Canadian band's Amsterdam concert, which took place on 21 January.
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Organic waste generated in Cardiff will be sent to Gloucester for treatment, it has been announced.
| Cardiff Council says 628 tonnes of carbon dioxide will be saved by sending waste to a site in Gloucester rather than Derbyshire.
Cardiff does not have processing capabilities for organic waste.
Councillor Margaret Jones said: "I am delighted this contract will enable us to make further CO2 reductions when compared to landfill."
The contract awarded to New Earth Solutions will run for a minimum of one year, with the option of extensions adding up to a further three years.
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A road has collapsed after a burst water main caused heavy flooding in part of Plymouth. | The burst, in the Melville Road area of the city, has seen the streets closed between Alexandra and Cambridge roads near the Ford Primary School.
A "significant" amount of water was running downhill, Devon and Cornwall Police said.
South West Water said it was "hoping to restore water supplies as soon as possible".
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A marina lock gate torn from its hinges by the remains of Hurricane Ophelia on 16 October will be removed from the water and assessed for damage. | Repairs on the 80 tonne gate in Milford Marina are under way after it was left floating in the marina entrance.
The Pembrokeshire coast had been battered by winds of up to 90mph.
Around a dozen boats had been trapped in the docks before the gate was tugged away by the Svitzer Gelliswick.
The Port of Milford Haven said the gate was taken to the J Wall on 1 November, where it will be winched from the dock by a 500-tonne crane.
The gate will then be checked for damage and any important repairs made.
A barge is scheduled to tow the gate back into place in several weeks' time.
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The case against a man charged with attempted murder over a shooting has been discontinued, it has been confirmed. | A teenager suffered chest and hand injuries in the attack in Radford, Nottingham, on 29 June.
Kieron Saunders, 30, of Cardale Road, Nottingham, had also been charged with possession of a firearm with intent.
The Crown Prosecution Service said no evidence was offered at a hearing at Nottingham Crown Court on 6 March.
A spokesman for the CPS said a review of defence submissions had led to the decision there was "no realistic prospect of conviction".
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A cyclist has died after a hit-and-run collision in the West Midlands. | Emergency services were called to Midland Road, Darlaston, Walsall, at about 03:20 GMT on Wednesday.
West Midlands Police said a man had suffered a serious head injury after being knocked off his bike by a car. The force said the driver then left the scene and investigations to trace them are ongoing.
The A462 Midland Road remains closed between Empress Way and The Green.
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So, for the avoidance of doubt, I hate this time of year - largely because of the convention, in the media, in business, in the City, that it is time to take stock and make predictions for the coming year. | Robert PestonEconomics editor
Is it that those extra glasses of festive vino are supposed to improve powers of foresight? Or is there some magic in Christmas and Hanukkah that means whatever I was thinking two weeks earlier about what's happening in the world is changed in some mystical way?
Bonkers.
Unfortunately it is the expected bonkers. So here goes.
First point.
The economic recovery we've witnessed in almost all the developed and big economies this autumn will continue through most of 2014, and in some cases - including the UK's - may gain momentum.
The "flows" in the global economy - temporarily at least - are not as strong a brake on growth as they were: the pace of tax rises and spending cuts has slowed almost everywhere; consumers are more confident, largely because there haven't been any truly hideous shocks for almost two years; and businesses are a bit more confident.
And, of course, central banks have continued to create free money and cheap credit as if there is no tomorrow - to offset the intractable reluctance of commercial banks and financial institutions to create credit.
Hey presto, this is the jolliest Yule for six years. And if you don't want to spoil the festive mood, stop reading now.
Second point.
The big structural flaws in most economies, and the global economy, are not mended, so - unless this coming year's more benign economic conditions are exploited to accelerate the remediation - the recovery could very easily start to peter out towards the end of 2014.
Or to put it another way, the "stock" problem - excessive debts in Europe, Japan and (to a lesser extent) the US - is still with us. The lack of competitiveness of many western economies, the UK, France, even the US, has not been fixed.
And because of the endemic weakness of the richer economies, China remains dangerously dependent on mind-bogglingly excessive, debt-fuelled investment to generate the rapid growth perceived necessary by its government (and one January treat for you - ha ha - will be a film I've made for BBC2 on whether the Chinese economic miracle is about to expire).
To be clear, in a globalised world, we are all in this together. And the long-term sustainability of growth in both West and East would require two analogous changes: a greater willingness of Chinese people to consume, and an increased desire on our part to save, or cultural revolutions that would be the work of decades.
The way I see all this, as you know (you really do, or you haven't been paying attention), is that there is far too much debt in the world, and far too little equity, because
a) most rich economies have an extraordinary propensity to consume,
b) our banks, till recently, fed this consumption with the frenzied provision of credit,
c) we buy far more from the rest of the world than we sell to it, because our tradeable sector - especially in manufacturing - is too small.
On this view, America's much more rapid recovery than Europe's is no mystery: it is because the debts of American households have fallen fairly rapidly since the 2008 global calamity; and because the notorious or celebrated fracking has made America much less dependent on expensive imported energy.
Only France, with its vast nuclear generators, has relatively cheap energy within the EU.
Importantly, European banks and insurers are - generally - weak, not capable of supplying vital credit to households and businesses (this is less of a problem in the UK). And the putative solution, a comprehensive "asset quality review" by the European Central Bank over the coming year, may for a time make banks more risk averse and reluctant to lend, so as to minimise the amount of expensive capital they may be forced to raise to fix their historic imprudence.
Also, and to state the bleedin' obvious, European member states persist in maintaining the conceit that monetary union requires only very limited political and fiscal union.
So, for example, a recently announced plan to tackle the problem of banks that are too big to fail, an agreement on new rules for limiting the impact on taxpayers when they do fail, keeps all the residual burden of rescuing banks on the home country's exchequer. With no explicit sharing of costs and risks by eurozone countries, the finances of the weaker economies - Spain, Italy, inter alia - will remain dangerously stretched.
In those circumstances, of banks' viability in extremis resting on the questionable solvency of their home countries' governments, there is little prospect of banks in the weaker economies being able to borrow from markets cheaply or easily - in that the risks of banks' creditors losing money remain non-trivial.
That in turn means that the weaker banks will remain unhealthily hooked on cheap funding from the European Central Bank, and will continue to find it hard to finance any fledgling economic recovery.
Which I could have condensed by saying "plus ca change..."
Hey presto: Europe is still flatlining, and America is growing at 3% per annum, or maybe a bit more.
All of which creates something of a puzzle: why on earth is Britain growing at an almost identical pace to America, and pulling away from our confrere across the Channel?
Yes, household debts in the UK have fallen relative to income, though not in absolute terms, and they remain high (140% of available income, more than £1.5 trillion).
But, we don't have cheap energy (I didn't need to remind you of that, did I?).
Also the gap between what we sell to the rest of the world and what we buy from it has actually been widening. And business investment has increased only very slightly.
Or to put it another way, why are British consumers (is that you, by the way?) saving less and spending again?
I wrote a bit about all this recently.
But, silly me, I forgot quite an important stimulus - which has nothing to do with the Chancellor, or the Bank of England.
You might call it a leaving present from the now defunct Financial Services Authority, because it was the decision in April 2011 of the FSA's then chief executive Hector Sants to force the banks to pay restitution for mis-selling PPI credit insurance.
At the time the FSA estimated this would lead to the banks forking out "just" £4bn.
This was a wild under-estimate. It is now clear the banks will be handing more than £16bn to their customers, which represents a boost to consumers' balances of around 1% of GDP.
Since around three quarters of this PPI cash has been handed out over the past 18 months, this is probably the single biggest contributor to the revival of consumer spending.
The banks' sins of the past transformed into a current virtue, thanks to the intermediation of the regulator.
Wunderbar, surely.
It's coming to an end of course (although the spam texts and cold calls from the dratted claims firms would make you think otherwise).
Which is why it really matters that businesses, with their tails up a bit, become less risk averse and start investing.
As it happens, the business leaders to whom I chat are remarkably bullish right now. And although this is hideously unscientific and "intuitive", my sense is that there are some legs to this recovery, for all the drag of a lamentable trade performance.
So what's the biggest challenge or risk for 2014?
It is the probable phasing out of money and cheap-debt creation by the US and UK central banks (there is no chance of that happening in the eurozone).
Will the economies in the US and UK have achieved adequate lift-off velocity to withstand the choking off of the fuel of exceptional monetary stimulus?
Gawd only knows, because this is genuinely uncharted territory. If you pressed me, I would say I doubt it, but I could be wrong (as if you doubted that).
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Police involved in a major search for a missing walker on the Carmarthenshire coast are looking for a person flying a drone in the area when she disappeared. | Susan Smith was last seen at 13:30 GMT on Saturday near the Carmarthen Bay Holiday Village in Kidwelly.
Five Coastguard teams, a helicopter, RNLI lifeboats and a mountain rescue team are helping Dyfed-Powys Police with the search for Ms Smith.
Officers want a person flying a drone in the area on Saturday to call them.
"We have been made aware that someone was flying a drone in the area and we would ask that person to contact police as soon as possible," said Sgt Jess Jones.
Officers said Ms Smith - who is described as about 5ft 2ins tall, petite and with blonde hair - was known to walk along the beach to St Ishmaels and Ferryside.
Police believe she was wearing black jeans, a black fleece and navy and grey walking boots when she was last seen on Saturday afternoon.
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It is Sunday, and a chorus of Tagalog and Bahasa Indonesia greets shoppers at the Lucky Plaza mall along Singapore's Orchard Road. Hundreds of foreign domestic workers from the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere come here every Sunday to catch up with friends and send money home via the many remittance shops. They make up the 200,000-plus workers employed in Singapore's households. | By Sharanjit LeylBBC News, Singapore
Liza Padua is among them. She is here to meet friends and celebrate her 49th birthday. Her friends have brought cake and presents, and she is looking forward to a day of festivities. She has spent 20 years in Singapore as a domestic helper and has always enjoyed her day off.
"It's so good to have Sunday off and be able to reconnect with your friends and keep in touch with the Philippine community," she said.
"Many of us have families we left behind back home, so meeting with friends is a nice way to have a sense of having a family too here in Singapore."
Basic right
Having a day off from work is a basic right for workers around the world, but in Singapore a weekly rest day for domestic workers was only introduced at the start of this year. Previously, they were only allowed one day off a month. When the topic of a weekly day off was first broached, there was backlash from some quarters in Singapore who felt that the move would inconvenience many households.
But nine months on since the new ruling came into effect, critics say it is not being enforced. John Gee, an activist and past president of advocacy group Transient Workers Count Too was one of the people behind a decade-long campaign lobbying the Singapore government to give domestic helpers a mandatory day off a week.
He thinks the ruling is long overdue but estimates that in spite of it, as many as 50% of Singapore's domestic helpers still do not get a weekly day off.
"Saying that there has to be a regular day off for domestic workers doesn't necessarily mean they get it. The problem is there are two get-out clauses if you're an employer who doesn't want to give a day off," he said.
"The first is that if you're a domestic worker who signed a contract before 2013, when the law came into effect, you still have to serve out your two-year contract before you can have a day off. Then there's a clause that says a worker and employer can agree that they'll be paid to work the day off. Many employers are prepared to offer extra money but they aren't prepared to give workers a day off. "
Mr Gee says Singapore will often compare itself with the best in the world when it comes to business practices, but when it comes to domestic workers they will often compare themselves with the worst, such as the Gulf countries. This he thinks is wrong and needs to change.
Reports from international non-government organisations appear to back up his claims. Singapore's labour laws exclude domestic workers from the Employment Act, which regulates hours worked, safety guidelines, time off and retirement. Singapore also has no minimum wage system, but advice from employment agencies suggest domestic helpers are on average paid between S$400 ($320; £200) to S$600 a month, excluding a levy of S$265 that is paid to the government.
The nation has abstained on several key votes on the issue at the International Labour Organization (ILO). It did not support the ILO convention on domestic workers that includes rules on working hours, minimum wages, and maternity protection.
Worker abuse
Domestic workers seeking to better their lives can look to a number of organisations in Singapore. One such is Aidha, a micro-business school, which started under the auspices of United Nations Women in 2006. At S$350 for a nine-month course, domestic workers are given financial training, entrepreneurship and computer skills.
Ms Padua is a graduate from the school, which she says has enabled her to lease a farm in the Philippines and buy a water buffalo to work the land. It has helped her put her six nephews and nieces through college back in the Philippines. She undertook the cost of the lessons, but when she graduated her employers were so pleased they gave her a bonus.
But for every contented domestic helper in Singapore, there are also ones who have suffered terrible ordeals at the hands of their employers. Jane - not her real name - arrived from the Philippines two years ago to take up a job as a domestic helper in a Singaporean household. But she ran away after being abused by her employers, who she said regularly hit her. She added that they would often punish her by forcing her hands down the toilet while it was filled with a combination of bleach and urine for 15 minutes at a time.
Jane said she escaped by jumping out of their kitchen window and in the process, breaking one of her legs. She was rescued by another domestic worker in the building, who called a helpline for migrant workers. That happened last October, and the police are currently still investigating her case.
Jane said she had no choice but to escape because her employers never let her out and she was not allowed to speak to anyone. The consequences of not having a day off in her case meant she could not get help through the usual channels.
Singapore's Ministry of Manpower declined a BBC request for an interview, but issued a statement saying the weekly rest day policy would take time to implement.
"As with any policy, we have had to give time for the various parties to adjust. The rest day requirement was designed to be phased in over two years, and will cover all employment relationships from 1 January 2015. The agreement to opt for compensation in-lieu should be based on mutual consent, as with any contractual agreement. It should not be concluded under duress."
The ministry will impose stiff penalties of up to S$10,000 for employers who force their domestic helpers to go without a rest day or fail to compensate them for working on a rest day. Such employers could also face a jail term of up to 12 months.
But for Jane, who now works at a shelter for migrant workers helping others who are still escaping abuse, these rules cannot come soon enough.
"I don't want others to go through the same experience as me, so I want to share my story."
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When Huawei's founder and president Ren Zhengfei started his firm back in 1987 with just 21,000 yuan - the equivalent of about $6,600 today - little did he know his creation would grow to become a telecoms giant and make him one of the richest people in the world. | By Tim BowlerBusiness reporter, BBC News
With his personal fortune estimated at about $1.7bn, his company currently employs 180,000 workers around the globe - and its annual revenue is forecast to be $125bn (£96bn) this year.
Mr Ren is something of a recluse, but in the past few weeks he has been talking to journalists, defending his firm amid rising pressure from the US and other countries over security concerns about Huawei's role in building 5G networks across the world - and the nature of its links to China's government.
"We would rather shut Huawei down than do anything that would damage the interests of our customers," he countered. "I support the Communist Party of China, but I will never do anything to harm any other nation.
"Some people in the West believe that Huawei's equipment is stamped with some sort of ideology. That is as silly as people smashing textile machines back during the industrial revolution. We only provided equipment to telecom operators and that equipment does not have an ideology."
Born in 1944, he went to Chongqing University and then joined a People's Liberation Army research institute at the height of the disruption caused by the country's 1960s Cultural Revolution.
"There was chaos almost everywhere, including in agriculture and industry," he told reporters.
"Every Chinese person was allotted only one-third of a metre of cloth. That amount could be used only for patching, so I never wore clothes without patches when I was young."
As an engineer he was sent to help build a synthetic clothing factory in Liaoyang, northeast China.
"Conditions were harsh," he said. "Our housing was very shabby so we constantly felt cold. The temperature could drop to -28C. The supply of meat and cooking oil was very limited - there was no supply of fresh vegetables at all."
Yet Mr Ren says he was happy there: "If you read too many books in other parts of the country you could get criticised. The factory was probably one of the few places that people could read.
"We had to, to understand how the equipment worked."
In 1978, two years after Chinese leader Mao Zedong's death, he finally joined the Communist Party having invented a key tool used for testing advanced equipment at the clothing factory.
Mr Ren said that he had not been allowed to do so before, because of his father's links with the losing nationalist side in China's civil war. During the 1960s, his father had been labelled a "capitalist roader" - a pejorative term for those considered to be trying to restore capitalism - and imprisoned.
Mr Ren had hoped to become the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel in the army, but instead was demobbed in 1983 when China cut back its engineering corps.
After moving to Shenzhen in southern China and working in the country's infant electronics sector, he was eventually able to collect enough money to found Huawei.
He has two children from his first marriage - both working for Huawei - Meng Wanzhou and Meng Ping, who both took their mother's name to avoid "unnecessary attention".
Annabel Yao, his daughter from his second marriage, is a Harvard computer science student, ballerina and keen Instagrammer. Mr Ren's third wife is Su Wei, who was reportedly formerly his secretary.
In December, his eldest daughter - and Huawei's chief financial officer - Meng Wanzhou - was arrested in Canada at the request of the US amid fraud allegations over the company's ties to a telecoms firm that did business in Iran.
Mr Ren said he trusted the Canadian and US legal systems would "reach a just conclusion", but that "as Meng Wanzhou's father, I miss her very much".
Perhaps surprisingly, given the war of words over trade between Washington and Beijing, Mr Ren is an admirer of US President Donald Trump: "I still believe he was a great president in the sense that he was bold to slash taxes. I think that is conducive to the development of industries in the US."
The firm is privately owned by thousands of employees, which he said means it could work "truly for our ideas and for the greater good of society".
Despite the pressure from the US on countries not to use Huawei kit, Mr Ren said he is upbeat about the future. The company has more than 30 commercial 5G contracts and has already shipped 25,000 5G base stations.
"As long as we develop very compelling products, there will be customers who will buy them."
Follow Tim Bowler on Twitter @timbowlerbbc
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US President Joe Biden's team calls it a "moonshot"; critics question if it's a "quick fix"; and millions of Afghans wonder if it's the blueprint to end an endless war, or just make it worse. | By Lyse Doucet & Mahfouz ZubaideBBC News, Kabul
An apparent draft of a new peace agreement from the office of the US peace envoy in Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, has been leaked after doing the rounds in the Afghan capital, Kabul. The eight tightly typed pages, which were obtained by the BBC along with a leaked three-page letter from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have kicked up a political storm over the past 48 hours.
In his letter, Mr Blinken wrote that the US did "not intend to dictate terms" to the Afghan government and the Taliban, only enable both sides to "move urgently" towards peace.
But the plain-speaking Afghan Vice-President, Amrullah Saleh, fired straight back, saying Afghanistan would "never accept a bossy and imposed peace".
"They can make decisions on their troops, not the people of Afghanistan," Mr Saleh said.
A Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, told the BBC they were "still studying" the draft agreement. But he also stressed that they expect the US to meet the terms of the deal they signed last year. In other words, pull out the remaining 10,000 US-led Nato forces by 1 May, or else.
A moonshot is the kind of imagining which soars beyond "blue sky" brainstorming. It's the biggest of ideas to solve the very biggest of problems. In Afghanistan, it's nothing less than life and death: how, after two long decades, to withdraw without precipitating a spiral into greater violence.
"Dignified" is another new buzzword in this dreadful war: a dignified US departure; a dignified peace for Afghans.
"We do need to explore every avenue for a dignified peace to preserve rights and a fundamental set of values, including a democratic system of governance," said the Afghan government negotiator, Nader Nadery.
Mr Khalilzad, the US envoy, landed in Kabul last week with a new sense of purpose. His presence and draft plan sparked political electricity behind the ugly high walls protecting the elegant drawing rooms of the capital. It is focusing minds in a precarious moment when Afghanistan teeters on a knife edge between war and peace.
"There's an accelerating momentum and a greater sense of urgency," former President Hamid Karzai told the BBC in Kabul last week. There's even more toing and froing than usual in his heavily fortified bastion in the capital; his meeting room, with its traditional oblong arrangement of sofas and chairs, was packed on the day the BBC dropped by.
Cobbling together the "unity and inclusivity" called for in Mr Blinken's letter is Mr Karzai's forte. Warlords of past battles shut out by President Ashraf Ghani are being brought to the top table again, for better or worse. Some, who had reached out to the Taliban to seal their own futures and fortunes, are said to have realised that the cost of disunity could be chaos and collapse.
Mr Ghani, known to prefer an immersion in policy papers to the messy cut and thrust of politicking, is also being pushed back into the fray. In his book-lined office last month in the storied Haram Sarai, the former residence of King Zahir Shah, President Ghani hinted that this was crunch time: "Hard decisions and sacrifices lie ahead," he told us.
But when asked about Mr Khalilzad's previous draft of a power-sharing government, he dismissed it as "somebody sitting behind the desk, dreaming".
So will President Ghani, who still insists he'll only transfer power through elections, accede to this transition plan? One Afghan politician summed it up to us with an Afghan proverb: "If you don't go to school, you'll be taken to school." In other words, Mr Ghani might have no choice.
And what about the country's warlords - will they put aside age-old animosities for peace? They may, but with "hearts full of blood" - another proverb, and a warning that old feuds may not lie dormant for long.
The draft paper sets out a new arrangement in three parts: guiding principles for Afghanistan's constitution and the future of the Afghan state; agreed terms to govern the country during a transitional period and a roadmap to a "durable and just settlement"; and finally - and most urgently for Afghans - agreed terms for a "permanent and comprehensive ceasefire and its implementation".
There are blank spaces and options as well. The length of a transitional government is marked "XX". Two possibilities for an executive administration are offered: one similar to the current arrangement led by a president and vice-presidents; another which includes a prime minister.
In an effort to expedite the process, the US is pulling out all the stops and calling in all the favours. The UN, kept largely on the sidelines until now, is shifting to centre stage to confer greater international legitimacy on the process, and make it easier for neighbours who have long meddled in Afghanistan to sit around the same table. Mr Blinken's letter also proposed a high-level meeting in Turkey to bring warring sides together.
And there is something for everyone in the eight-page draft peace agreement. The Taliban will note a suggestion for a High Council for Islamic Jurisprudence to provide "Islamic guidance and advice" - though it's likely to fall far short of what the Taliban herald as the return of a "pure Islamic government".
Women's groups will see, on the very first page, that "the future constitution will guarantee the protection of women's rights". If anyone knows that words alone are never enough, it's the women and girls whose lives have changed, but remain heavily circumscribed, whether or not the conservative Taliban are in power.
And millions of Afghans, hearts hollowed out by grief, will press for progress towards what this paper calls "a national policy of transitional justice" - even though they know that the arc of history in Afghanistan has never bent towards justice.
"Bringing lasting peace primarily depends on the Afghan sides, but the international community led by the US was a stakeholder in this conflict, and their responsibility doesn't end with ensuring a safe exit for their troops," said Shaharzad Akbar, chairwoman of the Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission.
"They still have leverage with both Afghan sides of the conflict and can utilise that to push for substantive discussions to end the suffering of Afghans through talks," she said.
There are those who caution against too much hope: "The only attractive argument for this plan is [if] its success means a ceasefire," said Laurel Miller, the director of the Asia Programme at the International Crisis Group and a former US state department official. "But if the weak, fractious, transitional structure collapses - which is a high probability - then the ceasefire won't last."
Peace is on the agenda as never before, but so is war. Both sides talk of plans for the worst of all summer offensives. "It will be a miracle if this works," one Afghan involved in the peace effort told us.
But in a country that has lived through almost everything, aiming for moonshots and miracles may not seem far-fetched. The people are anxious for the endless war to end, and as soon as possible.
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From household names to newcomers, we take an affectionate (and sometimes irreverent) look at all 46 artists nominated for the 2012 Brit Awards.
| Ryan Adams
Brief bio: Prolific poster boy of alternative country, who once described his music as "a Hallmark card if it was written in disappointment".
Nominated for: International male
What they say: "The caricature painted of him over the years of a difficult, moody rock star with a ferocious appetite for drugs and booze is light years away from the polite, friendly, open man sipping a cup of tea in the sunshine." [The Quietus]
What we say: We're still waiting for Ryan to form a supergroup with Bryan and Oleta. They could call it The Adams Family.
Brief bio: One-woman saviour of the British record industry, whose voice literally exploded halfway through 2011.
Nominated for: Best British female, Best British single (Someone Like You), Best British album (21)
What they say: "She can seethe, sob, rasp, swoop, lilt and belt, in ways that draw more attention to the song than to the singer." [New York Times]
What we say: She hates to turn up out of the blue, uninvited... but the Brits is certain to welcome Adele back with open arms. And a few trophies.
Brief bio: Sheffield musical prodigies, led by kitchen sink wordsmith Alex Turner. Their first album was the UK's fastest-selling debut in history until it was overtaken by Susan Boyle.
Nominated for: Best group
They say: "Being up there in the limelight is something that didn't come naturally to me at all. But now I'm doing stupid crowd participation things. I have started to enjoy that side of things." [Alex Turner, speaking to 6 Music]
What we say: Turner says he's stopped writing about "chip shops" and "taxi ranks" but his dry wit hasn't dried up. See, for example, the title track to their latest album Suck It And See: "That's not a skirt, girl, that's a sawn-off shotgun... and I can only hope you've got it aimed at me."
Brief bio: Booty-shaking, record-breaking, man-baiting, Grammy-taking, hit-creating mother-of-one. Quite popular.
Nominated for: International female
What they say: "Such was her long-stemmed beauty, as she prowled and strutted in search of her missing skirt, that among the audience of 170,000 people there were young men who passed out standing up, their eyes wide open." [Telegraph]
What we say: According to the lyrics of 1+1, Beyonce "don't know much about algebra", but she's definitely got talent where it counts.
Brief bio: Innovative Icelandic musician, multimedia artist and noise provocateur. Her latest album, Biophilia, is available as a series of interactive iPad apps.
Nominated for: International female
She says: "How I hear music is more related to nature. It's not related to some Christian German guys, Bach and Beethoven. I don't mean that in a bad way. I totally respect Christians and Germans, it's just that I think there should be versatility." [National Geographic]
What we say: If Bjork wins for her latest album Biophilia it will, by implication, mean the first ever Brit award for featured vocalist Sir David Attenborough.
Brief bio: Consultant-turned-rapper-turned-crooner, whose austerity anthem I Need A Dollar tapped into the mood of a nation.
Nominated for: International male, International breakthrough
What they say: "He is an informed conversationalist, speaking calmly on all manner of topics, from breakdancing to Noam Chomsky." [Telegraph]
What we say: It's a good thing Aloe adopted a stage name - Egbert Nathaniel Dawkins III would be hard to engrave on a statue.
Brief bio: The Harold Pinter of dubstep, known for minimalist soundscapes punctuated by long... pauses. Not to be confused with the US tennis player.
Nominated for: Best British male
What they say: "On one hand, I don't understand this at all. On the other, it's just incredible music". [Comment on Blake's YouTube page]
What we say: Like Sudoku or a bank heist, James Blake's album is difficult but rewarding.
Brief bio: Revitalised Britpop survivors, fronted by musical polymath Damon Albarn.
Recipients of: Outstanding contribution to music
They say: "I've been to the Brits only two or three times [and] I felt slightly guilty about winning. I was worried that people would think we were spoilt brats. This time, sod it, I'm just going to lap it up I think." [Guitarist Graham Coxon, talking to The Daily Record]
What we say: Blur's outstanding contribution prize comes five years after arch-rivals Oasis took home the trophy. So that's that argument settled.
Brief bio: AKA Justin Vernon, whose moody debut For Emma, Forever Ago was famously recorded alone, in a snowbound log cabin. The self-titled follow-up won Vernon a Grammy for best new artist.
Nominated for: Best international male, international breakthrough
What they say: "Amorphous and triumphant - a haze of acoustic guitars, airy synthesizers and tumbling drums floating beneath Vernon's hallucinogenic yowl, like two stratus clouds overlapping in a dream" [Washington Post]
What we say: Bon Iver's success has led to the creation of tribute band Bon Joviver, who cover soft rock classics with Vernon's distinctively spectral harmonies.
Brief bio: Enigmatic singer-songwriter whose latest record is a concept album about snow. Her debut single, Wuthering Heights, was the first British number one to be both written and sung by a woman.
Nominated for: Best British female
She says: "I'm really looking forward to taking a break." [Huffington Post]
What we say: Glaciers move faster than Kate Bush's release schedule, so the appearance of two albums in 2011 made her Brits nomination almost a certainty.
Brief bio: Bird-like Twickenham singer with a voice like a hurricane. Her self-titled debut album was nominated for a Mercury in 2011.
Nominated for: British breakthrough act
What they say: "It almost feels like going into a trance when I sing." [Interview Magazine]
What we say: Anna Calvi wrote the bulk of her album in her parents attic - she must have had lofty ambitions [you're fired - ed].
Brief bio: South London dance duo Saul Milton (Chase) and Will Kennard (Status). Their mixture of rave, rock and ribcage-rattling bass won them a headline slot on Glastonbury's West Holts stage, where Saul celebrated his 30th birthday.
Nominated for: Best group
What they say: "Cherry-picks the chunkiest, most accessible, lowest-common-denominator features of half a dozen genres and splices them together into a Frankenstein's monster of an album, in which the modern Prometheus is lurching forward to catch the kitchen sink he's just been thrown." [Guardian]
What we say: One of only two British dance acts with a nomination, despite a resurgence for the genre in 2011. Unlikely to win, nonetheless.
Brief bio: Chart-toppling giants of soft rock, whose latest album hit number one in more than 30 countries. Frontman Chris Martin has two main lyrical themes: "Everything is going to be OK" and "I'm very sorry".
Nominated for: Best British album (Mylo Xyloto)
What they say: "Coldplay's semi-experimental approach to arena anthems has made them one of the most commercially successful rock band of the 2000s." [Billboard]
What we say: Chris Martin says he "made up" the words Mylo Xyloto and that we, the listeners, should determine the meaning. Bet he's a nightmare at Scrabble.
Brief bio: Big-hearted poets of English suburbia. Their fifth album, Build A Rocket, Boys! was an understated, tender reaction to the success of their Mercury-winning breakthrough The Seldom Seen Kid.
Nominated for: Best group
They say: "You can't completely ignore the fact that when you've had a bit of success, people - especially financiers - are expecting more of the same, but we didn't let it change the way we wrote." [Frontman Guy Garvey, Paste Magazine]
What we say: Garvey got in trouble with his band when he drunkenly announced the title of his album on radio. Imagine what secrets he might give away after a night of free record company booze at the Brits.
Brief bio: Garrulous dance guru, whose stage name derives from the fact his initials are E.G. (Elliot Gleave). His third album, Playing In The Shadows, debuted at number one.
Nominated for: Best British single (Changed The Way You Kissed Me)
He says: "This album was aimed at getting me into arenas. And it has." [This Is London]
What we say: Hit single Stay Awake features the world's worst product endorsement deal, as Example promises to "stick around like Elastoplast".
Brief bio: Leslie Feist from Nova Scotia, purveyor of quirky, textured folk-pop. Her career received a boost when Apple chose the lighthearted single 1-2-3-4 for an iPod commercial.
Nominated for: Best international female
What they say: "Her voice shines in a downcast way, drawing just the right amount of emotion from the lyrics, never overwrought or melodramatic but potent nonetheless." [New Zealand Herald]
What we say: When Shia LeBeouf insisted on playing Feist's album on the set of Transformers 3, director Michael Bay stormed off the set. Is there any way we could book Feist's next tour around the production schedule for Transformers 4?
Brief bio: Seattle five-piece, whose rustic harmonies and flashes of psychedelia recall Fairport Convention and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
Nominated for: Best international group
What they say: "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and beards" [Spin]
What we say: Hirsuites you, sir.
Brief bio: Pale-faced musical foghorn Florence Welch and her ragtag band of minstrels. Fond of percussion. Mad as a hatstand.
Nominated for: Best British female, Best British album (Ceremonials)
She says: "I wanted to call this whole record just Violence. A violent emotion. You can feel things violently. It's a beautiful word." [USA Today]
What we say: This is the sort of music you hear just before they sacrifice you to the volcano gods.
Brief bio: Rock survivors, who rose from the ashes of Nirvana and fought their way through the ranks. One of their 2011 shows triggered volcanic tremors in New Zealand.
Nominated for: Best international group
Dave Grohl says: "It's weird when there's a kid on the bill who comes up and says, 'Your band was my first concert'. You just think, 'Oh no. I'm that guy, now? What am I, Gandalf?'" [Entertainment Weekly]
What we say: Rock and Roll isn't dead, it's just hibernating in Dave Grohl's beard.
Brief bio: LA indie pop quartet. Their background as jingle writers shines through in their supremely catchy pop hooks.
Nominated for: International breakthrough
What they say: "Foster The People make infectiously good music, don't stick to a formula and make you yearn to lie on your back in the middle of a field, feeling the hot sun streaming down on your face." [Music OMH]
What we say: The band's breakthrough hit Pumped Up Kicks is the best pop song about a high school massacre since I Don't Like Mondays.
Brief bio: Former Oasis guitarist and his furious eyebrows, now striking out with solo project Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds.
Nominated for: Best British male
He says: "It is a new sound… but only from taking things away. The excesses of Oasis, like the extra guitars, I just took 'em away. I didn't add anything." [Music Radar]
What we say: The most famous roadie the Inspiral Carpets ever had.
Brief bio: French DJ-turned-producer, whose thumping dance tracks are fronted by R&B royalty from Usher to Rihanna.
Nominated for: Best international male
What he says: "I think America was always scared of dance music. We came with a new sound, creating that bridge between the electro culture that comes from Europe and the urban culture that is more American - it's such magic." [Idolator]
What we say: Would you recognise David Guetta if he fell out of a hammock labelled "This is David Guetta's Hammock"?
Brief bio: The only person to have won the Mercury Prize twice, Polly Jean Harvey's latest album narrates the grim effects of war on generations of English soldiers.
Nominated for: Best British album (Let England Shake)
She says: "It took four years of writing before I ended up with the songs on this record, and I had to discard a huge amount of material." [BBC]
What we say: In the 1990s, Radio 1 presenter Emma Freud introduced her as "PJ and Harvey". Sadly, Polly's version of Let's Get Ready To Rhumble wasn't a patch on the original.
Brief bio: Two titans of hip-hop, joining forces for a gold-plated album of rap duets. The gold-plating was literal for anyone who invested in the deluxe CD.
Nominated for: Best international group
What they say: "Just two guys sitting on a stoop, telling stories, lamenting the mistakes they've made, expressing hope that the next generation might learn something from them." [New York Times]
What we say: The rappers also go by the names Hova and Yeezy which, coincidentally, are the noises we made last time we had an asthma attack.
Brief bio: Fright-wigged pop banshee, who released the best-selling debut album of 2011.
Nominated for: Best British female, British breakthrough act, Best British single (Price Tag)
She says: "I see my music as Emotional Therapeutic Pop music that bleeds into loads of different genres." [Seventeen]
What we say: "It ain't about the cha-ching, cha-ching; Ain't about the ba-bling, ba-bling" is now the official slogan of the Eurozone.
Brief bio: Perennially popular male vocal harmony group, already hard at work on their fourth album.
Nominated for: Best British single (She Makes Me Wanna)
What they say: "They may be more popular than Simon Cowell could possibly have imagined - he turned them down twice, you know - but JLS are no musical innovators." [BBC Music]
What we say: Marvin! Oritse! Aston! JB! They tend to sing about "da club" a lot, as this is where the Honeys regularly spend the evening.
Brief bio: Respected producer, who gives life to the music of Laura Marling, Kings Of Leon, Ryan Adams and Emmylou Harris, amongst others.
Recipient of: Best British producer (awarded last week)
What they say: "He's very, very patient, and he's got a very good ear. He's the first person I go to with my songs." [Laura Marling]
What we say: A hugely talented producer, Johns learnt the trade from his father, Glyn Johns, who sat behind the mixing desk for The Eagles, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.
Brief bio: Grandiloquent rockers, based in Leicester. Claimed their fourth album Velociraptor! would change people's lives.
Nominated for: Best group
They say: "Velociraptors used to hunt in packs of four. They were the rock'n'roll band of the dinosaurs." [Guitarist Serge Pizzorno in the NME]
What we say: Oh come on, everyone knows the most rock'n'roll dinosaur is the Brachylophosaurus.
Brief bio: Country trio formed in Nashville (where else?) six years ago. A big crossover act in the US, they recently won the Grammy for best country album.
Nominated for: Best international group
The band says: "We won't just throw a fiddle on the song if it doesn't really call for it." [The Banter]
What we say: Lady A's perfect smiles are no accident - guitarist David Haywood's dad invented teeth bleaching in the 1980s.
Brief bio: Shy, subtle, retiring performer of popular song. Once attended an awards ceremony in a dress made of meat.
Nominated for: Best international female
What they say: "Excess is Gaga's riskiest musical gamble, but it's also her greatest weapon... While most 21st-Century pop stars pulverize their imperfections into an Auto-Tuned slurry, she boldly wears her audacity like a meat dress." [Spin]
What we say: Why don't people make more fuss about the meat dress?
Brief bio: Long-legged pop waif, born Victoria Louise Lott in 1991. Skipped school to get a recording contract at the age of 15 and earned her first platinum disc three years later.
Nominated for: Best British single (All About Tonight)
What they say: "Even with a newfound smokiness to her vocals, she delivers all the passion of a student singing in school assembly." [Independent]
What we say: For her new album Pixie wrote a tribute to Stevie Wonder called Stevie On The Radio, then persuaded Stevie Wonder to play harmonica on it. How postmodern.
Brief bio: Wan, shy folk singer from Hampshire. The surprise winner of last year's best British female award, she released her haunting third album A Creature I Don't Know in September.
Nominated for: Best British female
What they say: "While she may not be a particularly revealing performer, she's an extremely commanding one." [Pitchfork]
What we say: Last year, Laura gave her Brits trophy to her mum. Another one would really tie the room together.
Brief bio: Briefly popular chart rock band, whose career was revitalised by radio-friendly disco stomper Moves Like Jagger.
Nominated for: Best international group
They say: "Only Jagger has the moves like Jagger. But it's attainable... I don't think anyone could claim to have the moves like James Brown, or the moves like Michael Jackson, or the moves like Prince." [singer Adam Levine on NPR]
What we say: No doubt inspired by Mick Jagger's anti-establishment politics, Maroon 5 recently created their own flavour of iced tea.
Brief bio: Hawaiian-born soul star whose backing band are tighter than Lycra. Co-wrote Cee-Lo's Forget You and scored a trio of number ones with solo singles Just The Way You Are, Grenade and The Lazy Song.
Nominated for: Best international male
What they say: "His skill is an ease with both old‑fashioned songcraft and hip‑hop swagger." [Guardian]
What we say: Fans of genetic improbability will be pleased to know that Bruno recently tweeted "I'm pretty sure I'm pregnant".
Brief bio: A choir of (you guessed it) Military Wives, put together for a TV show. Their love song, Wherever You Are, sold 631,000 copies and was the 2011 Christmas Number One.
Nominated for: Best British single (Wherever You Are)
They say: "I can't believe that I can actually sit here on Christmas Day and say I've got a single out that is number one... it feels unreal." [Choir member Emma Williams]
What we say: The best chart act the armed forces have produced since Robson and Jerome.
Brief bio: Outlandish, Trinidadian-born musician who rose to fame by upstaging the likes of Lil Wayne and Mariah Carey with guests verses on their singles.
Nominated for: International breakthrough
What they say: "One of Minaj's most endearing qualities is, despite the funny faces, the fact that she's an MC with her heart on her sleeve and a sad story to tell." [No Ripcord]
What we say: Nicki has recorded a concept album about her alter-ego Roman Zolanski. We are not making this stuff up.
Brief bio: Armed with a guitar and tender vocals, Morrison tackled the death of his father on third album The Awakening, which quietly charted at number one last autumn.
Nominated for: Best British male
He says: "I'd love to do a side-project where I'm not James Morrison, I just put a vocal on a fat beat or something." [Female First]
What we say: A deserving nominee, given his cross-generational appeal, but Morrison remains as popular and edgy as a facecloth.
Brief bio: Perma-grinning X Factor nice guy who scored two number one singles in 2011. Your mum likes him.
Nominated for: Best British single (Heart Skips A Beat)
He says: "That's probably the best thing about being famous... you are able to help and support other people and make a difference." [The Banter]
What we say: Cliff Richard for the 21st Century.
Brief bio: X-Factor endorsed boy band. Average age 18-and-a-half.
Nominated for: Best British single (What Makes You Beautiful)
What they say: "Aimed solidly at teenage girls (and boys) who are waiting for somebody to be secretly in love with them, What Makes You Beautiful is so unthreatening it might have to think twice about holding hands." [NME]
What we say: One Direction have fans who call themselves The Directionettes. They throw carrots at the band when they play live. Carrots.
Brief bio: Kermit-voiced rapper, born in Hackney. Formerly known as Stephen Manderson, he has transcended his past as an "angry youth" to become one of the UK's most successful hip-hop artists.
Nominated for: Best British male
What they say: "It's easy to understand the appeal of Professor Green, the gobby class clown who's always disrupting lessons with a crude comment. Problem is, he could really do with some fresher jokes." [NME]
What we say: In his number one single Read All About It, Professor Green confesses: "I write songs I can't listen to." Don't be so hard on yourself, son, they're not that bad.
Brief bio: Cartoonishly pretty, enigmatic femme fatale with a line in alluring noir pop. Despite the success of her debut single Video Games, she is plagued by accusations of inauthenticity by critics incensed that she (gasp) changed her name.
Nominated for: International breakthrough
She says: "I love to sing and I really love to write, but in terms of being onstage, I'm not that comfortable." [GQ]
What we say: Basically a musical incarnation of The Great Gatsby's Daisy Buchanan.
Brief bio: Bajan pop princess with an astonishing work rate. Rihanna has released six albums in seven years, and played 10 dates at the O2 arena in 2011.
Nominated for: Best international female
What they say: "I wish no ill will against Rihanna and her friends. Perhaps they could acquaint themselves with a greater God." [Northern Irish farmer and local councillor Alan Graham, who put an end to the singer's raunchy video shoot on his land last October]
What we say: Needs no introduction. A mainstay of the Brits and a phenomenally successful artist. She won this prize last year, and could easily do it again in 2012.
Brief bio: Former medical student with a knack for writing catchy, classy R&B hooks. A stellar 2011 saw her reach number one with Professor Green before launching her solo career with top 10 hit Heaven.
Nominated for: British breakthrough act
Recipient of: Critics' Choice award
She says: "If the sun is out, the songs I write are usually rubbish. The best songs come around 2am for me." [Orange Music]
What we say: Aberdeen's other best-known exports are Annie Lennox and granite. Sande models her career on one and her hair on the other.
Brief bio: A little bit jazz, a little bit hip-hop, Ed Sheeran is a songwriting prodigy who built his fan base organically through extensive touring. Result: 791,000 albums sold in 2011.
Nominated for: Best British male, British breakthrough act, best British single (A Team), best British album (+)
What they say: "The incessant melodrama can grate, but Sheeran's voice, alternating between soulful huskiness and stuttering sing-speak, is a treat." [Telegraph]
What we say: Ed's fans are like putty in his hands. Hormonal teenage putty.
Brief bio: Wily rock quartet and saviours-du-jour of British guitar music, who mix blistering garage rock with brooding odes to Post Break-Up Sex.
Nominated for: British breakthrough act
What they say: "Guitarist Freddie Cowan is so toffee-nosed he's 14th in line to the throne and gets carried to gigs on a sedan chair." [NME]
What we say: The Vaccines played more than 50 festival dates in 2011 and are slowly turning into falafel.
Brief bio: Five boys next door with a chart-friendly line in ravepop. Vaguely more "rough" than JLS or One Direction, The Wanted have scored two Top 10 albums in as many years.
Nominated for: Best British single (Glad You Came)
They say: "We have to remember that as well as the horny mums who like us, we're writing to girls too, so we don't want to go too overboard." [Jay McGuiness, speaking to Digital Spy]
What we say: They may be heart-throbs but "I decided you look well on me" is the most clunky, unromantic lyric of the year.
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The full list of confirmed candidates for the 5 June Newark parliamentary by-election has been released by Newark and Sherwood District Council. | Robert Jenrick is to represent the Conservatives, Michael Payne Labour, David Watts the Lib Dems, and Roger Helmer the UK Independence Party.
In April, UKIP leader Nigel Farage ended speculation that he might stand.
The by-election was triggered by former Conservative MP Patrick Mercer's resignation over a lobbying scandal.
The full list of candidates, in alphabetical order by surname, is:
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A eight-foot long boa constrictor which sparked a police alert when it went missing 10 days ago has been found. | The snake slithered out of its owner's house in Boston on 28 November, prompting Lincolnshire Police to warn people to keep away from the animal.
However, the force said the 8ft 6ins (2.6m) snake had now returned home after its mystery absence.
A force spokesman said: "It was found at the address this morning with no apparent ill effects."
The snake's owner took the reptile into Boston police station to show officers it had returned.
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The race to detect the "God Particle" is heating up. A US "atom smasher" called the Tevatron may have its life extended to continue searching for the Higgs boson.
Rolf-Dieter Heuer is director-general of Cern (The European Organization for Nuclear Research), which operates the Large Hadron Collider - the major European rival to the Tevatron.
In an interview with the BBC's Paul Rincon, Dr Heuer said he hoped that Europe would be first to detect the Higgs particle.
| PR: You must be excited by the possible detection of the top quark - the most massive elementary particle - by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Does this bode well for the early discovery of new physics by the LHC?
RH: Yes. I think it's amazing how well the experiments were prepared, and how well they were calibrated. Everything is running fantastically; the machine, the experiments and also the computing grid, which is very important to distribute and analyse data worldwide.
So, it is going fantastically well after four months; now it's up to nature to give us new physics.
PR: Do you think new physics - signs of supersymmetry perhaps, or signs of the Higgs boson - could be detected within the LHC's first science run?
RH: With supersymmetry I think there is a chance because we can open a much larger window [the LHC can get up to much larger energies than any previous particle smasher] than our friendly competitor the Tevatron at Fermilab [the US national laboratory which operates the Tevatron].
If there are low-mass states, up to 800 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), we have discovery potential [for supersymmetry] at the LHC until the end of next year. With the Higgs, it might take more time because the Higgs is a very elusive particle, very difficult to find. I guess it will take longer.
PR: Does the fact that the Tevatron may now work until 2014, through the time when the LHC is shut down [for maintenance at the end of 2011], give Fermilab a potential advantage for finding the Higgs first?
RH: They would not run it [until then] if they did not see an advantage in that. We have to [investigate] and see what they could gain from running for three more years.
It could give them an advantage, but I think we have to prepare the LHC in such a way that it safely runs at high energies and (achieve that) as early as is possible.
As a physicist, I must say in principle it doesn't matter where the particle is found, the main thing is that it is found. As the D-G of Cern, I must say I would of course like to find it first, that's clear. But it's science that counts and we are now carefully looking into our plans.
PR: What can we draw from the combined result of recent Higgs searches at the Tevatron and, if the Higgs is this elusive, what happens if we don't find it? What then?
RH: The (combined Tevatron) results... exclude a mass region where the [Higgs] particle is, let's say, easiest to find. The closer you go to the lower limit... the more difficult it becomes. So it doesn't change the possibilities for Fermilab or for Cern.
At the moment, I don't know how to define when we should say that we have not found it. With 95% probability of exclusion, we still have 5% probability we could find it. So that takes some time.
I think we can define when we have not found it when we have found something else. If the Higgs boson is not there, there must be something else which is fulfilling the same tasks. Something must happen at the energy range of the LHC in order to give mass to particles.
PR: The LHC could start the search for dark matter particles soon. Does this search have the potential to turn up something quite quickly, or do you see that as a longer-term endeavour?
RH: Both. For example, with supersymmetric particles, we have discovery potential of more than a factor of two above the Tevatron in 2010/2011. If nature is kind to us, there could be dark matter candidates of reasonably low mass - below 800 GeV.
If nature has decided to put dark matter candidates into the higher mass region, beyond 800 GeV, it will take more time - as for the Higgs boson. This is the nice thing: you don't know when you will find it, and you don't know what you will find - you just know what you are looking for.
PR: The penultimate question. The Super LHC (a proposed upgrade to boost the luminosity - or beam intensity - of the LHC): what will that allow you to do and are you confident you will secure the funds to do that?
RH: We have changed the way we are planning to do the high luminosity phase of the LHC so that we can afford it - even in the present circumstances. It will give us a higher chance of finding things which have an even lower probability of being produced.
So we can dig even deeper into the haystack; that's one thing. Then, by increasing the amount of collisions, you will also go deeper into the tail of the energy distribution. You automatically get 10-15% higher energy reach than before.
PR: With the next generation of particle colliders, such as the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) and the International Linear Collider (ILC), is there any broad timescale and are you confident you will get the money? Also, how would these projects be governed?
RH: They have to wait for the results from the LHC, because one technology is essentially ripe (the ILC) but it does not give as much energy as the other technology (CLIC) which is not as ripe.
The governance of such projects needs to be global. We have to discuss how to involve everybody in the design, construction, maintenance and operation of such a facility. So discussions are going on over how to do that.
I think it is affordable if the three regions of the world are working together. This is what they started to do at the LHC. Now they have to do it at a different scale for the ILC or CLIC.
Rolf-Dieter Heuer was speaking to BBC News at the recent International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Paris
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On one side of the Atlantic: a country that quite can't decide how it should cut off ties with its close trading partner. | On the other: a government so divided that it shuts down when it can't agree on how to spend its money.
Our correspondents - Anthony Zurcher in Washington and Rob Watson in London - took a moment to ask each other via webcam: is my government more dysfunctional than yours?
Anthony: I'm an American political journalist, but we pay attention to what's going on on the other side of the pond.
Rob: I lived for 11 and a half years there so it still fees a bit like home, the US.
Anthony: So you have good knowledge. One of the things I do is follow a lot of Brits and Americans and there was a tweet that caught my eye and this is what it said: "We are a nation sleepwalking towards a cliff edge. If we do not pull ourselves from the brink the damage will be permanent."
I read that, and I did a double-take because I wasn't sure which country they were talking about, who the 'we' was. But it was David Lammy, a British Labour MP. So I guess my first question to you is: convince me, why are things worse on your side of the Atlantic?
Rob: I'm not sure I'd want to do it that way round Anthony. But I guess if had to do a score of a zero to 10 of how bad are things, I'd say a nine. And the reason I say this, and to get a bit serious for a second, I do think this is the worst peacetime crisis Britain has faced since the end of World War Two. For three reasons, basically.
Number one the issue is massive, it's not just about deciding to leave a golf club. It affects how we project power in the world, our place in the world, our economic model, it's incredibly important to our labour market here, so the issue is huge.
Number two: the politicians are utterly and hopelessly divided about what to do about the result of that referendum in 2016.
And lastly, and this is where things are really nasty here and maybe have similarities with the US: the people are divided. And people are divided in a way they haven't been in this country. I mean normally people are divided on political lines, class lines, wealth lines, now they are divided on cultural identity. So people who supported Brexit tend to be described often as nationalists and people who voted Remain are often thought of as progressives.
So there you go, I'd give us about a nine out of 10. Where are you Anthony?
Anthony: Nine out of ten? Hah, it's hard to give a number to this crisis. I'd say a six, maybe a seven.
I mean the crisis that we're having in the US right now, at least the immediate crisis, is such a ridiculous issue: it's five billion dollars of wall funding in a federal government budget that is a trillion dollars. The stakes on this, when you look at it, seem small, it's just a little drop of money.
But it's a good point you make about how the people are divided - and it's something you see here in the US as well. I mean this wall fight and the government shutdown were about $5.6bn - this is a symbolic battle over the direction of the country, who gets to set political priorities, whether it's Donald Trump or the Democrats in Congress.
I think it shows the systemic problem of the American government right now where can we as a divided nation where people have very different views, can a government that is inherently divided where you have different parties controlling different parts of government, can that function without grinding to a halt? And I'm not sure it can.
Rob: Well, let me put this to you. I always remember when I was a reporter in the US after covering many of Bill Clinton's speeches, and not sure if this one was after Columbine or the Oklahoma bombing, but he said this, and I don't know if he borrowed it from anybody else, that really resonated with me.
You know he did that thing where he bites his lip and says "There's nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed by what is right about America." Immensely powerful. Do you think that's still true?
Anthony: Clinton had a way with words. There are signs of silver lining. I mean there were compromises last year on criminal justice reform, and there were signs that people could come across the aisle and co-operate.
Take one example: there's a mayor in Indiana, he's called Pete Buttigieg. And he's running for president. He's gay, in a happy marriage. And the idea that gay marriage could be a non-issue, people didn't really mention it when he announced his candidacy, they were talking about him being a millennial and not that he was gay, that represents a sea change in US politics even from just 15 years ago.
Maybe there's still the potential that Americans have a short memory - we see a lot of conflicts right now and they put it behind themselves, move on and before you know it, something that seemed a life and death battle, whether it's immigration now or trade now, that can change into a shrug and a "Oh, that's no longer a big deal and we all agree on it."
Rob: I guess that's one of the things I'd pick out from my American experience - the thing I loved living about in the US - was that can-do spirit. So that no matter how many problems, sometimes self-inflicted, that America creates it's also brilliant at coming up with the solutions.
Whereas us here in the UK, our national slogan, and I think a newspaper had a competition about this, is "Mustn't Grumble."But maybe there are two ways of skinning a cat.
I have a theory about the UK. Everyone is immensely gloomy right now. And I tend to take the view that in 2012, when people were looking at Britain and we were holding the Olympics here, all over the world they were saying "My goodness, isn't the UK cool, look how there are so many non-white athletes, the country's also recovering from recession."
Now they are looking at the UK and thinking "What's happened, have these people gone crazy?" So my take is that maybe people were way too optimistic in 2012 and way too pessimistic now - I mean how would you score the US on that front now? Because that does seem to be one of the big problems we have, and the US: we have very divided populations.
Anthony: Right … yeah. I think you touched on something earlier, part of the problem here in the US and in the UK, there is a group of people who have been left behind.
You looked at London and the Olympics and it was all great news; and you looked at the election of Barack Obama here and the way US society was changing, this was all great news and progress. But the reality was that the systems, the global systems, were hurting people.
One of the funny things was, I was covering the Donald Trump phenomenon very early on, and I kept being asked by British colleagues how he could be doing so well and why he was touching into this groundswell of support from people who seemed to be upset at the American system and felt they had no purchase in the American politics.
That changed a lot after Brexit! Lots said I don't understand. And right before the November election, it was British colleagues telling me "I think Trump is going to win - this feels like Brexit redux." I was saying well there's a chance … Clinton has an electoral lock. We see this is a problem that isn't getting fixed any time soon.
Rob: That's very interesting. I was about to say there's something similar in the UK. And in other European countries we all have that in common because with the Brexit voting phenomenon, a lot of it was about people who looked at the world around them and thought "This isn't the Britain I grew up in. The economy has changed. Everyone raves about the kind of people who go off to Davos and super-cool cars and planes but from where I'm sitting this doesn't look so great."
And I remember during the Brexit referendum going to parts of the UK where the population had barely changed in its ethnic composition in 800 years since the Normans invaded and suddenly 40% of the town has got EU nationals who have come in to do various things in the field, agricultural jobs.
But here's the thing. I scored it high right at the start - nine out of 10 - because I said people are very divided. My hunch would be here in the UK that if - and my goodness this is a big if - that if some fantastic politician was to miraculously appear, and I have to say there's absolutely no sign of this person in the Brexit era, I suspect that they could start to heal the divisions in the UK.
But I suspect, I maybe wrong, that it would be more difficult in the US. It's hard to imagine an American leader who could bring together people who are Trump supporters and people in big cities who had been super-enthusiastic about Barack Obama. What do you think?
Anthony: One of the things you see time and time again with Donald Trump is the strength of his base. It's not a huge percentage of the US population - 30-35% - but they are sticking with him through thick and thin. And even when Donald Trump is off the scene, one way or the other, whether it's re-election in 2020 or he's removed by some strange chance before then, the idea of Trumpism - the idea that there are people totally disenfranchised from the political system - that's not changing.
In the United States, demographically, culturally, socially, we're in a transition. And any time there's a transition, any time there's change, there's going to be unease, resentment and crisis that is created by those transitions. And you're seeing it in the UK and you're seeing it in the US.
The question is can the US political system handle this? Obviously we've handled political crises in the past. But because of the way the country is divided regionally, divided culturally, even between cities and suburbs, the system I think is creaking under the pressure.
Rob: That's an interesting point. And it also presents challenges for us journalists doesn't it? What do you do when you meet people as a journalist who you're very unhappy with. Do you tell them "Actually if you look at the statistics things aren't as bad as they seem?"
In the US I think it's called the Man on the Street. And you think, hang on a minute, maybe we should, yes, absolutely have as many ordinary folk as possible on the telly, but also challenge them a bit. What do you think?
Anthony: Right, yeah. I go to a place like Texas and talk to people where I'm from, and they have a decidedly different view of US politics, of what government can and cannot do, the role that government plays in people's lives. And then I go to California, and for them government is good, government is a positive force, they aren't afraid of higher taxes and they aren't afraid of more government involvement in their lives.
I mean, those are diametrically opposed viewpoints and on a local level, on a state level, it works alright, but when you send all those politicians from those states to Washington and get them to agree and compromise when the people back home are telling them that the other side is anathema to their way of life it becomes a real challenge.
I said six or seven for the American crisis because long term I think there are systemic problems. But you know, there are immediate crises too, like the investigations into Donald Trump. You don't have to deal with anything quite like that with your government.
Donald Trump is being devilled by obstruction of justice, possible ties to Russia, business dealings - all of that could push us up to a nine or a ten in the blink of an eye.
Rob: Anthony, I think we need to wrap it up. So I would just say this: When people say to me "Rob, when is it all going to end? How's this Brexit, how's it all going to end?" I often hear on the street, "Well, it's probably going to be alright." It's very British and to go back to that phrase we had at the start: mustn't grumble.
What about you Anthony?
Anthony: You know, I think that eventually there will be some kind of kicking the can down the road but the problems, the divides in this country, aren't going to go away. It's going to be difficult to find any kind of long-term solution.
It seems that this conflict and division is going to be with us for at least two years until the next election might sort out some of the government divisions. But the reality is that the system is set up for conflict - and conflict is what we're getting.
Rob: We'll talk again before that's up.
Anthony: Absolutely.
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A mass brawl erupted in Brighton on the eve of lockdown involving a group of about 20 people. | Sussex Police were called to Montpelier Place at 22:15 GMT on Wednesday.
One man suffered serious injuries and was taken to Royal Sussex County Hospital for treatment, where he remains in a serious condition. Four men have been arrested and remain in custody.
The force is appealing for witnesses.
Det Insp Owen Radley said: "The incident happened in what would have been a busy area and we are sure someone would know what happened."
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North Korea has said that the rocket it fired early on Sunday, was a new ballistic missile called the Hwasong-12. Defence expert Melissa Hanham explains what it tells us about Pyongyang's military strides. | Sunday's missile launch was a successful one and it demonstrated North Korea's longest-range nuclear-capable weapon yet.
Accompanying photographs showed it to be the same missile on parade last month at a massive military parade to mark the birth anniversary of North Korea's founding father Kim Il-sung.
Current leader Kim Jong-un was on-site according to photos released from North Korean state media KCNA and Rodong Sinmun.
In the hours afterwards, the statistics of the launch perplexed some observers, even to the point of questioning the data.
With tensions high, US Pacific Command was careful to categorise the flight as "not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile", which is - in short - one which could reach the US mainland.
One step further
This "mystery" missile is now revealed to be a powerful intermediate range missile, which North Korea claims can deliver a large and heavy nuclear warhead.
This vague statement leaves the door open to a range of possibilities, including that North Korea has not been able to make a compact warhead, or even that a new warhead will be revealed in the future.
North Korean state media said the missile had been launched over the country and into the sea east of the Korean Peninsula 787km (489 miles) away from its launch site near Kusong. It reached an altitude of 2,111.1km according to KCNA.
These figures fit approximately with statements made by both American and Japanese officials monitoring the situation.
While unusual, this sharp trajectory with an extremely high altitude allowed North Korean scientists to test the range of the missile without directly flying over any neighbouring countries.
The altitude would also allow the North to test the atmospheric re-entry vehicle under the extreme heat, pressure and vibration. The KCNA noted both facts in its public statement on Monday.
This "lofted" trajectory would be equivalent to over 4,500km if launched at a standard trajectory, putting US bases in Guam well in range.
It is indeed the longest-range missile North Korea has ever tested (aside from its space launch vehicles).
Deeply disturbing
Photographs indicate the Hwasong-12 to be a single stage, liquid-fuelled rocket, which would be unusually inefficient at this range due to the weight of the frame, fuel and oxidisers.
One possibility is that the body of the rocket is intended to be one part of a larger multi-staged intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching well into the US mainland.
In this way, North Korea can make iterative progress towards an ICBM without immediately crossing Trump's red line.
The missile launch, occurring just days after the new South Korean President Moon Jae-in took office, is deeply disturbing to many observers.
Missile testing under Kim Jong-un increased dramatically compared with his father and grandfather's programmes.
This test marks the 10th test of 2017, and this particular missile shows a greater range than any other tested in its military programme.
South Korea's new president has espoused dialogue with North Korea, and is now forced to take a tougher line just days into his administration.
So once again North Korea, with its rapidly advancing missile technology and the decline in relations with its neighbours, including China, has left diplomats scratching their heads.
Melissa Hanham is a Senior Research Associate in the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California, USA.
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A husband and wife who died two days apart after being found at home both had head injuries consistent with a fall down the stairs, police said. | John Hewitson, 90, and Connie Hewitson were discovered in Acheson Way, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, on Monday morning.
Mrs Hewitson, who was 55, died soon after paramedics arrived. Her husband died at Ipswich Hospital on Wednesday.
Suffolk Police, which had treated the deaths as unexplained, said the deaths were not believed to be suspicious.
Post-mortem examinations were carried out on Thursday and the results revealed the cause of death to be similar in both cases.
Detectives were still investigating what happened and said anyone with any information should contact them.
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The London Bridge attacks set Donald Trump off on an extended Twitter rant over the past few days, reviving his calls for sweeping immigration action and renewing old feuds with Democrats, gun-control advocates and even the mayor of London. | Anthony ZurcherNorth America reporter@awzurcheron Twitter
While White House advisor Kellyanne Conway recently complained that the media have an "obsession with covering everything he says on Twitter and very little of what he does as president", Mr Trump is the pot-stirrer-in-chief, who has the power to drive debate and shape events.
Words, whether spoken or tweeted, have consequences. The president's Monday morning fusillade about his immigration policy is no exception. Here are five things we learned.
A ban is a ban is a ban
The lynchpin of the White House's defence of Mr Trump's two controversial immigration executive orders that set restrictions on immigration from a handful of majority-Muslim nations was that they had no connection to the anti-Muslim travel ban candidate Trump proposed back in December 2015.
The executive actions, they argued, constituted temporary restrictions and not a "ban", Muslim or otherwise.
The president has occasionally undercut that defence, by using the b-word in the past - leaving his aides to clean up the mess.
"It's not a Muslim ban. It's not a travel ban," Press Secretary Sean Spicer said back in January. "It's a vetting system to keep America safe."
On Monday morning, however, Mr Trump applied kerosene to that defence, set it ablaze and danced around its ashes.
"People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want," he tweeted, "but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN."
Trump targets the courts (again)
Speaking of the judicial branch, the president on Monday morning went on the attack against the US legal system, calling the courts "slow and political".
The line is reminiscent of one of the president's more inflammatory tweets, when he lashed out against the federal judge who struck down his original immigration order.
"The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!" he tweeted on 4 February.
The following day he issued an even more ominous warning, tweeting that the judge put the nation in peril and "if something bad happens blame him and the court system".
According to one theory, advanced by Lawfare blog's Jack Goldsmith, Mr Trump's seemingly ill-considered comments are all part of a plan to get the courts to strike down his immigration orders, freeing him to blame the judiciary for any subsequent attacks.
It may, however, be just another case of "what you see is what you get" with Mr Trump. He has feuded with judges throughout his professional life, including criticising the Mexican heritage of the man who was presiding over a lawsuit against his for-profit "university" during last year's presidential campaign.
President Trump is the same as candidate Trump is the same as businessman/TV star Trump. The stage may be different, but the man doesn't change.
Trump turns on his own
One of the more unusual components of Mr Trump's Monday morning diatribe was that he turned his Twitter invective on his own administration.
He lashed out at the Justice Department, headed by his close political confidant Jeff Sessions, for focusing its legal defence on what he called the "watered down, politically correct" second executive order on immigration and not the more sweeping first version that explicitly mentioned religion and caused confusion when it was first enforced at airport immigration checkpoints.
Justice Department lawyers have tried to decouple the second order from the original, arguing that it remedied the discriminatory portions of the earlier effort, clarified that those with legal residency were unaffected and focused exclusively on nations that had previously been determined to be of concern to US.
When the president signed that second order in early March, Spicer tweeted that it would "keep the nation safe".
"This revised order will bolster the security of the United States and our allies" Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said.
Now the president is bad-mouthing the very same action his aides had resolutely defended. He is clearly irked that his administration abandoned that first travel order, particularly after he told its critics that he would see them "in court".
If Mr Trump continues to casually undercut his own people, however, they'll be less willing to rush to his defence in the coming days - when the president may need them most.
Last week, for instance, multiple officials doggedly refused to say whether the president believes climate change is caused by human activity - a position most conservative officeholders, including the president's own Environmental Protection Agency head, accept. Such reluctance may be just a taste of things to come.
Why go out on a limb for a president who is standing by the tree with a saw in hand?
Extreme vetting is back
The president also dusted off one of his favourite terms from the 2016 campaign - "extreme vetting" - which he said is helping "keep our country safe".
The original justification for the travel ban orders was that they were a temporary measure to allow a rigorous review process to be instituted for all individuals entering the US. The first action's time frame for implementation was 90 days - which would have set the mark at 27 April.
The second order, signed on 6 March, reset the 90-day clock again - a point that was reached on Sunday.
The Weekly Standard's Michael Warren reached out to the Trump White House for further clarification on what vetting measures had been put in place and was directed to the State Department, which has not yet responded.
Before Monday morning the last time the president himself had mentioned "extreme vetting" was in mid-February, when he said it "will be put in place, and it already is in place in many places".
Now extreme vetting - as a term at least - is back. But what is it? And if it's already in place, doesn't that erase the justification for implementing the travel ban?
It might - unless, of course, the ban was never intended to be temporary. That's a question the "slow and political" courts are likely to consider.
Trump is cornered
The president's social media onslaught comes after the latest round of stories about how the president was going to be more disciplined and focused, and less prone to Twitter tirades. Mr Trump's lawyers, we were told, were counselling him to tamp things down, lest his comments land him in more hot water.
The president has apparently disregarded this advice yet again and is trying his best to fight old battles and rekindle old feuds.
Why? Perhaps it's because there is a very dark storm cloud on the horizon. On Thursday former FBI Director James Comey - the man Mr Trump dramatically fired and has since very publicly insulted - will testify under oath before a Senate inquiry into Russia's meddling in the US presidential election. He's expected to discuss reports that the president asked him to pledge his loyalty and pressured him to back off from his investigation of Trump foreign policy advisor Michael Flynn.
Given Mr Comey's reputation for political independence and moral certitude - combined with the possibility that he has contemporaneous memos documenting his interactions with the president - the testimony could be disastrous for the White House.
At the very least, it will be a spectacle the likes of which Washington has not seen in decades.
The president could be eager to change the subject or, at the very least, deflect some attention. If so, the past few days of Twitter invective could be just the start.
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A century ago, Iceland banned all alcoholic drinks. Within a decade, red wine had been legalised, followed by spirits in the 1930s. But full-strength beer remained off-limits until 1 March 1989. Megan Lane asks why it took so long for the amber nectar to come in from the Icelandic cold. | When the mercury hovers below zero, a cold beer is not the first drink that springs to mind. A warming shot of schnapps might be more appropriate.
But on 1 March 1989 - when the top temperature in Iceland was -5C (23F) - beer was exactly what drinkers had in mind. It was the first time in 74 years they'd had a chance to legally order beer. And order it they did, in rowdy scenes televised live on national television.
Historian Unnar Ingvarsson was 21 at the time and living in a small town. "It was a big party. I and my friends bought a case each... We managed to finish them quickly and went to the pub where we stayed and drank through the night.
"A girl who had been living in Australia taught us drinking games - we lost obviously."
This red-letter day is marked annually as Bjordagur (Beer Day), though it tends to be much quieter now than the bacchanalian scenes witnessed 26 years ago.
A generation on, beer accounts for 62% of the 7.1 litres of pure alcohol consumed each year by the average Icelander. That's higher than in traditional brewing countries such as Germany and the Czech Republic (54% each) and the UK (37%), according to the most recent World Health Organization figures.
But for much of the 20th Century it was unpatriotic - and illegal - to drink beer.
When full prohibition became law 100 years ago, alcohol in general was frowned upon, and beer was especially out of favour - for political reasons. Iceland was engaged in a struggle for independence from Denmark at the time, and Icelanders strongly associated beer with Danish lifestyles.
"The Danes were drinking eight times as much alcohol per person on a yearly basis at the time," says historian Stefan Palsson, author of Beer: Around the World in 120 Pints.
As a result, beer was "not the patriotic drink of choice".
The independence and temperance movements reinforced each other, and in 1908, four years after gaining home rule, Iceland held a referendum on a proposal to outlaw all alcohol from 1915. About 60% voted in favour. Women, who still didn't have the vote, were vocal in their support.
"Prohibition was seen as progressive, like smoking [bans] today," says Palsson.
It didn't take long for Prohibition to be undermined. Smuggling, home-brew and ambassadors lobbying for alcohol to oil the wheels of diplomacy all played a part.
"Doctors started prescribed alcohol as medicine and they did so in huge quantities, for more or less everything. Wine if you had bad nerves, and for the heart, cognac," says Palsson.
But beer was never "what the doctor ordered", despite the argument some put forward that it was a good treatment for malnourishment. "The head doctor put his foot down and said beer did not qualify as a medicine under any circumstances," Palsson says.
There were other leaks in the Prohibition armour too.
"Prohibition supporters complained that painters who never used to use spirits to clean their brushes were now getting litres and litres each year," says Palsson. "So alcohol was flowing in from all directions."
Then the Spanish threatened to stop importing salted cod - Iceland's most profitable export at the time - if Iceland did not buy its wine. Politicians bowed to the pressure and legalised red and rose wines from Spain and Portugal in 1921.
Over time, support for prohibition dwindled. It had already been repealed by all the other European nations that had experimented with it (apart from the Faroe Islands) when in 1933 Icelanders voted to reverse course.
But even then the ban remained in force for beer containing more than 2.25% alcohol (about half the strength of an average-strength beer). As beer was cheaper than wines or spirits, the fear was that legalising it would lead to a big rise in alcohol abuse.
The association of beer with Denmark also continued to tarnish its image in a country that only achieved full independence in 1944.
However, beer remained accessible, just about, to those who really wanted it. "If you knew a fisherman, he may have had a few cases stashed in his garage - usually the cheapest and strongest beer available, often stored too long," says Palsson
Also popular, according to Ingvarsson, was tipping brennivin (burning wine), a potato-based vodka, into non-alcoholic beer - which tasted, as he puts it, "interesting and totally disgusting".
Some Icelandic drinks
It wasn't until the 1970s with the rise of city break holidays, that attitudes really began to shift, Palsson suggests.
"You'd go to London to shop, to watch football and go to the British pubs, and this started to seem like something you would like to have over here," he says.
Another crack in the edifice of prohibition came in 1979, when businessman David Scheving Thorsteinsson challenged the rule that only pilots, cabin crew and foreign tourists could bring in duty-free beer. When his six bottles were confiscated, he refused to pay the fine. His cause was taken up by the MP Sighvatur Bjorgvinsson, whose bill to allow Icelanders the same rights was passed in 1980.
It became practically a civic duty for Icelanders to buy a duty-free crate at the airport: six litres of imported beer or eight litres of local beer (brewed in Iceland even though it was not legally available outside the airport). If they didn't like beer themselves, they'd pass it on to family, friends or colleagues.
Polls throughout the 1980s showed about six in 10 Icelanders supported legalising beer. "Beer is being consumed in Iceland," said Jon Magnusson of the Independence Party in 1987. "Why should the state not get its piece of the cake in the form of taxes and so on?"
Finally, in 1988, Iceland's parliament, the Althing voted to legalise beer, after debates that were televised live and attracted huge audiences. A dozen beer-lovers remained outside the building to flash victory signs following the conclusive post-midnight vote in the upper house, reported AP.
Today Icelanders drink less than many of their European counterparts. The 7.1 litres of pure alcohol drunk annually by over-15s in Iceland, on average, compares with 11.4 litres in Denmark, 11.6 in the UK, 12.2 in France and 15.1 in Russia, according to the World Health Organization's Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health 2014.
Iceland also has a relatively high proportion of abstainers, according to the WHO report - lifetime abstinence for 14.1% of the drinking age population, and 32.1% in the past 12 months. In Denmark, these figures are 4.5% and 11.4%, with 15.1% and 16.1% in the UK.
But when it comes to binge drinking, Iceland's stats are on a par with the UK, and Palsson puts this down to drinking habits laid down in the beer prohibition years.
"Before 1989, most alcoholic consumption would take place over a few hours at weekends. So you needed big clubs which could serve a lot of customers in a short period of time. Some served bjorliki, pseudo-beer, a mixture of low-alcohol lager and different types of spirits served in large beer glasses."
Beer Day is not generally used as an excuse for binge drinking these days, however. Though it's mentioned in all the guidebooks, it isn't the festive blowout tourists often seem to expect, judging from surprised posts on TripAdvisor.
"Maybe we should make it into more of a celebration," says Audur Osp, who runs the popular I Heart Reykjavik travel blog. "I will go out for a beer myself to celebrate, possibly to one of the craft beer bars to try something new."
Ordering an Icelandic beer isn't always easy, unless you happen to speak the language. Some, such as Borg Snorri Nr. 10 and Ulfur Ulfur Double IPA Nr. 17, are just about pronounceable, but others - Olvisholt Suttungasumbl, for example, or Víking Islenskur Urvals Einiberjabock - are more of a challenge.
Once you have the glass in your hand, though, it's easy. You just say "Skal!" and drink.
The Magazine in Iceland
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Nelson Mandela, South Africa's first black president and the father of the struggle against apartheid, has died at the age of 95. His three weddings and two divorces have left a complex and divided family, spanning four generations.
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Evelyn Ntoko Mase
1922-2004
The first wife of Nelson Mandela, whom he married in 1944 and divorced in 1958. She died in 2004 of respiratory problems.
Winnie Madikizela
1936-
Mandela's second wife, whom he married in 1958. They separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996. She is a social worker, activist and controversial ANC politician in her own right.
Graca Machel
1945-
Mandela's third wife, whom he married in 1998. A Mozambican politician and humanitarian worker. She is the widow of Samora Machel, Mozambique's first president.
Madiba Thembekile
1945-1969
Born in 1945, Mandela's first son was killed in a car crash when he was 25. Mandela was in prison at the time and was not permitted to attend his child's funeral.
Makaziwe
1948, died aged nine months
Mandela's eldest daughter died aged just nine months. His next daughter was named Makaziwe in her honour.
Makgatho
1950-2005
Mandela's second son died of Aids-related diseases in 2005. After his son's death, Mandela said: "Let us give publicity to HIV/Aids and not hide it...". Makgatho's eldest son, Mandla, is the family heir and chief of the Traditional Council in Mvezo - birthplace of his grandfather.
Makaziwe (Maki)
1954-
Named in honour of her older sister, who died some years earlier. Of the four children born to Evelyn and Mandela, Makaziwe is the only one still living. She has held senior university positions and has worked at the Development Bank of Southern Africa.
Zenani (Zeni)
1959-
The eldest daughter of Mandela and his second wife, Winnie. She is South Africa's ambassador to Argentina and is married to Prince Thumbumuzi Dlamini of Swaziland.
Zindziswa (Zindzi)
1960-
Businesswoman and managing trustee of the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund. With Mandela jailed in 1962, neither she nor her sister saw much of their father during their childhood.
Source: Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory
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The band Hunter and the Bear started out as a duo that used to rehearse in a soundproofed shipping container in a London car park before becoming a four piece that supported Eric Clapton this summer.
Ahead of their appearance at Loopallu in Ullapool, lead vocalist Will Irvine tells of growing up in Achiltibuie, listening to his parents' 1970s American rock music and the challenge of coming up with a good band name. | By Steven McKenzieBBC Scotland Highlands and Islands reporter
Hunter and the Bear say they can chart their progress by where they are on the bill for this month's Loopallu music festival.
The first time they played, they were on the fringes performing small gigs in Ullapool's Arch Inn and Argyll Hotel.
"This year we've been invited to play on the main stage," says Irvine.
"That is a real step up for us and a good reference point, letting us see how far in a year we've come."
Hunter and the Bear started out as a duo, Irvine and long-time friend Jimmy Hunter, who hails from Glasgow.
The pair ended up at the same university in Newcastle where Irvine studied English with drama and Hunter a business course.
Irvine says: "I was interested in the singing and song writing side of music, but Jimmy taught me to play guitar.
"He coached me through to a point where we could play together."
Later, after university, the pair headed north to Irvine's family home in Achiltibuie in Wester Ross to write songs, before travelling to London in pursuit of gigs.
"Ideally we would have liked to have stayed in Achiltibuie, but we felt we had to be somewhere we could be frequently playing live," says Irvine.
"We felt we had some songs that weren't terrible. We had a few friends in London and were able to get a few gigs, and get invited back to play some more."
Hunter and Irvine decided the next step was to add a drummer and bassist to their outfit.
"We managed to do this reasonably quickly," says Irvine.
They spotted drummer Gareth Thompson, from Brighton, playing in Ronnie Scott's Jazz Bar in London's Soho.
Thompson was asked to an audition where, at that time in 2012, Hunter and the Bear were regularly rehearsing.
"It was a rehearsal studio inside a shipping container in a car park," says Irvine. "It had been soundproofed and had an old drum kit and a couple of amps in it.
"We had really good times there."
Chris Clark, from Shrewsbury, a bassist with a love of heavy metal, joined the band next.
Irvine says: "Our musical influences are all different. It is a real mixture and I think that is reflected in our music and song writing.
"I grew up listening to my parents' old rock music, bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Van Morrison. Lynyrd Skynyrd's Simple Man was usually playing in the car on the way to school. And, of course, there was lots of exposure to traditional music."
Earlier this summer, Hunter and the Bear played support to Eric Clapton at his performances in the SSE Hydro in Glasgow and the Leeds Arena.
Irvine says: "Before the performances we would go to a sound check and the lead sound guy would ask us to play a little bit. The sound in those enormous arenas was amazing. It was something I had never experienced before."
At the end of this month, Irvine will be back on home turf playing at Loopallu.
The London-based band has already been up in Wester Ross this year playing at the Summer Isles Festival in August. Irvine has played solo at the small festival in the past.
During the summer, Hunter and the Bear also played at Scotland's T in the Park and Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival.
"We come up to Scotland as often as we can," says the lead vocalist.
"Coming home to Achiltibuie is somewhere I can always come up with ideas, away from the busy schedules down in the city.
"It is somewhere you can clear your head, see the sea and get out for a walk if the writing isn't working out."
So was it in the far north, under its dark skies - light pollution is not a problem in a community of about 300 people - and seeing the constellations of Orion the hunter and Ursa Major, the Great Bear, that Irvine and Hunter drew inspiration for the band's name?
"We came up with some terrible names for the band at first. I'm too embarrassed to mention them," says Irvine, before revealing the answer.
"Jimmy's surname is Hunter and when I was at school I played a lot of rugby and my nickname was the Bear, so we thought Hunter and the Bear was a good name.
"However, because of Jimmy's beard and hair people always think he's the bear in the name.
"The name means a lot of different things to us as a band," Irvine adds. "And we hope it is one that people remember."
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The body of a man has been discovered in a flat in Southampton, sparking a murder investigation.
| The 70-year-old was pronounced dead after police were called to the property in Bursledon Road shortly after 21:00 GMT on Wednesday.
Hampshire Constabulary said the man's next-of-kin had been informed of his death.
Officers remain at the scene. Anyone with information is urged to contact the force.
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A new arrest has been made by police investigating the murder of a man stabbed after an "altercation" at a newsagent. | Daniel Fitzjohn, 34, died in hospital after the attack in the Kingsley area of Northampton on 14 June.
Officers said a 25-year-old man from Wolverhampton was being questioned on suspicion of murder.
Another man from Wolverhampton, 27-year-old Daniel Quinn, has already been charged with murder.
He was remanded in custody after appearing at Northampton Crown Court on Monday.
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A man who drove from London to Derbyshire to collect a wardrobe claimed he had "forgotten about lockdown", police said. | Officers came across a van in the village of Repton on Saturday evening.
They approached the driver, who told them he had come from London to pick up some second-hand furniture and admitted the trip was not essential.
Derbyshire Police handed him a £200 fine for breaking lockdown rules.
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Launching a spin-off to a hugely popular TV series can go either way. There are plenty of success stories (like Frasier) but also quite a few flops (with all due respect to Joey). | By Steven McIntoshEntertainment reporter
BBC One's latest drama, Life, is a spin-off from Doctor Foster, which launched in 2015 and was watched by an audience of more than 10 million.
Life is set in the same world as its predecessor, but only features one familiar character - Victoria Hamilton's Anna, the friendly neighbour who always had a glass of wine in her hand.
But does that mean viewers need to have seen all of Doctor Foster to understand its new spin-off, which begins on Tuesday night?
"Absolutely not, no," says Hamilton. "To an extraordinary degree, I think, you really don't need to have seen it.
"Life is a very complete story on its own, this is an entirely different universe and you're given everything you need to know about it in episode one of this story."
Those who did watch Doctor Foster may remember that Anna left Parminster in series two, having discovered that her husband had been unfaithful again. In Life, Anna has changed her name to Belle (as her full name is Annabel) and is trying to start afresh.
But she is just one of several main characters, who all live in close proximity to one another.
Set in Manchester, the series follows the residents of a large house divided into four flats, and also stars Adrian Lester, Alison Steadman and Melissa Johns. The neighbours don't know each other well, and yet their lives intertwine in unexpected ways.
Writer Mike Bartlett (who was also behind Doctor Foster) was intrigued by how the characters' actions could impact on each other, often without them realising.
"I used to live in a flat which was part of an old house that had been divided up, and I was amazed that we were all one stud wall away from each other, but didn't really know each other," he explains. "We would hear the most intimate details of each other's sex lives and love lives, and yet you'd meet in the corridor, and you wouldn't exchange two words.
"And I found that really interesting about our nature as people, when we want to be private and when we want community. We are desperate for connection, and yet so often we end up feeling alone, particularly in big cities, so I wanted to write about that."
Spin offs: A brief history
Some of the biggest shows in TV history were spin-offs. The hugely successful Frasier lasted for 11 seasons and notched up 264 episodes - just behind its predecessor Cheers, which managed 270. Happy Days had a whopping seven spin-offs. The most successful were Mork & Mindy and Laverne & Shirley.
More recently, the Emmy-nominated Better Call Saul launched in 2015 as a spin-off from Breaking Bad, and was created by the same team - Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould. Young Sheldon is still going three years after it debuted as an examination of the childhood of The Big Bang Theory's lead character.
But others have been distinctly less popular. Friends spin-off Joey lasted just two seasons and failed to match the phenomenal popularity of its predecessor. And the less said about Only Fools And Horses spin-off Green Green Grass, the better.
Life is appropriately named, as the series covers birth, death, marriage, infidelity and mental health.
The series launches with the arrival of Belle's teenage niece, who is quite a handful, to put it mildly. "Her niece comes into her life like a whirlwind, and one of the things that Belle has always ended up doing is looking after other people, taking their problems on board and being the person that copes with stuff," Hamilton explains.
"So you watch her try to cope with all of these people and essentially try to carry all of their problems for them, at the same time as being less than honest about how huge her own demons are."
But each character in the show has their own inner battles - which is a reflection of real life, says Lester, who plays David: "Everyone is going through some unique, incredibly profound, heart-breaking situations, and it's great to be part of a show that explores that."
Steadman's character Gail finds herself re-evaluating things as she approaches a major birthday.
"Here was a woman who had been happily married for all these years, lovely home, two kids, and everything seemed fine, but suddenly she looks at her life again, at the age of 70," she says. "Normally people look at their lives again at the age of 50 or 60, but at 70? To suddenly say 'hmm' and re-appraise it, that seemed interesting and challenging."
The fourth main character is Hannah, played by Melissa Johns. "In episode one, Hannah is heavily pregnant, and the father of her baby is Andy, who she had a one night stand with eight months previous," she explains.
"I think the term is entanglement - you know, like Jada Pinkett Smith and August [Alsina]," jokes her co-star Calvin Demba, referring to one recent high-profile affair.
In the absence of a third series of Doctor Foster, Bartlett felt there was potential to explore and develop the character of Anna, but also make a drama which struck a different tone.
"I'd written a lot of quite heavy things," he says. "Doctor Foster goes to very dark places, and this show goes to very dark places too, but what I felt I hadn't seen enough of was a show that allowed us to see the strength that people have, the kindness, the goodness.
"A show that really took a group of characters through some of the toughest stuff that everybody has to face in life, and saw how they dealt with it."
Follow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email [email protected].
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The body of a man found in the French Alps last week is that of a missing British skier, French police confirmed. | John Bromell, 39, from Willingham by Stow, near Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, was last seen on the Paquis chairlift in Tignes, on 7 January.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said: "Our staff are supporting the family of a British man following his death in France."
It said it was in contact with the French authorities.
More from Lincolnshire
At the time of Mr Bromell's disappearance, there was more than 1m (3ft) of snow reported in the resort, with a warning about the risk of avalanches issued.
A full-scale search by French police was hampered by what were described as "terrible conditions".
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Two paramedics were injured when their ambulance smashed into a cycle shop after crashing with a car. | The crash happened in Brockenhurst, in the New Forest, on Wednesday evening.
The paramedics were reported to have suffered serious but not life-threatening injuries. The female car driver was left with minor injuries.
In a separate incident, a woman was arrested on suspicion of drink driving after reversing into a police car dealing with the initial crash.
A South Central Ambulance Service spokesman said the two staff members had since been discharged from hospital and were recovering at home.
He confirmed the ambulance had been on an emergency call at the time of the crash.
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A jury has been discharged at the trial of two men accused of murdering another man at a flat in Derby. | Paul Steele, 53, died after being found injured inside the property in Lapwing Close, Sinfin, Derby, on the evening of 9 December.
Talvir Singh Girn, 40, of Cloverdale Drive, Derby, and Kulvinder Singh Nath, 52, of Glencroft Drive, Stenson Fields, both deny murder.
The trial is due to re-start with a new jury at Derby Crown Court on Wednesday.
Follow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to [email protected].
Related Internet Links
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Facebook has launched its location-based Places service in the UK. | It allows people to "check in" wherever they are and see who among their friends and other Facebook users is - or has been - at the same location.
The service also lists nearby businesses and attractions, and Facebook will target the locations it lists to each Places user.
It has numerous privacy controls in place to control the amount of location information that is shared.
Places is available in the US and now the UK for the iPhone and select other smartphones through Facebook's mobile site, with other countries to come.
Michael Sharon, product manager for Places, said that the firm was working on developing the application for Blackberry and devices running the Android operating system.
He added that the firm has made Places' API - the software that allows other programs to interface with it - available, so that Places will be able to integrate with existing location-aware services such as Foursquare.
"We started seeing that in status updates people were saying things like 'going to the gym' or 'hanging out with Joe and Sue'," Mr Sharon said at the UK launch.
"We realised that this is something that people do every single day, telling their friends where they are.
"The natural thing is to build a product that takes advantage of this and makes it easier, more convenient and more social for them to do what they're already doing."
The service allows people to access "Place pages" wherever they are, indicating local points of interest and listing people who are "Here Now" and friends who have visited the place.
Users can then "check in" to the location, making themselves visible to their friends, to everyone on Facebook, or to no-one at all.
The location information can then appear on a user's wall and newsfeed; however, the default setting is that only Facebook friends can see the check-in.
Mr Sharon stressed that there were also a number of security features in place for minors; for example, only a minor user's friends will be able to see check-ins.
Josh Feldberg, a digital consultant attending the UK launch, told BBC News that the sheer size of Facebook's user base would make it more successful than other location-aware services such as Gowalla and Foursquare.
"It makes my location check-ins more useful; Foursquare's a bit of fun but only a couple of times has it led to actual offline meetups; with Facebook, the people on there are more my close friends and family."
Advertisements will not be linked to Place pages, but rather targeted at specific users; Mr Feldberg said the location-aware service could offer new types of content.
"It could help with their advertising revenue but their ads are already quite targeted; from a marketing point of view for businesses it offers interesting opportunities. You could do reward schemes for people who check in at a certain business, for example."
Rik Ferguson of security firm Trend Micro, trialled the service as it was launched on Friday. He raised a number of concerns about the functionality that allows users to check in their friends at a given location.
"One of the major issues is the way that Facebook have implemented his functionality," Mr Ferguson told BBC News.
"By default, users are opted in to the ability to be tagged by their friends, they are opted in to allowing their friends' Facebook apps to access their location information, and they are opted in to allowing 'non-friends' checked-in to the same place to see their whereabouts.
"This is all backwards - this should be deployed on a purely opt-in basis and no information about my whereabouts should be posted without my explicit consent, every single time a post is made."
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For the first time in nearly two decades, two giant pandas will be brought from China to the UK, to live in Edinburgh Zoo. The project represents the culmination of five years of political and diplomatic negotiation at a high level. But why does the panda - unlike any other animal - have the power to involve and engage so much? And what is the key to its enduring popularity?
| They remind us of ourselves
One of the main reasons we love pandas is that they remind us of ourselves, says Ron Swaisgood, Director of Applied Animal Ecology, San Diego Zoo Institue for Conservation Research.
"They eat sitting up using their hands and their special pseudo thumb, which is actually a modified wrist bone," he told the BBC News website.
Zoo visitors love to watch Pandas eating and are often amazed by the way they handle their food with considerable dexterity - thanks partly to that "pseudo thumb", which functions as a sixth digit.
The classic pose for a panda eating is one that resembles the way humans sit on the floor.
According to Mr Swaisgood, we also love pandas because of their distinctive eyes. Their eye patches make their eyes look bigger.
"People love big eyes because it reminds them of children," he says. "This is called neoteny in scientific terms."
Neoteny basically means keeping a juvenile appearance into adulthood.
According to the San Diego Zoo's website: "Our own young have characteristics that we humans respond to such as a big, round head, large eyes, a high forehead, and a roly-poly body. We are programmed to respond to these babyish looks. Babies just make us like them and want to care for them. It is part of our human makeup."
In the human world, panda eyes can take on a less appealing connotation, often being associated with badly applied make-up, or lack of sleep.
We just find pandas funny. But, according to Henry Nicholls, author of The Way of the Panda, they are undeserving of mockery. Indeed, pandas were not seen as figures of fun until humans failed to get them to reproduce in captivity.
Out of their natural habitat more than 60% of male pandas exhibit no sexual desire at all. In a bid to encourage them to mate, the Chinese have experimented with everything from what has been dubbed "panda porn" - explicit video of pandas mating - to traditional herbs.
In the 1960s, attempts to get Chi Chi, a famous panda bought by London Zoo, to breed failed spectacularly.
"At the height of the Cold War, she was even flown to Russia to mate with a giant panda there. It was a very high-profile failure, sparking a rash of cartoons about the case and an explosion of humour that has never gone away," Mr Nicholls told the BBC News website.
But in fact, pandas' mating habits are only funny by human standards, Mr Nicholls points out, and the species is very effective at breeding in the wild. The female panda may only be fertile for a few days each year but during this period she will mate dozens of times, with multiple males.
The giant panda's enigmatic nature is in stark contrast to its sheer bulk and striking appearance. The few that remain in the wild are mainly scattered across six isolated mountain ranges across south-central China.
For researchers, it is a real challenge to find this extraordinarily elusive beast which moves away higher and deeper into the forest before long before humans can get anywhere near.
"There is some rather heartening that, in a very developed world, this species can still evade us and manage to carve out a space for itself," Mr Nicholls says.
The panda has been relentlessly made into a symbol since the 1960s. It's been used by the WWF to convince us about the importance of conservation.
According to San Diego Zoo's Ron Swaisgood, the fact that they are an icon of conservation helps boosts their appeal.
"People love to rally around an underdog," he says. "Good news is, it's working. China has now established more than 60 reserves protecting the remaining pandas and researchers have accumulated enough knowledge about their biology and behaviour to have a self-sustaining captive population and begin to adaptively manage the wild population toward recovery."
The panda has also been used by China to represent the potency of a nation.
Our love of pandas has also been used as a marketing ploy - their black and white folds used to sell everything from sweets and fizzy pop to Western consumer to cigarettes in China.
The giant panda is so linked to the idea of China that, unlike any other animal, it has become a political symbol. Decisions to lend and loan pandas take years of negotiations. Edinburgh Zoo was reportedly in talks with the Chinese for half a decade before the deal to house Tian Tian and Yangguang was sealed. And, unlike the exchange of any other animal, these deals often involve political negotiations at the very highest levels.
Giant Pandas are officially listed on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's list of endangered species, which assumes there are fewer than 2,500 giant pandas in the world. The official figure is 1,596.
But, suggests Mr Nicholls, it is almost impossible to effectively document the actual number of pandas in existence, the animal is so elusive.
He says that such is the cultural and political power of the animal for China that is highly unlikely the number would ever be simply scientific.
"It has been suggested that with an animal this emblematic, politics gets in the way of the actual scientific decisions. A census which took place in the 1970s was highly massaged to get a sense of a species on the edge."
Although giant pandas are classified as a kind of meat-eater, in the wild they eat almost exclusively bamboo, and a lot of it. The average giant panda can consume as much as 14kg (30lbs) of bamboo shoots each day. Because of this simple diet, which is low in nutrients, the panda conserves energy by limiting its movements.
But the diet is also linked to some of the giant pandas most distinctive features, including its round face with its powerful jaw muscles to crush the shoots.
In captivity, pandas enjoy a much wider variety of foods - including honey, eggs, fish and fruit and vegetables like oranges, yams and bananas.
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She was, by almost all accounts, a rather wonderful woman - smart, helpful, and engaging - and a familiar presence behind the old-fashioned wooden reception counter in the Central Hotel's spacious lobby in the Somali capital, Mogadishu. | Andrew HardingAfrica correspondent@BBCAndrewHon Twitter
"We made a really good connection. She was very attentive, and was doing her job very well. One government minister I knew was ready to offer her a job," said a European official who sometimes stayed at the hotel in order to meet the many Somali politicians who had made it their home. He asked for his name not to be used for security reasons.
"She was a nice person, really talented," confirmed the hotel manager and co-owner, Ahmed Ismail Hussein, of Luul Dahir, the Somali woman in her mid-30s whom he had hired four months earlier.
'She exploded here'
"She had six young children, and everyone was sympathetic and supportive. But after all, to me she was not a nice person. She was a horrible person when you consider what she did," he said.
On 20 February, a car bomb was driven inside the hotel's heavily guarded courtyard during Friday prayers.
Dozens of men, including ministers and a deputy prime minister, were praying in the hotel mosque.
Somehow, the mosque wall managed to absorb most of the blast, and for minutes afterwards, dazed survivors wandered around the courtyard.
This was the moment Luul Dahir chose to make her move.
The manager had noticed earlier that morning that she seemed tired, and tearful - and had asked her if she wanted to take a day or two off.
"She was looking down - I told her: 'Please, take leave.' She was not willing to go," he said.
Underneath her black chador she had strapped a belt packed with explosives.
"She exploded here, this black spot. She was looking for the deputy prime minister, asking: 'Where is my uncle?' He was not really her uncle but she wanted to make sure he dies," said Mr Hussein, showing me around the scarred courtyard.
Others remember hearing her scream - trying, they thought subsequently, to attract a crowd around her.
Mr Hussein suspects there might have been a scuffle - that the minister's bodyguards even fired shots at Ms Dahir.
But she managed to detonate her bomb.
"I believe not less than 40 people were killed here", said Mr Hussein. Official figures suggest about half that number.
'Shortcut to paradise'
The al-Qaeda-linked Somali militant group, al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the attack. More details about Luul Dahir soon emerged.
She had recently returned from Holland, where she had lived since childhood as a member of Somalia's huge diaspora.
She had applied for jobs at a number of prominent hotels in Mogadishu. In her letter to the Jazzier Palace hotel, she had described herself as:
"A dynamic professional who strives for excellence in all assigned tasks. I have good customer service skills. I consistently approach work with energy. I am a team player."
Her hobbies included "reading new novels" and "learning new things." Her application was rejected.
Ms Dahir's late husband, named as Abdi Salan, had been involved in another al-Shabab suicide attack, one year earlier, on Mogadishu's heavily guarded government compound, Villa Somalia.
Somehow, none of this had come to light before the attack. Indeed, it is alleged that several senior security officials had befriended Ms Dahir at the hotel.
"I believe these guys, al-Shabab, use weak people - people with difficulties. They tell them this is a short cut to go to paradise," said Mr Hussein, who had also returned to Somalia recently after 24 years in Sheffield, England.
"Later I learned that [Luul Dahir] had problems with her sight. Her husband was dead. I heard he was another suicide bomber," he said.
"She had six young children and was struggling... So I think her mentality was turned... she had been told: 'Paradise is waiting for you. Your husband is waiting for you'," he added.
The Central Hotel bomb was by no means a one-off. Mogadishu's political elites have been targeted in a series of recent hotel attacks - several involving members of the diaspora.
"People keep asking: 'Why do the diaspora come back to kill themselves and kill others?'
"They say we cannot trust the diaspora because they're blowing themselves up. It's very hard now to get confidence and trust from others," said women's rights campaigner Ifrah Ahmed.
Read Andrew's other reports from Somalia:
Sun, surf... and grenades in Mogadishu
'Why I left al-Shabab'
Getting round remittance bans
Two days after we visited the Central Hotel, a car bomb exploded on the street outside, killing diners lunching at a popular restaurant.
The manager, Mr Hussein, replayed the explosion for us on the hotel's CCTV.
"They've parked right opposite our door. That young boy... will be among the dead very soon. That's the one.... You can see the car burning there," he said quietly, describing the scene unfolding on the screen.
"I'm very pessimistic. It needs a sea of change to happen here. The government is doing absolutely zero. They're just going... around and around, fighting among themselves," he said.
Since the second bombing, which broke most of the hotel's windows - only just replaced after February's attack - Mr Hussein is actively considering a return to Britain.
"Two years ago property was booming, there was a lot of activity. But since then 80% of the diaspora went back because of the deteriorating security situation," Mr Hussein told me.
"Only a few like me are still here, and I cannot go back easily because I invested a lot of work and money. But I don't know how long I can stand on my feet... I may go back to the UK," he said.
Ms Dahir's actions continue to haunt him, and many others who encountered her in the days leading up to February's attack.
The anonymous European official, who had been so struck by her enthusiasm, now remembers a seemingly throwaway comment she made - as they discussed security at the hotel - which has now come to have much more sinister undertones.
"She said - and I think this is word for word - 'It's not the number of guards on the outside. It's who gets inside that will make it unsafe.' That was on the Wednesday before that attack," he said.
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Leicester City are on the brink of pulling off one of sport's greatest fairytales - even the bookies thought there was more chance of finding the Loch Ness Monster than the Foxes winning the Premier League. But what impact have they had on the people of the city? | By Calum McKenzie & Sandish ShokerBBC News Online
As #backingtheblues began trending on Twitter shop windows were dressed in blue, bars created blue cocktails and a butchers at Leicester Market was selling limited edition blue sausages.
One coffee shop even created a special Vardyccino - with the chocolate on top supposed to look like the team's striker Jamie Vardy - while someone modified a photo of King Richard III, whose remains were found beneath a city centre car park, in a Foxes kit.
But the excitement is not just limited to Leicester City supporters.
The city's elation has also gripped people who did not previously like the sport.
Nicola Butler, 33, from Ratby, Leicestershire, admits she was never a football fan until the start of this season.
"I have a few friends who are die hard [Leicester City] fans and they would talk to me about it.
"And it's kind of got everyone else excited about it too."
On Friday the mum-of-two joined her colleagues at the University of Leicester and a large majority of the city dressed in blue.
"When you meet people excited by it, you can't help but get gripped by it as well.
"I don't know anyone who hasn't been caught up in this story. Even my granddad, who lives near Liverpool, wants Leicester to win.
"Whatever happens everyone really just can't believe we have come this far."
As a treat for her dad's 60th birthday, Mrs Butler bought tickets to her first ever football game to watch Leicester play Swansea City last weekend.
"It was brilliant. The atmosphere was amazing," she said.
But despite the heady atmosphere in the city, there are still some who are refusing to be swept up in the excitement.
Lee Pickering, who lives in the city, says he will probably be watching the Grand Prix instead of Leicester's game against Manchester United on Sunday.
"It'll do nothing (for the city)," he says. "Those that like football will enjoy it because they'll get to see bigger teams come down here but those that don't like football will be like 'so what'. It won't make any difference at all."
It seems people like him are in the minority though.
Harinder Singh, born and brought up in India, only caught the Leicester bug during the Foxes' great escape from relegation at the end of last season.
"As you know in India, we are crazy about cricket and hockey, but when I came over to this country, football is the main sport," he said.
"I started watching football but only the internationals when England were playing, and I wasn't really interested in backing any club side until I moved to Leicester.
"I'm amazed to see how this team has dug itself out of a hole having almost been relegated last year.
"Since then, I've been following them and it's completely amazing what these guys have done."
Whatever the outcome of Leicester City's title race, there is no doubt it has united the city.
And while there are still some people who will be happy to hear the back of the team winning the league, the team's accomplishments this seasons will be talked about by for many years to come.
Related Internet Links
Leicester City FC
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It's not often a world leader insists so openly on taking the blame. In newsrooms across Europe journalists looked on baffled as Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that a strict Easter Covid lockdown, agreed and announced just 30 hours earlier, was off. | By Jenny HillBBC Berlin correspondent
Mrs Merkel not only apologised but begged forgiveness. "This mistake is mine alone," she said.
Once the surprise subsided, German commentators took a rather favourable view.
"Respect!" said the tabloid Bild. Tagesspiegel pictured Mrs Merkel in biblical robes, bent under the weight of a cross, with the words "Merkel Culpa". Mrs Merkel, ran the general view, had made a mistake and, rightly, come clean about it.
But most are still scratching their heads over why the chancellor would expend so much political capital over such an insignificant development. Germany usually shuts up shop for three days of public holiday over Easter.
Mrs Merkel had agreed with regional leaders to extend the number of "Ruhetage" (rest days) to five. But the plan reportedly infuriated business owners, concerned about logistics, and in particular supermarket chains, which warned of empty shelves if suppliers and staff were forced to shut down.
Given the increasingly chaotic nature of the Covid pandemic response here, it's fair to assume that many Germans might have simply shaken their heads and muttered, had the plan been shelved in a less dramatic fashion.
So why the mea culpa?
It's possible that Mrs Merkel, the daughter of a pastor, and a leader who frequently cites the importance of transparency within a democracy, simply felt it was the right thing to do.
But with her apparently heartfelt apology Angela Merkel has, by accident or design, arguably distanced herself from Germany's regional leaders who, throughout the pandemic, have bickered, procrastinated and repeatedly ignored her calls for a tough national strategy. That's their prerogative of course - this is federalism.
More on Europe's pandemic
The Easter plan was, by all accounts, her plan.
It was one of the rare corona policies for which she was more or less directly responsible unlike, say, the fudged agreements last autumn which, against her wishes, saw regional leaders grudgingly - and belatedly - introduce restrictions as the second wave began.
Mrs Merkel, who wanted a hard, fast, national strategy then said she regretted the tardy response - but she didn't apologise for it.
It was perhaps telling then that, the day after her Easter U-turn, she stood up in parliament and effectively challenged regional leaders to put their money where their mouth was - calling on them to take the initiative and be more creative in their response.
If you think you can do it better, the subtext seemed to say, then get on and do it.
Pre-election anxiety
At least one leader, Berlin mayor Michael Müller, is now resisting the implementation of an emergency brake which, it was agreed, all German states must impose when infections reach a certain limit. So it's fair perhaps to assume that Mrs Merkel's exasperation is growing.
Some wonder whether Mrs Merkel - now just months away from stepping down - apologised because she felt she had nothing now to lose.
Quite the reverse. Support for Mrs Merkel's coalition government, and her centre-right Christian Democrat (CDU) party, is wavering. Some in the CDU fear it might be driven from government come the September general election.
Nor is Mrs Merkel showing any sign of stepping back to allow Armin Laschet, who it's widely assumed will be her potential successor, more room centre stage.
Commentators argue that, if Mrs Merkel really wants to make amends, she should turn her attention to Germany's vaccination programme. Its slow rollout is an increasingly incendiary source of public frustration. Just 10% of the population have received a first dose.
Case numbers are rising exponentially, fuelled by the spread of the B117 or UK/Kent variant. Lothar Wieler of the Robert Koch Institute, which advises the government, has warned there are already indications that Germany's third wave could be worse than the first two. Without further action, he added, case numbers could soar to 100,000 a day.
Mrs Merkel, who has warned that hard weeks lie ahead, has promised to accelerate the vaccine rollout, and is sticking to her pledge to offer all adults a vaccine by late September.
The chancellor - who after 16 years in office is famed for her crisis management and safe pair of hands - may find her reputation depends on that pledge.
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When I composed a blog post around about this time last year, on trends to look out for in the media in 2017 , I mostly eschewed concrete predictions.
| Amol RajanMedia editor@amolrajanBBCon Twitter
And thank goodness. Who on earth could have foreseen a snap general election in which social media would drive a shock result, Rupert Murdoch selling up most of his company to Disney, or the BBC getting a new director of news and current affairs?
Then again, some of the trends in media are so well established that it is possible to make an informed guess as to what is around the corner. So forgive me again, would you, if I don my helmet and shield and venture forth into this lookahead to 2018...
1. Tech and the intellectual trap
Of course the backlash against big tech companies will intensify in the coming year. Many of those who have led the charge against, for example, Google and Facebook, are publishers with a strong commercial incentive to do so, because those two companies are taking their advertising dollars. That is not to invalidate the stories, of course.
But if they continue then so, too, will the entrapment of this whole debate in a language and intellectual prism which is out of date. All the calls for regulation and social control of these companies are happening within a framework for media - whether legal, social, or moral - which is simply not suitable for these companies.
For instance, the exhausted debate about whether they are platforms or publishers ought to move on to a sober acceptance that they are new kinds of companies, with huge variations between them, which have characteristics of both platforms and publishers.
I'll try to do my bit on this, but I suspect tech will remain trapped in a conversation that hasn't kept pace with the times.
2. Advertising will continue to fold into just two companies
Estimates for the proportion of digital advertising dollars consumed by Facebook and Google vary, but that it is growing sharply is not in any doubt. On current trends, it is quite possible that by the end of 2018, 90 per cent of new digital advertising spend in the US goes to these two giants.
Can you guess what that means for the advertising industry, which employs millions of people, many of them hugely creative? In many cases, it means a P45. Obviously there has, historically, been a demand for agencies to tell clients (i.e. wealthy brands) where to spend their money, and how best to communicate that message by crafting a savvy campaign.
Increasingly, however, the first half of that equation is becoming simpler, because you just spend your marketing cash with Google and Facebook. This will drive innovation: you may have noticed the adverts in your Facebook news feed are eerily well-informed on your correspondence with friends and family, your general interests, and even recent holidays.
And yet, for all that, these companies are often far from transparent about just who is consuming content and where.
2018, like 2017, is going to be a very tricky year for many chief marketing officers at big companies, and for many advertisers full stop.
3. TV will bifurcate
Television is splitting into two, between high-end entertainment with big production values, ranging from glamorous dramas to documentaries and boxset comedies, on the one hand, and live, event-based news and sport on the other.
I have been told by someone senior on Planet Murdoch that the reason Rupert decided to sell most of his entertainment interests to Disney is because he could see this bifurcation happening, and he realised that to compete in the entertainment game you need massive scale and as direct a route to customers as possible.
Even he, the ultimate media mogul, can't compete with the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Disney when it comes to entertainment, so he's focusing on what he knows, which is news and sport.
This is what he meant when he said the deal with Disney means he is "pivoting at a pivotal time".
This bifurcation does rather beg the question of what role all the stuff in the middle - those lower production value shows, broadcast on TV channels that are a middle man between programme and viewer - will play. If demand from viewers for such shows begins to dry up, the whole industry will face upheaval.
4. The need for scale will drive consolidation
All the mega mergers in media today, from Disney and 21st Century Fox to AT&T and Time Warner, are driven by this need for scale. When you have ferocious competition for eyeballs, you need to own as much of the great content as possible, and have the most direct route to as many customers as possible.
This is what I meant when I wrote last year that pipes will meet ideas. The owners of distribution (pipes) will need to get together with those who have the best ideas, content and stories to captivate consumers. This is called consolidation. It happens most often in sectors where there is an over-supply of providers (as with British newspapers, historically), and where there is technological upheaval.
The tech giants reshaping media - Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google - all have massive scale. They have customer bases that are hundreds of millions if not billions strong.
Everyone working in media should ask themselves: if Rupert Murdoch thinks that his $80bn company is too small to compete in entertainment, are they working somewhere that has the scale to do so? The BBC, by the way, is about a twentieth of that size.
5. Streaming will continue to make the internet, not television sets, the home of broadcast
The bifurcation of TV and the drive toward scale are driven by technology. Not, that is, merely by the arrival of massive new tech players to the broadcast game; more by the capability of streaming services to broadcast direct to consumers via the internet and, especially, their smartphones. This cuts out those middle men known as TV channels.
In the US, a huge library of streaming services - Hulu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, HBO, Showtime, Starz and many others, long before you get to Netflix - are on offer to consumers, and in 2018 many more UK customers will pay for the freedom and choice they bring.
Two consequences follow: first, a generational divide in consumption, where older viewers continue to watch television sets and allow schedulers to determine their viewing habits; and second, a dawning realisation among British TV executives, reliably late to the game, that the very idea of channels and schedules is becoming obsolete for millions of the most addicted viewers.
It will take many years, perhaps even decades, but the current trends in media suggest that TV channels will become focused on those live events - news and sport - that Rupert Murdoch says he wants to focus on.
6. A major BBC News show or service could shut, prompting outrage
Gone are the days when I would look at weekly figures for revenues, or spreadsheets showing editorial and production costs, and being generally terrified of a P&L, but desperate to see it nevertheless.
So I don't know very much about the breakdown of costs across BBC News. But I do know that around £80m still needs to be found in the next three years or so (the goalposts have been known to shift); and I'm told that Tony Hall, the director general, and Anne Bulford, his deputy, would like to frontload some of those savings.
You do the maths. To find, say, even £20m, you could slice whole chunks out of a range of services. Maybe you could get to £30m with painful but relatively unarguable chops/trims/cuts (delete as appropriate).
But how do you get to £40m, £50m, and more? Only by doing the hard stuff: losing particular programmes or services. This will prove very unpopular, not least because said show or service may employ a producer who has impeccable political connections.
Chopping whole shows or services at the BBC is fiendishly difficult. It always runs into political difficulty, or a non-political lobby group. But as night follows day, the numbers make it plain that some high profile cuts are imminent, and with it, the backlash. This could come as soon as the first quarter of this year.
7. Many companies will wake up to the camera as a way of talking
The genius of Snapchat, though it isn't unique to that platform, is the realisation that for a generation of teenagers and 20-somethings, the camera is a way of talking. That is why Snap Inc call themselves a camera company; it is also why their executives make a point of noting that Snapchat opens to the camera (unlike, say, Twitter or Facebook which open to a news feed).
This is no less than a fundamental shift in the use of technology for communication, and the potential for media is enormous - both in terms of programme-making and advertising.
Many of what you might call the heritage brands in written media, from The Economist to The Daily Telegraph have started making useful inroads on Snapchat. It's a long way from the crafted articles for a newspaper that their staff entered the profession to do, but the chance to connect to a generation of young people is exhilarating.
8. Podcasts will do for the left what talk radio has done for the right
This is already happening of course. It is a curious fact that for years, talk radio in both Britain and America was dominated by the right. Of course, many radio stations served liberal audiences too, but they tended to be a minority.
Now the extraordinary explosion in podcast consumption, particularly among young people, has given liberals an opportunity to counter-attack. This is especially the case in the US, where thousands of podcasts have mobilised and politicised a huge new audience, leading to live shows, merchandising, social solidarity and a resistance movement.
In Britain, there are countless outstanding conservative podcasts. Now for the Left, and particularly those sympathetic to Jeremy Corbyn, podcasts offer an opportunity to consolidate their perceived advantage on social media.
There is no intrinsic reason why podcasts should favour liberals, but the demographics may offer one: younger people may prefer podcasts consumed on smartphone to radio stations, and they are more likely to vote in a leftish manner.
9. Some hard evidence on fake news at last
I've often explained on this blog why I am cautious and sceptical about the fake news phenomenon, and won't repeat those arguments. In 2018, however, we should get a much more concrete sense of just how big a threat fake news is.
In the US, Robert Mueller's investigation into links between Trump and Russia may cast fresh light on the use of bots by those around Vladimir Putin. And in Britain, it would be reasonable to expect - not least after a tense meeting between Boris Johnson and his Russian counterpart last week - for the Prime Minister to put some flesh on the bones of her assertion that Russia is interfering with democratic politics in the UK.
Nevertheless, every time you hear a journalist in what some call the mainstream media bewailing fake news, remember they have an incentive to do so.
10. Might another foreign investor swoop into Fleet Street?
It's inevitable that big changes, including of ownership, are coming in Fleet Street. The Observer gets a new editor soon, perhaps even in January, when The Guardian's switch to tabloid will generate savings in production.
The deal to smash the Express and Mirror titles together will go through, if the companies can work out how to solve their respective pension liability nightmares. With a willing buyer and seller, the deal ought to happen.
If the Barclays have recouped their initial investment on the Telegraph, they could well sell it. Might it go to a foreign investor? Unthinkable in Lord Hartwell's day, but with money to burn and a reputation to burnish, it's certainly possible.
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A human skull was found alongside an M54 slip road in Shropshire, West Mercia Police said. | It was discovered by workers doing a survey of the roundabout at junction four, near Telford, on Thursday.
Police were called to the roundabout shortly before 13:30 BST. Highways England was also at the scene.
The eastbound entry slip road was closed for the rest of the day for a forensic investigation to be carried out, the force said.
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A proposal to introduce a general sales tax in Guernsey has been rejected by the island's government.
| Deputy Mike Hadley claimed a 2-3% sales tax on the price of everyday goods could generate £30m a year to help fill the island's financial black hole.
However, an overwhelming majority of deputies rejected the proposals.
In 2009 deputies approved a five-year strategy aimed at saving up to £70m through cut backs and the sharing of departments' resources.
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A 70-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of murder following the death of a woman aged 74. | Police are investigating after the woman was found dead at a property in Sebastopol, Pontypool, at approximately 09:20 GMT on Saturday.
Officers said the arrested man, from Pontypool, is currently in police custody.
Gwent Police said officers were in the area "to reassure the community and carry out investigations".
Related Internet Links
Gwent Police
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After a dispute over junior doctors' contracts which has rumbled on steadily for a year, there has been a flurry of activity in just a couple of days. The British Medical Association announced it would ballot members over industrial action. The Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has invited the BMA junior doctors' leader to a meeting. And an open meeting convened for doctors by NHS Employers has been abruptly cancelled. | Hugh PymHealth editor@bbcHughPymon Twitter
The events are of course not unconnected. The minute the BMA decided to hold a vote on industrial action ministers were always likely to sit up and take notice. Mr Hunt, it appears, has been away for a few days so a return to the office on the first working day after the ballot announcement was a good opportunity to look again at the contract issue.
Whitehall sources indicate that Mr Hunt is keen to meet Dr Johann Malawana, the new chair of the BMA junior doctors committee. Dr Malawana took on the role on Saturday and his first task was to announce the ballot, describing his members' mood as "incredibly angry". The Secretary of State has every reason to want to meet the new leader, especially one with a mandate for possible protest action.
The Government line is that drawing up a new contract is best done by negotiation and that no firm and final offer has been put in front of the doctors. Although wanting to simplify and amend the contract, sources indicate that ministers have not set out detailed demands over which working hours in the week should attract higher payments.
The BMA, however, is adamant that the Government and NHS Employers have demanded preconditions, including treating Saturday as a normal working day like Monday to Friday. That's why the association felt it had no alternative to suspending its involvement in talks. Negotiations stalled in October 2014 and the BMA declined to re-enter talks this summer. The Government then said it would impose a new contract on junior doctors in England from August 2016. The Scottish and Welsh administrations have not gone down the same route.
Mr Hunt, it seems, would rather avoid headlines about doctors working to rule and routine surgery being cancelled. There was a walk-out over pensions as part of a public sector day of action in 2012. But you have to go back to the 1970's for the last time BMA members took disruptive action over pay. Mr Hunt has seen NHS consultants return to the negotiating table over the issue of weekend working. He will hope very much that the junior doctors can be persuaded to enter talks before a ballot takes place.
A roadshow of open meetings for junior doctors planned by NHS Employers has been cancelled. One, planned for Westminster, was axed with less than five hours notice. Ministers had probably concluded that such events would be a magnet for protests witnessed by TV crews and a public focus for junior doctors' anger. But as it was, even after the cancelled meeting at Westminster, a few thousand medics still turned out to take part in a lively demonstration on Monday evening.
Dr Malawana and his colleagues have accepted Mr Hunt's invitation for a chat at the Department of Health. He has made it clear that the ballot and possible route to industrial action will continue unless the Government can give "absolute assurances" sought by the junior doctors. The question now is how far the Secretary of State is prepared to go to get people around the table.
On the face of it the two sides are some way apart. Ministers and NHS chiefs want to create a new contract which rewards higher-achieving junior doctors more than the current system allows with automatic increments. They also want a simplified system of payments for weekends and unsocial hours.
The junior doctors, by contrast, say they could lose up to 30% of their annual pay with the new contract and be pushed into working excessive hours, putting patient safety at risk. They argue that doctors will head for the exit doors and seek employment overseas, leaving the NHS short of qualified staff.
Much, then, hangs on the meeting between Mr Hunt and Dr Malawana. At stake is the possibility of serious talks over contracts or the first industrial action over pay and conditions by doctors in 40 years.
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A man who strangled his partner after consuming excessive amounts of alcohol and drugs has been jailed for life. | Benjamin Bowler killed 39-year-old Kelly Price at their flat in Gillingham, Kent, on 16 January 2020.
Bowler, 41, drank a bottle of whisky while she lay dead in the property.
He was found guilty following a trial at Maidstone Crown Court and was sentenced to a minimum of 17 years in prison.
Bowler told an acquaintance over the phone that he had killed his girlfriend.
Kent Police attended and found Ms Price dead in a bedroom.
Related Internet Links
HM Courts & Tribunals Service
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Gloucestershire Police say they are concerned about the welfare of a missing soldier.
| L/Cpl Steve Flegg, of 1st Battalion The Rifles, disappeared after attending a course in Wiltshire.
The 29 year-old was seen at Tesco in Tidworth just after 20:00 GMT but did not return to his Forest of Dean home.
Police describe L/Cpl Flegg as slim with cropped dark hair and have asked anyone who sees him to contact 101.
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Elections for the European Parliament will be held on 23 May 2019. Voters will choose 73 MEPs in 12 multi-member regional constituencies. Each region has a different number of MEPs based on its population.
| 3 MEPs will be elected to represent the North East. MEPs are elected by proportional representation, in order as listed by their party. The number of MEPs each party gets is calculated using a formula called d'Hondt, except in Northern Ireland, where the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system is used.
Back to introduction
Candidates shown in party list order
Change UK
Frances Weetman
Penny Hawley
Kathryn Heywood
Conservative
Richard Lawrie
Chris J Galley
Duncan Crute
Green
Rachel Featherstone
Jonathan Elmer
Dawn Furness
Labour
Jude Kirton-Darling
Paul Brannen
Clare Penny-Evans
Liberal Democrats
Fiona Halleast
Julie Porksen
Aidan King
The Brexit Party
Brian Monteith
John Tennant
Richard Monaghan
UKIP
Richard Elvin
Chris Gallacher
Alan Breeze
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Speed restrictions signs have been put up outside half the schools in Flintshire in time for the start of the new term with the remainder due to be complete by October. | The 20mph signs are now displayed at 40 of the county's 83 schools in a move to improve road safety.
The go-ahead was given by the Welsh government in July.
Flintshire councillor Bernie Attridge said it was a major step forward in protecting the safety children.
The move will cost about £50,000.
Resurfacing work has also been completed outside schools in Connahs's Quay, Mold and Flint.
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After all the impatient European foot-tapping, the incessant talk of ticking clocks and of Article 50 time running out, there's a distinctly laid-back air in Brussels at the moment when it comes to Brexit. | Katya AdlerEurope editor@BBCkatyaadleron Twitter
"Relations are a lot more normalised between the UK and the rest of the us after the Salisbury attacks and the show of solidarity with Britain at the EU leaders' summit two weeks ago," one European diplomat told me.
"Besides which," he added with a glint in his eye, "we know the Brexit drill by now.
"The UK makes a fuss, tells us things are unacceptable - like the financial settlement (the so-called Brexit bill), and like allowing EU citizens the right to stay permanently in the UK, even if they only move there in the transition period after Brexit - but the British Government gives in, in the end. Even if they dress up the fact to make it more acceptable at home."
This week, we enter what Brussels calls the end stage of Brexit negotiations leading up to (what is hoped will be) a final agreement in the autumn.
But - and this is another reason for the rather laid-back atmosphere in Brussels Brexit circles right now - EU insiders think much of the detail and substance governing EU-UK future relations will actually be worked out after the UK leaves the bloc in March next year.
More on Brexit
In the meantime, many in Europe believe the UK will accept a few more hitherto "unacceptables" in the coming months - such as having a role for the European Court of Justice in policing the Brexit agreement and the 21-month transition/implementation period that follows.
This, because the EU assumes the UK Government has its eye on the bigger prize: leaving the EU, with its reputation, and the Conservative Party as a whole, as intact as possible and with little immediate disruption to UK business and the economy.
"And it's not all about them giving in in the negotiations," a Brussels contact insisted to me.
The EU makes compromises too, he said, but tries to keep arguments between member states behind closed doors in order to reach a common EU position before facing the British side across the negotiating table.
What to watch out for
EU internal spats to watch out for in post-Brexit relations talks include fishing rights, financial and other services, and the rights of EU citizens in the UK after the transition period.
Brussels envisages five rounds of negotiations with the UK (roughly one every two weeks) leading up to the EU leaders' summit in June. Don't forget, European capitals have to approve any Brexit progress made in Brussels.
The talks will proceed along three parallel tracks:
"We have to make as much progress as possible before the summer," one EU diplomat told me.
"You know us Europeans and August - we go to the beach, nothing happens in Brussels - and we risk getting to the October leaders' summit, which we call the 'end game' for the Brexit agreement, by which time we could see people running around and screaming in each other's faces if things haven't yet been decided."
Waiting for the break
The UK has waited a year to engage in talks on future relations with the EU post-Brexit, so it's a big deal that these negotiations are starting now.
Still, don't hold your breath. It's far from clear how detailed these negotiations will be and how much substance we can expect from them.
EU countries are in disagreement with each other and it's been a subject of contention in the UK government too.
Most European diplomats I speak to say they believe the bulk of EU-UK negotiations about trade in particular will take place after Brexit in March next year.
Under EU law, Brussels cannot finalise a trade or any other future relations deal until the UK has left the club and is a "third country".
Whatever is agreed between the two sides by the autumn - David Davis insists the final document should be substantial - will be summarised in a "Political Declaration" between the EU and the UK.
This will be attached to the Withdrawal Agreement, formalising the UK's exit from the EU.
Unlike the Withdrawal Agreement, the Political Declaration will not be legally binding - allowing for a changing of minds during the transition/implementation period that follows Brexit.
'Pure fantasy'
The EU's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, is now selling hard the idea that the UK can change its mind during the transition period and choose to stay part of the European single market and customs union - particularly with a view to solving the Irish border issue.
This would be the ideal post-Brexit scenario for the EU.
But it's been described to me as "pure fantasy" by a British diplomat.
That being said, there is an increasing expectation amongst some in Brussels that the UK may eventually choose to stay in some kind of customs union with the EU.
As mentioned above, the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement is a legally binding text.
Seventy-five percent of its content has already been signed off between the EU and UK but important outstanding issues remain:
The UK insists that future EU-UK relations can be so close after Brexit as to render all talk of a border irrelevant.
The EU is doubtful this will be possible, considering the UK Government's declared intention to leave the customs union and single market.
Too much to lose
For now then, the EU thinks Ireland will be another UK capitulation.
So far the UK has refused to accept the EU backstop suggestion - where, if all else fails, Northern Ireland will say in the customs union and in relevant parts of the single market to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland.
But EU diplomats believe this will likely remain the solution on the table come Brexit time.
One contact told me: "My prediction is the UK will add bells and whistles, will dress up the backstop and try to sell it as something else. But since we all want to avoid a cliff-edge Brexit and the Irish question has to be solved, this backstop is the way to go."
Needless to say, UK negotiators are dismissive.
There's talk again of a possible no-deal scenario if Ireland can't be agreed, where the UK falls out of the EU next year with no agreement in place and therefore no implementation period to transition to after Brexit.
But judging by the absence of all that impatient foot-tapping in Brussels, eurocrats feel confident that both sides - the EU and UK - know there's too much to lose to let that happen.
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Walkers along the Cardigan coastline are being warned about the dangers of approaching seal pups. | The young seals may look abandoned but the Wildlife Trust's Living Seas said they are often left on the beach as their mother swims for food.
Sarah Perry, Living Seas' science officer for south and west Wales, has urged people not to touch them as this could cause them to be abandoned.
Dogs should also be kept on a lead "well away", she added.
Ten baby seals were found on Monday alone after the charity checked the shoreline between New Quay and Llangrannog.
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Hot on the heels of the Independent Police Complaint Commission's announcement it will launch a review of its investigation into the death of Sean Rigg, a second London family have said the watchdog's probe into their son's death was deeply flawed. | By Kurt BarlingSpecial correspondent, BBC London
Olaseni Lewis, known as Seni, was an ambitious 23-year-old IT graduate with a degree from Kingston University and plans for postgraduate study.
In August 2010 he was physically well with no history of mental illness.
But within two days of uncharacteristically odd and agitated behaviour - and 18 hours after being brought to hospital - he was all but dead, having collapsed during prolonged restraint by police.
He never regained consciousness and died three days later.
Seni was restrained three times - first by hospital staff and then by police - for 45 minutes before his collapse.
'Confusion and oversight'
The IPCC investigation was completed in the autumn of 2011.
The family's solicitor Raju Bhatt said: "The family is faced, 12 months on, with no progress.
"The IPCC appear to recognise that 'confusion' and 'oversight' served to undermine their investigation."
The death raises uncomfortable questions in light of the inquest into Sean Rigg's death.
Mr Rigg, 40, died at Brixton Police Station in 2008. An inquest found police used "unsuitable" force.
At the inquest into Mr Rigg's death the South London and Maudsley Trust (Slam) admitted deficiencies in protocols between themselves and the Metropolitan Police.
The Met suggested they regularly look at how police and mental health practitioners work together.
So two years after Sean Rigg's death, why did things continue to go wrong?
'Distressed and agitated'
It is not known why Seni Lewis began acting oddly, although he might have smoked strong cannabis.
When he failed to settle his family took him to Mayday University Hospital, Croydon.
His subsequent distressed behaviour concerned Accident and Emergency staff.
His family agreed he should be taken to a place of safety - known as a section 136 suite - at Maudsley Hospital to protect himself and others.
All the time he was showing signs of growing distress.
His father and friend joined him at the Maudsley and he was given medication.
But it was clear Mr Lewis was scared and uncertain what would happen next.
During the afternoon, he managed to leave the hospital, going to Denmark Hill Station - followed by hospital staff, his father and friend.
Police were called and Mr Lewis was coaxed back.
Mr Lewis's parents agreed he should stay in hospital for treatment, rest and assessment.
Mother Ajibola Lewis said: "We knew he wasn't well and needed help - more than we could give."
Contact confusion
Staff agreed to admit him as a voluntary patient.
But admitting him required another journey - NHS managers insisted his home address meant he must go to Bethlem Royal Hospital several miles away.
Having helped Mr Lewis settle there his family left giving contact details.
At about midnight Mr Lewis's friend called the hospital to check on his welfare and was told he had been taken back to Mayday Hospital.
Staff were trying to get in touch with his family - apparently unaware they already had contact details for his mother.
The friend provided the details again and Mr Lewis's mother was informed he was taken to Mayday A&E after a "collapse".
His family have since gathered an outline of what transpired after they left Bethlem Hospital.
Mr Lewis had become increasingly agitated at their absence - especially when told he could not leave.
'Held face down'
He understood he was there voluntarily.
The family said eventually it appears he was sectioned, restrained and held face down on the floor while medication was administered by hospital staff.
Police were called after he allegedly damaged a door and were asked to to help take Mr Lewis to the seclusion room.
His family understand that despite being handcuffed and struggling he was never violent.
Once inside the seclusion room he was held forcefully face down on the bed and then on the floor by police.
The restraint lasted 45 minutes and involved 11 officers.
Further medication was forcibly injected and - no longer struggling - he was left on his own lying face down on the floor, the Lewis family understands.
He was then seen motionless. In reality he was all but dead.
Following attempts to resuscitate him he was taken by ambulance to Mayday Hospital and put on life support, dying shortly afterwards.
The IPCC then investigated.
Mr Bhatt told the BBC none of the restraining officers have ever been put on notice that their conduct was under investigation.
They have not been interviewed, under caution or otherwise. Their written accounts remain untested.
Mr Lewis's case will offer more food for thought to new IPCC chairwoman, Dame Anne Owers.
She has already expressed concern that failure to interview police under caution undermines the search for the truth.
The IPCC has said it awaits advice from the CPS before proceeding, while the Met said it was unable to comment.
Meanwhile Slam claims it has striven to improve policies and practice.
An inquest is due next spring.
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In a single week last summer, the deaths of two black men and then five police officers in a series of shootings across three US states left some wondering where the country was heading. One year on, what's changed? | By Jessica LussenhopBBC News, Louisiana & Texas
Last week, on 5 July, Sandra Sterling lay awake in her bed nearly the entire night.
"At 1:30 this morning, you'll never know what I went through," she said later.
Before the sun rose on 6 July, Diamond Reynolds also could not sleep.
"The first thing I did was think, 'Phil's not here,'" she said. "Last year we was waking up together around this time."
And in the wee hours of 7 July, Abigail Irizarry, a dispatcher for the Dallas Police Department, was also struggling.
"I woke up early and it was kind of hard seeing everything on the news all over again," she said. "The footage of what happened."
One year ago, in rapid succession, a series of incidents shook three American cities over the course of three days:
After the three events splintered apart into their own individual investigations, memorials, trials, and controversies, it became difficult to remember that they occurred back to back, on a week when it felt as if the nation was on the brink of a race war.
But last week, they were pulled back together as the friends, families and survivors central to each incident dutifully marked the anniversaries, one after the other. Though they did so in vastly different ways, with at times diametrically opposed messages, the three communities were all in mourning. They shared those sleepless nights.
"As much as we politicise and advocate our position when these tragedies happen, the grief of the family of an officer and the grief of the family of a person killed by an officer is the same grief," said David O Brown, who was the chief of the Dallas police on the night of the ambush.
"These funerals - they're all the same," he said. "These families hurt in the same ways."
While the race war never arrived, a new presidential administration did, one with a very different view on the federal government's role in police-involved killings and law enforcement reform in general. President Donald Trump's attorney general, Jeff Sessions, believes that consent decrees - agreements between local police departments and the Department of Justice on a set of reforms that often occur after a high profile incident - can "lower police morale" and actually increase crime.
Sessions has ordered all current consent decrees to be "reviewed". Fourteen police or sheriff's departments currently have such decrees, including Ferguson, Missouri, and many others were in the works in cities like Baltimore and Chicago.
Politics aside, the consequences of these incidents continue to pulse through the nation as a whole, affecting not just the families of the deceased, but those on the periphery as well.
5 JULY
On the sweltering Baton Rouge afternoon of 5 July, Abdullah Muflahi smoked a cigarette outside of his store, Triple S Convenience, and watched a video on his cell phone.
It was not the one he recorded a year ago, of the death of his friend Alton Sterling, who died just feet from where Muflahi was sitting. It was one from that morning, when a group of protesters from the New Black Panther Party clashed with Baton Rouge police officers at their headquarters a few miles away.
The video, taken by a local news crew, showed the group of about 30 demonstrators try to walk through an opening in barricades surrounding the police headquarters when a brawl broke out with the officers blocking the way. The officers deployed their Tasers - they alleged later that one of the Black Panthers also had a Taser - one shot a PepperBall gun at the demonstrators, and seven protesters were arrested.
Two of Sterling's aunts are seen on the tape being dragged to the back of the protest screaming and crying.
"Nothing has changed," said Muflahi. "It's very depressing."
Just a week earlier, US Department of Justice officials declined to charge the two officers who shot Sterling with civil rights violations. Louisiana state officials have yet to announce whether they will pursue their own indictment.
No charges for US police over Alton Sterling killing
Why do US police keep killing black men?
'Legendary' image of US protests emerges
Muflahi, a laconic, bearded 28-year-old Yemeni immigrant, allowed Sterling to sell bootleg CDs on a table outside his shop in a busy but economically depressed part of Baton Rouge. They'd sit outside on days just like this one and talk over cigarettes.
One year ago, Muflahi noticed the flashing lights of police vehicles pull up outside the store. Someone called to say Sterling had threatened them with a gun.
By the time Muflahi pulled out his cell phone and started recording one of two videos that went viral of the incident, Sterling was already on his back with two officers on top of him. Within seconds, one officer yelled, "Gun!" and that's when the shooting started. The video footage shows Sterling's eyes go wide, blood pooling on his chest.
"It's not as easy as just seeing it on the tape or the screen," said Muflahi. "Seeing it in front of you, somebody that you know, you knew for a while, it takes a big effect on your whole life."
Since the incident Muflahi has started seeing a psychiatrist. He said he has trouble sleeping, and when he does sleep, he finds it impossible to get up in the morning.
"My doctor's been trying to give me something to help me out," he said. "He said it was all because of depression."
Standing next to Muflahi was Arthur "Silky Slim" Reed, a former gang leader turned activist. Reed runs an organisation called "Stop the Killing" whose members listen to police scanners and race to the scene of every homicide in Baton Rouge. This is how Reed got his hands on the second tape of Sterling's death, which he turned over to the press, not trusting the local police to make it public.
"They have put new policies in place for policing," Reed conceded. "But even when you break the policy there's no [accountability]. So it's the same old thing and it's not just Baton Rouge, it's all over America."
Reed's vehicle sat in the Triple S car park - an ambulance painted black blasting "Tha Crossroads" on a loop. Inside was a bench seat facing a television screen, which played footage of the aftermath of real homicides in Baton Rouge that Reed and his associates filmed, in the hope that showing the extremely graphic tapes to the friends and family of the dead will motivate them to change their lives.
The screen that afternoon showed a young man in a white tank top lying in the street. When the police lifted him by his arms, his head pitched lifelessly to one side, blood pouring out of his nose and mouth.
"So many people like to try to throw this cliche on us like, 'Oh, how come they don't worry about when they killing each other?' We do," said Reed. "We show this."
Not long afterwards, Sandra Sterling - the aunt who raised Alton from the age of 10 when his mother died - walked into the Triple S. She looked exhausted, her voice hoarse from screaming.
"I don't have no strength left," she said.
Sandra said she did her best to raise her sister's children, but Alton and his siblings were often in trouble, sometimes locked up.
During his last stint in prison, Sandra said, Alton's brother died of a drug overdose. When she went to pick Alton up after his release, he insisted she take him straight to his brother's gravesite.
"Later on they buried [Alton] exactly where he was standing," she said.
As dusk approached, a group of about 60 activists and community members gathered in the parking lot of the Triple S. It was an informal gathering, light-up placards spelled out the words "JUSTICE FOR ALTON STERLING". A few activists spoke, several state and city officials milled about, but there were no celebrities or crowds like the hundreds that had descended on the food mart a year ago.
Sandra Sterling grew incensed.
"Why nobody out here?" she cried, her voice breaking. "This street was flooded with people. Y'all make me think that y'all forgot about Alton. How could you forget?"
Despite the chants of "justice for Alton Sterling", despite the activist who turned to her and promised in a soaring voice that the two police officers would certainly be indicted, Sandra was not optimistic.
"After the Philando Castile murderer got off, I don't feel a lot of hope," she said.
6 JULY
Unlike the Sterling family, which is still waiting to find out if Louisiana authorities will indict the two officers involved in Alton's death, the friends and family of Philando Castile have their answer. On 17 June, a jury acquitted Officer Jeronimo Yanez on all counts in Castile's death.
On the 6th of July, Diamond Reynolds woke up early, around the time that her boyfriend Castile used to wake up to get ready for his job as a cafeteria supervisor at an elementary school in St Paul, just a few blocks from where he lived as a boy.
Waking up alone, Reynolds said she felt sluggish and weak.
"It's just gonna be a hard day," she said.
Shot US man's partner seeks law change
The view from Philando Castile's empty seat on the porch
Reynolds doesn't have a lot of time for outrage over the court decision. She has to be out of the apartment she and her five-year-old Dae'Anna are currently living in by the end of the month, and since she can't find work, coming up with the money for a new place is proving impossible.
"No one will hire her," said her mother, Dafina Doty. "We're really, really, really having a hard time right now."
Still, Reynolds got up, and loaded Dae'Anna into the car to go do last-minute shopping for an event she was hosting later that afternoon to mark the year anniversary of Castile's death, titled "Black Love: A Remembrance Celebration".
At about the same time that Reynolds was heading for the store, a press conference was starting at the Minnesota State Capitol in downtown St Paul.
Rather than feeling forgotten in a dusty parking lot like Sandra Sterling had the day before, Castile's uncle Clarence found himself standing beside Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton, who announced the appointment of Clarence to the state's Peace Officer Standards and Training board.
"I can be angry at the system because they let Yanez off the hook. I can be angry at that. But I can also feel empowered because I've been appointed to this board," he said later. "For me, that's power."
Governor Dayton also announced a $12m infusion of money into the board, in a fund named after Philando.
"We need this extra training for our police officers," Valerie Castile, Philando's mother, told reporters. "Because at the end of the day, everyone wants to go home. The police wants to go home, and the civilian wants to go home."
The Castiles hosted a memorial dinner at an idyllic farm for about 250 friends and family later that day - no media allowed - just to the west of where Philando was killed. Reynolds held her separate event in a lakeside park to the east of the site.
Notably, Castile's name and image were absent from the flier for Reynolds' event. This was in accordance with Castile's mother's wishes, which Reynolds agreed to but was still bothered by.
"The fact that my child wasn't his child and we weren't married doesn't discredit the love that we had for each other," she said. "Doesn't mean we weren't a family."
At both events, attendees ate and danced, listened to live music. The atmosphere was relaxed, the surroundings were lush. Dae'Anna played with her therapy dog, Chedda - Philando's nickname. Reynolds called it the "closure" that she and her daughter had been craving for the last year.
Still, in the back of Reynolds' mind there are many pressing worries. She rattled off a list of the kinds of jobs she's applied for over the last year: administrative work, customer service, childcare provider, nurse's aid.
"People notice who I am and they don't want to work with me," she said.
Then there's Dae'Anna. Reynolds needs to find a new home in time to enrol her for her first day of elementary school. The five year old is thriving in some ways - already reading chapter books and excited to start the first grade - but she also gets picked on by other kids who needle her about Castile. She's receiving therapy, but still ducks down in her car seat at the sound of sirens.
"She thinks any police officer [could hurt her]," said Reynolds. "Even when I tell her all police officers aren't bad, she's still going to be scared of them."
7 JULY
Shetamia Taylor remembers the face of the burly, bald officer who turned as he was being shot and called out to her as she and her four sons were leaving what had been a peaceful protest in downtown Dallas.
"He's got a gun," the officer yelled. "Get down!"
Taylor and her sons turned to run, but before she could, a bullet ripped through her leg with a red-hot stinging sensation, shattering her tibia bone. She grabbed on to her second oldest son and tumbled to the ground, covering him with her body.
A group of officers formed a protective circle around Taylor, including the one who'd first warned her. Later on she learned his name: Dallas police officer Lorne Ahrens. He would not survive.
"He was one of the five," she recalls. "I am so thankful to god that he spared us, but I'm so saddened that these men, these husbands, these fathers didn't."
On 7 July 2017, the city of Dallas commemorated the deaths of Officer Ahrens, Officer Patrick Zamarripa, Officer Michael Krol, Sergeant Michael Smith, and Dallas Area Rapid Transit officer Brent Thompson. All five were killed in an ambush by Micah Xavier Johnson, who reportedly told police negotiators he wanted to kill white officers in retaliation for the deaths of black men and women at the hands of police. Johnson was killed after an hours-long standoff by an explosion set off by the Dallas police.
Dallas police shootings: What we know so far
Who were victims of the Dallas shooting?
In pictures: Dallas police shootings
One year later, in the dim light of the room which served as her recovery room for three months, Taylor still walked with a slight limp. She had a metal plate and six screws holding the bone together, and though she was finally able to return to work she still has thousands of dollars in medical bills left to pay.
She had no plans to venture back into downtown Dallas for memorial events that day. Just seeing the news about the anniversary that morning sent her into a minor panic attack, her chest pounding and hands shaking.
"I guess it's just part of the PTSD," she said.
El Centro College police officer John Abbott didn't have that option. That morning, 12 months on, Abbott donned his uniform and headed in for his shift, patrolling the same campus where he took fire from Johnson. He walked the same street where he had pulled a wounded officer to safety - his own legs shredded by flying glass - only to roll him over and see that it was his long-time friend, DART officer Brent Thompson. Abbott, who is also a Navy medic, worked to save Thompson's life, but it was too late.
"I was just angry. I wanted to get a hold of that guy," recalled Abbott. "I don't know that there really is anyone who is a civilian who will ever be able to understand that type of reaction."
For Dr Alex Eastman - lead medical officer for the Dallas Police Department SWAT team, assistant professor of surgery at UT Southwestern Medical Center, and a trauma surgeon at Parkland Memorial Hospital - the day began with a short prayer in the "trauma pod" at Parkland surrounded by the medical team that had worked feverishly to save the officers' lives that night.
"I know many of us have hurt deeply over the last year," he told the small gathering of doctors, nurses, technicians and security guards. "This has certainly been, for me, one of the most challenging events of my career."
Then he swapped out of his white doctor's coat, and suited up in the same SWAT gear he wore a year ago when he found himself in the middle of the shooting.
"I'm doing [on 7 July] what the rest of the police department and what Parkland Hospital is doing - we're going to take a few minutes for ourselves and we're going to reflect and honour the memory of our colleagues that aren't with us anymore," he said. "And then we're going to do what we do everyday. We're going to come to work and do our jobs and protect this great city."
Eastman went on duty to help watch over the city-wide memorial held in front of Dallas' city hall. Hundreds poured into the grassy areas in front of the building to listen to state and local politicians express condolences and grief, pledges of loyalty to the men and women in blue, and for extra spending on police tactical gear. At exactly 8:58pm, when the shooting began a year earlier, the crowd held tiny blue lights aloft as bagpipers played Amazing Grace.
Although the deaths of the officers took place at a protest over the deaths of Castile and Sterling, few of those present drew a link from those deaths to the deaths of the officers.
"I guess my perspective was we hadn't had anything like that happen in Dallas, so why did we pay for other issues?" said police dispatcher Abigail Irizarry, who was on duty the night of the ambush. "Why us?"
For Jose Vela, the contrast was even more stark. One year ago, he'd come to the demonstration as the leader of an organisation called "Cop Block" which filmed and scrutinized police behaviour. Vela said he was a block and a half away when the shots began.
"I saw the police literally run towards the bullets flying," he said.
Vela was so affected he completely reversed course. He resigned from Cop Block, started showing up to police stations in Dallas with an American flag, donating money to police causes, and instead of filming cops, filming civilians to try to be of assistance to law enforcement.
"Crime is going up. The police department is short 400 officers. They're tired, they're desperate," he said. "There will always be bad police, but overall, all police are good. They all have families, they're all human beings."
Opinions split from Baton Rouge to St Paul to Dallas on whether or not there is a way to connect the three days, and the seven deaths.
The Sterling family bristled at the thought that Alton somehow caused the deaths of the Dallas officers. Clarence Castile freely admitted he'd been too steeped in his own grief and effort to hold his family together to think about much about the other families.
The police community feels increasingly embattled after several ambush killings of officers over the past year including just last week, the death of a New York City police officer who was shot through the window of her cruiser by a mentally ill man.
But Shetamia Taylor quietly connected all these worlds. She was born in Louisiana, raised in Minnesota, and now lives in Texas - a set of facts that leads internet conspiracy theorists to accuse her of being a "crisis actor" and a hoaxer.
She went to the march a year ago to protest over police brutality, on behalf of her four black sons. She left wounded, but alive, thanks, she believes, to the bravery of an officer who died helping her.
Even before that day one year ago, her youngest son declared he wants to become a police officer, a decision she supports.
"I know there is false fear on both sides," she said on 7 July. "But being a black mother of four young black men at a time where race tensions are so high, to have these white officers so willingly risk their own lives for my black life? Come on now - everybody matters."
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A 12-year-old boy has been found alive after being buried under an avalanche in the French Alps for 40 minutes. | The child, who has not been named, was skiing with his family in La Plagne and was hit by the avalanche after leaving a supervised run.
He was later found with help from a sniffer dog brought in by local police.
"It's a miracle because [the boy] had no victim-detection device," one of the rescuers told AFP.
"The chances of survival are minuscule after 15 minutes under the snow."
The boy, who suffered only a broken leg, is being treated at a local hospital.
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Schools and colleges in Northern Ireland are closed for a second day following advice from the Department of Education (DE) about the "potential severity" of Hurricane Ophelia. | Permanent secretary Derek Baker said the decision was taken "to avoid any potential risk to life".
However, with the worst of the storm over, some parents said the decision was "ridiculous".
Others said the closures would ensure damaged properties were repaired.
The Republic of Ireland was worst hit with three people killed in separate incidents.
The announcement to keep schools closed in Northern Ireland on Tuesday was posted in a tweet from the DE account on Monday afternoon.
Some parents welcomed the decision, saying the safety of children was paramount.
Others called for schools to be closed for even longer due to potential travel dangers.
Some parents suggested that the half-term break should be adjusted to make up for the extra days lost as a result of the storm.
However, children will be back at their desks on Wednesday, according to a tweet posted by the DE account.
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A woman in her 90s has been left with a broken arm after she was targeted in an attempted bag-snatch. | The victim was in the Rowland Hill shopping centre in Kidderminster, Worcestershire, when the attempt took place, West Mercia Police said.
A man approached her and then pushed past her, knocking her down, as he tried to take the bag.
"No items were taken from the bag but the woman suffered a cracked bone in her arm," police said.
Details of the incident, which happened on Thursday afternoon, have only just been released.
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A 19-year-old man has appeared in court to deny murdering a 22-month-old girl. | Erin Emilia Rain Tomkins died at Sheffield Children's Hospital on 21 May as a result of severe head injuries.
Martin Johnson, of Leighton Road, Gleadless, pleaded not guilty to murdering the toddler when he appeared at Sheffield Crown Court on Tuesday.
Mr Johnson was remanded into custody ahead of his trial, which is due to take place at the same court on 19 November.
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Russia's state TV is facing criticism over its coverage of the recent flood crisis, including its failure to interrupt entertainment shows to provide up-to-date coverage of the tragedy - until the arrival on the scene of President Vladimir Putin. | By Stephen EnnisBBC Monitoring
The floods in the southern region of Krasnodar killed at least 170 people.
As evidence mounted during 7 July of the terrible havoc wreaked the previous night, Russia's main TV stations - official channel Rossiya 1, state-controlled Channel One and Gazprom-owned NTV - carried regular reports from the disaster area in their scheduled bulletins.
But even when the death toll was around 100 and rising, they did not make room for any special news bulletins and carried on with their normal programmes.
These included light-hearted comedy and cabaret shows - something which caused outrage among a number of Russian Twitter users.
Although the floods topped the main evening bulletins, they did not dominate them.
Just over 12 minutes of Rossiya 1's hour-long primetime Vesti v Subbotu (News on Saturday) was devoted to the disaster, with almost as much time being given over to a report about the redevelopment of Moscow and an interview with a pro-Kremlin politician about a controversial bill affecting the status of Russian NGOs.
Commenting on the coverage on his Facebook page on 7 July, former NTV presenter Anton Krasovskiy said the fact that not one national channel was carrying round-the-clock coverage from the disaster zone was a "crime".
Putin appearance delayed
This was not the only notable anomaly in the day's TV coverage. Another was the absence from the screens of Mr Putin.
As a rule, Mr Putin dominates Russian TV news. But all through the day and into the evening on 7 July, bulletins came and went without the country's leader appearing to give a response to the tragedy.
Russian state TV's behaviour changed abruptly at just before 23:20 Moscow time, when Rossiya 1 and Channel One broke into their regular programming to bring viewers special bulletins devoted exclusively to the aftermath of the floods.
As Russian media academic Anna Kachkayeva observed on Radio Liberty, the "trigger mechanism" for this change appeared to be less a desire to address the concerns of the public than the arrival of Mr Putin on the scene.
For here, at last, was the president flying in a helicopter over the disaster zone, grilling a local official about allegations that people had not been warned of the impending flood and issuing orders for the provision of humanitarian assistance.
Or, as Ms Kachkayeva put it: "The hero arrived, sorted everything out and asked all the questions".
'Service and subordination'
As distinguished TV presenter and opposition activist Leonid Parfenov observed in a much-discussed speech in 2010, news and current affairs programmes on Russian state TV primarily serve the purposes of the governing elite.
Mr Parfenov said that a state TV correspondent was not really a journalist, but a "functionary who follows the logic of service and subordination".
And one of state TV's most important functions seems to be to show Mr Putin as a dynamic man of action, not merely commenting on events, but taking charge of them.
During the forest fire crisis in 2010, they even went so far as to show him taking the controls of one of the aircraft that was putting out the blaze.
Kursk
The care with which the Kremlin spin-doctors and their colleagues in state media handle Mr Putin's image during times of crisis probably owes much to the lessons learned from his handling of the Kursk submarine tragedy in August 2000.
The Russian media (which were a lot freer at that time) severely criticised the new president for (among other things) carrying on with his holiday at a Black Sea resort as the tragedy unfolded.
He made his first televised statement on the Kursk when he was still at the resort. A leading newspaper described him as looking "tanned and even slightly sunburned".
The following month, Putin was also widely criticised for his apparently offhand reply to CNN's Larry King inquiry about the fate of the Kursk: "It sank".
The phrase may still haunt Putin. Opposition Twitter users were quick to seize on it when commenting on the fate of Krymsk, the town where most of the flood victims perished.
A typical tweet ran: "And now a question for Vladimir Putin. What happened in Krymsk? - They sank."
Speaking on Radio Liberty, Aleksandr Melman, TV critic for mass-market daily Moskovskiy Komsomolets, said Russian TV's response to the recent flood crisis was the "logical outcome of Putin's rule and the type of television associated with it".
BBC Monitoring selects and translates news from radio, television, press, news agencies and the internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages. It is based in Caversham, UK, and has several bureaux abroad. For more reports from BBC Monitoring, click here
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The Pitmen Painters, a celebrated group of miners-turned-artists, rose to prominence in the 1930s with their work chronicling life in the coal-mining town of Ashington, Northumberland. Now, inspired by their example , photographers are capturing the spirit of a community decimated by that industry's decline. | "The dole office was packed out. Nightlife turned into a ghost town as pubs became empty. Drugs began to thrive. I remember being scared of the glue-sniffers.
"Then it just became part of the local culture to smoke cannabis, and class A drugs were easy to find as drug dealers were everywhere."
Myrle Howard, the daughter of a miner, was 13 when Ashington Colliery shut in 1988, four years after the miners' strike came to an end.
Her father Ron would later lose his job at nearby Lynemouth Colliery, which closed in 1994. He became depressed, "which was hard for us five kids to understand - why Mam and Dad were fighting over bills not being paid, living off economy burgers and dry mash potato".
Howard, along with photographer Julian Germain, is now using her camera to record life in a one-industry town that has little in the way of any industry left.
The project, which produces the Ashington District Star newspaper, was commissioned through the bait programme at Woodhorn with investment from Arts Council England.
The Pitmen Painters
-Founded in Northumberland in the early 1930s as a Workers' Educational Association class giving mining families access to the arts
-The Pitmen paintings were inspired by the artists' own lives
-The group held its first exhibition in 1936 at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle and many of the paintings are on permanent display at Woodhorn Museum in Ashington.
-Written by Billy Elliot creator Lee Hall, their story was turned into a play that was performed at the Royal National Theatre in London and on Broadway
A spokeswoman for development company Arch said reviving Ashington remained an uphill struggle.
"The town has been in a state of decline for many years," she said.
"The loss of coal mining and associated industries created a fundamental imbalance between the need for jobs and the supply of them."
For Myrle Howard, who moved to Greece for several years, some of the problems associated with the town are rooted in a pessimism born of the gradual decline of the coal-mining industry.
"My parents had very little hopes for my future and so I felt they didn't drive me to do well in my education as they felt there would be no jobs at the end of it," she recalls.
"I find now on social media sites, the majority of my friends have terrible grammar."
But she remains hopeful: "I finally moved back and now feel more jobs have been created and money is being invested wisely in our local community.
"If people really want to find work, they can. However, many people just don't have the education and drive."
Ashington
-One of the largest towns in Northumberland with a population of 28,000, it grew from a few farms in the early 19th Century
-Its colliery opened in 1867 and shut in 1988
-At one point, Ashington was the largest mining village in the world, according to Ashington Tourist Information
-Famous sons of the town include World Cup-winning footballers Sir Bobby and Jack Charlton, England fast bowler Steve Harmison and Newcastle United legend Jackie Milburn
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A report into care for people with learning disabilities says they are being failed by the government, because they are often kept in institutions far from home for too long. One mother explains how her family has been affected. | By Sima KotechaToday programme
Leo Andrade's 19-year-old-son Steven has severe autism as well as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
He was sent to St Andrew's psychiatric hospital in Northampton last year. Mrs Andrade, who lives in Islington, London, claims she had little choice in the matter and continues to feel as if she has no say in her son's care.
She says the journey to and from Northampton every weekend often takes up to four hours - and that she is only allowed to be with Steven for an hour at a time.
"The distance is about 80 miles away - it takes hours to get there," says Mrs Andrade, who is married with two other children.
"Every Sunday we should see Steven - but it's not happening presently.
"I haven't seen him for three weeks. On one occasion I didn't see him for three months because the hospital said I was disrupting him."
The difficulties she is facing mean she has "no trust whatsoever in the system".
"I do not want my son again in any other institution. I also find the idea that having my son away from us is robbing us of having a family."
Christmas cancelled
St Andrew's hospital says it provides care for some very vulnerable people and "can give reassurance that it does everything it can to provide the most appropriate care in the best possible environment".
A report commissioned by NHS England, following the abuse scandal at Winterbourne View care home in Bristol, is calling on the government to give people like Steven - and their families - more rights.
The BBC's Panorama uncovered neglect and abuse of patients by staff at the Winterbourne View private hospital, near Bristol in 2011. Six people were jailed in 2012 and five given suspended sentences as a result.
The authors of the "Winterbourne View - Time for Change" report want those receiving care and their families to be able to challenge the system if they wish to.
Mrs Andrade welcomes the report, but is concerned that the implementation of the recommendations will not be so easy, suggesting decision makers often shy away from risky decisions which ultimately could make a big difference.
For her, Christmas will never be a time to celebrate unless her son is close to home - and happy.
"We don't do Christmas. I had a dining room here - I took it away because it was too difficult to sit down at the table and my son is not there.
"My family is broken. My son's only crime is autism."
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Places of worship, wildlife and wells are among ten projects in Wales to have been awarded a share of £2.6m. | The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) grant has been invested in sites of natural, industrial, maritime and sporting heritage.
It includes opening up the historic pilgrimage site at St Dyfnog's Well, Denbighshire, and documenting Connah's Quay's maritime history in Flintshire.
The HLF grant aims to celebrate Wales' "rich and diverse past".
Grant awards include:
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Media are careful not to exaggerate the importance of a meeting between the leaders of India and Pakistan, held in Delhi on Tuesday after the Pakistani premier, Nawaz Sharif, attended the swearing-in ceremony of India's new PM Narendra Modi the previous day. | Most commentators, however, hail the get-together as a step towards improving strained relations between the two nations.
"Modi told Sharif that terror sourced in Pakistan had to end" and that Islamabad has to speed up the trial of the 2008 Mumbai attacks suspects "to prove it was serious about engagement with India," The Times of India reports.
That is why, the Indian PM has accepted his guest's invitation to visit Pakistan but has made no commitment on Islamabad's call for resuming the stalled dialogue between the two countries "on all issues, including Kashmir", The Hindu explains.
For the Deccan Chronicle, despite the "tough talk on terror", at the end of the meeting, "there were clear signals that the two neighbours are willing to make the necessary efforts" to get the two countries talking to each other again.
The Pioneer is also optimistic. It explains in an editorial that the meeting has "brought the two leaders on the same page" and "has injected positive energy into the India-Pakistan relationship".
The Firstpost website is full of praise for the Pakistani prime minister. "He came like a gentleman; he talked like a statesman; and he went back home without throwing barbs at India," writes Rajeev Sharma, adding that "the Modi-Sharif meet is a ray of hope". Nevertheless, he adds that now "everything will depend on the Pakistan army and how the Pakistani military leadership assesses Sharif's India visit".
"If Sharif proves unable to deliver, at some point down the line Modi should open a direct line of communication with the Pakistan army," advises The Times of India.
'Real test' for cabinet
Newspapers continue to analyse PM Narendra Modi's "trimmed" government. He will be in charge of a smaller cabinet of 45 members compared to the 71 that were serving under his predecessor.
The Indian Express says that the council of ministers "includes some unexpected choices that suggest Modi is prepared to take risks for potential big payoffs". "By and large, Modi's cabinet choices are a job well begun," the paper concludes.
"Narendra Modi has ushered in significant changes in administration, dismantling existing structures by merging key ministries in an attempt to bring in more synergy in governance, negate contradictory approaches among departments and make decision-making more efficient… The real test, however, will be in proof of delivery of the concept", says The Hindustan Times.
Writing in the Business Standard, columnist AK Bhattacharya begs to differ. "The compulsions of keeping the party leaders and alliance partners happy took precedence over the goal of rationalising ministries that over the years had become oversized and unwieldy," he argues.
Train safety
Media are focusing on the issue of railway safety in the wake of the train accident in northern Uttar Pradesh state on 26 May that killed 25 people.
The accident "is an alarm bell for new railway minister DV Sadanand Gowda to take up the issue of railway safety on a war footing," says The Indian Express.
"It is indeed in this regard that the new government will have to bring about a perceptible change… The new minister for railways is a competent person; he must set the ball rolling," adds The Pioneer.
BBC Monitoring reports and analyses news from TV, radio, web and print media around the world. For more reports from BBC Monitoring, click here. You can follow BBC Monitoring on Twitter and Facebook.
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A Conservative-run council in London is among five boroughs which plan to raise council tax next year, in defiance of the government and rejecting the offer of extra money for a tax freeze as a "short-term gimmick".
| By Tim DonovanPolitical Editor, BBC London
Bromley Council is proposing an increase just short of the 2% cap which would have triggered a public vote in the borough.
Like Bromley, Kingston-upon-Thames, Lewisham, Harrow and Croydon are also set to raise council tax.
Recently Communities Secretary Eric Pickles accused some councils of being "democracy dodgers" for proposing increases just beneath the threshold which would require a referendum.
But Bromley's leader Stephen Carr says the borough - geographically the largest in London - is being "poorly-funded" by government and he is confident that local people will back the increase, £14 for the average household, to preserve services.
'No-gimmicks' approach
He argues that the government's offer to fund a freeze was a "very short-term solution" for two years, and after that bigger financial problems would still need to be addressed.
He said: "We have a no-gimmicks long-term approach to finance and we aren't going to sacrifice that for a short-term one-off period.
"It's about balance and judgement. We have consulted local residents and we think that for a relatively small increase in council tax we can protect key front-line services.
"Bromley remains the second lowest funded borough in London and yet has the second lowest council tax in outer London."
Mr Pickles made it clear he hoped most councils would freeze their council tax next year.
He said he was not opposed to tax rises that would "fund local opportunities", but said authorities must "be straight with people", and win over the public first.
Some campaigners have criticised Bromley's Tory administration for proposed and past cuts to services, including the closure of day centres, reduced provision for the elderly and disabled, and the closure of a library.
'Welcome boost'
Former Conservative councillor Rod Reed - now an independent local campaigner - said the council could save money instead by cutting the number of senior officers and using millions of pounds in reserves.
He also claims it has gone back on promises to cut the number of councillors by a third.
But Mr Carr says people will be content to pay more council tax because of its past record of value for money.
Apart from the five boroughs which are set to raise council tax, 23 boroughs say they are planning to freeze it and two - Bexley and Wandsworth - have not yet decided.
Labour-controlled Hounslow is one of two boroughs - the other being Hammersmith and Fulham- which have announced they will reduce council tax next year.
It is offering a cut of half a percent, or £5.45 pounds, for the average household.
Leader Jagdish Sharma said it was a "small but welcome boost" to residents, made possible by achieving more than anticipated savings this year, and despite facing a £12m cut in budget next year.
Tax cut 'meaningless'
Mr Sharma said: "I think the council is becoming leaner and smarter. We have had to make a lot of redundancies."
But some say the cut to council tax in Hounslow is "meaningless" after two years in which the council has had to find savings of £30m.
Irene McNamara and Sue Clark, who have adult sons with learning difficulties, were part of an unsuccessful campaign to prevent their life-skills day centre from closing last year.
They say their sons now have less intensive support and attend fewer hours at another centre, and their free transport has been cut.
Mrs McNamara said: "My son has lost community and continuity. It's been an awful time for us.
"Wherever you go, it's the OAP or disabled person who gets the first cut."
Mrs Clark said: "We would rather be paying the higher council tax we were paying and keeping it as it was."
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