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Christmas services will go ahead as normal at a Lincolnshire church, despite it being damaged by flooding earlier this month. | St Botolph's Church, known as Boston Stump, was flooded with over a foot of water when the Haven burst its banks on 5 December.
Restoration work was already under way before the church was flooded.
Princess Anne, patron of the restoration appeal, visited Boston to view the damage caused.
Boston Stump was closed while the church was cleaned and dried out.
As well as the Christmas services, the church intends to hold a service of hope and renewal in the new year.
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A road in Wolverhampton has been evacuated after a suspicious device was found, police said. | Wheatsheaf Road in Pendeford was evacuated after the device was found in an empty property by a council worker, Wolverhampton Police said.
In a tweet the force added an explosive ordnance disposal team were being sent to the scene.
Residents have been temporarily relocated to the Dovecote Housing Office on Ryefield.
Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, on Twitter, and sign up for local news updates direct to your phone.
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Eleven people have been arrested during a protest against migration controls outside an immigration detention centre near Heathrow. | Members of the No Borders network said they were trying to stop a flight to Ghana to deport illegal migrants.
Scotland Yard said the demonstration at Harmondsworth involved about 30 people and lasted from 18:00 GMT on Tuesday until 01:30 on Wednesday.
The UK Border Agency said it could not comment on deportation flights.
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A World War II mine found at a Suffolk beach has been safely detonated.
| A swimmer found the spherical explosive device, which coastguards said was 12in (30cm) across, on Tuesday evening on Southwold beach.
A Royal Navy team of bomb disposal experts went to the site and detonated the mine shortly after 1800 BST.
A small area of the beach had been cordoned off while the team examined the mine. The device is thought be have been British made.
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Failings in disability benefits assessments - including claimants being asked when they had "caught" Down's syndrome - have led to a "pervasive lack of trust" in the system, MPs say. | The Commons Work and Pensions Committee said reports by private contractors for the two main disability benefits, PIPs and ESA, were "riddled with errors".
And it said contractors "universally missed" the set performance targets.
A government spokesman said the assessments worked for the "majority".
'Shocking and moving'
The committee said it had received an "unprecedented" number of responses from people who had claimed Personal Independence Payments (PIP) or Employment and Support Allowance (ESA).
Almost 4,000 claimants detailed "shocking and moving, credible and consistent" accounts, the report said.
A recurrent complaint was that claimants did not believe the companies' assessors could be trusted to record evidence of their conditions accurately.
Examples given by the committee included:
A former benefits assessor told the BBC some of her ex-colleagues "copy and pasted" their assessments.
The unnamed woman told Victoria Derbyshire: "The nurses (assessors) were under a lot of stress and I think it led to a lot of mistakes."
The MPs' report said ministers should consider taking the process back in-house from Capita, Maximus and Atos when contracts come up for renewal in 2019 and 2020.
'Professional and compassionate'
Committee chairman Labour MP Frank Field said the shortcomings were causing "untenable" human and financial cost.
"No-one should have any doubt the process needs urgent change," he said.
A Department for Work and Pensions spokesman said: "As the Work and Pensions Select Committee highlights, assessments work for the majority of people, with 83% of ESA claimants and 76% of PIP claimants telling us that they're happy with their overall experience."
The DWP had already accepted more than 100 recommendations from five independent reviews of the Work Capability Assessment and commissioned two independent reviews of PIP assessments, he added.
Capita said it was "firmly committed to delivering a high-quality service" and that its qualified healthcare professionals were "dedicated to delivering professional and empathetic assessments for all claimants".
The Maximus-operated Centre for Health and Disability Assessments said it had achieved its quality standards in January but was "fully committed to making further improvements".
And Independent Assessment Services - formerly known as Atos Healthcare - said its focus was on providing a "professional and compassionate assessment service".
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Here's my report on fears of a low tour-out for the first-ever elections for police commissioners. My question to would-be voters: "Are you excited about the PCC vote?" | Mark EastonHome editor@BBCMarkEastonon Twitter
With less than a month to go before the first ever elections for police commissioners in England and Wales, there is still some concern that poor publicity will lead to a low turnout. They will be elected on 15 November and replace police authorities in each force area in England and Wales, making police directly accountable to voters.
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More than 6ft (183cm) tall and well-built, Anthony Unuode, 28, dreamed of serving in the Nigerian army, but was killed by thugs breaking up protests against police brutality in the capital Abuja, writes the BBC's Nduka Orjinmo after attending his memorial. | As hundreds of candles burned into the night, friends, family and strangers spoke about Anthony and his selflessness, while some shuffled their feet in grief, heavy with the burden of his death.
"Have we betrayed the dead?" asked one man, who said he did not know Anthony personally but, like many others, felt a kinship had developed between them during the protests against police brutality that rocked Nigeria last month.
The protests were held under the #EndSars banner, a reference to demands for the disbandment of the notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad, whose officers were repeatedly accused of criminal activity ranging from extortion to extra-judicial killings.
"He died fighting for the same thing we are fighting for," said another speaker, who followed Anthony on Twitter.
Protesters said that Anthony was brave. When thugs suspected to be hired by politicians to crush protests attacked them on 13 October at the Berger roundabout in Abuja, he stepped forward and shielded those he could, escaping with a minor injury on his arm.
Four days later, the thugs launched another attack with machetes, daggers and wooden sticks to disrupt a march along Abuja's Kubwa expressway.
It is unclear whether Anthony was among the marchers or just happened to be walking in the area, but, his friends say, he suffered deep machete wounds to his head.
'These were the things he fought against'
With blood gushing from his head, he removed his shirt, wrapped it over his wounds and ran for miles seeking help, finally collapsing in front of his friend Muazu Suleiman.
"I put him in the car and drove as fast as I could to the national hospital, but when we got there, there were no hand gloves, no cotton wools, no drugs. I had to go and buy these things from outside," said Muazu.
"When they wanted to do surgery they were using their phone lights, some of the tools they needed were locked behind glass," he added.
Hospital spokesman Tayo Hastrup denied the allegation, describing it as a "lie".
But Anthony's elder brother, Austin Unuode, also complained about the hospital, saying medics "couldn't run some of the tests because there was no electricity".
"These were the things he fought against, he believed that things needed to change in Nigeria," he added.
Mother misses funeral
Eze Divine, who attended the candlelight memorial held at Anthony's home, called for justice.
"It's bad that those that killed him may never get arrested because these are state-sponsored thugs.
"If we are asking for an end to police brutality and they are sending thugs, it says a lot about the government. It could have been me, it could have been anybody," he said.
The police told the BBC that they were investigating Anthony's murder, and no arrests had yet been made.
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A graduate in education at the Nasarawa state university close to Abuja, Anthony was a reflection of young Nigerians in many ways.
In a country where millions of graduates are unemployed and get little support from the state, most young people create their ways of earning a living.
At the time of his death Anthony was running three online betting shops.
He was also a small-time estate agent and "did anything that would bring legitimate money", said his brother Austin.
"It's a big loss, because since my father died, he has been the breadwinner of the family.
"My mother is not even around to see his last remains lowered as she travelled abroad," he added.
It was not only armed thugs who had been deployed to crush the protests, but also soldiers who - two days after Anthony's death - shot protesters at the Lekki toll gate in the commercial hub of Lagos.
Although the military has denied that troops opened fire, Amnesty International and multiple eyewitnesses are adamant that they killed at least 10 protesters there.
Ironically, Anthony, before his death, had applied to join the army, believing it was his patriotic duty to help in the fight against militant Islamist group Boko Haram, which has been waging a brutal insurgency in the north of the country for more than a decade.
"He always talked about joining the army to fight Boko Haram.
"He was passionate about Nigeria and Africa and always wanted to give his quota," said Anthony's brother.
Unlike many protesters, Anthony had never been a victim of police brutality himself but he joined the demonstrations because he wanted a better Nigeria.
"When he saw the youths coming together, he called me and said this was a turning point," said his close friend Shedrack.
What next for the #EndSars protests?
The day after Anthony was buried, the leaders of the protest movement and thousands of others held an online session for more than four hours to map a way forward following the end of the mass protests that saw Nigeria's massive young population demonstrate its power.
"What next? Where do we go from here?" asked moderator Ebuka Obi-Uchendu as he opened the Zoom session after a minute's silence in honour of the dead.
In his response musician and lawyer Folarin Falana, better known as Falz, said: "I dare say things will never be the same in Nigeria again.
"The work now lies in citizen education, letting people know about their rights and the laws."
Other speakers urged the youth to get involved in politics, and use their numbers to elect capable representatives.
"What we have seen is that we can gather and we can organise," said Feyikemi Abudu of the Feminist Coalition, one of the main protest groups.
She is referred to as "the president" by her thousands of followers online for her exceptional organisational skills that made the demonstrations a success.
"Things that we didn't think could be done in months or years were achieved in weeks and it is that energy that we need to keep," she said.
Anthony's friends agree, pointing out that he had written on his private Instagram account almost prophetic words before his death.
"To my generation of Nigerians. I love you and you have earned my maximum and genuine respect.
"The powers that be are truly against us and are doing everything in their power to stop this movement. It will get worse, but please let us never back down," Anthony had written.
Additional reporting by the BBC's Chukwuemeka Anyikwa
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With its scenic mountains and stunning Buddhist monasteries on hilltops, Bhutan is a traveller's dream and described by some as the last Shangri-La - a mystical beautiful place where everything is perfection. | By Anbarasan EthirajanBBC News, Thimphu
The country's capital, Thimphu, is a refreshing delight to those who are tired of traffic and pollution in mega cities. The fresh air and the lush green mountains and snow peaks in the distance offer a visual treat.
Men, women and children calmly walk around in the country's traditional attire. It is probably the only country in the world where there are no traffic signals - just traffic police officers giving hand signals.
But beneath the surface, this picture-postcard country has been experiencing an undercurrent of tension and nervousness since last year.
Sandwiched between two Asian giants - China in the north and India in the south - the Himalayan nation, with a population of about 800,000, was anxious when troops from the two military powers squared up to each other over their border dispute.
The flare-up was in a strategic plateau called Doklam - situated in the tri-junction between India, Bhutan and China.
The remote mountainous region of Doklam is disputed. Bhutan and China both claim the area. India supports Bhutan's claim over it.
When China started to expand an unpaved road in June 2017, Indian troops went across and stopped the work, triggering a face-off between the two sides.
Delhi argued that the road had security implications. The fear is that in any future conflict, Chinese troops can use it to seize India's strategically important Siliguri Corridor, known as the Chicken's Neck, which connects the Indian mainland with its north-eastern states.
Some experts said the fears were far-fetched.
But many Bhutanese were unaware of the strategic importance of Doklam.
"Doklam was insignificant until it became a controversial issue a few months ago. Most Bhutanese don't even know where Doklam is," says Namgay Zam, a multimedia journalist in Thimphu.
She adds: "It became a matter of contention and discussion only after it blew up as a controversial issue between China and India".
The tense stand-off between Chinese and Indian troops in Doklam raised concerns among many Bhutanese that it could trigger a war between the two Asian giants. Beijing angrily denounced what it described as a "trespass of Indian troops".
After weeks of hectic diplomacy by the Indian and Chinese leadership, the 73-day face-off was brought to an end. Indian troops finally withdrew.
The Bhutanese government refuses to publicly discuss the Doklam stand-off, but it issued a cautious statement last August welcoming what it described as "the disengagement by the two sides".
Many in Bhutan say the flare up was a wakeup call.
There was a passionate discussion on social media over whether it was time for Bhutan to settle its border dispute with China and follow an independent foreign policy. Some even argued that Bhutan should come out of India's influence.
After Tibet was invaded and annexed by China in the 1950s, Bhutan immediately turned south - towards India - for friendship and security. Since then it has been under India's sphere of influence.
India provides economic, military and technical help to Bhutan. The Himalayan nation is the largest recipient of India's foreign aid. India gave nearly $800 million to Bhutan's last five-year economic plan.
Hundreds of Indian soldiers are stationed inside Bhutan and officials say they offer training to Bhutanese troops. Its military headquarters is in the western town of Haa, about 20km (12 miles) from Doklam.
While many Bhutanese are thankful to India for its assistance over the decades, others, particularly the young, want the country to chart its own course.
Bhutan's foreign policy takes India's security concerns into account because of a special treaty, signed first in 1949. The treaty was revised in 2007 but it gave Bhutan more freedom in areas of foreign policy and military purchases.
Some here feel India's influence has been overbearing and stifling.
"As we mature [as a democracy] we have to get out of India's shadow. India also should not think of Bhutan as what some people refer to as a 'vassal state'. Let Bhutan decide its own political future," argues Gopilal Acharya, a writer and political analyst.
Bhutan and China have disputes over territory in the north and in the west. There is a growing feeling within Bhutan that it is time for the country to reach a settlement with China.
"Bhutan actually needs to resolve this issue with China at the earliest, that's what I feel. After that we may be able to move forward diplomatically or otherwise this [Doklam] problem is going to reoccur," says Karma Tenzin, a political commentator.
"We cannot afford to have two superpowers lock their horns at the doorstep of a peaceful nation like Bhutan."
Several people who I spoke with in Thimphu argue that India could have shown restraint and avoided a face-off with China.
They think India's stance might have an impact in Bhutan's efforts to solve its long-standing border dispute with Beijing.
India has been unable to stop the Chinese making inroads into other south Asian countries like Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Bangladesh. Bhutan is the only country in the region which has no formal diplomatic relations with Beijing.
There is also resentment among several Bhutanese who feel that India has been unfairly treating them in exploiting its natural resources. Delhi's "big brother" attitude, they say, could lead to people calling for more trade links with China. They point to Nepal playing the China card vis-à-vis its relations with India.
"For us, our future is with India. But we should forge a new kind of relationship which is equal between India and Bhutan. We have to look for new areas of engagement on equal footing," says Mr Acharya.
While India grapples with the challenge of a rising China, both militarily and economically, it is also in danger of losing its allies if its foreign policy is not based on mutual respect.
Bhutan may be a tiny Himalayan nation but it holds a strategic card. It does not want to be squeezed in India-China rivalry. The last thing they want to see is Chinese and Indian armies squaring up to each other once again near their border.
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A coronavirus outbreak has been declared at another hospital in Wales. | Swansea Bay health board said 10 patients and five staff had tested positive at Morriston Hospital in the past few days.
The health board said most cases were connected to cardiac services and announced a temporary suspension of routine cardiac surgery.
At the city's other hospital, Singleton, nine members of maternity staff had also tested positive.
They are self-isolating and no patients had tested positive, the health board said, adding wards and beds at Singleton Hospital were all open as normal.
It comes after an outbreak was declared at Newport's Royal Gwent Hospital on Monday.
Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board is also dealing with outbreaks at three of its hospitals - Royal Glamorgan Hospital in Llantrisant, Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil and Bridgend's Princess of Wales Hospital.
Last Thursday, Betsi Cadwaladr health board said 24 patients were being treated as part of a Covid-19 outbreak at hospitals including Glan Clwyd in Denbighshire, Colwyn Bay and Llandudno.
Most had been receiving care for more than two weeks and were said to be recovering.
"The safety of our patients and staff is paramount and we are doing all we can to contain the spread of the virus while minimising the impact on our services," said Prof Richard Evans, Swansea Bay health board's executive medical director.
"We will continue to closely monitor and manage the situation."
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Three 24-hour Belfast bus lanes are to be scrapped. | One of the three is the controversial lane beside Central Station, which will instead operate from 07:00 to 19:00 like most other bus lanes in the city.
There were complaints about the camera operating 24 hours a day - even when buses are not running.
Two other 24-hour cameras, on the Upper Newtownards Road and the Saintfield Road at Forestside, will also have their hours reduced.
It comes after figures revealed more than 2,000 people have been fined for driving in Belfast's city centre bus lanes between the hours of 00:00 and 06:00.
City centre buses do not run at night, with the latest one ending before midnight.
Figures obtained from the Belfast Telegraph in a Freedom of Information request revealed 115 of these were fines issued on East Bridge Street and 2,090 fines issued on the Castle Street bus lane.
Minister for Infrastructure Chris Hazzard asked for the matter to be reviewed.
A Department for Infrastructure spokesperson said: "A review of all 24-hour bus lanes took place in March.
"It recommended that three of the 24-hour bus lanes could be amended to 7am to 7pm, including East Bridge Street, Saintfield Road at Forestside and Upper Newtownards Road.
"Legislation is currently being prepared to enable these changes to be made."
Councillor Jim Rogers told BBC News NI he had been keen to see an end to 24-hour bus lanes.
"When they were first introduced I couldn't believe it. Our buses and trains don't run 24 hours," he said.
"I remember saying to the department 'What's the reason for this?' They could give me no answer.
"Bus lanes are causing mayhem and driving people out of the city centre."
Since June 2015, motorists who drive in the lanes have faced a £90 fine, which is reduced to £45 if paid within two weeks.
There are more than 60 bus lanes across the city.
Bus lanes were introduced as part of the On the Move traffic plan. Last year, Ciaran de Burca from the Department for Regional Develoment's transport projects division told Stormont MLAs that the scheme was not about making revenue.
More than £500,000 was raised from fines between 22 June and 16 September 2015.
He said he and his staff did not believe that they would raise this level of fines.
Extra signs had been put up in efforts to reduce the number of drivers being caught out, he added.
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Matt Lucas is set to return to Doctor Who for its 10th series. | Having taken part in the show's 2015 Christmas special alongside Peter Capaldi and Alex Kingston, Lucas will reprise the role of River Song's former assistant Nardole.
"I'm chuffed to bits that Nardole is returning to the Tardis for some more adventures," Lucas said.
The star will appear in the opening episode of series 10, which begins filming in Cardiff on 20 June.
Steven Moffat, lead writer and executive producer, added he was "delighted and slightly amazed to be welcoming Matt Lucas back on to the Tardis - and this time it's not just for Christmas, he's sticking around".
"One of the greatest comedy talents on planet Earth is being unleashed on all of time and space."
Capaldi will return as The Doctor while Pearl Mackie replaces Jenna Coleman as his new companion, Bill, in her first major television role.
Lucas said he was looking forward to reprising his role in the sci-fi drama because he "loved acting with Peter and I'm excited to work with Pearl".
Also announced to be joining the series this year is Jekyll & Hyde and Sherlock star Stephanie Hyam.
Doctor Who will return to BBC One with a December Christmas special followed by a new series in 2017.
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Clapping for our carers and other key workers has become a rite of passage for many of us - a way of showing our appreciation for front-line workers risking their lives to keep us safe. | But Thursday's event, the eighth since the lockdown started, is the first since some NHS staff said they felt "stabbed in the back" by people breaking lockdown guidelines to hold VE Day street parties.
An intensive care doctor said the parties she witnessed put emergency staff lives at risk and increased the possibility of a second wave of coronavirus cases.
So, is it hypocritical of people who broke the the rules on Friday to applaud those same carers on Thursday?
According to experts on ethics, it is not necessarily hypocrisy - although it could be considered selfish.
Dr Paddy McQueen, who teaches philosophy at Swansea University, said a key feature of hypocrisy was pretending "to be something they are not or believe something they do not believe".
"My hunch is that quite a few people who clap for carers and the NHS, while also failing to observe social-distancing measures, do have genuine admiration and appreciation for them," he explained.
"Thus, they are not pretending to admire or support the NHS. Rather, they might fail to make the logical connections between their behaviour and the impact it has on the NHS."
What might come close to hypocrisy, Dr McQueen added, is if someone believes people should be observing social distancing, but makes excuses for failing to observe it themselves.
He calls this the "what I do won't make a difference" attitude, but says it is "morally dubious" rather than hypocritical.
Another ethicist agreed it does not constitute hypocrisy, but is "selfish".
"It is akin to being grateful that someone is cleaning up the litter while you throw your rubbish on the ground," said Dr Tristan Nash, lecturer in philosophy at the University of Wales Trinity St David.
"It is being grateful that NHS workers are putting their lives at risk while taking actions that could serve to increase that risk."
Unions representing NHS staff would not be drawn on the question of morality, but called on people to support NHS staff by abiding by social-distancing rules.
The Unite union said it was "extremely concerned that non-compliance" with the rules "ultimately puts lives at risk".
The British Medical Association (BMA), which represents doctors in Wales, said while it was "heartening" to see the appreciation, "the best 'thank you' we can ask for" is that people follow Welsh Government guidelines on social distancing.
"It's disheartening to see people putting themselves at risk when doctors and other healthcare professionals are doing their utmost, day in, day out, to protect patients," said Dr David Bailey, chairman of the Welsh council of the BMA.
The union which represents nurses said it supports the public wanting to say thank you to NHS staff "who are working around the clock saving lives during this pandemic".
But Helen Whyley, director of the Royal College of Nursing in Wales, called on people to follow social-distancing guidelines to protect the NHS.
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A Bristol-based company has secured the lease of part of the seabed off Skye to deploy four tidal turbines. | Marine Current Turbines said the £40m project would see the devices installed at Kylerhea, narrows between Skye and the Scottish mainland, by 2014.
The company already operates a commercial-scale tidal power device at Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland.
It said the four SeaGen units could potentially generate enough electricity for 8,000 homes.
The company has secured an "agreement of lease" from the Crown Estate, which owns the seabed.
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On paper Israel and China are unlikely close trading partners. | By Dave GordonBusiness reporter, Tel Aviv, Israel
China, the world's second-largest country, is the biggest exporter on the planet. While Israel, a tiny strip of land in the Middle East, is only in 45th place on the global exporting league table.
And importantly - Israel has always been a steadfast ally of the US.
So given the current trading spat between the US and China, you would expect Israel to be firmly on the American side.
Yet what many people don't know is that Chinese investment in Israel is continuing to boom, at the same time as a growing number of Israeli firms are entering the Chinese marketplace.
So while President Trump is slapping tariffs on Chinese exports and talking tough, Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu is happily encouraging his country's firms to accept Chinese investments, as the figures show.
In 2016 China's direct investment in Israel almost tripled to $16bn (£12bn), according to a report in the South China Morning Post newspaper.
Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post predicts that China will overtake the US as the number one source of overseas investment in Israel.
So what has brought the two countries together, and should Israeli firms be cautious?
Over the past two decades the Israeli economy has established itself as a leading hub of technological development.
Commentators say that Chinese firms want to get their hands on that technology, at the same time as Israeli companies want better access to the giant Chinese marketplace.
"The Chinese are leveraging Israeli tech to fuel their economy, Israel is held in high esteem as a hub of innovation," says Hagai Tal, chief executive of Taptica, an Israeli mobile advertising company.
"China is set on learning as much as it can in order to position itself as an innovation economy.
"[Meanwhile], Israeli companies also see important opportunities in the East, and the meeting point of these two approaches is what produces such successful business partnerships."
To help bring Israeli and Chinese companies together, a number of business events are now held every year, such as Silicon Dragon Israel, which took place in Tel Aviv at the start of the year, and the China-Israel Innovation Summit, which was held earlier this month in Guangdong.
Rebecca Fannin, a founder of Silicon Dragon Israel, says Israeli tech start-ups that have secured Chinese investment tell her they "are progressing faster with Chinese capital, and through introductions, collaborations, and easier access to the large China mainland markets".
In recent years Israeli firms that have either been bought outright by Chinese companies, or sold them share of their business, include medical lasers operation Alma Lasers, and medical devices group Lumenis. Others are Israeli dairy business Tnuva, image recognition firm Cortica, and gesture control group Extreme Reality.
Royi Benyossef, an Israel-based manager at investment fund Samsung Next, says that the Chinese are "mesmerized by Israel and its technology exporting capabilities".
Other commentators say that the different national characteristics of the two countries complement each other.
Peggy Mizrahi, a Chinese citizen who lives in Israel, says: "The Chinese are known for long-term planning, and being conservative and hierarchical, unlike the commonly recognised Israeli mindset of [being] fast, innovative, flexible, and having a lack of respect for authority."
Daniel Galily, an Israeli expat who has lectured in business at Beijing Geely University, adds that: "The educational system in China places great emphasis on discipline and obedience to superiors, while the Israeli educational system and the Israeli army encourage students and soldiers to think about new ideas, and to solve problems in situations of uncertainty.
"The Chinese understand that, and so they strive to integrate the Israeli creativity into their economy."
However, it is not just Chinese firms that are benefiting from closer trade ties between the two countries.
Spotad, an Israeli digital advertising firm, entered the Chinese market last year after securing funding from a Hong Kong-based private equity firm.
The company now works with all the major Chinese online advertising exchanges.
Other Israeli firms that are continuing to make inroads into the Chinese market include mobile marketing firm AppsFlyer, and diamond trading platform Carats.
Global Trade
More from the BBC's series taking an international perspective on trade:
Yet while both Chinese and Israeli firms seem pleased with their continuing cooperation, some commentators are anxious.
"One of the biggest drawbacks that I see here for Israel is that China is notorious for not respecting the intellectual property laws of other nations, so Israel has to be very careful about what kind of manufacturing they outsource to China," says Jason McNew, founder and boss of Pennsylvania-based Stronghold Cyber Security.
Lee Branstetter, professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College, says that the concern in the US is that Israeli technology could ultimately find its way into the hands of the Chinese military.
"The Pentagon is increasingly worried that artificial intelligence capabilities acquired by Chinese firms through civilian investments or licensing deals could find their way into a new generation of Chinese weapons that would threaten American troops and American allies.
"The Pentagon is also worried that Israel could become a back door through which China could acquire capabilities that it could not get in the US due to regulatory scrutiny.
"I suspect that this will place some limits on the extent and magnitude of the emerging Israel-China relationship. If an American pilot were ever shot down by a Chinese missile powered by Israeli technology, it would be a real problem for the Israeli government."
The Israeli government declined to comment on these security and defence sector issues.
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Jamestown, Tennessee, is one of the poorest towns with a majority - white population in the US. The area overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump and locals believe new jobs will now come - but will that be enough to turn around decades of economic distress? | Valeria PerassoSocial Affairs correspondent, WS Languages
Nine years after his plumbing company collapsed at the height of the credit crunch, Clint Barta is feeling confident enough to start again.
"It's only been days, so it's a bit slow," says Barta who has been in the business for 33 years. "But I'm meeting with a builder tomorrow."
The plumber had to lay off 75 employees back in 2008 and commuted daily for an out-of-town job to keep his family afloat.
"For years, we saw nothing in this town," he says. "But now we live in 'Trump times' and it's all starting to change".
Barta lives in Jamestown, a tiny town of 1,900 people nestled in the fertile hills of north Tennessee. An area "with 230 churches and just one pub", as some locals describe it.
It's a two-hour drive from here to the nearest city, and the busy streets and shining high-rises of the state capital Nashville feel like a world away.
In Jamestown, the streets that make up the town centre are deserted.
A short walk takes you past row upon row of empty shops with bare shelves, broken blinds, and months' worth of post piling up under the doors.
There are dusty shop fronts, a florist with plastic funeral wreaths in the window, a thrift store, a few sun-bleached 'For Sale' signs.
Between 2008 and 2012 official statistics show Jamestown had the sixth lowest median household income of any town in the US. And by 2015 over half of its population was living below the poverty line.
But since Donald Trump won the election in November 2016, there's a new sense of optimism in the air.
"I am hopeful about his promise of bringing jobs back, I have already experienced it myself with my business reopening", says Clint Barta. "Trump is a businessman and I'd rather have a businessman in office than a politician."
Many echo his optimism. Voters in Jamestown and the surrounding Fentress County came out overwhelmingly in favour of the Republican candidate, who won 82.5% of the local vote.
"[We are] Republicans through and through, there's no denying it," Barta laughs.
White America
With a population that is more than 95% white, Jamestown is a textbook example of a small white working-class American town.
Fifty years ago it was a thriving hub with hundreds employed in local mines and three garment factories.
But then the mines closed and the factories left. Many here blame the North American Free Trade Agreement, Nafta, signed in the 1990s, for "taking our jobs south to Mexico".
Plans to turn Jamestown into a hub for the service industry failed to materialise, and neither did a new interstate highway that would increase commercial traffic.
The local industrial park today stands half empty. A giant Walmart did finally provide some new jobs, but also forced many "mom-and-pop" stores out of business.
Unemployment in the area rose above 6%, much higher than the national 4.3%, and on a par with Alaska and New Mexico, the two states with the worst rates in US.
But despite all this, the latest state-level statistics are starting to show some good news - and giving people hope.
During the first 100 days of Donald Trump's presidency, Tennessee became the country's number one state for small business job growth, according to the Paycheck/IHS index.
And in May the state saw its largest month-to-month unemployment drop in more than 30 years, figures from the Bureau of Labour Statistics show.
For people here, it's confirmation that their new president is delivering on his campaign promise to generate 25 million jobs and become, in his own words, "the greatest jobs producer that God ever created".
In fact, the trend actually started before the change of administration, thanks to relatively low tax rates and the low cost of living in the state.
But J. Michael Cross, the county executive of Fentress County, is definitely feeling optimistic.
"Thirty-five percent of all large cranes in the US are said to be in Nashville right now", he says. "New buildings of all sorts are popping up."
Although that figure is hard to verify, Tennessee's multi-million pound construction blitz has been well documented.
And Mayor Cross - whose patch includes Jamestown - is a firm believer in "trickle-down economics".
"It may take a year or three, but at some point in time we will benefit from some of those new jobs and industries," he says.
Hover over the curve to see figures for each month.
"I ask friends when I go hungry"
At the Jamestown food bank, those waiting to receive their free box of provisions know little about state statistics.
As they file through this blue, galvanised steel shed they probably have other numbers on their minds - working out how to make each precious food parcel last.
Demand is so high that families are only allowed to come here once every six weeks.
"Resources won't stretch any further," says Sally Frogge, a sprightly 77-year-old volunteer, who is updating the records on a computer.
Like most of the 15 volunteers here, she is from one of Jamestown's many local churches.
It is a precise, choreographed operation.
The volunteers walk between pallets and crammed shelves, filling boxes with basic supplies - packets of rice, tinned fruit and vegetables, biscuits and flour. The Methodist church donates washing powder and sometimes there is also soap and toiletries to hand out.
The food bank helps out 150 families every week. A rough estimate says that one in every six homes in Fentress, a county of 17,000 inhabitants, depends in some way on food banks to feed themselves.
"There are so many people on disability income, the elderly, the unemployed…", says Sally. "[People] tell us they are looking for work and that goes on and on for months".
Kenny Jones, 51, is one of the hopefuls.
"I haven't been here for a while," he says. "I don't want to make it a habit. But work is non-existent, whenever a position comes up there are 20 people in line waiting to take it".
Jones' story is typical. He worked all his life in the construction industry, driving from state to state, picking up short-term contract work.
It was a hard, hand to mouth existence, living out of a suitcase. When his wife and children left him, he decided he couldn't do it anymore.
He couldn't afford to keep his car, and in a town where public transport is almost non-existent he has to rely on friends to give him lifts.
Kenny says he can make the food bank provisions last 20 days if he eats once a day. But that still leaves another 22 days before he can come back for another box.
"I have friends that I ask for help when I go hungry," he says.
He's heard there might be a factory opening up soon and he's hoping to find out what work might be on offer. But he's not holding out much hope.
"This town will eat you if you let it," he says as he loads his food box into a friend's car. "And it'll never get better."
A job centre... with no job offers
"The employment office? I don't think it exists any more," says the local librarian. It's scorching in the midday sun and the library is the only open door in Jamestown's complex of municipal buildings, organised around a car park.
She's wrong. But the office is so small and tucked away that it would be easy to miss.
Sitting at a single desk in a windowless room at the end of corridor, manager Janice Campbell is happy to chat.
She points out the computer for doing job searches which is almost always free.
On the jobs board, there are just three postings: one for teaching jobs in local schools, another one for a position with a charity for the disabled.
The third one is for the role of county Sheriff, after the previous incumbent stepped down and pleaded guilty to coercing vulnerable female prisoners into sex.
With few jobs on offer, Janice gets few visitors. But recently she's had a flurry of calls from people who, like Kenny Jones, have heard a factory is about to open up.
"No-one's said anything to me", says Janice. "But the rumour's out there because 10 or so people are contacting us daily asking the same thing."
Back in the Fentress County council offices, Mayor Cross is crunching the numbers.
The official stats for the current state of affairs in Jamestown make pretty grim reading.
The town's average household income is just $15,700 (£12,082), compared to a country-wide average of $53,000. And a shocking 50.5% of the local population lives below the poverty line, compared to a national average of less than 15%.
People have got used to things being bad, says Mayor Cross. "The biggest challenge is the negative mentality of many residents."
The mayor is adamant things are looking up, with several local businesses taking on staff recently.
"Three or four other businesses have added 75 to 100 jobs to the local economy," he says, a significant amount for an economically active population of about 10,000.
But there will only be a real turnaround if Fentress County can attract new businesses from outside the area. And he believes President Trump can help this to happen.
"I've always researched business models and I have studied Trump for 30 years, before even dreaming he would get into politics," he says. "The poor, rural people look at him as a refreshing break from old school politicians."
"There is confidence and people will be more willing to take risks".
Even the churches are in expansion mode, he says, which may give the construction industry an extra boost.
And that's no small opportunity: Fentress County is at the heart of America's Bible Belt. On the road into Jamestown alone there are more than 70 churches, with their crosses and billboards lit up with bible quotes.
"Are there 230 churches in the county? Could be", says Cross, who doesn't know the exact figure but thinks that doesn't sound off.
And the new factory that so many people are talking about?
"We are in conversations," he says. "A big company from outside state, could mean up to 150 jobs. That's all I can say, let's hope we can bring good news in a couple of months."
Sweating in his dirty work overalls, Timothy Dillard is sawing three-metre wooden planks into skirting boards.
After 22 years in the military and four more as a missionary in Africa, he returned home to Jamestown 18 months ago and set up a construction company.
"Service with a higher purpose," says the motto printed on his business card, followed by a biblical reference. Micah 6:8: "What does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy".
Dillard has a staff of five - all local young people, one of them recruited just yesterday. And today they're renovating a run-down cottage outside town.
"With the crisis a few years ago, everything came to a halt," he says as he reaches out for the next plank. "But recently, the hiring has gone up and people are more willing to spend."
Many of his clients are retired people who have moved to Fentress County attracted by low property taxes and cost of living.
Many come for the horse riding. With its tracks and hillsides, this is a dream destination for the equestrian community. "Some stay," he says. "That all creates jobs."
Small companies like Dillard's, employing several to a few hundred workers, make up 94% of business in the US. And everyone here understands that President Trump's promised new jobs will only come in large numbers if those small firms are able to expand.
But in a place that's been in such a long downward spiral, turning things round is not easy.
"The biggest challenge is finding people who want to work," says Dillard. "People come for a week and as soon as they get paid they don't show up again. Why work, when you've got free money?"
In Jamestown 39.6% of all adults of workforce age, from 18 to 65, are living off welfare payments - compared to a national average of below 15%.
And to many small-scale employers, that seems like a big disincentive for people to get into the workforce.
"Generation after generation of people drawing checks", he says, taking a break from his work bench.
"How do we fix that? I don't know the answer… but then, I don't make policy."
Trailers, dogs and drugs
Some of the people Tim Dillard probably has in mind are to be found in Jamestown's Sunshine Lane.
Its name belies the grim reality of a pockmarked old concrete street lined up with crumbling trailers and wooden shacks, abandoned cars, stray dogs and piles of rubbish that occasionally get set alight, releasing a thick smoke.
The doors - those that exist- are mostly left open, windows covered with fabric and cardboard in the place of glass. Some houses have porches made of sheets held together with rubble and old armchairs outside.
"What are you looking for?" asks Connor, strong, angular faced and sun-tanned, his neck covered in scars from past injuries.
It's the middle of the working week but everyone here seems to be home - although most prefer to hide away at the sight of strangers. Dogs bark unwelcomingly.
Connor, who's about 40, lives at the bottom of Sunshine Lane, in a little cabin with peeling paint. He has one room which he shares with a woman who hides behind the fabric hanging in the doorway the moment she sees us. He can't walk much: he has a broken back, he says, after an injury he had while working at a local garage, fixing trucks.
"What do I live off? Well, I'm on disability (allowance), I draw my check for some 600 dollars," he replies.
"I don't know if there are jobs now because I don't go to town often, but to those that say that people here don't want to work, let me tell you: the jobs are bad, they always have been. There are so many like me, who get hurt because the job is dangerous and then you are on our own, in pain and with no other jobs to go for."
His neighbour opposite, with whom he doesn't really get along, has a similar story.
Pauline was diagnosed with lung cancer, had surgery twice and lost everything: her job at a bar and the few savings she had. Painfully thin, emaciated "with the cancer back" and on sickness benefit, she lives alone in Sunshine Lane. She lost contact with her family but a friend visits from time to time.
"Now I'm here, no choice, no joy", she says, lying on a shabby sofa outside her home.
Pauline has just two broken teeth, a half-smoked cigarette in her right hand and another, not yet lit, in her left. Her face is pocked with countless red blemishes and has track marks of syringes on her arms.
Sunshine Lane is also the place where Jamestown's biggest tragedy is played out in plain sight.
Drugs. Some heroin, but for the most part methamphetamine and prescription pills, according to Sergeant Brandon Cooper, a spokesman for the Sheriff's office.
Sunshine Lane, everyone agrees, is a safe haven for consumers and dealers alike. Connor says he takes pills "every so often" to ease his back pain, although he doesn't see himself as an addict.
As in many other American towns, drug addiction is at epidemic levels, although the county does not provide any official figures.
But they do provide crime statistics which give an indication of the extent of the problem.
Fentress County has a brand new prison, built in 2014 and nicknamed "the Taj Mahal" by locals, with space for 166 inmates.
The jail is currently at full capacity and 80% of the inmates are in for drug-associated offences.
Drug abuse is a very real obstacle to any official plan to tackle unemployment.
"It is hard: how can drug users be productive? I question whether those people want a job hard enough to overcome their drug addiction," asks Mayor Cross.
For Mark Clapp, senior emergency doctor at the hospital, the issue's more complex than that.
"My experience tells me that it takes them to have something radical or catastrophic in their life that triggers the desire to change," he says.
He estimates that 10% of the population suffers from addiction and here he sees "two or three serious drug-related admissions" every time he's on shift in the emergency room.
Clapp was an obstetrician for 20 years until he "got tired of signing death certificates" for the parents of children he had helped deliver, due to overdoses. He moved to the emergency room instead but, inspired by his religious beliefs, he also runs a rehabilitation clinic for addicts.
"The nature of the jobs we have around here plays a part: young people do physically demanding work, they wear out their back, get prescriptions to manage pain - and they never get off them. As a doctor, what do you do with a 22-year-old with chronic pain who is already on a high dose of narcotics?"
The solution, he says, is not just more jobs - but better ones.
"There is no way out if we don't stop the brain drain of the brighter kids, who go away for college and never come back."
'Trump is going to do great things'
Nancy Lee Thompson is having breakfast as she does at least twice a week in the West End cafe.
It's a typical American diner and at 8am it's buzzing with customers and smelling of fry-ups and coffee.
Nancy is 68 and moved here from Florida, one of a growing number of retired people living in Fentress - a new demographic that now makes up 28% of the local population.
She's also a proud Trump supporter.
"I love Trump," she says. "He is going to shake things up that needed to be shaken for a long time, he is not part of the political system that has dragged us down."
"There are so many people here that have never known the satisfaction of a good day's work. And that's a shame, because it is a good feeling. But that's about to change".
"We have seen our business improving recently, that's a fact," agrees Bob Washburn, one of the owners of Wolf River Valley, a nursery that trades decorative plants and some vegetables.
He hasn't got a figure to hand, just a perception that comes from years of attending to his customers day in, day out. His business - peonies and pumpkins, geraniums and chillies, chrysanthemums and tomatoes - depends more on the weather than on the mood in Washington DC, he admits, but it's also affected by people's outlook.
"People seem more optimistic and optimism changes the economy. As a business person, I am always looking for lower taxes and looser regulations, which he has promised," says Washburn.
"We feel we have reached the bottom and the only way is up. And country people here are very proud and they feel that for the very first time they had an input into deciding who the president is. The unspoken, silent great majority," adds Washburn.
At the (only) local bar
But not everyone shares the enthusiasm.
T'z Pub is Jamestown's only bar. It's housed in a shed down a gravel track and, like the West End cafe, it has a loyal clientele.
A dozen patrons sit around the horseshoe-shaped bar, all part of a single conversation. On the other side of the bar is Theresa Hale, handing them cold beer bottles and getting her tips through Bella, a dog who catches the patrons' one-dollar bills with her mouth and diligently brings them to her owner.
Hale is a Texan who you wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of. She came to the town "following a lover, but it didn't work out" and decided to take over the once notoriously rough pub and clean up its reputation. She banned guns and fist fights and saw off undesirable regulars who used to leave the car park full of syringes.
Back then the place was always full, but she prefers it like this, with the pool tables empty and a few loyal customers.
"Fentress: the county with 230 churches and only one bar," she laughs. "We should print t-shirts with that slogan!"
This is a "dry county" with strict legislation against alcohol sales. In the last election there was a move to ease the restrictions but it was voted down.
"Trump? What do you want us to say about Trump?" says one of the customers, his tone distinctly unfriendly. There's suddenly an uncomfortable silence.
"I can tell you why nobody wants to talk: because nobody wants to be associated with the bar," says Teresa. "We're in the Bible Belt and that says it all. The church dictates the way of life and the politics of this place."
But the conversation soon starts up again.
"Here people feel that they share values with the president, and even more so with the vice-president Mike Pence" says one man.
"And then there's this idea that by making America great again, whatever that means, we will all individually benefit in this part of the state. That's nonsense," says his companion, a twenty-something woman, by far the youngest in the group.
"Nothing will change just because there is change at a federal level. We will still be run by the same handful of rich, powerful families of the town."
Trickle-down effect
Outside the courthouse in the centre of Jamestown, a team of gardeners are planting flowers.
"We try to do things that are uplifting. Psychologically, get people to think that good things are happening," Mayor Cross explains.
In the square across from his office a new gym and boutique have just come into business - their "Now Open" banners livening up the row of empty shops.
On the next block, Clint Barta, the plumber, is washing the windows in his wife's boutique - one of the few to have remained opened on the main street.
He says he's taking heart from the boom in Nashville and keeping his fingers crossed that it will have a trickle-down effect.
To give himself a boost, Clint has started going to the First Baptist church, partly to fulfil his desire "to spend some time with the Lord," he says, and partly because it is "good for the networking".
"The more you get known, the better opportunities you have."
"I truly believe that Trump will do everything he has promised us," he says. "I've seen a lot of good things from him."
"Yes, we all make mistakes, we live and we learn. But with him, I'm not disappointed one bit."
Text and photos: Valeria Perasso. Video: Hetal Gandhi.
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The Sri Lankan President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, is cutting short his visit to Nepal to return to Colombo in the wake of the attack
in Pakistan on his country's cricket team. | Mr Rajapaksa called the assault by masked armed men on the bus carrying the Sri Lankan team cowardly.
At least five policemen escorting the team were killed but none of the cricketers were seriously injured.
The Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Rohitha Bagollagama has been despatched to Pakistan.
Before leaving Nepal, Mr. Rajapaksa has held talks with Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal in Kathmandu.
The two countries have also signed few bilateral agreements, media reports said.
The Sri Lanka president's scheduled visit to Lumbini, the birthplace of Lord Buddha was cancelled as a result of his cutting
short the three-day official trip.
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A revolution is under way in the teaching of computer science in schools in England - but it risks leaving girls and pupils from poorer backgrounds and ethnic minorities behind. That's the conclusion of academics who've studied data about the move from ICT as a national curriculum subject to computer science. | Rory Cellan-JonesTechnology correspondent@BBCRoryCJon Twitter
Four years ago, amid general disquiet that ICT was teaching children little more than how Microsoft Office worked, the government took the subject off the national curriculum. The idea was that instead schools should move to offering more rigorous courses in computer science - children would learn to code rather than how to do PowerPoint.
But academics at Roehampton University, who compile an annual study of computing education, have some worrying news. First, just 28% of schools entered pupils for the GCSE in computing in 2015. At A-level, only 24% entered pupils for the qualification.
Then there's the evidence that girls just aren't being persuaded to take an interest - 16% of GCSE computing entrants in 2015 were female and the figure for the A-level was just 8.5% . The qualification is relatively new and more schools - and more girls, took it in 2016 - but female participation was still only 20% for the GCSE and 10% for the A-level.
It looks as though the few that did take the exams were very focused - girls got higher grades than boys in both the GCSE and the A-level.
Unsurprising
Carrie-Ann Philbin, a former computing teacher who works to engage children in coding at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, describes these figures as "disappointing but not surprising". She points out that we are at an early stage in developing computing education and things should improve.
But she also thinks that the way computing is often sold as if its only purpose is to turn out a generation of programmers is a problem. "This only alienates teenage girls who already have a negative idea of what it is to be a 'computer geek'."
It also appears that poorer children and those from ethnic minorities are less likely to be getting the computing education the government says is vital if the UK is to have the skills it needs to compete in the digital era.
Pupils on free school meals made up just 19% of GCSE entrants, when they are 27% of the population, and just 3.6% of students were black when they make up 4.7% of that age group.
But wasn't the picture roughly similar for the old discredited ICT course? Well, no. While it is gradually being phased out, more pupils are still taking the ICT GCSE than computing, and the entrants are far more representative of the wider population. Forty-one per cent of GCSE entrants were female, and the exam had higher numbers of entries from children from low income and ethnic minority backgrounds.
Split emerging
"Computing and ICT had really quite different groups of students taking them," says Miles Berry from Roehampton. "ICT was much closer to the average in terms of gender, low income, ethnicity and prior attainment in maths."
His colleague Peter Kemp says diversity in the kind of children getting computing education is important. "We need to make sure that computer science becomes a subject at least as inclusive as the old ICT qualification. If the current disparities in access go unaddressed we risk wasting the opportunity to transform the tech industry into a more equal profession."
They both worry that schools are looking at this new subject with some scepticism and deciding that there are other priorities when budgets are tight. In schools that are offering the new A-level in computing, class sizes tend to be small, raising the prospect, says the Roehampton report, that their economic viability will be questioned under new sixth form funding arrangements.
And while many teachers supported the move towards a more rigorous form of computing education, some who warned about the danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater now feel vindicated.
Difficult
Drew Buddie, an ICT teacher who also acts as an examiner for the computer science GCSE, says the new exam is just too hard for many children, and is proving very stressful for teachers too. The result, he fears, is that "whole cohorts of students are now completely switched off doing ANY computer-related GCSE." He says the content of the new course is so different that many ICT teachers just do not have the knowledge to teach it, and he fears that computer science could become a niche subject, taught in only a few schools.
The Department for Education is looking on the bright side. "The number of girls studying computer science has nearly doubled since last year and we want to see more follow their example," a spokesperson said.
The DfE went on to say that "mastering Stem skills would ensure our future workforce has the skills to drive the future productivity and economy of this country".
What it doesn't say is that computer science can be creative and fun. Perhaps those words need to be inserted into the curriculum - otherwise many pupils and teachers may decide that computing is just too hard to bother with.
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"Put back those roaming charges we've just scrapped? We wouldn't dream of it!" That's the public message coming from the UK mobile phone operators about the threat of higher costs for travellers from a "no deal" Brexit. | Rory Cellan-JonesTechnology correspondent@BBCRoryCJon Twitter
But off the record there is a subtler message - it all depends on what our continental colleagues do.
Roaming may be free for customers but not for the operators. Every time you use your phone abroad your home operator is charged a fee by the one you are using abroad. That rate has been capped by the EU as part of the abolition of roaming but once the UK leaves, all bets are off.
"If we leave the market they wouldn't be bound by the directive," says one operator. "They could treat our customers like someone from America or Australia and double or triple the charge."
The government's own document on what would happen in the event of a "no deal" Brexit says "surcharge-free roaming when you travel to the EU could no longer be guaranteed".
While it stresses that this is an unlikely scenario, it also promises to introduce a monthly cap of £45 on any roaming charges. UK operators may feel that this puts them at an unfair disadvantage to their EU counterparts who will be free to charge UK firms whatever they like.
And some may be more tempted than others. Millions of UK travellers visit Spain each year while far fewer Spaniards come here, so Spanish operators may decide it is time to start recouping the cost of letting them roam on their networks.
Europe's mobile companies reluctantly accepted the abolition of roaming charges by the EU while warning there would be a cost. While they may have been charging excessive amounts when you travelled abroad in the past, that allowed them to keep prices down at home.
Now, they have the opportunity to profit from UK travellers who have enthusiastically taken up the opportunity to "roam like at home".
UK operators will undoubtedly be under great pressure from the government to just absorb any higher costs from roaming customers.
But they are also being told to find the money to invest in new 5G networks. So expect them to be among the fiercest opponents of a "no deal" Brexit.
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Greenland's economy relies on fishing and hunting, but the government has ambitious plans to develop the country's resource industries. In places like Narsaq, there's a fear that mining could destroy the environment and traditional ways of life. | By James FletcherBBC World Service, Narsaq, South Greenland
Jens Erik Kirkegaard looks out across the smooth black water of Kangerluarsuk fjord to the snow dusted mountain rising steeply from the far shore. It's a clear, cold day at the beginning of winter, and Greenland's mining minister has his hands stuffed deep in a pair of seal-fur mittens to keep them warm.
"When you grow up in Greenland, you don't really think about the different mountains having different minerals," he reflects.
Standing by his side is a man with a white beard, wearing a battered red felt hat. Greg Barnes is chief geologist for Australian mining company Tanbreez Mining, and he's brought the minister here to pitch his plan to turn the mountain they're looking at into a mine.
"It is the world's biggest rare earth deposit, it's probably got 50% of the world's rare earth in it," he claims. "This is one of the world's top 10 mines eventually we think."
Rare earth elements are used in everything from mobile phones to solar panels to wind turbines. China dominates world supply, but if people like Greg Barnes are right, Greenland has the potential to be a major player.
It's not just rare-earth minerals - Greenland also has reserves of gold, iron-ore, rubies and uranium, as well as oil and gas. In this country of just 57,000 people, with a GDP of $2.4bn (£1.5bn), developing those resources could have a big economic impact.
And it could bring full independence from former colonial master Denmark, which still provides a substantial annual subsidy for Greenland's budget.
"It gives you some thought that you've been walking on billions of dollars all your life and not knowing about it," Kierkegaard says. "It's a significant time in Greenland."
In the nearby town of Narsaq, money like that could make a huge difference.
Nestled at the foot of a mountain where two fjords meet, it's a picturesque town of brightly coloured houses like Lego bricks sprinkled amongst the snow.
Like much of Greenland, it has traditionally made its living from fishing and hunting, and also more recently farming for lamb. But at the town slaughterhouse, manager Henning Sonderup tells me that traditional way of life no longer pays the bills.
"Many people are unemployed," he says. "Lots of families from Narsaq have moved out to other cities, so we have to do something."
Several years ago the shrimp processing plant in Narsaq closed, and with it around 80 jobs. It's been partly offset by the expansion of a catering school and the construction of a new slaughterhouse, but Narsaq's population has fallen by around 10% over the past five years.
Sonderup feels that unemployment and a lack of opportunities leads to social problems - "people drinking beer, some going around just like zombies with nothing to do".
Susanne Lynge is another who thinks the town is in a downward spiral.
She's leading a loud protest in the snow outside the town council offices, shouting slogans into a megaphone while dozens of school children cheer in response. They wave colourful signs calling for the council to speed up construction of a new school.
"Our local government needs money," she says. "I wish they would open the mining."
Henning Sonderup reels off a list of the improvements that mining could bring: "New school, bigger hospital, better airport, new harbour, new roads, everything," he says. "Greenland will be on the map again."
The Tanbreez mine isn't the only one proposed near Narsaq. Another Australian company, Greenland Minerals and Energy (GME), is developing a rare-earth mine at Kvanefjeld, a mountain plateau about 6km (3.7 miles) from the town.
Unlike the Tanbreez mine, Kvanefjeld will produce uranium, fluoride and thorium as well as rare-earth minerals.
The mine's prospects received a major boost in October when Greenland's parliament voted by 15 votes to 14 to overturn a long-standing ban on uranium mining. There are more legal hurdles to be overcome before uranium mining is a reality in Greenland, but the vote triggered huge debate in Greenland and much concern in Narsaq.
Avaaraq Olsen is a teacher and member of the local council for the opposition Inuit Ataqatigiit party. Sitting in her kitchen, she remembers the day the ban was overturned.
"I was very sad, I was crying," she says. "I'm ashamed of being a Greenlander. If this mine is starting here in Narsaq, we will be moving away, not just from Narsaq, but from Greenland."
At Olsen's house, there are guns by the door where you or I might keep umbrellas, ready to be slung over the shoulder whenever the weather is right for hunting birds or seals.
"My biggest concern is it will cause so much pollution that we won't be able to live in our town - and all the animals and biodiversity will be destroyed, " she says.
These environmental concerns are shared by other hunters and fishermen, and many of the 50 or so sheep farms in the surrounding area.
French-born Agathe Devisme runs Ipiutaq Farm with her Greenlandic partner Kallista Poulsen. As well as farming 300 sheep, they also rent out a cottage on the farm to tourists during the summer.
"People coming to Greenland are looking for something pure," she says. "It's the last corner of the world not touched by pollution. If there is any kind of radioactivity in the area, they will not like it."
The mines would also involve an influx of foreign workers into Narsaq, as there simply aren't enough skilled workers in Greenland to fill all the jobs the mines will create. Some see this as a benefit - the miners will live in the community, send their kids to the school, and spend their money at local businesses.
But other aren't so sure.
"I don't think it's healthy for such a small town to have so many people from outside," says Ivalo Lund, head nurse at Narsaq's Hospital. "It will be young men looking at the beautiful young girls here."
She's worried about sexually-transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies to fathers who leave town, and like Olsen says she'll move away if the Kvanefjeld mine goes ahead.
"I will be sad to see this town be destroyed," she tells me. "It will be a mining town and we will never ever be able to live as we do now."
Greenland Minerals and Energy have spent much time trying to assure local residents that these concerns are misplaced.
"Other countries like Canada and France have uranium mining," says Ib Laursen, the company's operations manager as he drives around town. "If they can do it, we can do it in Greenland, we can take best environmental standards and put them to work here."
We stop at an empty multi-story housing block, its windows smashed and boarded and insulation poking out through holes in the walls. Laursen has lived in Narsaq on and off for 10 years, and wants me to see the impact of people leaving town.
"Despite what people say I do have a social conscience, my heart is here," he declares. "I'm more worried about the mental pollution, in a place like this where you have more and more social issues.
"We need to break that circle we need to bring back jobs and opportunities to the region. And you cannot make an omelette without cracking some eggs, because this will be an industrial revolution for this area."
There's still a question whether that industrial revolution will ever happen. Despite years of government promotion, there are no mines currently operating in Greenland. But this year has seen the strongest signs yet that mining will become a reality.
As well as overturning the uranium mining ban, in October Greenland's government granted the first major new mining licence in years. Tanbreez Mining has applied for a licence to develop their mine, and there are several other companies likely to follow suit over the next year.
Climate change may also help speed the development of new mines, making minerals more accessible as Greenland's ice-cap melts.
If and when mines do go into production, ensuring that the benefits are maximised and the pitfalls avoided will be a huge challenge for Greenland's government. Avaaraq Olsen isn't sure they're up to it.
"We are a young nation, we don't have enough experience," she says. "We don't have enough skilled people to work in the ministries who are going to secure our safety and our health."
But the mayor of South Greenland, Jorgen Waever Johansen, rejects the criticism.
"I know some groups around the world would like to have the Arctic as a prehistoric natural museum," he says. "But there are people here who want a good standard of living and want to be part of a global world."
Greenland is on its way to independence, he says proudly.
"Why should any people strive for independence if they don't believe in themselves?"
James Fletcher's Assignment is broadcast on the BBC World Service on January 2 from 00:32 GMT. Listen via BBC iPlayer Radio or browse the BBC documentary podcast archive.
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The two big challenges for George Osborne today were to do something to wake the UK economy from the torpor that has afflicted it since 2008, while also persuading investors of the world that lending to the government remains a prudent thing to do. | Robert PestonEconomics editor
How has he set about it?
Well he has another go at trying to restart business investment, which has been so spectacularly disappointing over the past few years.
The chancellor is using the forecast £3.5bn of proceeds from the auction to mobile phone companies of broadcasting spectrum for their 4G broadband services to give some temporary tax cuts to business - of which the most eye-catching is an increase for two years in the annual investment allowance from £25,000 to £250,000.
At a cost of around £2bn, this provides a valuable tax incentive for investment to small and medium size businesses.
There is a further tax cut of greater political symbolism, which is that corporation tax will be cut by one percentage point more than expected in April 2014. That would take the rate of corporation tax to 21% - and makes it almost inevitable that by the time of the 2015 election, the mainstream rate of corporation tax will be 20%.
And as some of you may become tired of hearing in the coming weeks, month and years, a corporation tax rate of 20% would be the joint lowest rate of any of the large G20 economies.
Of course, not all businesses can celebrate a reduction in the tax burden.
The chancellor is trying to make it harder for multinationals to shuffle their costs and revenues around the globe to minimise the amount of corporation tax they pay to him.
And he still regards any tax cuts for banks as toxic. So the bank levy is being increased to sustain the net annual proceeds from the levy at £2.5bn.
Nor is Mr Osborne playing Santa for business leaders as individuals. He is increasing taxes raised from those on high earnings by a £1bn a year, through the device of limiting the tax relief they can enjoy on pension saving.
And what about investors?
Well they won't regard it as good news that it will take a further year for the ratio of national debt to GDP to start falling: on the projections of the Office for Budget Responsibility, debt will reach a peak of 79.9% of GDP in 2015/16, before falling to a still high 79.2% in 2016/17.
But that deterioration is not unexpected.
Which is partly why, for some time now, investors have been expecting the UK to lose its AAA credit rating, the government's cherished kitemark as one of the world's most trusted borrowers
That fear, of a loss of the AAA, has not diminished, and looks likely to happen in early 2013.
Which would be a big political embarrassment for George Osborne and David Cameron, who have spent the past couple of years flaunting the AAA.
But the cost may be largely a political one, for the coalition, rather than an economic one: there has already in recent weeks been a smallish rise in the long-term costs of borrowing for the Treasury, which may be markets discounting the ratings downgrade.
Update 17.05
What the chancellor needs, more than anything else, if he is to hit debt targets that are - yet again - worse than previous forecasts, is an economic recovery.
And for that he needs a private sector that feels more confident and starts investing again.
So, at the heart of his statement today were a series of measures designed to appeal to the fabled business community.
There is £2bn worth of 100% tax relief on investment of up to £250,000 for two years.
There is an extension of relief on business rates for smaller businesses.
And perhaps most eye-catchingly of all, there is a further 1% to be taken off the standard rate of corporation tax - which will fall to 21% in 2014.
Which almost certainly means that by the time of the next general election, the UK will have a 20% tax rate for companies - which would be the joint lowest of all the big G20 economies.
Also, Mr Osborne announced what he hopes will be a significant boost to spending on infrastructure - which many businesses have been calling for.
All that said, many business people will be in two minds whether to crack open the bubbly.
Many of them - especially those in middle management - will be hurt by a £1bn raid on tax relief for those on higher earnings saving for a pension.
And they may worry more than most about the symbolism for the British government of losing its AAA credit rating - which now looks likely to happen in the early months of next year - following the deterioration of growth prospects and public finances.
They may also query whether the chancellor is engaging in the kind of creative accounting that gets some fast-and-loose businesses into trouble - by the way he is banking and spending £3.5bn of proceeds from an auction of 4G broadband spectrum that hasn't happened yet.
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West Yorkshire MP Stuart Andrew has been made a new junior minister at the Wales Office, in Theresa May's reshuffle, Downing Street has said. | Mr Andrew, Conservative MP for Pudsey, grew up in north Wales and is a Welsh speaker.
The role was previously held by Aberconwy MP Guto Bebb, who becomes a junior defence minister.
On Monday, Number 10 confirmed Alun Cairns remains Wales' voice at the UK Cabinet table as Welsh secretary.
Mr Cairns said: "I am delighted to welcome Stuart Andrew to the Office of the Secretary of State for Wales.
"I've worked with him over many years so I know that he will be an excellent champion for Wales within Whitehall and a fantastic representative for the UK Government in Wales."
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The talk in Darmstadt is of the "green wave". | By Jenny HillBBC News, Darmstadt, Germany
One in three voters in this city near Frankfurt backed the Greens in the Hesse state election last month.
In the city centre, workmen are setting up a Christmas market in freezing drizzle.
There were workmen here just over three years ago too. Then, they were preparing for a street party: Darmstadt had turned out to welcome its refugees.
Since then, migration policy has redefined German politics. Angela Merkel's centrist coalition government has bickered, dithered and shifted to the right.
As a result, voters have walked away from her Christian Democrats (CDU) and the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD).
Many have chosen instead the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), but also more recently the resurgent, and far more liberal, Green party.
Why the Green surge?
The Greens' strong performance has taken many by surprise. First they scored well in the Bavarian election last month, then here in the state of Hesse. And, were Germany to hold an election tomorrow, polls suggest the party would come second, just a few points behind Mrs Merkel's conservatives.
Singers arrive at a warm, brightly lit church hall near the city centre, faces flushed with cold, pulling off hats, gloves and scarves.
"We have a lot of students, a lot of young people, but also a mixture of cultures and people, from engineers to people who work with kids, or in the zoo," said Alison. "I think that's one of the reasons the [Green] party is so big here."
"They're riding on a wave right now," said Gudrun. "Especially with AfD coming up, people are starting to think, 'OK, where can I make a point'? And that's what brings them to the Greens."
"But on the other side we've got climate change," she says. "A lot of people really believe that it could happen and it's really affecting us. Especially this summer it was so extreme and I think that's one of the reasons why."
But the Greens will need more than environmental policy if they are to cement their status as Germany's second-strongest party.
Are they trusted?
Steffen Ross runs a bicycle shop near the city centre.
"Business and the Greens are an uneasy couple. The Greens want growth, but they don't want a lot of things that are associated with growth," he says.
He cites the Greens' promise to shut down "dirty" coal-fired power stations, and their wariness about fully embracing new digital technology, in case it infringes citizens' privacy.
As we talk, a couple of well-wrapped cyclists speed past the door, on a brand-new cycle lane courtesy of the local Greens. Steffen agrees the party has been good for his business. "But for me the question is: can the Green party operate effectively in questions of economics and politics?" he adds.
On that point, the party is trying hard. It has revamped its image and its new leaders - Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck - are determined to play down the party's left-wing protest past.
Who are the Greens?
The Greens have their roots in the environmental and peace movements of the 1970s.
Long defined by their opposition to military intervention and nuclear energy, and their calls for a more ecologically minded Germany, they first took seats in the Bundestag in 1983 and joined two coalition governments - both with the SPD.
Their appeal to voters was for many years somewhat diminished by infighting between the radical left (so-called "Fundis", or fundamentalists) and the more pragmatic or centrist "Realos", or realistics.
It's less of an issue for the party now. These days the Greens have their sights on the centre ground.
What's interesting about Hesse is that the Greens and CDU are negotiating to renew a regional coalition government here. Analysts predict that it could be a model for Germany's next governing alliance at federal level. But they would have to overcome significant differences - not least on migration.
"We don't even have common ground to talk about migration, because we haven't managed to pass an immigration law yet," says Hildegard Förster-Heldmann, a Darmstadt Green politician elected with more than 30% of the vote. "That would be the first step. Then we can step-by-step convince people and create common ground."
Political turbulence
She faces the same challenge as her national colleagues: how to keep the momentum going.
"The subjects we work on - the environment, resources, sustainability, are subjects which affect everyone," she says.
"The Greens were the only ones who managed to show those subjects were interconnected. If we keep working on that, we might be able to keep the voters who supported us on impulse."
Some see the success of the Greens as an antidote to the far right. But Dirk Jörke, a professor of political science at Darmstadt University, is wary.
"I don't believe this will make right-wing populism disappear - quite the opposite. It will lead to an increasing division and the debate will become more morally charged. In the end that will not contribute to the decline of far-right populists, but rather confirm them."
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A project to preserve and display a historical collection of railway locomotives and carriages has received a £35,000 development grant. | The Isle of Wight Steam Railway Company has been awarded Heritage Lottery funding for its Changing Trains project.
The £1.1m scheme aims to build a rolling stock storage and display building at Havenstreet.
Chairman Steve Oates said: "This is a tremendous boost to us."
The railway now has two years to submit a more detailed bid for the remainder of the funds needed.
Mr Oates said: "Changing Trains will give visitors the opportunity to view historic railway vehicles at close quarters and discover how they were once so much a part of life on the Island."
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Samuel Pepys never intended his famous diaries to be made public. But without them, we would be denied his very colourful eyewitness accounts of 17th Century London life. How did he manage to be in the right place at the right time? | The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich is seeking to find the answer in a new exhibition looking at Pepys's meteoric rise from relatively humble beginnings.
"The 1.25 million words in Samuel Pepys' diaries give us the richest record we have of Britain in the 1660s," says co-curator Robert Blyth.
"It was a terrifically turbulent and exciting time. You get the end of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, the restoration of Charles II, and then the plague and the Great Fire of London.
"Pepys was there for it all."
Pepys sat for this portrait several times over a number of weeks. Dressed in a hired gown, he wanted to look like a cultured and sophisticated man about town.
But he paid for such a look in more ways than one - writing in his diary that he almost broke his neck looking over his shoulder to hold the pose for artist John Hayls.
From a modest background - his father was a tailor - Pepys rose to be a senior naval administrator, an MP and president of the Royal Society.
"He was a real social climber," says exhibition co-curator Kris Martin. "Partly self-made, but he owes a lot to his distant cousin Edward Montagu who played a major role in his success."
Pepys's diaries were written in a form of shorthand - partly to conceal the content, and partly so Pepys could write quickly.
For more than 100 years the volumes sat on the shelves of Magdalene College, Cambridge - with all the other books he had bequeathed after his death. The first transcriptions appeared in the early 1800s - with the full, more candid versions only published in the 1970s.
"He was an appalling womaniser by modern standards," says Blyth. "He may well have been horrified that his diary is now laid bare for all to see. It is like your whole Facebook account being broadcast to the world."
This next painting marks the restoration of the English monarchy at the end of Cromwell's Commonwealth - with Charles II's state entry into London on 22 April 1661, the day before his coronation.
"Pepys rushed to Cornhill to watch it. He got a room, some cake and wine - and admired the ladies," says Kris Martin. "But he also mentions how incredible the scene was. Sparkling diamonds woven into fabric and crowds cheering."
The white arches in the distance were specially made temporary structures - constructed of plaster and paper mache - designed to show the strength of the restored monarchy.
The scene is in marked contrast to the cold January day in 1649, when Pepys bunked-off school and headed to Whitehall to watch the execution of Charles I.
"Pepys was a republican and supported Cromwell as a young man," says Martin. "But he switched, on the advice of his cousin Edward Montagu, just at the right time as the republic was crumbling."
"And Pepys was, of course, at Westminster Abbey to witness to coronation of Charles II," says Robert Blyth.
"In his diary he complains about not being able to hear the music too well. And he doesn't see all of it. It is a very long ceremony, and he leaves early to go to the toilet."
The coronation painting above also stresses that the newly restored monarchy is secure - adds Martin.
"The King's loins are on display. It is very much about 'I am fertile, I will give you children, we will rule a long time'."
The actress Nell Gwyn, reclining in the painting above, was Charles II's mistress.
Pepys called her "pretty, witty Nell".
"She had a real talent for comedic roles," says Blyth. "And avid theatregoer Pepys took delight in watching women on stage - looking at the female form."
The up-close image of a flea below comes from a publication which Pepys described as "the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life".
Micrographia, by Robert Hooke, was the first book to illustrate insects and plants as seen through microscopes.
And it was through rat fleas that the deadly bubonic plague began to sweep through London at the end of 1664.
"Pepys was constantly worried about the plague," says Martin. "He loses friends. His baker. His butcher. And he was obsessed with death rates, checking them weekly.
"He is also concerned about wearing his new wig, as it may have been made from the hair of plague victims."
He never got the disease.
Pepys's accounts of the Great Fire of London in September 1666 are, says Blyth, "without doubt some of the most affecting and extraordinary entries in his diary".
"For the whole year the population of London had a great sense of foreboding, because the year had the number of the devil in it - 666. There was just this sense that something appalling was going to happen."
The fire started at the king's bakers in Pudding Lane, and quickly spread west through a tinder-dry London, buffeted by a strong easterly wind.
Famously, Pepys buried a parmesan cheese and some wine in his garden.
"He offered his advice to King Charles and his brother, James the Duke of York," says Blyth. "He was granted an audience because the duke was Pepys's boss in the navy - and the capable Pepys would be able to get the instruments of government working together to fight the fire."
Blyth says that once the fire was out, Pepys was invited to dinner and, as typical with middle-class Londoners, the conversation turned to property prices.
"And how landlords would now, because more than 100,000 people had been made homeless, be able to command greater rents for those properties which had survived."
In his role as Lord High Admiral, James, Duke of York, would not have usually dressed quite so flamboyantly as he is in the painting below.
"For this portrait, the future King James II is shown in the stylised outfit of Mars the Roman God of War," says Blyth. "But the duke was a skilled commander, not just a figurehead."
And for most of Samuel Pepys's career as a naval administrator, James would have been his boss.
England's main nautical rival at that time was the Dutch Republic.
The painting above shows the humiliating raid on the Medway in 1667 - during the Second Anglo-Dutch War.
Pictured in the centre is the English flagship, the Royal Charles - which was seized by the Dutch. The same ship had brought Charles II back from exile in 1660.
Blyth says Pepys was not implicated in the incident but he was clearly worried for the future of the monarchy and any implications for his career - noting in his diary that it was not his fault.
"I have, in my own person, done my full duty, I am sure," he writes.
Samuel Pepys may have been only in the congregation at Westminster Abbey for the coronation of Charles II, but by the time Charles' brother James came to the throne in 1685, Pepys's social standing was such that he was one of the coronation canopy bearers.
This etching shows the procession - with Pepys on the front left corner. He took on the role because, by that time, Pepys had become a Baron of the Cinque Ports - in Kent and Sussex.
Robert Blyth and Kris Martin both stress the value of Pepys's daily observations, because they paint a more colourful, human picture of life in the 17th Century.
"He was dashing around London soaking up all that was going on," says Blyth. "Food and drink. Gossiping about who was in and out of favour. Moaning about traffic jams. You can impose 21st Century London on what he wrote."
"Pepys could have thrown his private diary on the fire but he didn't," adds Martin. "And because he didn't, we have learnt so much. We have the diary of an everyman, but also a mover and shaker in society. He was a very modern character. There is a bit of Pepys in all of us."
Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution can be seen at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London from 20 November 2015 to 28 March 2016.
All images subject to copyright.
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A drone attack on the world's biggest oil-processing plant has triggered the largest jump in crude prices in decades and raised fears of a new conflict in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia has said its oil output will return to normal in the next few weeks, causing prices to ease a little. But the repercussions are still being felt thousands of kilometres away in India, explains the BBC's Suranjana Tewari. | What happened?
On 14 September, drones targeted Saudi Arabia's Abqaiq oil refinery and Khurais oil field. The attacks knocked out half of Saudi Arabia's total output and 5% of global oil supply.
Saudi Arabia is the world's biggest oil exporter, shipping more than seven million barrels daily. Saudi stocks stood at 188 million barrels in June, according to official data.
Yemen's Houthi rebels - who are aligned with Iran - have claimed responsibility for the attacks. The group has launched attacks on Saudi soil before, including on oil pipelines.
But this attack was on a much bigger scale, hitting the world's biggest oil-processing plant as well as another oil field.
Saudi Arabia has said that production will be back to normal by the end of September, which has slightly calmed oil markets.
What's India got to do with it?
India imports nearly 83% of the oil it consumes, making it one of the biggest importers of oil in the world.
Most of its crude oil and cooking gas comes from Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
It used to import more than 10% of its oil from Iran. However, earlier this year, the US pressured India to stop buying Iranian oil after walking out of the nuclear deal.
India also imports from other countries like the US, but at a higher cost.
"India viewed Saudi Arabia as amongst the safest suppliers in the world," BJP spokesperson and energy expert Narendra Taneja told the BBC. "With this sophisticated attack and the precision with which the attack was done, we have now realised that their facilities are vulnerable and that does make us anxious."
He added that a lot would now depend on how Saudi Arabia responds to the attack - any military action would lead to escalation in the region, which could then disrupt supplies from the entire Gulf region.
"Right now, the worry for India is the price - but if the supply is not properly resumed in the next two weeks, then we will also have to worry about the supply."
In the last seven years, India's energy strategy has focused on diversifying sources of supply.
"We are importing from Africa and the US, but the Middle East remains our main source," he said. "India will have to make constant efforts to diversify more," Mr Taneja said.
What does it mean for Indians?
It depends on how long production is stalled. Saudi Arabia says it will take a few weeks to repair the facility.
But any longer will have a further impact on the price of oil and that could cause India's import costs to go up.
The Indian government is already stretched financially and so higher costs mean it has less cash with which to effectively tackle its economic slowdown.
The price of petrol and diesel could rise if crude prices globally continue to rise.
Every one dollar increase in the price of oil raises India's import bill by $1.5bn every year.
It would also affect many industries, including manufacturing and aviation, and can accelerate inflation.
By-products of crude oil are also used in the production of items like plastic and tyres, which may become more expensive.
So, what can be done?
Not much, if experts are to be believed.
"The government may not be able to do much right now," Madan Sadnavis, an economist, said.
"It can buffer supplies through reserves which we have which will help perhaps a month or so. If the crisis persists, it can cut taxes, but that affects revenue and hence the fiscal deficit. But as long as the price remains less than $70 a barrel, the shock can be absorbed," he added.
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Historian and constitutional expert Lord Peter Hennessy looks back at British history to evaluate the significance of the referendum result. The Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary University of London was speaking to the BBC's Diplomatic Correspondent James Robbins. | Never in our peacetime history have so many dials been reset as a result of a single day's events.
The only thing comparable in my lifetime is the end of the British Empire, which, like this, was a huge geopolitical shift. But getting rid of the British Empire was done over many, many years and by and large in the time control of the British government of the day. It left very few scars on us.
But this is sudden. This is guillotine time. This is quite extraordinary and in peacetime British history quite unprecedented.
If we go back to the beginning, it took three attempts for Britain to join the European project.
Harold Macmillan steered his cabinet towards the first application to join the European Economic Community in July 1961, an effort which failed because of opposition from French leader Charles De Gaulle.
During Harold Wilson's second application in 1967, The Labour prime minister said we wouldn't take 'no' for an answer and ended up getting exactly that again from General De Gaulle.
Ted Heath finally pulled it off with President Pompidou and the law was passed in 1972, leading to our admittance in January 1973.
Ever since then it's been part of the warp and woof of British foreign policy and our attitude towards the world. It's part of Britain's notion of its ability to punch heavier than its weight internationally, and it has been central to so many calculations.
That's why this vote is the most remarkable jolt to the system. Where it leads in terms of the psychology of British politics as well as the personnel of British politics and indeed the very survival of the United Kingdom as a union with Scotland is all up in the air.
There never has been a day when so many moving parts were thrown up in one go and nobody knows where they will fall.
We know one thing and one thing only - that within a few years we shall no longer be a member of the European Union.
We know so little else about how it will play out, both in terms of the emotional geography of our politics and the emotional geography of our people.
The referendum has revealed deeper fissures and deeper divisions than perhaps we realised were there.
We know we've been a country ill at ease with itself for a very long time, with all sorts of divides, including those based on geography and wealth.
But this process has thrown it into stark relief, and we're going to have to stand back and take a long and careful look at ourselves.
We will need to re-examine the kind of society we are and the kind of relationships we want in the world.
'US will be horrified'
Looking to our relationship with the United States, ever since the Marshall Plan brought the Western European countries together after the Second World War to put a dollar curtain up against the Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union, the US has wanted us to be a good European player.
They have also wanted us to be their number one friend. We were meant to be the hinge that joined the North Atlantic instinct with the European instinct.
For this reason they will be horrified by this result. Their notion of who we are and the special ingredients of our special position in the world will be as much affected as we are by this.
I suspect the feeling will be that they've got enough to worry about in the world with a resurgent Putin and Middle East in the state it is without their one dependable ally causing all this trouble.
They will see Britain - instead of being its usual force for stability in the world as a great and mature democracy - as a bringer of instability to Europe, and they won't like it one bit.
This result, on the other hand, is, of course, a victory for democracy. The greatest strength of any country is the degree to which it is an open society and this vote showed that on that index we excel.
The sovereign will of the British people is what has prevailed in producing this enormous geopolitical shift. So it's three cheers for democracy and for the 72.2% voter turnout rate.
While the consequences of it are very complicated, the will of the people will obviously have to be respected.
But, my heavens, it becomes a nitty gritty slog from now on. In particular, the long-term consequences for our place in the world are very considerable indeed.
In 2025, we will be out of the European Union and we could be shorn of Scotland. We will be a very different country.
I hope to heaven - because I love this country deeply - that it doesn't turn narrowly inward-looking and resentful.
That ain't what the British people are for.
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Nearly 80 workers were taken off a North Sea oil platform amid fears it had been damaged by Storm Imogen. | Shell said 40 workers taken off Brent Bravo went to the Brent Charlie platform and 39 to Brent Delta on Sunday night, as a precaution.
The company said there were concerns over structural damage on one of Bravo's legs.
The Brent Bravo is 115 miles north east of Lerwick.
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A man was taken to hospital with a gunshot wound after a police car was flagged down in Birmingham city centre. | Officers were stopped in Bristol Street just after 05:30 GMT, West Midlands Police said.
"The 24-year-old was in a white Audi and his injuries are not believed to be life-threatening," a spokeswoman added.
Two vehicles and several other men are thought to have fled the scene. Anyone with information was asked to contact police.
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The Scottish Prison Service (SPS) has just announced a move to allow children of women prisoners extended "sleepover" visits at the new HMP Inverclyde facility. But what's life really like for the young people who are separated from their mothers by prison bars? | By Alicia QueiroBBC Scotland
Kirsten Johnston is mum to two boys. When they were eight and three, Kirsten was sentenced to two years in prison for embezzlement. It was her first offence.
Kirsten spent two weeks in Cornton Vale, the infamous all-women's prison in Stirling, before being moved to HMP Greenock. Initially, she was put on suicide watch.
She served six months in prison. She rang her sons every day, and saw them when she could - in Cornton Vale this depended on how many prisoners wanted to use the family visiting facilities, in Greenock they would visit once a week.
Kirsten could have seen them for longer, but Greenock prison staff advised against it - male prisoners were in the visiting hall for the second half of the session and she got the impression from staff that it "wasn't advisable" for her children to be there at the same time.
General visiting times - when all visitors come at once - were hard. Drugs would be passed around before her children's eyes. "I felt very uneasy," Kirsten says. "You're waiting for something to happen. You don't want your family and your kids to be in that sort of environment."
Kirsten's boys would spend three hours in the car before they got to Greenock. When they arrived, they wanted to move around. But Kirsten wasn't allowed - she had to stay seated all the time.
Anxiety issues
When Kirsten was in Cornton Vale, her children thought she was in hospital for mental health issues, as she had been before. Indeed, many of the children of her fellow inmates had no idea their mothers were in prison. In Greenock, however, her children knew where she was.
"They took it in their stride," she says - but the effects were inevitable. "I called home one night and my eldest son was in a terrible state, he'd had a horrible nightmare. He said he'd been trying to get me out of prison.
"I tried to pacify him and say - 'It's just a silly dream, I'm not going to be here forever'. But then you put the phone down and you go back to your bed and you've got these thoughts in your head… it's just a horrible position to be in."
She can see the marks on her sons of six months without mum. Her eldest has had anxiety issues and her youngest has been questioning the experience in the last few weeks. "Why were you there, mummy?" he asks - or, "Remember, we used to go to that place to see you."
"I'm just honest with him," Kirsten says. "I try to explain it so that he understands. I just say: 'mummy did something she shouldn't have done and so she had to go there'."
Prison charity Families Outside estimates that 27,000 children in Scotland experience the imprisonment of a parent every year.
However, the SPS is only considering allowing children of female offenders to spend sleepover visits at HMP Inverclyde.
Tom Fox, head of corporate affairs at the SPS, said: "If a woman is in custody the impact on the family can be much more catastrophic.
"The overwhelming majority of female prisoners have some sort of family. You just need to take a walk round a wing - instead of seeing pin-ups of pop stars or women in bikinis, it's photographs of children."
'Innocent victims'
Children whose mothers are imprisoned tend to face greater challenges, because the majority of children are cared for primarily by their mothers.
"It's devastating losing any parent into the criminal justice system," says Sarah Roberts, child and family support manager at Families Outside.
"But if the mother's the primary care-giver then that is utterly devastating - because they're not just losing their mum but also their home, their care-giver, their family."
According to Families Outside, when a father goes to prison in Scotland, 95% of children remain living with their mother. But when a mother is incarcerated, only 17% stay with their father. The rest are sent to live with family or put into social care.
The psychological effects of losing a parent to prison are not unlike bereavement: loss, fear, anger, shock and sadness. But the added stigma and shame of having a parent in jail compounds these emotions.
Media representation can be particularly harmful. Sarah Roberts describes how one woman, convicted of drugs smuggling, was described by the press as "an evil monster". Her children read the article. "It was incredibly damaging for them," she says.
Tam Baillie, Scotland's commissioner for children and young people, agrees. "Children of offenders suffer ongoing trauma, loss and stress throughout arrest, trial, imprisonment and release," he says. "Publicly, they may be exposed to shame and bullying, while privately they cannot be comforted by the strength and love of the absent parent."
He recommends child impact assessment reports at the point of sentencing - so that children's wellbeing is taken into account before a mother's sentence is decided.
As it stands, children with a parent in prison are three-times more likely to have serious mental health issues than those in the general population.
Sarah Roberts says children need to be listened to and supported. "I think when a mother goes to prison, children are made to feel as if they've done something wrong or are from a 'bad family' - it's really important they hear the message that it's not their fault.
"The children have done nothing wrong. These are innocent victims every time."
Planning for the future
The situation for these children may seem bleak - but it's improving.
Some Scottish prisons already have mother and baby units, where young children can spend time with their mothers if she is the sole care-giver - and once the new Inverclyde prison and Edinburgh unit are built, all prisons will have the facilities.
Cornton Vale also has independent living areas outside the security perimeter of the jail. They house mothers with very young children who are nearing the end of their sentence.
There are positive parenting classes and "bonding visits" in many prisons - so children can spend time with their parents outside of normal visiting sessions. Every prison has a family contact development officer, responsible for helping inmates maintain healthy family relationships.
Sarah Roberts says the facilities for younger children have improved massively - even in men's prisons.
HMP Low Moss has homework clubs, where children visiting their fathers can engage with them in normal family activities. At HMP Addiewell, there are "Tune In" sessions, where dads can sing nursery songs in family groups.
What's lacking is more flexible arrangements for older children. "Visiting every weekend doesn't work with teenagers because they want to have their life but they desperately miss their mum," says Sarah Roberts. "So options like an overnight visit or a private family visit could be really helpful."
That's where the Inverclyde proposal comes in - it gives the opportunity for older children to stay with their mother on weekends or during school holidays.
"What we're trying to do is something that's beneficial to those in our care, but that's also beneficial to children," says Tom Fox. "If that positive relationship with the mother is maintained, future generations are less likely to find themselves caught up in the criminal justice system."
Following her own experience, Kirsten Johnston is unsure of the benefits of sleepover visits. "What would happen if a child got upset halfway through and wanted to go home?" she wonders.
But she agrees that longer, more family-friendly visits are the best way to keep families strong in prison.
A one-size-fits-all system is never going to be adequate when dealing with the myriad of issues faced by female offenders and their families.
The key, according to Sarah Roberts, is having a range of options - "so that young children can interact and older children can have the time they need in the way they need it".
She adds: "Then, the impact for young people, children and mums is huge. It's saying to mum: 'You're still a parent'. And what do we want when people come out of prison? We want them to be parents."
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On John Magufuli's first day as Tanzania's president, a year ago tomorrow, he created a storm on social media by making an unannounced visit to the finance ministry, catching the workers off-guard. But what else has he achieved in his first year? The BBC's Dickens Olewe looks at his highs and lows. | What would Magufuli do?
During that visit to the finance ministry, he reportedly asked after those who were not at their desks - a subtle message that he would not tolerate the legendary absenteeism of government workers.
He said he was keen to ensure that the government would have enough money to fund its election promises.
Surprise visits of government offices have become a trademark, meant to project his looming presence and to instil discipline and accountability.
But perhaps his most effective stunt yet was leading the country in cleaning the streets on independence day, 9 December.
He had already announced the cancellation of the planned lavish celebrations, with the allocated funds going to cover expenses in public hospitals.
This act boosted his reputation among East Africans, inspiring a hashtag on Twitter; #WhatWouldMagufuliDo which was widely used in neighbouring countries.
Although the hashtag was mostly used to mock Mr Magufuli's austere policies, it unwittingly defined his leadership style, which many have come to admire.
Approval rating
Despite winning early admirers, many doubted that he would maintain his hands-on strategy, but so far he seems to have dumbfounded his critics.
He continues to attract admiration for following through his campaign promises to change "business as usual" in Tanzania. A recent poll says he has a 96% approval rating.
"There is no doubt that President Magufuli is very popular among many ordinary Tanzanians," political analyst Kitila Mumbo told the BBC.
"But many are also keen to see him provide civic space for freedom of expression and political gatherings and rallies which his government banned a couple of months ago."
Magufuli effect
Weeks after he assumed office, government officials seem to be following his cue.
A top local official, probably wanting to impress, ordered the police to lock up workers who had arrived late for a meeting.
The move was criticised by human rights groups who said that employment laws should be followed.
The BBC's Sammy Awami in Dar es Salaam says that the attitude of government workers has changed since Mr Magufuli came to office:
"They are now more willing to do their jobs and are afraid of engaging in corruption. People are experiencing better services in hospitals and schools," he says.
The president's main promise of extending free education to secondary school, which came into effect in January, has also been well received, our correspondent adds.
Ghost slayer
In May, an audit ordered by Mr Magufuli revealed that there were some 10,000 "ghost workers" on the public sector payroll.
Payments to the non-existent employees had been costing the government more than $2m (£1.4m) a month, according to the prime minister's office.
Such revelations continue to magnify the challenges the country faces and his actions endear him to Tanzanians.
Example to Kenya
A recent example of his popularity came during a visit to neighbouring Kenya earlier this week, only his third foreign trip since he came to office.
His visit coincided with news of an alleged corruption scandal that has rocked President Uhuru Kenyatta's government.
Kenya's top cartoonist Gaddo depicted state officials, who had gone to receive Mr Magufuli at the airport, dashing off as he emerged from the plane holding a whip.
His image as a corruption fighter has captivated Kenyans who suggested that Mr Kenyatta's government should get tips from him:
However, it has not been all rosy for Mr Magufuli.
Another African dictator?
Gaddo recently caricatured African leaders, perceived to be dictators, in several categories.
He listed Mr Magufuli as a petty dictator, saying that his government's actions to shut down the media and intimidate opposition parties shows that he's "an aspiring dictator".
At least 10 people have been charged for "insulting" Mr Magufuli on social media platforms, leading to criticism from human rights organisations.
His popularity seems to be the antithesis of what US President Barack Obama famously called for as a solution to the continent's political problems during his inaugural visit to Africa in 2009: "Strong institutions instead of strongmen".
Mr Mumbo told the BBC that despite Mr Magufuli's popularity, many Tanzanians also want to see an "open-democratic space".
In June, opposition parties criticised his government for banning live broadcasts of parliament sessions and street protests.
Attack on freedom of expression
The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a US aid agency, cancelled nearly $500m (£405m) of funding in March partly on concerns over the enforcement of a cyber crimes law which they say limits freedom of expression.
MCC also expressed concern about the election in the semi-autonomous region of Zanzibar which it said was "neither inclusive nor representative".
The October election for president of the semi-autonomous archipelago was cancelled half-way through the count.
The opposition Civic United Front (CUF) said the annulment was because it had won, but the electoral commission said there had been widespread fraud.
The information ministry has also banned two radio stations for allegations of "sedition" and a weekly newspaper for "defaming" Mr Magufuli.
It seems these concerns have not shadowed what many consider as his attributes.
African of the year?
In fact, Mr Magufuli might just cap his year by winning the prestigious Forbes Africa person of the year award - he has been nominated for "boosting Tanzania's economy".
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After rumours that Apple was going to get rid of the headphone jack in its imminent iPhone 7, more than 200,000 people have signed a petition asking them to reconsider. This humble plug is a rare example of technology that has stood the test of time, writes Chris Stokel-Walker. | For what remains an unconfirmed rumour, a lot of people are upset about the new iPhone. It's alleged that Apple will be scrapping the 3.5mm socket, instead leaving headphones to be plugged into the "Lightning" port - the company's own design of socket.
Cynics have pointed out that while this might enable iPhones to be slightly thinner, it will render many headphones useless and force manufacturers to pay Apple a fee to use their Lightning plugs on products.
The petition says Apple's purported move would "singlehandedly create mountains of electronic waste".
It will also be a blow for a piece of technology that has been remarkably resilient. The 3.5mm headphone jack is essentially a 19th Century bit of kit - it is a miniaturised version of the classic quarter-inch jack (6.35mm), which is said to go back as far as 1878.
Both sizes of plug have a nubbin of metal that nips in before flaring out just before the tip. "It needed to be something that could be inserted and removed very easily, but still make a secure connection," says Charlie Slee, a member of the Audio Engineering Society.
Initially the quarter-inch jack was used by operators in old-fashioned telephone switchboards, plugging and unplugging connections. "The standard has always been quarter-inch jacks," says Dr Simon Hall, head of music technology at Birmingham City University.
"Professional headphones in studios, guitar leads - they all run off quarter-inch jacks."
Of course, as miniaturisation changed audio equipment, so the plug had to have a smaller alternative.
The 3.5mm version quickly became popular, spread by the use of personal headsets on transistor radios in the middle of the 20th Century.
The jack is known as a tip, ring, sleeve - or TRS - connection. The "tip" transfers audio into the left-hand earplug of a stereo headphone set, and the "ring" the right. The "sleeve" is the ground or "shield". This set-up is stereo - the original mono plugs had only tip and sleeve. Certain modern plugs have a second ring to allow control of a headset microphone or volume.
"Technically speaking, it's not a bad design," Slee says of the utilitarian, adaptable design. "If the parts are made cheaply they can break and lose contact, but ultimately it does the job it was designed to do."
And yet, if the rumours - which Apple is not commenting on - are true, it bodes ill for the 3.5mm jack.
Apple has a track record of being early to abolish things which then start to disappear from rival products too. It killed the 3.5 inch floppy disk early. It also was among the first to remove optical drives.
But those signing the petition on the Sum of Us site and social media users have suggested that Apple's motive is greed.
The potential grief in a switch to Apple's proprietary Lightning connector is obvious.
"It feels painful because you've got hundreds of millions of devices out there that are using the old standard," says Horace Dediu, a technology analyst with in-depth knowledge of Apple.
If you're using £1,000 headphones with your iPhone at the moment, you're going to be slightly cross.
And Charlie Slee thinks consumers are also concerned about ceding control to Apple. "People are mainly upset because they like to think they're in control of their technology," he says.
But this sense of the consumer in control is misplaced, Slee says. "Actually, the contrary is true: The big technology companies have always been in control of how you listen to music and watch videos."
The headphones in history
The "primitive headphones" (as above) used for listening to early phonographs were simple acoustic tubes.
Headphones are really just ordinary telephone receivers adapted to fit a headset, says John Liffen, Curator of Communications at the Science Museum. The headset usually had just one receiver for a single ear.
The first headsets with a receiver for each ear were just called "telephones". The name was supplanted by "headphones" by the beginning of the 1920s when they were being widely used to listen to broadcasting via crystal sets.
For many years headphone receivers were the simple "Bell" type with permanent magnet, coil and diaphragm. Today's high-end 'phones are considerably more sophisticated, similar to miniature loudspeakers.
Source: John Liffen, The Science Museum
"I think it's a storm in a teacup," adds Simon Hall. His reasoning? Having a standardised headphone jack on mobile phones and MP3 players is only a relatively recent luxury.
"If you look at the previous generation of phones, things like Nokia phones, you had to have an adapter," he reasons. "If you want to connect headphones to professional equipment, you also need a professional adapter."
As recently as 2010, Samsung phones came equipped with a proprietary headphone port not dissimilar to Apple's rumoured replacement for the 3.5mm socket, the "Lightning" port.
This isn't the first time Apple has aroused ire. Way back in 2007, with the first iPhone, it received complaints that the headphone jack was sunk into the casing.
One technology wag called it "a great business plan - break an important device function, and sell the solution for fun and profit." The problem was fixed when Apple released its second iPhone model in 2008.
But Apple is known for evolving technology: "They got rid of DVDs, they got rid of the floppy disk drive; they got rid of parallel ports, they're eventually getting rid of USB. This is how they move," says Dediu, the Apple-watcher. He reckons the switch to Apple's proprietary connection augurs a planned move to headphones that are akin to the Apple Watch.
Owners of "old" headphones may find themselves having to buy adapters.
Dediu forecasts a rapid change. "What Apple does is catalyse transitions," he says. "It would have happened anyway, but if it wasn't for Apple it'd have taken 10-15 years, but now it'll happen in 5-7 years."
That the time may have come for the 3.5mm jack to be replaced shouldn't come as such a shock, believes Dediu. "Studying Moore's Law and the history of technology, it's clear we're not going to stick around with something analogue for long," he says. "It's almost puzzling that it's taken so long."
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Sri Lanka is in a state of shock and confusion, trying to understand how a little-known Islamist group may have unleashed the wave of co-ordinated suicide bombings that resulted in the Easter Sunday carnage - the worst since the end of the civil war a decade ago. | By Anbarasan EthirajanBBC News, Colombo
The South Asian island nation has experience of such attacks - suicide bombers were used by Tamil Tiger rebels during the civil war. But the ruthlessness of the new atrocities has stunned the nation anew.
Eventually the government spokesman, Health Minister Rajitha Senaratne, came out and blamed National Thowheed Jamath (NTJ), a home-grown Islamist group, for the bombings.
"There was an international network without which these attacks could not have succeeded," he told reporters on Monday.
That might go some way to explaining how a group that has been blamed for promoting hate speech may now have been able to scale up its capacity so monumentally.
On Tuesday, however, the Islamic State (IS) group said its militants had carried out the attacks. It published a video of eight men the group claimed were behind the attacks.
The IS claim should be treated cautiously. It is not clear whether these men were trained by the group or simply inspired by IS ideology.
Political deadlock and confusion
The manner in which NTJ was identified was circuitous. The prime minister said there had been warnings made to officials that hadn't been shared with the cabinet. He said only the president would get such briefings, even though it is not clear if he personally did in this instance.
This is not an insignificant statement from a prime minister who was at loggerheads with the president for much of the past year. Many are drawing a conclusion about how political discord can have serious consequences - as well as undermining trust in the messages being put out.
If the suicide bombers were local Sri Lankan Muslims, as stated by the government, then it is a colossal failure by the intelligence agencies. Information is also now emerging in the US media that the Sri Lankan government may also have had warnings from US and Indian intelligence about a possible threat.
"Our understanding is that [the warning] was correctly circulated among security and police," Shiral Lakthilaka, a senior adviser to President Maithripala Sirisena, said.
The Sri Lankan president, who oversees security forces, has now set up a committee to find out what went wrong.
Sri Lankan intelligence was credited with foiling several suicide attacks by the Tamil Tiger rebels at the height of the civil war and for penetrating a well-knit and ruthless Tamil Tiger organisation.
Sri Lanka's Muslim strife
While this is clearly a security and political failure, there are also questions about the nature of communal strife in Sri Lanka's more recent history. During the civil war, Muslims were also targeted by Tamil Tiger rebels and suffered at their hands.
But Muslim community leaders say successive Sri Lankan governments have failed to restore confidence among young Muslims following more recent attacks by some members of the majority Sinhalese Buddhist community.
One of the worst incidents was in the town of Digana in central Sri Lanka where one person died when a Sinhalese mob attacked Muslim shops and mosques in March last year.
"After Digana quite a few Muslims lost faith in the government to provide them security. Some of them got the idea that they can defend themselves," says Hilmy Ahamed, vice-president of the Sri Lanka Muslim Council.
The attacks and what the youths perceived as the lack of action by the government may have led some of them towards groups like NTJ.
Some of the radicals were blamed for damaging Buddhist statues in recent years and their leader was arrested last year for offending religious sentiments. He later apologised for offending the sentiments of the Buddhist Sinhalese.
Radical preacher
Now it is widely believed a new group emerged a few years ago under the leadership of Zaharan Hashim, a radical Muslim preacher from eastern Sri Lanka.
Mr Hashim posted several videos on social media purportedly promoting hatred against non-Muslims. Most of his videos are in the Tamil language. His teachings are said to have attracted several Muslim youths.
"This man was preaching hate with lots of YouTube videos on social media posts. Some of us reported him to the national intelligence services. Once about three years ago and once in January this year," says Mr Ahamed.
He added that security services did not take any action against Mr Hashim. Reports say the preacher was one of the suicide bombers though it's yet to be confirmed.
Muslim community leaders say a few youths went to Syria to join IS, and some of them were killed in fighting there.
It's important not to overstate this, though, and a former senior military officer Maj Gen (Retired) GA Chandrasiri says "we have very cordial relationship with the Muslims. Most Muslims are not with these people. They are peace loving people".
There are no reports so far of a high number of jihadists returning to Sri Lanka. But even if a select few jihadists are angry with the majority, why were Christians targeted?
In the complex cocktail of Sri Lanka's religious and ethnic tensions, Christians are almost unique for not perpetrating any kind of violence on behalf of their community. After all, it is a religion that crosses ethnic lines.
Global dimension?
I covered the Sri Lankan civil war for years and reported on many Tamil Tiger suicide attacks. It took years for the group to be able to learn to detonate such devices.
So it is intriguing that a lesser-known Islamist group, with a few home-grown radicals, could carry out six - some say even seven - suicide attacks with such pinpoint precision and devastation. None of them failed.
Even though connections with global jihadist groups are unclear, the choice of major luxury hotels and Christians as a target - in addition to the sophistication of the operation - makes it plausible that local radicalism has come under the influence of global jihadist networks. It would be a tried and tested pattern in global attacks.
During the Sri Lankan civil war foreign tourists were spared and attacks on outsiders were rare. In the latest bombings, many foreigners were killed and this has raised the spectre of links with al-Qaeda or IS.
"For this type of operation you need lots of assistance from outside. You need finances, training and technique for this kind of work. You can't do these things alone. May be there was some help from outside," Gen Chandrasiri said.
Violence is not new to Sri Lanka. It went through turbulent times during a left-wing insurrection in the 1970s followed by a nearly three-decade bloody war with the Tamil Tiger rebels. Tens of thousands of people were killed.
But the ruthlessness and sophistication of the latest atrocities indicate that it will be challenge for the Sri Lankan security forces to deal with those behind the bombings. The last thing the Sri Lankan public wants is more violence and recrimination.
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Plans to regenerate Swindon town centre have moved a step closer after the council granted outline permission for the first phase of a £330m development. | The Union Square scheme will include residential apartments, a multi-storey car park, a bus station, medical centre, shops and restaurants.
The project is to be situated between Swindon railway station and The Parade.
Chris Hitchings of regeneration company Forward Swindon said the planning permission was "a very important step".
A planning application for the first phase of development on the former police station site off Fleming Way will now be submitted to Swindon Borough Council.
Developers Muse want to begin building work in April 2012.
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Happy, sad or poignant? Pop or classical? | By Max EvansBBC News
Is there a perfect combination of music to ease the stress, fear and boredom bearing down on many people during the coronavirus lockdown?
"I don't think there's a recipe, but I think there are some broad things we can look at to help," said Elizabeth Coombes, a music therapist who has previously created her own playlist to ease anxiety.
So, what should go on your lockdown playlist?
The potential mental health implications of the coronavirus pandemic and resulting lockdown have been well-documented, with some warning of damaging long-term effects.
But Ms Coombes believes music can "really help" by providing mental "refreshment". So what are the the sounds to try?
"One of the most important things [to think about] is 'what do I need right now in terms of my own well-being?'
"We instinctively use music to change our emotions and probably just don't think about it overtly," the University of South Wales senior lecturer said.
"So, we might use energetic music if we want to do something energetic, like the housework or a work-out.
"I think maybe now is the time to actually think about it more consciously."
Ms Coombes said some parents of premature babies had told her during one study that Ed Sheeran's timbre helped them to relax - but added that picking songs and artists was largely subjective.
For example, when she posted Adele's Someone like You on a list of potentially relaxing songs many people agreed, but one replied to say "I'd rather fill my ears with molten lead than listen to it".
"In practice, it can be really difficult to generalise about things like that. I think there is something about what you could call your own significant referential music - songs you have a special relationship with.
"It's quite deep and complex."
Elizabeth Coombes' lockdown playlist
You'll Never Walk Alone by Gerry and the Pacemakers topped a recent chart of classic songs, enjoying renewed popularity amid the coronavirus crisis.
And Emma Lewis, 24, would certainly want classic hits on her playlist, including September by Earth, Wind & Fire and Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours by Stevie Wonder.
Ms Lewis, who works in admissions at Cardiff University, has been swapping playlists with her family and friends, and compiling a collaborative playlist remotely with colleagues as a "nice way to be connected".
"I think it's definitely a way we that we can feel together when we're not," she said.
"It's a way we can universally share something. I think everyone can understand that."
She has also been taking part in the popular 30-day song challenge on Instagram, which involves people sharing their favourite songs in response to specific questions.
And music has brought her closer to some people in ways she could not have imagined before lockdown.
"I live in an apartment block here and our neighbours never really spoke, but on Saturday night all of us went out on the balconies and about 15 balconies were singing Delilah by Tom Jones.
"It was a really nice moment we would never have if this wasn't currently happening."
Should you make more than one playlist during lockdown?
BBC Radio 1 presenter Huw Stephens said music had always been an art form which can "soothe and save us".
He said: "This current lockdown has been interesting, because statistics show that people have turned to radio stations more than they have the streaming sites.
"When it comes to creating playlists, I'm always a fan of tuning in to a DJ you trust."
Stephens advised that when making a playlist for yourself at the moment "be kind to yourself".
"You can make as many playlists as you like, with each one serving a different purpose. Some nostalgia is always a good thing; the songs that make you feel good no matter how famous or not they are."
And he said going on a "musical journey online" was always fun, "starting with a video for a song you love and seeing where it takes you next".
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She is one of the world's leading forensic ecologists who has helped gather evidence for some of the highest-profile murder cases of recent years. But Prof Patricia Wiltshire's interest in the botanical world began during her childhood in Wales. | Ms Wiltshire, 77, remembers with fondness the walks she went on with her grandmother, Vera May Tiley, that introduced her to the natural world.
She said: "We lived in a small mining village, Cefn Fforest, near Blackwood in the South Wales valleys.
"We would go on walks and she would show me things in hedgerows; birds' nests, insects and plants we could eat, like hawthorn and wild garlic.
"She was also a good gardener and keen to protect her plants from pests, so I learnt about plant diseases and how to grow food."
Ms Wiltshire's interest in plants grew further after an accident when she was a young child.
She said: "When I was seven, I decided to scare my mother by jumping out on her and shouting 'boo', not realising she was carrying a pan of hot chip fat.
"I got badly burnt and ended up covered in bandages for two years.
"I also suffered from pneumonia, measles, whooping cough and bronchitis, which left me with a chronic cough problem.
"I missed a lot of school but had my encyclopaedias, which were my joy.
"This was post-war Britain. The NHS had just been set up by Aneurin Bevan, and some of his family lived over the road, but access to treatment was still minimal."
Despite her fledgling interest in plants and botany, Ms Wiltshire had little desire to make them her academic profession after she left Lewis Girls' grammar school in Hengoed.
Instead, aged 17, she moved to London and began a job in the civil service.
For the next decade, Ms Wiltshire trained as a medical laboratory technician at Charing Cross Hospital, learning histology (the microscopy study of tissue), bacteriology, and also biochemistry (the chemical processes in living organisms).
She then studied for a botany degree, becoming a lecturer and expert in palynology - the study of pollen and spores.
Pollen and spores can last for millions of years if conditions are right, even on surface soil and vegetation.
So Ms Wiltshire began specialising in archaeological sites - taking soil samples and recreating the environment in and around Roman era sites such as Hadrian's Wall in northern England and Pompeii in Italy.
'Eureka moment'
But in 1994, when she was in her fifties, she received a phone call which would change the course of her career.
It was from a police officer in Hertfordshire asking if she could help with a murder.
A charred body had been left in a ditch and there were tyre marks in the adjacent field.
Police wanted to know if a car belonging to their suspects had been present in the field.
Prof Wiltshire said: "I'd never done anything like it before, but I analysed everything in the car and found pollen from the pedals and footwell matched that of an agricultural field edge.
"When police took me to the crime scene, I was able to identify the exact spot where the body had been dumped from the types of flowers in that section of the hedge.
"It was a eureka moment for me because I didn't think it would be that specific."
Despite her own initial scepticism of forensic ecology, she began working on more and more cases.
In 2002, she helped police gather evidence in the case of murdered schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham, Cambridgeshire.
Police had discovered their bodies in a ditch, but wanted to establish the approach path their killer had used.
Ms Wiltshire was able to do this by analysing the re-growth of trampled plants leading to the ditch.
Police then conducted a detailed search of her route, and found one of Jessica's hairs on a twig.
Ms Wiltshire subsequently gave evidence in the trial of Ian Huntley who was convicted of murdering the two ten-year-olds.
Other high profile cases she has been involved with include the child murders of Milly Dowler and Sarah Payne, and five women murdered by a serial killer in Ipswich in 2006.
Ms Wiltshire has also worked on cases in south Wales.
She said: "In about 2005, I was called to New Tredegar in the Rhymney Valley.
"Two thugs had kicked a man to death, then dumped his body in some ferns.
"It lay there for a few days, then they returned to burn it, but people saw the smoke and called the police.
"They later arrested two men and wanted me to discover if they had been on the site."
Ms Wiltshire matched the pollen from the men's shoes to that at the scene, but was still puzzled as the pollen she discovered was not normally found in Wales.
Eventually she realised that the lorries that were trundling along the adjacent road were carrying topsoil from England, which was blowing onto the field and depositing pollen and spores.
The fact that the pollen was so uniquely located - and matched both the suspects and the crime site - led to the two men confessing.
In another case in Bridgend, a body was lain on some wet, peaty soil, which preserves pollen for a long time.
Ms Wiltshire later found traces of walnut pollen in the soil and on the suspects' shoes, but she knew there was no walnut site close by.
Again, it was eventually discovered that a walnut tree had been cut down by a farmer thirty years previously. The pollen had remained in the soil ever since.
Ms Wiltshire, who published a memoir in 2019, said: "People may not realise it, but pollen and spores can tell us stuff that DNA and fingerprints simply can't.
"Pollen isn't easily washed away and it stays on people's clothes and shoes. If you walk on soil or vegetation, you inevitably pick it up."
Since her first Hertfordshire case, Ms Wiltshire has been able to use the wide range of subjects she studied to develop forensic ecology, which has helped solve many cases over the years.
She said: "Sometimes the police call me a 'Welsh witch' because of the way I process a mass of data and come up with ideas.
"But it's not magic, it's analysis."
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Is Kim Jong-un rational? The new US ambassador to the United Nations thinks he is not. Nikki Haley said after North Korea's simultaneous launch of four ballistic missiles: "This is not a rational person." But is she right? | By Stephen EvansBBC News, Seoul
Kim Jong-un may have many flaws. He is without doubt ruthless - the bereaved relatives of the victims of his regime, including within his own family, would testify to that. He may have driven through an economic policy that keeps his people living at a standard way below that in South Korea and, increasingly, China.
And he seems to have personal issues, such as eating a lot - photographs show his bulging girth - and being a fairly heavy smoker.
But whatever these failings and foibles, is he actually irrational - which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "not logical or reasonable, not endowed with the power of reason"?
Scholars who study him think he is behaving very rationally, even with the purging and terrorising of those around him. Prof Andrei Lankov of Kookmin University in Seoul told the BBC: "He is perfectly rational. He sometimes overdoes it. He sometimes tends to apply excessive force. Why kill hundreds of generals when dozens will do?
"Most people he kills would never join a conspiracy but he feels it's better to overdo it. It's better to kill nine loyal generals and one potential conspirator than to allow a conspirator to stay alive.
"But he is rational."
Prof John Delury of Yonsei University in Seoul said that even having his half-brother killed (as the allegation is - denied by Pyongyang) would be a rational act; not nice but rational.
"A sad fact of history is that young kings often kill their uncles and elder brothers. It may be cruel, but it is not 'irrational'. If you don't take my word for it, read Shakespeare."
On this assassination of Kim Jong-nam, allegedly at the hands of agents of the regime, Prof Lankov says it is similar to the Ottoman Empire, where concubines of the Sultan had countless children, any of whom had a bloodline that might one day legitimise a claim to the throne.
Prof Lankov thinks that Kim Jong-nam was, accordingly, a threat, probably not that great a one but still intolerable: "Probably he was not that dangerous but you never know. He was definitely under Chinese control."
Prof Delury said that there was nothing irrational about Kim Jong-un's drive to obtain credible nuclear weapons: "He has no reliable allies to guarantee his safety, and he faces a hostile superpower that has, in recent memory, invaded sovereign states around the world and overthrown their governments.
"The lesson North Koreans learned from the invasion of Iraq was that if Saddam Hussein really possessed those weapons of mass destruction, he might have survived."
This was compounded by the lesson of Libya, according to Prof Lankov: "Did American promises of American prosperity help Gaddafi and his family? Kim Jong-un knows perfectly well what happened to the only fool who believed Western promises and renounced the development of nuclear weapons. And he's not going to make that mistake. Once you don't have nuclear weapons you are completely unprotected.
"Did Russian or American and British promises to guarantee Ukrainian integrity help Ukraine? No. Why should he expect American, Russian or Chinese promises to help him stay alive? He is rational."
If he is rational, what does he want? On this, scholars are divided. Prof Brian Myers of Dongseo University in Busan in South Korea said that Kim Jong-un wants security but also a united Korea as the only way he and the regime can survive in the long term.
"As every North Korean knows, the whole point of the military-first policy is 'final victory', or the unification of the peninsula under North Korean rule."
A credible nuclear force would give him the ability to pressure the United States to remove its troops from the peninsula.
"North Korea needs the capability to strike the US with nuclear weapons in order to pressure both adversaries into signing peace treaties. This is the only grand bargain it has ever wanted," said Prof Myers.
And once the US troops had gone, on this argument, North Korean rule would be unstoppable.
Prof Lankov doesn't agree with the emphasis. He thinks survival is by far the most important motive behind Kim Jong-un's actions: "Above all, he wants to stay alive. Second, economic prosperity and growth - but it's a distant second."
So what's to be done? Prof Lankov sees no good options: "I don't see any solution right now." He thinks the best option is to persuade North Korea to freeze its development of nuclear weapons at a particular size of arsenal "but it will be very difficult and North Koreans may not keep their promises".
And money would have to be paid. "But this deal isn't good from an American point of view because it means paying a reward to a blackmailer, and if you pay a reward to a blackmailer once, you invite more blackmail.
"The second option which might work is a military operation but that is likely to trigger a second Korean war and will permanently damage American credibility as a reliable ally and protector.
"Worldwide, a lot of people would see that it's better to have enemies than such friends."
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A mother and her daughter, both from El Salvador, have spent more than 500 days at an immigration detention centre in the US, despite a rule limiting the detention of under-age migrants to a maximum of 20 days. | By Patricia Sulbarán LoveraBBC Mundo
Luisa* has the sweet voice of a nine-year-old girl, but she sometimes sounds wise beyond her years. She has had to write letters to legislators, asking authorities to release her and Ariana*, her mother, from a US government detention centre for migrant families.
(*Both "Luisa" and her mother, "Ariana", are under assumed names in this report. They have asked to stay anonymous because they are at risk of deportation. )
As of 2 February, she has spent 531 days in US government custody together with her mother, as they try to avoid deportation following an unsuccessful asylum request.
According to legal aid organisations operating in the country's three migrant family detention centres, Luisa, who is from El Salvador, is currently the migrant child who has spent the longest time in the custody of ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement).
She has spent almost all that time at the South Texas Family Residential Centre, in Dilley, Texas.
"All my friends left already. Me and my other friend, we are the only ones left," she says over the telephone.
According to existing US rules, migrant children must be released after spending a maximum of 20 days in detention by ICE, following the so-called Flores Settlement Agreement of 1997.
However, Luisa and four other children aged 3 to 16, together with their mothers, have spent more than 500 days at the same facility.
'Nobody can replace a mother'
Luisa could have left the detention centre to stay with another relative in the US. But mother and child decided to stay together while they fight in the courts against government efforts to deport them.
Ariana says: "Nobody can replace a mother. I can't leave my daughter with them [her relatives in the United States]. My daughter is very young, she needs me to take care of her. How could I leave her?"
Immigration lawyers and advocates say that ICE should release the families instead of putting them in a position to decide to separate from their children while detained and at risk of deportation.
During the past electoral campaign, US President Joe Biden spoke against family detentions and demanded in June that migrant children and their parents be released "immediately".
Luisa's case shows the complications of an immigration policy that has often been described as "dysfunctional".
'Two Christmases'
Luisa is tired of her situation. "I have spent two Christmases here," she says. "I miss cooking food. I would like to cook my own food. I have learned a little bit of English. I want to learn more at school, but away from here".
Her mother says that the girl does not like the food at the detention centre, and that her behaviour has changed as time goes by. "She only eats fruit, and sometimes not even that," she adds.
Ariana, who is 31 years old, adds that she herself has fallen ill from anxiety.
"I am taking pills, and some time ago I experienced an attack. I did not know what it was. The paramedics told me it was an anxiety attack."
"I sometimes feel like it is not me who is in there," she adds.
Denied asylum
Ariana says, without adding much detail, that violence in El Salvador led her to flee the country with Luisa, leaving two other children behind.
On 21 August 2019 they crossed the US-Mexico border and on the 27th, they were taken to the Dilley facility, where they were interviewed by an official two days later.
According to Mackenzie Levy, a paralegal for Proyecto Dilley who represents the family, their asylum petition was denied soon afterwards because they had not requested it earlier in Mexico or in Guatemala before doing so in the US.
Her lawyers appealed the decision in September at an immigration court, which ratified the decision to deny asylum and order their deportation.
Ariana's attorneys have asked the government to allow her to appear in front of a judge to present her case.
ICE said it would not be able to comment about her case due to ongoing litigation.
Near deportation
Ariana explains that the government has tried to deport her and her daughter "at least five times", with lawyers avoiding their expulsion from the US, sometimes at the very last moment.
The mother says that her daughter "understands more and more" the situation they have encountered when they have been taken to airports and faced imminent deportation to El Salvador.
"It angers me that they take me away, then back in, then back out," Luisa says when asked about how she feels at the detention centre.
One of the things that most worries Ariana is that she believes her daughter is falling behind in her education.
"She does not learn enough here. It has been already two lost years," she says.
Levy says that several of her clients criticise the quality of classes offered at the detention centre to the children, who "spend a lot of time on the computer, sometimes not learning anything at all".
Levy added that, during the pandemic, children have received homework packets that "are supposed to last for a week and they would complete [them] in a day, within a few hours".
ICE responded that the school at the Dilley facility reopened in-person classes in September and that "education packets were delivered in line with Texas directives for school closures due to the pandemic". The agency insisted that it "respects the dignity and humanity of families".
'Chaos and heartbreak'
Last November, more than 60 migrant rights groups sent a letter to President Donald Trump and then-President-elect Biden, naming 28 children who have been detained with their families for terms of up to 15 months, demanding their release.
ICE indicated in a statement released that same month that the families had enjoyed wide access to legal options and that it had been determined that they had no legal basis to stay in the United States.
Of the 28 children mentioned in the letter, six have since been deported and 17 released. Five, including Luisa, are still in custody.
"This type of policies creates more chaos and heartbreak," says Sarah Pierce, at the Migration Policy Institute, an independent think tank.
"If you see it from the perspective of a person requesting asylum, what you find is layers and layers of bureaucracy."
Five hundred and thirty-one days after her entry into the US, Luisa has not left detention.
Her 10th birthday is coming up, and she is looking forward to it.
"I want to be outside, at my aunt's house, on that day," she says, hopeful.
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A girl who died after being hit by a car in Staffordshire has been named by police as 13-year-old Jorja Deborah Fisher. | Police said she was hit by a Hyundai Tucson on the River Drive junction with Fazeley Road, Tamworth, on Friday evening.
"Jorja suffered serious injuries" and died in hospital a short time after the crash, the Staffordshire force said.
The teenager's family is being supported by specialist officers.
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The Job Retention Scheme has been retained across the UK, while England enters a new month of lockdown. But it's not clear it will also be there if Scotland needs to deploy it at a time when England does not.
Businesses welcome the return of furlough, but there's dismay in some sectors about the implications for their costs. Furlough has supported 9.6m people to stay in jobs, though 9% of them went on to lose their jobs. That goes for 19% of young people. | Douglas FraserBusiness/economy editor, Scotland
Furlough goes on. We were due to be starting a new era of economic recovery and transition to a new jobs market from this morning. Ballet dancers were to reskill as cyber security consultants, at least according to the poster. But that's not how it's turned out.
In mid-summer and many times after that, we were told Halloween would be the end of it, for sure. But less than five hours from the end of October, the prime minister announced that it goes on, at least to 2 December.
That's with the announcement that England is going back into lockdown. We're back to the furlough scheme as it was in August.
The government pays 80% of normal pay for those on furlough, and employers pay about 5% of their total pay bill in National Insurance and pension contributions. Plus employers can take furloughed workers back part-time. So that's more generous than September or October.
Some important details: neither the employer nor the employee needs to have previously used the furlough scheme. That's important for many people who have shifted jobs in recent months, and for new firms. To qualify, you have to have been on the payroll and registered for PAYE tax before midnight on Friday 30 October.
You can be furloughed for as little as seven days. There has previously been a three-week minimum.
There are grants being paid to firms forced to close, and local councils in England are getting £20 per head of population to help out - a total of £1.1bn. There should be a share of that distributed through the funding formula for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
There's no mention yet of what happens to the Self-Employed Income Support Scheme, which was due to fall, from 1 November, to 40% of past year's profits to cover the next three months. That's for the limited number of self-employed people who qualify.
Meanwhile, the Financial Conduct Authority, the industry regulator, said mortgage lenders should extend payment holidays to a maximum of six months. So if you've already taken a six month holiday from payments, you may not get that continued.
Half a million closures
We were due for a new system that required people in firms that did not have to close to work at least 20% of their normal hours. In that case the UK government would pay out nearly half of normal earnings. That system required two big revisions, and even after that, it is not being introduced, at least until early December.
Meanwhile, furlough applies across the UK, though the need for it is lower in Scotland, for now. There's a lot less that has to close.
I'm told that governments in Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland all asked for a return to full furlough support in order to let them put in place tight restrictions they deemed necessary to suppress viral infection. Downing Street said no as there isn't enough money.
But now that England requires lockdown, there is enough money - borrowed money. That's clearly going to rankle and doesn't sound like a partnership of equals.
There will be talks on Sunday between the Scottish government and the Treasury about how this is to apply, given that Scotland does not require closure of half million non-essential shops, car showrooms, betting shops almost all hospitality, pubs, bars, cafes, restaurants other than takeaways, most hotels, leisure, indoor entertainments, from bingo to bowls, hairdressers and beauty salons.
And that's the issue raised by Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister saying that a crucial point is whether support on the scale announced for English businesses will be available if Scotland needs to impose further restrictions later - or if it is only available if Scotland happens to require a full lockdown at the same time as a lockdown in England.
There's relief across business that furlough has been extended, but absolute dismay from some sectors about this happening in November.
Shops are carrying a lot of Christmas stock, and they foresee a lot of business going to the big online retailers. People they were about to recruit but were not yet on the books will not qualify for furlough.
The British Retail Consortium says the new English lockdown will cause "untold damage" in the run-up to Christmas, costing countless jobs, setting back the recovery and, it says, with only minimal effect on virus transmission. For Scottish shops, which can remain open, this raises questions about supply chains being disrupted.
The UK Hospitality trade body says its members need more support than in spring. It'll have to sustain them through winter, and they're looking for a clear roadmap out of here.
The Food and Drink Federation said the extended furlough scheme is "extremely welcome", but the lockdown decision still threatens calamity if they don't see a detailed rescue package within only three days.
Independent retailers fear that there will be many more permanent closures, having lost quarter of shops from the first lockdown. And brewers face having to pour a lot of stale beer down the drain in December, with replacement costs. Fixed costs go on, even if the pay bill is covered by furlough, and they say the supply chain for hospitality tends to be forgotten.
Let's not forget travel, which will affect those Scots who travel through English airports, now facing a ban on international travel, so flights are likely to be cut back sharply. Airports and airlines say they require an immediate additional economic support package throughout winter, and a roll-out of a traveller testing regime.
Job search
So far, the furlough scheme has helped 9.6m people stay in jobs, though not all at the same time. It's come down a long way from its peak. And it's cost more than £40bn.
This week, we had interesting insights into what's happened to the people on furlough, from the Resolution Foundation think tank. It found 9% of people furloughed at some point had lost their jobs by September.
Among young people, that's as high as 19%, so furlough had helped delay the point that were going to lose their jobs anyway.
It found that, of people who were self-employed in February, 10% were unemployed seven months later, so they've been much less well protected.
A really important finding from this research is that people have been losing jobs, as they did in past recessions, but much more than in the past, they've not been getting back into jobs. So there are big outflows from work, and poor outflows back into work. That's particularly true of young people.
One of the reasons is that people are looking to get back into jobs like the ones they left, notably those in hospitality and leisure. The signs are that they're not going to sectors where there are recruitment shortages, such as social care.
And that raises a big challenge about re-skilling people to have the skills and confidence to seek out the work opportunities that are out there.
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An 18-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm after two men suffered suspected stab wounds in a "serious assault". | Staffordshire Police confirmed that the man was arrested on Saturday.
A 16-year-old boy and a 19-year-old man were also arrested in connection with the incident which took place on Minton Street, Wolstanton, Newcastle-under-Lyme, at about 02:20 BST on Saturday.
All three suspects have been released under investigation, police said.
Two men, aged 20 and 50, were injured during the incident.
The 19-year-old from Newcastle-under-Lyme was arrested on suspicion of assault, grievous bodily harm with intent and affray. The 16-year-old from Stoke-on-Trent was arrested on suspicion of assault, actual bodily harm and affray.
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The iconic image of a bloodied Syrian boy in an ambulance has sparked international compassion but, asks Lina Sergie Attar, can it now transcend being just a hashtag or viral moment and become a movement to end the war? | "He looks like a statue." That's what my 11-year-old daughter said when she saw the video of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh covered in grey dust and fresh blood, sitting on a bright orange chair in an ambulance.
He sits in complete silence, staring ahead with deadened eyes.
The statue moves. He touches his bloody forehead and studies his hand with confusion.
Then little Omran does what every parent has witnessed their child do. After a moment's hesitation, he wipes his hand on the chair. Except our children have done the same with ketchup, ice cream, chocolate. Not blood.
Yearly tradition
Once again, the world has been shocked by the image of a Syrian child.
Omran was rescued with his family by the Syrian Civil Defence (also known as the White Helmets) after a reported Russian air strike hit his home in rebel-held eastern Aleppo on Wednesday.
His photo has been featured on the front page of every major international newspaper, discussed on the news, and has gone viral on social media.
It seems the end of summer has become a yearly tradition for the world to awaken to Syria's tragedy through the photos of its suffering children.
Three years ago, it was the images of gassed children from the Ghouta region outside Damascus, who suffocated to death after a chemical weapons attack on their neighbourhoods - widely blamed on regime forces - as they slept in underground bomb shelters.
They looked like perfect porcelain dolls lined up in a row, waxy and unblemished.
One year ago, it was the photo of Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi who washed up on a Turkish beach after drowning while trying to reach Greece with his family as they fled the war like millions of other refugees.
Alan captured the world's hearts and compassion with his red T-shirt, navy shorts, and sturdy little shoes - a universal toddler outfit - and became the symbol of the plight of refugees.
Omran is the Syrian icon of 2016.
Unfortunately, every year these images are followed by millions of tweets, likes, and shares; they inspire public outrage and an outpouring of compassionate donations to aid organisations; and then, after a few days or weeks, the image and the crisis are forgotten.
The world moves on. Air raids by the Syrian government and its allies continue to drop bombs of all sorts on civilians; so-called Islamic State (IS) continues to terrorise Syrians living under its control; the death toll rises and the refugee crisis continues to escalate.
The international community and the UN wring their hands. And then about a year passes and another image goes viral. Over and over.
Deafening silence
Chemical weapons attacks, mass displacement, barrel bombs, air strikes, forced starvation, torture: every vile act of war imaginable has directly affected Syrian children since 2011.
For children like Omran, all he has known in his life is war.
For millions of Syrian children growing up during this gruelling conflict, their realities are bleak and their futures even bleaker.
If they stay in their homes, they are sitting targets of bombs and missiles. They may suffer hunger and illness if they live in besieged areas. They may not have access to schools or even access to safe passage to school.
If they leave with their families across Syria's borders to a neighbouring country, they may face being forced to work as child labourers to support their families.
Moving beyond the neighbouring countries' boundaries poses even greater risks: of drowning on the way to Europe; being trapped in detention camps; and finally, after reaching safe havens, they still are subjected to discrimination and hate campaigns.
Syrian children are unwelcome wherever they go.
This week, one image, one boy, one moment, was elevated above the dozens of moments that have happened every single day in Syria for the past five-and-a-half years.
Every day there are so many Omrans whose images you will never see and whose names you will never know.
And unlike lucky Omran, those kids don't survive.
This is not a hashtag moment. This is not a viral moment. This is a moment that must become a movement to end the war.
He looks like a statue. He stares at the camera, at us, in complete silence. Literally shell-shocked. As if he already knows that silence is the only appropriate response to what has just happened.
A child's crushing silence to match the world's deafening silence that Syrians know all too well.
Lina Sergie Attar is a Syrian American writer and architect. She is the co-founder and CEO of the Karam Foundation, which provides humanitarian aid to Syrians. @amalhanano
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Libor, the London inter-bank lending rate, is considered to be one of the most important interest rates in finance, upon which trillions of financial contracts rest. Here, the BBC explains some of the key facts.
| 1. What is Libor?
A global benchmark interest rate used to set a range of financial deals worth an estimated:
$450,000,000,000,000
The value of deals determined by Libor was revised down from $800 trillion to $450 trillion following new figures in the Wheatley report on 28 September 2012.
2. Why is it so important?
As well as helping to decide the price of other transactions, it is also used as a measure of trust in the financial system and reflects the confidence banks have in each other's financial health.
Mortgages
Loans
Inter-bank lending
Indicator of trust
Reflects health of banks
3. How is it set?
Banks don't just lend money to one another whenever they like. There is a system. Every day a group of leading banks submits the interest rates at which they are willing to lend to other finance houses. They suggest rates in 10 currencies covering 15 different lengths of loan, ranging from overnight to 12 months.
The most important rate is the three-month dollar Libor. The rates submitted are what the banks estimate they would pay other banks to borrow dollars for three months if they borrowed money on the day the rate is being set. Then an average is calculated. This is a simple example of how it works.
4. How have the allegations of manipulation arisen?
Since the rates submitted are estimates, not actual transactions, it has been suggested that banks could have submitted false figures. It is alleged that traders at several banks conspired to influence the final average rate that results, the official Libor rate, by agreeing amongst themselves to submit rates that were either higher or lower than their actual estimates.
During the past three years Barclays Bank, JP Morgan, Swiss bank UBS, Royal Bank of Scotland and Deutsche Bank have all been fined by financial regulators for this practice, which is seen as market manipulation and corrosive to trust in the financial markets.
In August 2015, former city trader Tom Hayes was convicted of conspiracy to defraud for manipulating Libor. He was jailed for 14 years a sentence that had since been cut to 11 years.
5. Could Libor be manipulated now?
After the allegations came to light the government commissioned a major review of Libor and how it was set. Oversight of Libor was passed from the British Bankers' Association to the Intercontinental Exchange - ICE. Rates are now based on actual transactions for which records are kept. Another key change is that there are now specific criminal sanctions for manipulation of benchmark interest rates.
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A housing developer which was refused permission to build 366 homes in Bangor because of fears over the effect on the Welsh language is appealing. | Gwynedd councillors also rejected the planning application by Morbaine because of concern about the impact on local traffic and schools.
The developer wants to build the houses at Pen y Ffridd in Penrhosgarnedd.
The planning inspectorate will consider the appeal before making a recommendation to the Welsh Government.
The application for the houses was the biggest considered by Gwynedd council and was refused using new planning rules designed to protect the Welsh language.
Residents had organised a petition against building at the 35.36 acre (14.3 ha) site raising concerns about overdevelopment and lack of infrastructure.
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The only two Lancaster bombers still flying are due to appear at Jersey's International Air Display in September. | The Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, based in Lincolnshire, is to join the other aircraft from the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum.
Air show commentator Melvyn Hiscock said: "It's absolutely phenomenal and fantastic news."
The two aircraft are expected to take part in a series of events during the summer months across the UK.
The annual air display attracts thousands of visitors each year.
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When two women wrote about how they had been "gaslighted" - made to question their sanity by an abusive partner - many readers, male and female, got in touch to share similar experiences. Here, three of them explain how they were left feeling utterly isolated. | "I actually thought there was something wrong with my memory"
I moved from southern England to a small Scottish village to be with the love of my life, a handsome and charming man who made me feel more alive and special than I ever thought possible.
Just before I moved, a friend said he thought my boyfriend wouldn't be happy until he had me living in the middle of nowhere, far away from anyone and all to himself. At the time I laughed it off but it turned out it couldn't have been more true.
At first he was completely attentive. He worked away as a lorry driver but he called every morning, throughout the day and last thing at night. I thought this was really nice of him but I started to notice he was really ratty if I missed a call because I was in the bathroom or in a shop. He became more and more short-tempered when I told him I had begun to make friends, causing us to have arguments on the phone.
One day, after he had left for work, a woman from the village asked if I would like to go round to her house for some wine. I had a really nice evening. When I got home, my mobile had several missed calls and many text messages. I had left it behind and not thought about it. The text messages started off asking why I wasn't answering the phone, and descended into calling me all sorts of horrible names, accusing me of being out with other men and so on. I couldn't believe what I was reading - this had come out of nowhere. I sent him a text explaining where I had been. He immediately called and shouted at me for 10 minutes, not letting me speak.
These arguments would make me feel terrible and he would blame me for not being able to concentrate or sleep because he was worrying about me, and therefore a danger on the road. But then he would send lavish flowers and I would feel grateful he wasn't angry with me any longer. I lived in a constant state of confusion and worry, never knowing what I had done to make him angry, and worried in case he had an accident.
Another time, when he was home, I was walking up the lane to our house when the farmer who owned the land stopped by. We leaned over the farm gate and had a long chat, looking out at the beautiful view. When I went into the house my boyfriend was sitting in a chair, staring at me. He kept denying there was something wrong, but he wouldn't speak to me and kept glaring. Eventually he said he knew what had been going on all this time - I was making a fool of him and having an affair with the farmer! I couldn't believe my ears, but he wouldn't listen to me.
I soon stopped visiting my friends in the village. I didn't dare go out in the evenings because he would call the house phone to check where I was. He didn't like me going out to work either, so I was pretty much stuck at home in the middle of nowhere. In some ways it was a relief because I didn't have to pretend to people that all was well.
I spent the next nine years walking on eggshells, never knowing if I was doing the right thing or the wrong thing in his eyes. His ultimate punishment was to attempt suicide. He did this more than once after an argument, which completely destroyed my confidence in myself. I was a confident, independent person when we met, and by the time he eventually left me I was a shell.
He would also try to make me think I had gone mad by claiming I had said things that I knew I hadn't.
Silly things, like I'd make spaghetti Bolognese and he'd accuse me of adding carrots just to upset him, even though I followed the same recipe every time. Or he would say I hadn't cleaned a room when I had, and would clean it all over again.
Taken individually, those incidents seem stupid and trivial but he would be so convincing that I would start to question myself. I actually thought there was something wrong with my memory.
I couldn't argue any more. I couldn't get my brain to think of a good response because his arguments were completely irrational. It was easier to just agree. I became a quiet, dull person - a shadow of my former self.
What is gaslighting?
I didn't really look like myself either - he didn't like me going to get a haircut because I had a male hairdresser, so I started cutting my own hair. I stopped wearing make-up or high heels. If I wore nice clothes, I was "dressing up" for somebody. I had to think about everything I did.
Before, I was confident, I was always happy, always laughing. If I laughed at something on TV, he would get angry - he thought I was laughing at him.
I trained myself not to be happy. Friends of mine have said, "How on Earth do you do that?" But it's the only way to cope. If you don't let yourself be happy, you can't get too hurt or upset by what's happening to you. It doesn't make a lot of sense, looking back.
I made two failed attempts to leave. But mostly I felt like I'd made my bed with this person, and I had given up too much to be with him. I hoped it would all turn around and it would be OK - but it never was. It's a bit like a dog that isn't treated well - it stays loyal to the person that feeds him.
The day he told me we were splitting up I thought I had won the lottery but a few months later, he decided he wanted to get back together. When I refused, he tried to lure me back to the house. That was really quite scary. He was on a mission - if he couldn't have me, then nobody could. I was afraid he was going to kill us both.
I spent about three years hiding from him, constantly moving house. I completely disappeared.
What I didn't realise was that it would take years for me to get back to being myself and repair the damage he did to me.
I will never forgive him and I'm telling my story so that hopefully it might help somebody else.
Caroline, UK
"As a man, I feel I have to keep quiet about it"
I'm glad that abuse like this is finally being taken much more seriously. Because although some of the other abuses I had suffered with my wife were long-lasting, the psychological abuse, especially in the form of gaslighting, was maybe the worst. It has taken me a lot of therapy to work through the pain.
I still look back at things that happened, even petty things like how she had hung up a picture in the main hallway of our apartment and when I commented on how nice it looked, she insisted it had been there for two weeks and I was stupid for not noticing it sooner. It was such an obvious place because it was hung right where the living room met the hallway. You could clearly see it from two parts of the apartment. I couldn't believe I would have missed something so obvious for so long.
This was the kind of thing that began happening more and more.
She would call me at work and say there was something wrong, that I had to come home - then, when I did, she would say I shouldn't have left work and make me feel like I'd overreacted. I ended up losing a job over this.
I would plan to do things with friends, but in the lead-up she would create problems so I couldn't go. Then she'd say: "Oh, weren't you supposed to go out?"
I could no longer make any plans, big or small. I became afraid of the consequences of anything I did, because I didn't want to be punished. I gained weight and got depressed, but still had this hopeless desire to make things work.
Sometimes things escalated and she became physical, but I had been raised to never hit a woman, so I didn't fight back. I couldn't see what good would come of it.
Further help and resources
The situation came to a head when she threatened my life. We were having an argument while we were driving, and she purposely wrecked the car. Luckily our child was not with us at the time.
That was when I knew I had to get out.
Since I left the relationship there have been a few difficult things to deal with because I am a man.
The help for men who come out of abusive situations can be incredibly slim. When I was in the process of leaving my wife, there was no shelter assistance and I was frequently referred to homeless shelters. As I was also trying to take our very young child out of the situation with me, that was not an option. We ended up living with family in the end.
Then there is the social stigma. I feel I have to keep quiet about it because many people, even potential new partners, view the abuse as something that I, as a man, "should have done something about" - as though if I had just put my foot down, it all would have been fine. That sometimes feels like an extension of the abuse.
Dwayne, US
"He stole everything from me"
Things started to go really wrong at the wedding. The vintage bus he had booked to transport our guests didn't turn up - it had broken down, he said. In fact he had never paid for it. At the reception, I found out later, he asked our guests for cash, saying he still had things to pay for and he didn't want to spoil my day.
We had met on a dating site a year earlier. He was a widower and told me he missed his child, who was living with his late wife's family. I felt for him, he seemed like such a good guy. A contractor working in IT, he was generous and looked after me, taking on the boring little tasks of life, like sorting out the car insurance or my medication.
Soon I made a discovery that shocked me. His wife had not died a year before we met, like he'd told me, but just six weeks earlier. He said he was sorry. He had been unhappy and lonely. Somehow, I forgave him. That's what marriage is about, right?
He managed to alienate me from all my friends and colleagues. He said one of my friends made a pass at him, so we avoided her. Another friend was "taking advantage of me" so I should cut her off. Or maybe he didn't feel like going out because he was feeling low, or he hadn't been paid, so we would stay in.
I always ended up doing what he wanted, to try and make him happy. But it got to the point where no matter what I did, nothing would make him happy.
When he was offered an exciting new opportunity in Spain, I left my well-paid job and removal men packed up our belongings. But there were delays - payments kept not coming through, contracts weren't honoured. Nothing was ever his fault. My redundancy money drained away.
I tried to help him sort his finances out, but every time I was due to meet an accountant or a solicitor, something happened: a mix-up, they were ill or they'd had an accident - a couple of them actually died, he said.
Nothing made any sense, I thought I was losing my mind. I was very depressed and considered killing myself. He did absolutely nothing to dissuade me. I realise now that if I had died, he would have had a payout from my pension. Was that the price he put on my life?
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He was often away for days at a time, taking my car. Summonses for unpaid parking tickets began to arrive in my name. Bailiffs knocked on the door, demanding payments for other unpaid bills - he had taken out credit cards in my name.
The car turned out not to be insured. When I confronted him, he said it was a mix-up, he had definitely paid. I tried to hide the car, but he found it. He said he was hurt by my lies: why had I not told him where it was parked?
He said he couldn't talk to me any longer because I wasn't on his side. He felt like he was all alone in the world - and it was all my fault.
One day, when he came back from one of his jaunts, he left his bag in the car. Inside, I found a letter from another woman. She wrote that she loved him, and was sorry that he was homeless.
Homeless? He had several homes - the one we were renting in Spain, and one here with his wife.
I walked back upstairs to find him waiting for me. He demanded his bag back. I said "No." He twisted my arm and slammed me up against the wall. My dog put her ears back and growled at him, which she had never done before. He let me go.
Distraught, I took my dog and drove to my friend's office in London. When she came out to meet me, she said: "You do realise you're wearing your pyjamas, don't you?"
He disappeared six months ago. He has stolen everything from me. I lost my income, my credit rating, and for a short time, my sanity. I can't even get my stuff back - I thought it had been shipped to Spain, but actually it's been in storage and about to be auctioned off.
I can't go back to my old life, I can't face having to explain. And who would believe me? If they know him, they'll say: "But he's such a nice guy."
He was so clever at picking up on my weaknesses and my good nature. He destroyed me from the inside out - he made me doubt my own sanity.
When I went to the police they said: "Everybody lies, there's nothing we can do about it."
And the lies keep coming.
His mother was surprised to hear from me - he told her I was in hospital in Germany, following a suicide attempt. She had given him thousands of pounds to pay for my care.
When I tracked down one of his other women, she was horrified. He had told her I was his mentally unstable sister, who had a controlling husband. They were planning to move in together.
I don't know where he is now but I fear he has found his next victim. I wish I could warn her, but nobody will listen.
Esther, UK
All names have been changed
Illustrations by Katie Horwich
Interviews by Vibeke Venema
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Three kayakers have been rescued in an operation involving the RNLI, the coastguard, a Royal Navy warship and nearby fishing boats. | The kayakers had got into difficulty in Loch Torridon, near Shieldaig, in the north west Highlands at 11:17.
Kyle Coastguard Rescue Team, Portree RNLI lifeboat and Stornoway Coastguard were sent to the scene.
Type 23 frigate HMS Sutherland and a number of fishing boats and other vessels also responded and assisted.
A local fishing picked up one of the kayakers and the helicopter winched two others from the water.
The coastguard said: "The casualties were safely rescued at the scene and later passed into the care of the Scottish Ambulance Service for further treatment."
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After years of controversy, Scotland's capital city finally has a fully functioning tram line, with the first paying passengers boarding on Saturday morning. The long-running story has been a financial and political melodrama. | By David MillerBBC Scotland transport correspondent
Month after month, year after year, the digging in Edinburgh's handsome city centre streets went on and on, as disputes raged and costs soared.
Deadlines came and deadlines went.
By 2011, the money had largely run out. The tram project was in crisis.
Back then the tram project was stopped in its tracks. Many feared the launch day would never come.
What exactly went wrong and, perhaps more importantly, how did bosses manage to avert a potentially humiliating failure?
It fell to Edinburgh City Council's new chief executive Sue Bruce to resolve the bitter and expensive legal stalemate with the companies building the tram line.
Days locked in mediation with the contractors proved vital.
"History has shown that we have been able to make it work," says Ms Bruce.
She says: "We have had zero disputes since mediation and I think it is very much about turning it into a cooperative way of working but nevertheless appreciating that the contractors had a wholly commercial view of it and we had very much a public interest view of things. And bringing those two things to meet in the middle somehow."
Fast forward to 2014 and the trams are finally ready to carry their first paying passengers. The council was forced to borrow its way out of trouble.
Interests payments on the final bill of £776m will take the total cost to over £1bn. But we still don't know when, or even if, the line will reach Leith and the waterfront.
Calls for a public inquiry are growing louder.
Prof Richard Kerley of the Centre for Scottish Public Policy is writing a book on the tram fiasco.
He says: "We have spent an awful lot of money on this. It is worth spending a relatively small amount of money to find out what happened and how it could have been improved because we are going to do similar things in other cities, either in Scotland or elsewhere in the United Kingdom, and we should learn from everybody's experience."
In Leith, support for the completion of the line appears to be strong but some have had enough and dread even the prospect of work on the line restarting.
Local businessman Alan Rudland says: "Businesses will make hard decisions. They will spend money, if it is wrong they will stop. They will stop digging when they get to the bottom of the pit.
"It seems to me however that the council are saying 'we are just going to keep on digging'.
"This is a project that is never going to make money to recoup its build costs and it is simply not going to make money to replace itself. So it is nothing but a money pit."
And there is criticism too from city centre residents who say their health is being threatened by traffic forced away from the tram route.
Dr Ashley Lloyd, a spokesman for residents in the New Town, says: "What we have here, in the cobbled streets around the residential parts of Edinburgh, we have HGVs coming through at all times of the day and night.
"We see at peak times here that traffic is so heavily congested that it is actually stationary for large parts of the time."
At the tram depot of the city's western outskirts, final preparations are under way for Saturday's launch.
Excitement in the city is building according to tram boss Tom Norris.
He says: "There seems to be a real keenness to be part of day one. That goes across our staff but also the people who are keen to see what trams are all about in Edinburgh.
"We want people to come and enjoy the experience. We expect it to be busy but we will be working very hard to make sure things go as smoothly as possible."
And for one young tram driver it will be a day to remember.
Craig Scotland will be at the controls of the very first service, starting at 05:00 from the Gyle shopping centre.
He says: "I'm really excited but it comes with nerves as well.
"When I left school I never thought I'd be doing something like this, making my own mark in history in Edinburgh."
And so it is over to you, as the citizens of Edinburgh and the taxpayers of Scotland finally have the chance to get onboard and judge for themselves if the disruption and the cost really have been worthwhile.
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A primary school was thrust into the spotlight last month when it was revealed it was teaching children in classes of more than 60 pupils. BBC News spent the day at Broadclyst Community Primary School in Devon to get a flavour of what it's like to be taught in such an environment. | By Claire Gilbody-DickersonBBC News
"Callum. Callum. Callum."
With the help of her head-mic, teacher Bronnie Williams is carrying out the morning roll-call; the class is big enough that some name repetition is inevitable.
Standing at the front of the three-row lecture theatre, she swiftly works her way through the list of 63 pupils. Projected on the main wall behind her is an image of the children's daily tasks.
By 9am, the Year 6 children at the academy school near Exeter have spent half an hour getting on with unfinished homework or quizzes in maths and English and they're ready for classes to begin.
Each child has an assigned seat and a £750 kit comprising a laptop computer, smart pen and mouse. The technology allows for their lessons to be uploaded to the cloud, making them accessible at any time.
The class, led by two teachers and two assistants, stays together for at least three hours a day for core lessons in maths, English and history.
For Gus, who's 10 years old, the super-sized class doesn't hold the children back. "Even though it's huge and there are a lot of us, we can all see the teacher because of the way the seats are arranged," he says. "It really allows us to socialise - that's one of the main benefits of this size."
Fellow pupil Jess, also 10 years old, is another fan.
"If you're in a class of 20 you wouldn't hear as many opinions or wouldn't have as many friends to choose from." She says all children have a mentor they see every week, who will set targets to work towards, "and if we have any problems they'll help us".
Broadclyst's head teacher Jonathan Bishop says the lecture theatre offers a "futuristic environment fit for the 21st Century". He says 90% of his school's pupils have attained the necessary standards in writing, reading and maths - well above the 65% required by the government.
Mr Bishop firmly believes smaller class sizes aren't necessary to provide a quality education. "I think there is a simplistic historic model that says one teacher for 30 children is the correct ratio, and there is no evidence that I am aware of that says 30 children gives quality education," he says.
"Having that flexible space with the support of experienced, skilled educators to meet the needs of children is much more of a targeted approach than having a smaller class with 30 kids."
The use of technology is central to the Broadclyst approach. It hosts the Global Enterprise Challenge, which gives children hands-on experience of marketing, web design and accountancy. The initiative connects the village school with classes around the world, from Israel and the Dominican Republic to Jordan and Spain, through cameras hanging from each corner of the lecture theatre.
"It's really good that we've got access to this amount of technology as it allows us to hear lots of different opinions and see lots of different things," Gus says.
After the core lessons, the class breaks up into groups of no bigger than 15. While keeping order might sound like an impossible task in a class of 63, the pupils' movements seem almost choreographed, with their smooth and snakelike exit being a spectacle in itself.
Now they're in smaller groups, the children go on to lessons in science, art and music. PE classes range from sailing and mountain biking to climbing, football and dance.
The government has enforced, with a few exceptions, a limit of 30 pupils to one teacher in infant classes, but there is no cap for older children.
Unions advocate for the 30:1 ratio to be extended to all classes regardless of pupils' age, as they believe a smaller class size has a "powerful impact on pupils' educational experiences", and they also say there are health and safety concerns relating to larger classes.
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The National Education Union's South West representative Hannah Packham told the BBC it was "extremely shocking and disturbing" to hear of the 63-strong class.
"Teachers in class sizes that are manageable are able to pick up some of the smaller issues that are difficult to highlight in a child," she says. "The ability to provide that pastoral support in a class of over 30, even arguably over 25, is really difficult."
She says she fears there could be an increasing number of schools introducing larger class sizes, even when teachers might "feel very uncomfortable" with this.
Asked whether his school had introduced the large class for financial reasons, Mr Bishop's response is that "this is not about money".
"This is about the delivery of great education," he says. "They're sitting in a hi-tech, futuristic room with four adults in that room. So you could take a traditional classroom and have one teacher and 30 children and it would be cheaper than what we are delivering here in this room."
Miss Williams, the main teacher in Broadclyst's Year 6, says class size does little to affect the teachers' workload. What has "really made a difference" for her has been the streamlining of tasks such as planning and marking.
Outlining the benefits of working with another three adults, she says: "Because you're team-teaching you're able to embellish and add upon the other person's input during the teaching and support each other."
She adds: "It [class size] definitely hasn't affected the support that we can give to children.
"It's my fourth year and I really enjoy it; I actually can't imagine going back to teaching a different way."
What does the research say?
A link has been found between smaller classes and attainment during the early years of school, but that appears to be less the case as pupils get older, a Department for Education report states.
According to the Education Endowment Foundation, while reducing class sizes can indeed help children, this is only the case when pupil numbers are below 20 or even 15.
Dr Stephen Curran, a teacher for 35 years and a government adviser, argues that bigger classes can be "extremely good" in schools where resources are used "wisely and effectively".
"This sort of rigid idea of having 30 in a class and that's the only unit you can ever teach, that doesn't really make sense to me." He believes technology can free teachers of the more tedious tasks so they can "use their expertise in the most efficient way".
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It's a boss's worst nightmare. | By Marie Keyworth & Matthew WallTechnology of Business reporters
You return from a trip to find that hundreds of thousands of dollars has been transferred out of company accounts - apparently at your instruction.
But you have no idea what your accountant is talking about - you didn't give any instructions.
This is what happened to Carole Gratzmuller, boss of a medium-sized French company called Etna Industrie.
Her firm, which employs 50 people and has been making industrial equipment on the outskirts of Paris for nearly 75 years, was the victim of a specialised email phishing attack dubbed CEO fraud, or "fraude au president" as they call it in France.
'Confidential transaction'
"My accountant was called on Friday morning," she tells the BBC. "Someone said: 'You're going to get an email from the president, and she's going to give you instructions to conduct a very confidential transaction and you're going to have to respond to whatever instructions she gives you'."
The accountant was then emailed from an address with Ms Gratzmuller's name in it, saying Etna Industrie was buying a company in Cyprus.
The email said the accountant was going to get a phone call from a consultant working with a lawyer, who would then give her instructions as to where to transfer the money.
"Everything happened between 9 and 10 o'clock," says Ms Gratzmuller. "The accountant probably got about 10 emails in that time and three or four different phone calls.
The fraudsters pressured her into acting quickly, without thinking - a standard feature of this type of phishing fraud.
"They didn't give her a moment to sit back and think that this was unusual," she says.
'Vulnerable'
Before noon the accountant had authorised wire transfers totalling €500,000 (£372,000; $542,000) to foreign bank accounts.
Luckily for Etna Industrie, three of the wire transfers were held up by the banks, but one for €100,000 went through.
The many faces of business email fraud
The company got this money back after the bank in question was found to be at fault by the French courts. However, the bank is appealing against the decision.
"It's like when your house or apartment gets broken into," says Ms Gratzmuller. "You feel vulnerable. People get into your life and they know things about you and you have no clue, and they take things from you."
French connection
But the case of Etna Industrie is small fry compared to the scale of "fraude au president" across France as a whole.
French businesses have lost an estimated €465m since 2010, official figures suggest, with 15,000 firms falling victim to the scam, including big names, such as Michelin, KPMG and Nestle.
The biggest fraud was for €32m, and a further €830m could have been stolen if more phishing attacks had proved successful, say French police.
Matthieu Bares, deputy head of their financial crime division, says there are one or two attacks on French companies every day, but that "plenty of victims don't report the fraud".
But why France in particular?
Gilbert Chikli, a French-Israeli man, may have a lot to do with it. He defrauded more than 30 banks and companies out of €7.9m during 2005 and 2006, pretending to be, variously, company heads and secret service agents.
Chikli fled to Israel in 2009 and in his absence was sentenced to seven years in prison last year.
With no extradition agreement between Israel and France, Chikli remains living in Tel Aviv, and a film based on his life is being made - starring French president Francois Hollande's girlfriend, Julie Gayet.
It is still predominantly French-Israeli gangs running the fraud, police say, and their ability to impersonate French bosses has seen France bearing the brunt of the onslaught in Europe.
Global spread
But CEO fraud is not just a French problem.
In the US, the FBI's internet crime centre or IC3 has been tracking "business email compromise" scams, as it calls them, and reckons about 7,000 companies have been defrauded of more than $740m (£508m; €682m) over the last two years.
The real figure is likely to be much higher though, given how reluctant many companies are to admit being defrauded in this way.
"We think more than $2bn has been lost to business email scams over the last two years," says Aaron Higbee, co-founder and chief technology officer of PhishMe, a US security company specialising in educating staff about phishing attacks.
One US company, Ubiquiti Networks, a wireless network equipment manufacturer, admitted to wiring $39.1m to fraudsters after falling victim to this type of scam repeatedly last year.
"Fraudsters are increasing the intensity of attacks," says Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer at data security company, Imperva. "So it only takes a tiny percentage to get through to be effective. There are not enough policing resources in cyberspace to monitor them all."
Social engineering
But why is CEO fraud proving so effective?
Mr Higbee suggests it because this type of email can more easily bypass spam filters and antivirus security systems.
"It doesn't need attachments carrying malware, it's just a conversation," he says. "It's very low-tech and a big departure from the large, automated malware attacks we're used to."
Fraudsters use publicly available corporate data gleaned from the internet to make the emails as convincing as possible, finding out who the bosses and senior financial officers are from social networks like LinkedIn, for example.
Staff are less likely to question instructions purporting to come from on high, and it's this psychological manipulation - often accompanied by a sense of urgency - that is a major factor in the fraud's success.
"It will spread because it's too good to be ignored," warns Jerome Robert from French cybersecurity company, Lexsi. "[Criminals] can make so much money in a very small amount of time, with minimal risk."
Businesses should be on their guard.
Listen to BBC World Business Report's How not to be a victim of internet scams
Follow Technology of Business editor Matthew Wall on Twitter: @matthew_wall
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Half-a-million pounds is to be spent on solving problems caused by a landslide on the Isle of Wight. | Councillors agreed on Tuesday to fund research into different options for repairing Undercliff Drive which was destroyed in February's severe weather.
Nine homes were evacuated and residents have been living in rented accommodation ever since.
The £500,000 will help decide which option to take including whether to build a low-cost road from the west.
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Avago Technologies, one of the world's biggest manufacturers of semiconductors, is buying its California-based rival Broadcom for $37bn (£24bn). | Between them, the two firms employ more than 20,000 staff worldwide with combined annual sales of £15bn (£10bn).
Avago, based in both the US and Singapore, said the deal was a "landmark" transaction.
It is using a combination of cash and shares to pay for Broadcom.
"The combination of Avago and Broadcom creates a global diversified leader in wired and wireless communication semiconductors," said Hock Tan, Avago's chief executive.
Broadcom makes semiconductors for set-top boxes, mobile phones and network equipment, and its chips are used in smartphones made by Apple and Samsung.
Avago has been expanding rapidly. Broadcom is the sixth company to be bought by Avago since the start of 2013.
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Car parts supplier Stadco has announced it will cut up to 60 posts from its Shrewsbury plant.
| Stadco, which makes panels for vehicles, will lose part of its production on 27 July.
It comes as part of the "constant flux" in the industry, a company spokesman said.
Stadco is working closely with the unions and its 400 Shrewsbury employees to "reduce the impact of redundancies", he added.
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A 12-year-old has been seriously injured after falling through the roof of a swimming baths. | He is in a "serious condition" in hospital after he fell at Parr Swimming and Fitness Centre in St Helens on Sunday night at 18:20 BST.
He had been seen on the roof with two other youths on Ashcroft Street before he "fell through", police said.
"Enquires are ongoing to establish the full circumstances," a Merseyside Police spokesman added.
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Mrs Doubtfire earned actor Robin Williams a clutch of awards, including a Golden Globe. For the author of the book on which the film was based though, the success it enabled her to enjoy was more than she could have imagined. | Robin Williams' idiosyncratic Scottish nanny was not what Anne Fine had in mind when she wrote Madame Doubtfire in 1987.
Ironically, considering Williams' depression and suicide, the star's portrayal of father Daniel Hilliard was less dark than she intended.
But, the Barnard Castle author accepts "books and films are very different beasts" and says she owes him a "tremendous debt" for the way he played the part.
"Any author is lucky to have that sort of exposure," she says.
"Because that film was such an international success it went all over the world, which meant that the book got translated into languages you wouldn't dream of assuming you would usually get into."
She was invited to Hollywood to watch the filming but did not go. She was busy writing at the time, but also conscious the author is rarely involved in a movie unless, like JK Rowling, they have a degree of control written into their contract.
"It seemed like an awful long way to go just to say hello to people and then be on the sidelines," she says.
She also declined an invitation to appear on the Parkinson chat show with Williams to publicise the film, having a prior engagement to speak to 300 librarians.
"Children's librarians are actually an author's bread and butter so there was no way I was going to just back out of that at the last minute," she said.
Mrs and Madame Doubtfire
She arrived home in time to watch the live broadcast and "thank God I wasn't there".
"He was clearly as high as a kite, on either his normal skills or God knows what," she remembers.
"He was talking a blue streak - even Parky never got a word in edgeways."
Convinced she would have been superfluous, sitting on the sofa "convulsed with laughter" but unable to squeeze in a contribution, she has no regrets she never got to meet Williams.
But she is "tremendously grateful" to him.
"Because of him I managed to pay off my mortgage," she says.
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With one week to go until the Holyrood election, there seems to be little mystery about the final result - with only the SNP talking about forming a government. But there are still some key questions to be answered, which could have a huge bearing on Scotland's future. | By Philip SimBBC Scotland political correspondent
Will the SNP secure an outright majority? Could they build a pro-independence majority with the help of other, smaller parties? Will the Conservatives hold off a Labour challenge in the battle for second place? And what are the factors which could help answer these questions?
Who will actually turn up to vote?
What could be key in this election isn't so much who votes for which party, but how many people turn out to vote at all.
Generally, for Holyrood elections, only about half of those who are eligible to vote actually do so. The average turnout since 1999 has been 53%.
That doesn't necessarily make things more unpredictable, although the Holyrood poll with the lowest turnout - 49% in 2003 - produced the "rainbow parliament" of seven different parties.
And the SNP overwhelmingly won lower-turnout seats in 2016 - the 41 seats with the lowest turnout all elected an SNP MSP, while the party only won three of the ten highest-turnout seats - suggesting that the current party of government may have little to fear from a quieter polling day.
The question is whether the voters who come to the polls in 2021 will be different from those of previous years.
Older demographics are traditionally more likely to vote - but are also more likely to be adversely affected by Covid-19 and thus potentially nervous about leaving their homes.
Meanwhile a record number of people have signed up for a postal ballot, but they are presumably fairly politically engaged types who would likely have voted in person anyway.
People are also less likely to vote in elections where the result appears to be a foregone conclusion - and in this contest, only one party is actually talking about going into government. But who will prove the most successful in getting their supporters to show up and put a cross in a box on 6 May?
What impact will smaller parties have?
There are a total of 25 parties running in the Holyrood election. Everyone in Scotland will have at least 15 different choices on the regional lists, and in some areas the ballot paper will resemble a phone book.
Small parties have run for parliament before with varying degrees of success, but in 2021 there seems to be more interest in the idea than ever before - chiefly thanks to former first minister Alex Salmond re-entering the political fray as the leader of the Alba Party.
It is extremely hard to say whether Alba will have a breakthrough of its own and boost the pro-independence cause, or split the vote and cost the larger pro-indy parties seats. The same could be said of George Galloway's All for Unity group on the pro-UK side.
To win a single regional list seat, a party generally needs about 6% of the vote in an area. The usual margin for error on an opinion poll is 3%: with smaller parties hovering in single digits, pollsters are essentially saying they don't really know.
The other unknown about smaller parties is whether they have changed the narrative around the election. They are chiefly pitching for list votes, but while there are two ballot papers in a Holyrood election there is only one campaign.
The SNP's plan for this election was to talk about independence essentially as a contrast between the leadership of Nicola Sturgeon and that of Boris Johnson. But the rise of Alba means Ms Sturgeon does not have complete control over the pro-independence side of the debate, and has found herself talking about borders, currency, the EU and all kinds of potentially sticky topics she would rather have put off until a future referendum campaign.
This will have gone down well with her pro-independence base, but what does it mean for the larger cohort of voters in "middle Scotland" who are either yet to be convinced or simply are not as engaged by the issue?
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Who won in my area?
Enter your postcode, or the name of your English council or Scottish or Welsh constituency to find out. Eg 'W1A 1AA' or 'Westminster'
Who will win key marginal constituencies?
There are 10 constituencies with a majority of less that 5% going into this election - and nine of them are SNP targets.
These individual local struggles hold the key to parliament either continuing much as it is now, with a minority SNP government, or the party securing an outright majority.
Can Labour hang on to its key marginal constituencies - which is actually really all three of them, in Dumbarton, East Lothian and Edinburgh Southern?
Can the SNP claw back some of the seats the Conservatives took off them in 2016, like Edinburgh Central, Dumfriesshire and Aberdeenshire West?
At the other end of the scale, could they be at risk of a focused Tory challenge in some of their own more marginal seats, like Perthshire South and Kinross-shire, Edinburgh Pentlands or Moray?
If you consider any seat with a majority of under 10% to be in play, then 16 of the 73 constituencies could potentially change hands. Of those, 12 are contests between the SNP and the Conservatives, currently split evenly between the two.
Once-dominant Labour are not in second place in a single seat with a single-digit majority, so will chiefly be focused on playing defence to hold on to what they have got. If they are to make gains, it will likely be via the regional lists.
How many seats a party can win from a regional list is directly affected by how many constituency seats it takes in that local area, so how much success the SNP has in these first-past-the-post contests will be pivotal to the overall result.
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What about the pandemic?
Circumstances have changed somewhat since the 2016 Holyrood election, when a historical figure named David Cameron was the prime minister. Both Scottish Labour and the Scottish Conservatives have changed leaders twice since then.
However the biggest upheaval has undoubtedly been the Covid-19 pandemic, which has changed the lives of everyone in the country.
Lockdown and social distancing mean that a lot of campaigning has been happening away from actual voters. Door-to-door canvassing was only allowed from mid-April; there are still no big rallies or street stalls. Handshakes are out of the question.
Parties have less contact with voters, and journalists and commentators are often watching the whole thing from home - it's hard to gauge the mood of the nation from such a distance, and harder still by scrolling through social media echo chambers.
Now that lockdown is easing and people have one eye on the future, how might that play into how they vote on 6 May?
Will they want to move on from the Covid-19 era, or stick with the leaders who saw them through it?
Are they champing at the bit for change, or fearful about the precarious state of the economy and the spectre of a fresh wave of mutated infections?
The pandemic and the impact it has had on the lives of everyone in Scotland will undoubtedly be to the forefront in voters' minds, but does that distract from other issues - from the constitution to bread and butter devolved topics like education, health and justice - or sharpen the focus on them?
What's happening in regional strongholds?
Polling might provide a top-down picture of Scotland as a whole, but the nation will not vote in uniform fashion on 6 May.
Every party has its regional strongholds, areas which have traditionally voted one way or the other - and they can differ wildly from one end of the country to another.
For example, in 2016 the Lib Dems held the two safest seats in Scotland - while also losing their deposit in the majority of constituency contests. They won more than two-thirds of the vote in both Orkney and Shetland, but hovered around 2% in a number of Glasgow and west coast seats.
So the party polling at X% Scotland-wide tells you really very little about its chances in specific constituencies or even wider regions.
You can actually see some of these effects writ large on the electoral map. Consider the whole of Glasgow turning SNP yellow in 2016, or the band of Tory blue spreading across the Borders and Dumfries and Galloway.
Sometimes this can come down to a "personal vote" for a particularly popular local campaigner, or it can be driven by policy - like how the Greens poll well in leafy urban areas like Edinburgh, but have only once won a seat in the North East, an area more reliant on the oil and gas industry.
So while party leaders and national campaigns dominate coverage, much of politics remains local.
What will really decide the election is what is happening and how people are feeling in communities from Oban to Westhill, from Ayr to Dunbar to Elgin, and in every corner of Scotland.
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The next general election will take place in just under eight months. So, what did we learn about Conservative policies at the party's annual conference this week?
The Conservatives are promising income tax cuts for all - but they might not be for a while... | By Kristiina CooperPolitical reporter, BBC News
The plan is for tax to start kicking in at £12,500 a year, instead of £10,500. That means no income tax at all for one million people. And a tax cut for 30 million - that's basically every taxpayer. It'll cost £5.6bn. The number-crunchers were quick to ask where such a big sum is going to come from. The answer is that cash will be freed up when there's more coming into Treasury's coffers than going out. When will that be? The Conservatives reckon they could eradicate the deficit - and even have a surplus - by 2018. A tax cut would follow by the end of the next parliament. That's 2020.
There's another tax cut in the offing - for higher earners...
David Cameron's big surprise was the promise that the higher tax rate, 40%, would start at £50,000 instead of £41,900 (again by 2020). A big gain for the better paid, with the cost to the Treasury around £1.6bn. Again, the Conservatives say it would be paid for by balancing the books via further spending cuts.
One more to go... the Conservatives are to reduce tax on inherited pensions...
It may have passed you by but there's a tax of 55% on some pension pots, when the owner of the pot dies. The Conservatives are abolishing this "death tax" on any remaining pension pot, which means more money for relatives and £150 million in lost income for the Treasury. It's actually being introduced next April - just before the election.
Enough tax cuts... what about cuts to public spending?
The Conservatives would make further cuts of around £25bn to public spending. They say it's the best way to finish the job of eliminating the deficit (the gap between the nation's income and outgoings).
A lot of money...where is the axe going to fall?
A Conservative government wouldn't increase benefits for working-age people for two years. That means less money for people receiving jobseekers' allowance, income support, tax credits and child benefit. Two thirds of the people affected have got a job. They rely on income support and tax credits to boost the low wages paid by their employers. The Conservatives say the benefit "freeze" would save about £3bn.
Benefit cap cut...
The maximum amount a household could claim each year would be reduced from £26,000 to £23,000. Jobseeker's allowance would be withdrawn from young people after six months unless they take part in "community projects". And 18 to 21-year-olds wouldn't be entitled to housing benefit.
More apprenticeships..
The savings from these benefit cuts would be used to pay for three million apprenticeships for young people and some people, like White Dee (of TV Benefits Street fame) liked the plan to introduce pre-paid benefits cards to ensure claimants can't spend that money on alcohol, drugs or gambling.
No cuts to the NHS
Not wanting Labour to be seen as the defender of the NHS, the Conservatives promise not to seek savings in the health budget. There are promises of better services too. In England, everyone would be able to see a GP seven days a week by 2020. The Conservatives say they'll recruit 5,000 more doctors.
Away from money matters... the Conservatives are staking their claim to be the party of law and order...
A Conservative government would introduce banning orders and extremism disruption orders - or EXDOs. A banning order could be used to outlaw a group that incites hatred or causes fear. EXDOs are based on ASBOs. They would stop "disruptive" individuals from speaking in public or holding a position of authority. There would also be a new law setting out victims' rights.
The police would be able to get hold of internet data...
The Home Secretary Theresa May would bring in new laws to make it easier for the police to collect information about internet activity by suspected criminals. There are some forms of data that internet service providers don't obtain or store. The Conservatives are promising a Communications Data Act, requiring companies to start storing certain types of information.
And on affairs of state...
The Conservatives have several bold constitutional moves on the agenda. They'd introduce English-only votes on English matters in Parliament. On Europe, David Cameron is promising to renegotiate agreements on the free movement of people. There would be an in/out referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union. And the Conservatives would get rid of the Human Rights Act, introducing a British Bill of Rights instead.
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The authorities in Iran blocked access to the messaging app Telegram over the weekend, as anti-government protests spread across the country. The BBC's Leyla Khodabakhshi looks at the role the app has played. | The demonstrations started last Thursday in Mashhad, historically a bastion of religious conservatism, and have now reached more than 55 cities and towns.
Telegram - which has an estimated 40 million users in Iran, equivalent to almost half the population - is believed to have been the main platform people used to obtain and share information about the protests.
Many Iranians use private Telegram groups to keep in touch with family and friends.
More importantly, they subscribe to public channels to get the news that is not available on state media.
According to researchers at Iran's Supreme Council of Cyberspace, an average Telegram user in Iran subscribes to more than 18 public groups with more than 5,000 members.
It was not surprising, then, that on the fourth day of the protests, the Iranian authorities "temporarily" blocked Telegram, as well as the popular social media platform Instagram.
On Wednesday, Communications Minister Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi warned that the ban could become permanent if Telegram refused to suspend "terrorist channels".
Telegram was one of the only social platforms not to have been blocked in Iran in recent years.
In his re-election campaign last year, President Hassan Rouhani declared that he had been responsible for ensuring that it continued to be possible to access the app, as well as Instagram and WhatsApp, during his first term in office.
And only one week before the current protests began, Mr Rouhani insisted that his communications minister would "not press the button that blocks social media".
On Saturday, Mr Jahromi sent a message via Twitter to Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram, asking the company to stop a channel "encouraging hateful conduct, use of Molotov cocktails, armed uprising and social unrest".
Mr Durov said calls for violence were prohibited by Telegram and within hours, the channel the minister was referring to - @amadnews - was suspended.
The decision brought sharp criticism from Iranian cyber-activists, who described Telegram's actions as "capitulation" to state censorship.
US whistleblower Edward Snowden warned Mr Durov that the Iranian authorities might not stop at requesting the suspension of a channel.
He was soon proved right, as access to the app was blocked altogether.
Mr Durov said that was because Telegram had "publicly refused to shut down channels of peaceful Iranian protesters, such as @sedaiemardom".
"We consider freedom of speech an undeniable human right, and would rather get blocked in a country by its authorities than limit peaceful expression of alternative opinions," he added.
It is clear that the government has also been under pressure from the more conservative sections of the political establishment to restrict access.
Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi, an influential cleric whose followers have used Telegram to promote his views, asked for a permanent ban on the "rotten swamp".
Iranian users turned to proxies to circumvent the ban or to using WhatsApp, which is not as popular in Iran as Telegram but still seems to be accessible.
The restrictions on social platforms announced on Sunday did not stop the protests.
People took to the streets of cities like Karaj, Khoramabad, Mahshahr, and Izeh on Tuesday night, despite assertions from officials that the unrest had ended.
Many observers have also taken to Twitter - another officially blocked social platform - to try to make sense of the protests, which have been unprecedented in terms of their geographical spread since the Islamic revolution in 1979.
Others have debated whether platforms such as Telegram have a responsibility during periods of political unrest to deal with misinformation and disinformation.
They often create an environment of false equality, some believe, where every source is just another source and the losers are people in need of accurate information.
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A woman in Essex has has told police she is unable to find a pet snake that lives in her home. | Rosie the Royal Python, who measures about 4ft long, is housed at the woman's address in Butlers Way, Great Yeldham.
Rosie has black and brown patches and an arrow-shaped head. She is "not aggressive".
The owner said she had thoroughly checked her home and believed Rosie might be lurking in a tree outside.
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In January 1996 an army of eco warriors took to the trees in Newbury to try to prevent the construction of the Newbury bypass. The road was eventually built, but 20 years on did the "Battle of Newbury" have a lasting impact? | By Linda SerckBBC News
"In other, less-civilised parts of the world, they might have had the machine guns out."
These were the words of the Under Sheriff of Berkshire, Nicholas Blandy, as he surveyed the Newbury bypass protesters clinging to trees, determined to thwart the bulldozers.
The trees, 10,000 of them, were eventually cut down to make way for the road that would get rid of a notorious bottleneck on the A34.
But this did not happen without a lengthy protest from eco warriors who doggedly chained themselves to trees, dug tunnels and caused a mass disturbance of a kind rarely seen before in England.
Six-hundred security guards were brought in to police the site, at a cost of £25m - one fifth of the total bill for building the road. During the January protests, some 748 people were arrested.
Anti-bypass protests had been going strong in Newbury since the 1980s, but the eventual evictions of the protest camps, tree felling and undergrowth clearance work began on 9 January 1996.
The clash received widespread coverage and protesting figurehead Swampy ended up a minor celebrity who appeared on satirical news show Have I Got News For You.
Twenty years on, Mr Blandy said he could now laugh at some of the memories.
"They had a certain amount of robust contempt for me," he says of the protesters.
"They had a big sound system rigged up in the trees playing Bob Marley's I Shot The Sheriff at loud volumes, which I thought was terribly funny."
Two decades later, Mr Blandy has been reunited with one of the main protestors, Phillip Pritchard, who spent two years campaigning against the bypass.
They both admire an old oak tree that survived the cull, and chat in an amicable way, though they maintain a distance while talking.
"I had such extraordinary respect for you because it was just so cold," Mr Blandy told Mr Pritchard.
"It was a bitterly cold winter and I do not understand those who stayed here in the ground or tree houses in the trees.
"Some of the protesters looked so unhealthy because in those conditions you needed [up to] 5,000 calories a day in order to live and you weren't getting it.
"Some people were getting visibly unhealthier as it went on. It was a very hard environment in which to live so to a certain extent I tip my hat off to you."
"There was definitely a lot of passion," Mr Pritchard remembers. "[We] were trying to act like an antibody for the Earth - trying to protect nature, to protect what was being destroyed in beautiful places.
"Often people did let themselves become quite ill, [but] there was an amazing network of people from the town.
"People brought food out, people came and had showers and baths in people's houses, that was really amazing although it was hard for people to walk a six-mile round trip just for a bath sometimes."
"At the time we felt quite cross towards the Under Sheriff of Berkshire but I can see you're a person, you were doing your role.
"I think it's been a really powerful part of my life and to be here talking to you is an interesting thing."
The intervening 20 years has not mellowed either of them in terms of their views on the situation.
"The years haven't made me in any way regret doing what I did, because I continue to think it's very important that the law is upheld," says Mr Blandy. "In a democratic society governments ultimately have to take decisions that are unpopular to some and they have to be carried out."
Mr Pritchard points out that the law became a "shifting beast" for the protesters.
"New laws [in 1994] were brought in to make what had been civil matters, such as trespass, into criminal matters - aggravated trespass, which meant that the police came in and arrested people and hundreds of people got criminal records for things that in the 1980s wouldn't have been criminal."
One protester who fell foul of this new law was Becca Lush, who was arrested three times in the first week of the January clash.
"Anyone who was arrested was given bail conditions that prevented them from going anywhere near the protest site, so I was out of action quite quickly certainly at the beginning of the protest," she said.
"But I was able to do all the other millions of jobs that enabled the protest to become prominent.
"It was a national issue, we were all over the national media for months and months, and the whole country knew what the government were doing."
Despite the campaigners losing, Ms Lush, who now works as a charitable giving manager for an organic cosmetics company, said there was a lot that was gained.
The protest was "absolutely crucial in changing transport policy", she says.
"After Newbury, the Labour government came to power with a manifesto pledge to stop road building and look at the alternatives, which they did do.
"Although there were 600 road schemes proposed initially by the Thatcher government, over the protest years it was whittled down to 150.
"By the time the Labour government came in 1997 the road programme was scrapped completely.
"So by anyone's standard that was an enormously successful campaign - over five years to reduce the multibillion-pound road building programme down to zero."
The protesters' legacy - Paul Clifton, BBC South Today
"I spent months reporting the battles at Newbury. One of the biggest tree camps was at Tot Hill. Today, it's a service area with a hotel and a McDonald's.
"Middle Oak became a symbol of the campaign: a solitary tree in the middle of cleared woodland was allowed to remain standing, a minor concession to the protesters.
"Driving past today you can barely notice it, tucked into a bend of the slip road between the A34 and the A4. Around it, some of the 200,000 new trees planted to replace the 10,000 cut down are starting to mature.
"The protesters lost the battle. But perhaps they won the war.
"There is no doubt the tree climbers swayed public opinion and, later, political policy changed too. It virtually halted the construction of major new roads for a generation.
"In the 20 years since the bypass was built, only two significant new roads have been created in this part of England: the Hindhead tunnel on the A3, and the Weymouth Relief Road.
"As Newbury was being built, a tunnel past Stonehenge in Wiltshire and a bypass for Arundel in West Sussex were being talked about. Twenty years later, they are still only being talked about."
And with the memories of 20 years ago still fresh in the minds of both the protesters and law enforcers, the legacy of the trees that were felled also lives on - albeit it not in Newbury.
Mr Pritchard says: "We collected tree seedlings that had sprouted where the trees had been cut down, and planted them in other parts of the country.
"Some of them are now way taller than me."
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The first images of a proposed new housing development on the site of BBC Wales' current headquarters in Cardiff have been unveiled. | The artist's impressions show how about 400 houses and apartments could look at the Broadcasting House and Ty Oldfield sites in Llandaff.
If given planning approval, work could start in 2018 after the BBC relocates to new headquarters in the city centre.
The images will be shown at a public exhibition in Llandaff on Thursday.
Concerns have been raised by the plans, with Llandaff Society saying the character of the area "will be very difficult to sustain" with so many homes being built.
The Taylor Wimpey development is expected to include a mix of one and two-bedroom apartments and three, four and five-bedroom houses.
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A man has appeared in court charged with causing the death of a 14-year-old girl by dangerous driving. | Liberty Baker died in hospital after a car mounted the pavement as she walked to school in Witney, Oxfordshire, on 30 June.
Two other 14-year-olds and a man were also hit in the incident on Curbridge Road and needed hospital treatment.
Robert Blackwell, 19, of Hayway Lane, Bampton, is also charged with causing serious injury by dangerous driving.
He spoke only to confirm his name, address and date of birth at Banbury Magistrates' Court.
He was bailed to appear at Oxford Crown Court on 8 December.
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The youngest MP at Westminster, Mhairi Black, is to take up a place on one of the House of Commons select committees. | The 20-year-old, who graduated with a first class honours degree in politics from Glasgow University last week, will sit on the Work and Pensions select committee.
The party has confirmed that SNP MPs will sit on 26 select committees.
There will be three members on the Scottish affairs committee, which the party also chairs.
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Albums addressing race, immigration, Brexit and class division populate the shortlist for the 2019 Mercury Prize. | By Mark SavageBBC music reporter
Among the front-runners is Idles' Joy As An Act Of Resistance, a pro-immigration punk record that champions vulnerability and community.
Punk energy also underpins slowthai's debut, Nothing Great About Britain; and London rapper Dave tackles the tough social conditions that confront black working class youths on Psychodrama.
The winner is announced in September.
More than 200 albums were submitted for consideration, with judges including former nominees Stormzy, Gaz Coombes and Jorja Smith, DJs Annie Mac and Clara Amfo and other figures from the music industry.
They've championed several guitar bands on a strong, urgent shortlist - from Dublin punk newcomers Fontaines DC to festival headliners Foals; while British rap is represented by Little Simz, Dave and BBC Sound of 2019 runner-up slowthai.
Meanwhile singer-songwriter Anna Calvi, whose album Hunter interrogates the constrictions of gender stereotypes, has now been shortlisted for each of her first three albums, equalling a record set by Coldplay.
And The 1975 could become the first band since Arctic Monkeys in 2007 to win the Mercury Prize and be named best album at the Brit Awards.
However, there was nothing in the nominations for Lewis Capaldi's Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent, the best-selling British album of 2019; while captivating, adventurous records by Nilüfer Yanya, AJ Tracey, James Blake and Lucy Rose were also overlooked.
Read about all 12 of this year's nominees below.
The 1975 - A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships
Smart phones, information overload, confirmation bias and attention deficit... The 1975's third album wrings humour and pathos out of our content-saturated world.
Frontman Matty Healy wrote the album in a flurry of creativity after kicking heroin, and the whirlwind of musical styles can be dizzying - but his compassion and humanity ultimately shine through.
The critics say: "A tone of urgent honesty pulses through the album, a visceral need to connect that shatters the production's glittering surfaces." [The Telegraph]
Mercury Prize judges say: "Thrilling and thoughtful, eccentric and electric."
Listen to this: Love It If We Made It [explicit language]
Anna Calvi - Hunter
Anna Calvi described Hunter as her "queer, feminist" album - a bolder, freer record than her first two albums (both of which were also nominated for the Mercury Prize).
Written as a reaction against the way women are "depicted as being hunted by men", it sees her rejecting gender conventions (As A Man) and pursuing "pleasure in all possible ways, free from shame" (Hunter).
A gutsy, predatory album that highlights Calvi's prowess as a guitar player, it's her most accomplished work to date.
The critics say: "A soaring, feverish conflagration of sense and sensuality." [Mojo magazine]
Mercury Prize judges say: "A wildly adventurous musical exploration of sexual identities and desires."
Listen to this: As A Man
Black Midi - Schlagenheim
The debut album by experimental rock band Black Midi has a made-up word for a title. "It's absolutely meaningless," bassist Cameron Picton told All Things Loud.
"It carries the vessel of those songs, which is why we think it's such a strong title. The only meaning that it could have in the world is being the album title, grouping those songs together."
The songs are equally difficult to define - being slippery, unpredictable indie-jazz-math-rock concoctions that will either intrigue or repel you.
The critics say: "There's so much going on here that nothing ever gets bogged down enough to feel indulgent." [Rolling Stone]
Mercury Prize judges say: "Black Midi are so wilfully resistant to following any obvious musical path that it is impossible not to enjoy the ride".
Listen to this: Ducter
Cate Le Bon - Reward
Cate Le Bon spent a year "sequestered in the Cumbrian mountainside" while recording her fifth album, living in a rented cottage where she built her own furniture and played piano late into the night.
"I felt like I may have lost my mind a little at times," she said - and while Reward has moments of quiet contemplation, there's an undertow of loss and pain that suggests solitude gave her permission to wallow in her feelings.
But Le Bon's restless musicality, all honking saxophones and rubber-band basslines, constantly hints at the allure of returning to the real world.
The critics say: "Spacious and remarkably constructed, with hidden compartments built for secret sounds that seem to unlock with repeated listenings." [Allmusic]
Mercury Prize judges say: "Elegant, urgent and shimmeringly romantic."
Listen to this: Home To You
Dave - Psychodrama
Framed as excerpts from a year-long course of therapy, Dave's debut album grapples with grief, pain, racial identity, domestic abuse and depression ("I think I'm going mad again," he raps on Psycho, "It's like I'm happy for a second, then I'm sad again".)
The music is as thoughtful and introspective as the 21-year-old's lyrics, dusted with melancholy piano chords and textured beats that set it apart from the grime scene he rose up through.
"It's meant to be innovative, risky, divisive in how it's heard," he recently told the Standard, describing the record as a "time capsule" people can open in "10 years and think: 'This is what it was like to be black in south London in 2019'".
The critics say: "The boldest and best British rap album in a generation." [The Guardian]
Mercury Prize judges say: "A powerful and astutely crafted memoir of Dave's life and our times."
Listen to this: Black [Explicit language]
Foals - Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost
"The ultimate Foals album," declared one critic upon hearing Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost - the first of two albums due from Foals this year.
Recorded after the departure of founding member and bass player Walter Gervers, the record fuses the band's early, inscrutable math-rock with the pulverising riffs of 2015's What Went Down and the hyperspace rhythms of Holy Fire, while adding a few new flavours for good measure.
The title comes from a video game screen warning players to save their progress, which frontman Yannis Philippakis applies here to the combined effects of political and environmental chaos.
The critics say: "This is Foals at their best, and we're only seeing half of the picture." [Drowned In Sound]
Mercury Prize judges say: "A musical soundtrack to the drama of climate change."
Listen to this: Exits
Fontaines DC - Dogrel
A year ago, Fontaines DC were playing in pubs - but the break-neck buzz of singles like Liberty Belle and Hurricane Laughter quickly saw them outgrow those stages.
Both are present on the Dublin band's debut album, a scrappy riff on their record collection (The Stooges, The Strokes, Joy Division) fused with the caustic romanticism of Shane MacGowan.
"We looked around at Dublin, saw what was happening on the streets, opened our ears, and turned it into some music," said bassist Conor Deegan.
The critics say: "A fiery album which grabs you by the scruff of your neck from the start." [The 405]
Mercury Prize judges say: "Smartly written, impatiently driven. Irresistible reflections on urban change and loss."
Listen to this: Boys In The Better Land
Idles - Joy As An Act Of Resistance
Anti-Brexit, pro-immigration and determined to topple toxic masculinity, Idles' second album pulls off the tricky feat of being compassionate and angry at the same time.
Over thundering riffs and bovver-boy drum beats, singer Joe Talbot tears into Britain's societal ills, while never losing his sense of humour. "You look like a walking thyroid," he cajoles an assailant on Never Fight a Man With a Perm. "You're not a man you're a gland."
The critics say: "This is the jarring sound of sensitivity in a new age of chaos." [The Line Of Best Fit]
Mercury Prize judges say: "Everything the title promises. A bruising, uplifting guitar-charged defiance of austerity and hatred."
Listen to this: Danny Nedelko
Little Simz - Grey Area
"I'm Jay-Z on a bad day, Shakespeare on my worst days," raps Little Simz on Offence, the strutting funk workout that opens her third album.
It's tongue-in-cheek, but there's a sliver of truth: 25-year-old Simbi Ajikawo has emerged as one of the UK's most agile wordsmiths and she reaches new heights here by confronting the demons that lurk below that self-belief.
Unusually for a British rap record, it's recorded with a live band, taking in everything from jazz and soul to punk and chiptune.
The critics say: "A wickedly assured, highly entertaining, coming-of-age marvel." [Pitchfork]
Mercury Prize judges say: "Rap as self-reflection, vulnerability as power. Poignant and implacable."
Listen to this: Offence [Explicit language]
Nao - Saturn
In astrology, Saturn's Return is the theory that you undergo life-changing events every 29 years, when Saturn returns to the same position it occupied when you were born.
For London singer-songwriter Nao, those changes involved a "complete shedding of skin" as she endured a painful break-up and questioned her career choices.
Thankfully, she chose to stick with music - escaping sorrow's gravitational pull with an other-worldly album of neo-soul.
The critics say: "Saturn's sonic palette and millennial anxieties are both strikingly modern, a testament to Nao's perceptiveness as a songwriter." [Loud and Quiet]
Mercury Prize judges say: "Beautifully crafted songs and buoyant vocals. An impeccable soul album."
Listen to this: Make It Out Alive
Seed Ensemble - Driftglass
Formed in 2016, Seed Ensemble is a 10-piece project led by saxophonist Cassie Kinoshi, who mix old and new beats with spiritual, Afro-centric jazz.
But it's a London album through and through. On the rootsy Afronaut, poetess Xana evokes London tower blocks and "growing up on Desmonds"; while WAKE is an acid-tongued tribute to the 72 victims of the Grenfell fire, opening with the lyrics: "Tell all my mourners to mourn in red, 'cause there ain't no sense in my bein' dead".
The critics say: "A powerfully coherent document of an important strand of UK contemporary jazz that's also a lot of fun to listen to." [Jazz Views]
Mercury Prize judges say: "Rousing and inspiring."
Listen to this:Afronaut
slowthai - Nothing Great About Britain
Nothing Great About Britain may not be an easy listen, but it is a compelling one - giving a voice to disillusioned provincial Britain, while firing shots at the monarchy, the police and the far right.
It's all the work of 24-year-old Tyron Frampton (slowthai was a school nickname), whose music is rooted in the sounds of grime and the attitude of punk.
But while the title track and the Skepta-featuring Inglorious paint a bleak picture of modern Britain, Frampton retains a reassuring faith in the communal power of music.
"I feel like as long as I bring people together, and we all have a love for life and a love for ourselves, I feel like that's what it's all about," he recently told Billboard.
The critics say: "A measured yet viciously ribald meditation on the contradictions at the heart of Britishness in 2019." [The Quietus]
Mercury Prize judges say: "Absorbing, vivid stories of lives lived at the cultural margins, told with tenderness, rage and humour."
Listen to this: Inglorious [Explicit language]
Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email [email protected].
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A contractor has been announced for a £75m improvement scheme to the A63 in East Yorkshire. | Balfour Beatty will start the Castle Street scheme in 2016/17.
The 0.9 mile (1.5 k) scheme in Hull city centre aims to improve journey times with a new underpass and two new pedestrian bridges over the road.
The plan is to lower the road into a cutting at Mytongate Junction so Ferensway and Commercial Road can pass over it.
The route is an important link between the M62, Humber Bridge and the city's port, the Highways Agency said.
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A free-riding fox surprised sightseers on a London tour bus - who found themselves sharing the experience with the furry stowaway. | The four-legged tourist is thought to have slipped onto the double-decker while it was parked in a depot.
It sat on the top deck and rode the bus until Park Lane, in the heart of the capital, when it was finally spotted.
RSPCA animal collection officer Jill Sanders, said: "Nowhere does it say that a fox can't travel.
"But understandably staff were a little concerned about the fox's welfare."
Passengers were taken off and the bus was locked so Ms Sanders could safely catch the fox.
It was then returned to its den, being released into undergrowth near the bus depot.
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Smile was the album that broke Beach Boy Brian Wilson, one of the greatest songwriters of the 1960s. Now, 45 years on, the dozens and dozens of recordings made in the now almost legendary Smile Sessions are being released. | By David SillitoArts and entertainment correspondent, BBC News
In 1966, the Beach Boys released Pet Sounds and set a new benchmark for innovative pop music. The Beatles took notice.
A year later, Wilson, the sensitive songwriter behind most of their hits, set out to create something an even more adventurous Beach Boys album. It was to be called Smile but it was never released.
Wilson still bears some of the mental scars. Talking to him now it's clear he has good and bad moments.
Some answers are abrupt, some tail off. Then suddenly, usually when he's talking about the music, he's entirely lucid.
The main problem was drugs. "I regret what happened. We overdid the drugs, we went too deep into the drugs," he says.
"It took us so into the music we couldn't finish it. Because we were so stoned, we were like... Okay, let's hold on for 10 minutes."
It's no wonder that a multi-layered pop masterpiece such as Good Vibrations took seven months to complete.
It was then an amazing amount of time, given that he had only a year or two before been producing four albums a year.
But while Good Vibrations was issued as a single, much of the material recorded over those months was never released.
In between the tracks were little spoken interludes. One of them is called Brian Falls In To A Piano, which Wilson now admits sounds rather crazy.
"Those drugs got us going," he says. "A lot of people in the early 60s were taking drugs, you know, and drugs do help the creative process. But they also do damage to the brain.
"You get two things. You get this creative high and the minus is you've got to come down off those awful drugs, back to the world of reality."
Water phobia
However, it was never clear how far Wilson truly returned. One tune, entitled Mrs O'Leary's Cow, is about fire and Wilson became alarmed when a fire started in the neighbourhood.
Had the song triggered the fire? Wilson was worried. He also wanted the feel of the beach to help his composing, so he had a sandpit installed in his house.
Yet looking back at film footage from that era is a reminder that the description Beach Boy was always an odd one for Wilson. He never went into the sea because he was terrified of drowning.
In the 1970s Wilson was, after some cajoling, filmed using a surf board in a segment for a TV programme. The board is the wrong way round.
In the Smile Sessions is the song Surf's Up. But it doesn't bear any similarities with their old tunes, such as Surfing Safari.
Surf's Up's lyrics go: A blind class aristocracy/Back through the opera glass you see/The pit and the pendulum drawn/Columnated ruins domino.
What did it mean? "I have no idea," says the lyricist Van Dyke Parks.
For a band that had been mocked when they had appeared at London's Albert Hall for being too square in their smartly pressed matching shirts, the transformation was bewildering.
Wilson's bandmates, especially Mike Love, did not know what to make of the songs. How would middle America relate to Love To Say Dada, Do You Like Worms and the companion piece to Brian Falls Into A Piano, Brian Falls Into A Microphone?
There was also a dispute with the record label. Wilson's mental health was not good. The tapes were shelved.
"We thought we were too far ahead of our time," he says. "It was too advanced, too much for people to understand and so we put it on the shelf for 40 years."
In 2004 Wilson returned to Smile and recorded a completed version with his new band the Wondermints.
Now, another seven years on, Wilson and the remaining Beach Boys are releasing the original Smile from the dozens of tracks and fragments recorded in the 60s.
Many of the songs have appeared on other albums. But what makes this special is that there is now a Beach Boys album called Smile - the long lost "missing" album that sent Wilson over the edge.
It's a little piece of the myth of the 1960s.
Smile is released in the UK on 31 October.
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A pilot cull of badgers is about to start in Wales with the aim of curbing tuberculosis in cattle; and the UK government has indicated that culling may begin in England too in the next few years.
Our environment correspondent Richard Black looks at what is happening, and what it may achieve.
| By Richard BlackEnvironment correspondent, BBC News
What is happening in Wales?
The Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) is commissioning a pilot cull of badgers within a 288 sq km (111 sq miles) area of south-west Wales.
WAG has not revealed the date when the cull will begin, nor the exact boundaries of the Intensive Action Pilot Area; but it is known to lie principally in north Pembrokeshire, extending marginally into Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire.
The aim is to remove all badgers within the area.
Animals will be trapped in cages and shot, although the control order also allows for the shooting of roaming badgers and for the use of lethal injection.
The order gives contractors the right to enter anyone's land. A minority of landowners have declared their opposition.
The pilot cull is expected to last for five years. It is part of a wider programme of efforts to control the disease in the area, which will also see cattle being tested for infection twice each year in addition to existing restrictions on their movements.
At least 1,500 badgers are likely to be killed during the pilot.
Why is it happening?
Infection through contact with badgers is one of the main routes by which cattle contract bovine tuberculosis (though nationally, cattle-to-cattle transmission is more significant).
This debilitating disease is caused by Mycobacterium bovis, a close relative of the bacterium that usually causes TB in humans.
Because the bovine bacterium can also cause human TB, infected cattle have to be destroyed.
The incidence of the disease has been growing in Wales. WAG says that more than 12,000 cattle were slaughtered as a result of TB infection in 2008 (compared with 669 in 1997), at a cost of £24m to the public purse.
In March 2009, Rural Affairs Minister Elin Jones announced that a pilot badger cull would be instigated. North Pembrokeshire was chosen largely because TB is an acute problem there, with more than half the compensation paid out across Wales going to farmers in this area.
Based on existing scientific research, WAG believes the cull may reduce the incidence of TB in cattle by 9%, with the effect persisting for 2 to 3 years after the cull stops.
The ultimate aim of the entire intensive bovine TB plan - culling plus all the cattle control measures - is local eradication of the disease.
How much will it cost?
WAG has allocated £9m over the five-year period to intensive bovine TB controls within the North Pembrokeshire area, including culling.
This does not include the cost of any policing operations.
WAG's advisory documents put the culling cost at £2,830 per badger.
It believes that given the high and rising cost of the disease in cattle, this is an investment that should pay for itself.
Is culling backed by science?
The biggest study on the issue anywhere in the world - the UK Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT), also known as the "Krebs Trial" - concluded that "reactive culling" (killing badgers in response to a TB outbreak in cattle) makes the problem worse, producing an increase in infections in cattle.
This is thought to be because culling disturbs badgers' social groups, causing them to roam further and come into contact with more cattle.
Culling "proactively" - seeking to wipe out badgers in pre-determined areas, as will be done in the Welsh pilot - brought the infection rate down within the culled area.
However, it also produced an increase in infection on farms outside the immediate area - again, probably because the badgers were roaming further afield.
In early 2007, the government's advisers, the Independent Scientific Group, which included the scientific leaders of the Krebs Trial, concluded that culling "cannot meaningfully contribute to the future control of cattle TB in Britain".
They said culling was unlikely to have a significant positive impact unless conducted over really big areas, and would not be cost-effective. The rising tide of infection could be tackled by cattle-based measures, they said.
Soon afterwards, a review by the then UK chief scientific adviser Sir David King reached the opposite conclusion: culling could be an useful tool under certain situations, he determined. His analysis did not include the question of cost effectiveness.
Sir David was heavily criticised within the scientific community, an editorial in the journal Nature saying his "mishandling" of the issue "…is an example to governments of how not deal with [independent scientific] advice".
Badgers are culled in the Irish Republic, where the government says it makes a real contribution to suppressing bovine TB, but will not eradicate the disease. In New Zealand, possums are culled for the same reason.
Is it legal?
The European badger (Meles meles) is a protected species under both the European Bern Convention of 1979 and the UK's 1992 Protection of Badgers Act.
However, both of these documents allow for exemptions "to prevent serious damage to crops, livestock, forests, fisheries, water and other forms of property", provided "there is no other satisfactory solution and that the exception will not be detrimental to the survival of the (wildlife) population concerned".
In addition, the UK's Animal Health Act of 1981 sets out conditions under which the designated government minister can order a cull.
The minister must be satisfied that a wildlife species is acting as a reservoir of an animal disease, and "that destruction of wild members of that or those species in that area is necessary in order to eliminate, or substantially reduce the incidence of, that disease in animals of any kind in the area", then he or she may "by order provide for the destruction of wild members of that or those species in that area".
Both UK laws, and the Bern Convention, apply in Wales.
Last year, the Badger Trust lodged application for a judicial review of the cull order.
Its main grounds were that culling would not "substantially reduce" TB incidence, that the minister had erroneously proceeded on the basis (contrary to her scientific evidence) that the benefit would persist for years after culling stopped, and that the minister had failed to balance the harm to badgers against the suggested benefits for cattle.
The judicial review found in favour of WAG.
However, in early June the Badger Trust won leave to appeal against that decision in the Court of Appeal. No date has yet been set.
What about vaccination?
Current regulations mean that vaccinated cattle could not be exported to the rest of the EU, as current tests cannot distinguish between infected and vaccinated animals.
Vaccinating badgers is another approach. The effectiveness of injectable vaccines has been shown in captive badgers, but has not yet been demonstrated in the wild.
The ultimate goal is an oral vaccine that would be added to food left out for badgers to eat. This may be available in four to five years' time.
The Irish Republic sees vaccination as opening the door to eradication of bovine TB. However, vaccines would not affect infected badgers, so culling might be maintained for some years after the start of a vaccination programme.
What does the Welsh plan mean for the rest of the UK?
The coalition government in Westminster (which administers the issue for England) says it will "introduce a carefully managed and science-led policy of badger control in areas with high and persistent levels of bovine tuberculosis".
In briefings in May, Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman said this could include limited culling in "hot-spots". But Agriculture Minister James Paice took a considerably stronger line, telling farmers: "We will do it - it is an absolute pledge".
Opponents have asked how small-scale targeted culls can be "science-based" when the Krebs Trial conclusions indicate that only large-scale culls can produce a positive impact. Ms Spelman says the situation has changed since 2005, when the Krebs Trial concluded.
Ms Spelman said her department would look to learn from the Welsh experience. This would not mean waiting for results, however, but observing how contractors carry out the process.
Northern Ireland's agriculture department does not have plans for a cull but, says it "shall be very interested to see exactly what it is they (Defra) propose and how it is to be funded".
The Scottish government has no plans in the area, as it says badgers are not a source of bovine TB infection in Scotland.
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Aberdeen-based Wood Group has been awarded a contract to help develop what is thought to be one of the world's biggest oil fields, in Iraq.
| Majnoon is estimated to hold about 38 billion barrels of oil.
About 200 Wood Group workers will provide tools, services and test equipment to assist the start-up, commissioning and testing of the field, which lies near Basra.
The contract is believed to be worth up to $20m (£12.8m).
The project is being overseen by Shell Iraq Petroleum.
The one-year contract was awarded to Wood Group-CCC, a joint venture between Wood Group PSN and Consolidated Contractors Company.
In March, Wood Group reported a 43% increase in pre-tax profits for 2012.
The firm made $363m (£239m) with revenues up 20% to $6.8bn (£4.5bn).
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A collection of Egyptian artefacts held by Eton College has been made available for public view with the opening of a new gallery. | Prince Charles opened the Bekynton Field Development, which includes 40 new classrooms and a new Eton Museum of Antiquities.
It will display artefacts given to the school over the centuries.
Head master Tony Little said: "It's wonderful to have a place where people can visit."
The new building is the biggest addition to the Berkshire public school since it was founded in the 15th Century.
It includes facilities for the school's modern languages, politics, economics and divinity departments as well as a 300-seat lecture theatre.
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We all watched as The xx made their meek acceptance speech over the sound of popping champagne corks during the televised conclusion to the evening but what's it like to be nominated and what happens on the day? Newsbeat's music reporter spent the day in the back pockets of nominees Foals to find out... | By Greg CochraneNewsbeat music reporter
Early afternoon
A hazy looking Foals arrive one-by-one from London Grosvenor House hotel's luxurious lift looking sleepy eyed.
After soundchecking in the basement venue of tonight's awards (7 September) the evening before they were put up in one of the building's swanky suites.
"£5 I've just paid for some water with herbs in," exclaims keyboardist Edwin Congrave holding a cup of tea. An A4 'day schedule' is shoved into the Oxford band's hands and a long day begins.
Mercury Prize goes to trio The xx
Meanwhile, many of the 12 nominated artists begin congregating in the hotel foyer.
Paul Weller looks every inch the confident favourite (or he might just look cool because he's wearing sunglasses inside), The xx clutch their suit bags and Biffy Clyro chat with Wild Beasts.
"I'm feeling a bit jittery now. I think I'm quite nervous, or it could be the hangover," says Foals guitarist Jimmy Smith cupping a wine glass of water walking from the lobby to the basement venue where the awards take place tonight.
"I've got to perfect my losing face. I don't want to be disappointed."
Mid-afternoon
"The room looks pretty amazing now," says Jimmy surveying the ceremony being prepared as the final tables are set out and the chandeliers dusted.
Taking to the stage after Biffy Clyro and Laura Marling the fivesome breeze through single Spanish Sahara for their television rehearsal and greet host Jools Holland.
Now, normally the nominees would head back to their plush hotel rooms to get changed into their Tuesday-best at this point. Not Foals though.
"This is the first thing we've ever done like this so we weren't sure how to play it," confides Jimmy looking down at his T-shirt. "We were going to go for the proper DJs. I'm glad we didn't.
"It's all about the music and about being yourself and looking like the band you are - which in our case is awful."
Rehearsal complete, Jimmy looks to capitalise on a free minute. "I'm going to go for a lie down," he says looking like he needs a lie down.
Early evening
An hour later, the five members reconvene in the hotel lobby preparing to be sent down the media shuttle run after Paul Weller, Villagers and Wild Beasts. "Can we go to the bar?" offers lead singer Yannis Philappakis.
One shot each later, chests puffed out and they're being sprayed by the flashes of about 30 paparazzi bulbs before wandering down the red walkway in the hotel courtyard to chat to the assembled media.
"If we broke up tomorrow, getting nominated here would feel like a concrete achievement," says Yannis to a BBC colleague udring one of their many interviews trying to sum up what being nominated for the Mercury Prize means to them.
Meanwhile, he's also the only person we've ever seen light up a string of cigarettes on a red carpet.
Attendees Martine McCutcheon, Mr Hudson, Seasick Steve and Mat Horne all brush past them.
Show time
After the "dazzling" of the red carpet the band are guided through a warren of corridors into the venue and to their table - decorated generously with alcohol.
Foals nervously wait their turn to play live on stage during the pre-recorded Mercury programme. "Some pretty great performances so far," says Jimmy anxiously. "Laura Marling was my favourite."
Following on from jazz outsiders Kit Downes Trio, Foals take to the Mercury Prize stage and rattle through their track confidently to huge applause from the hundreds of guests seated in the room. Murmurs around them suggest the 14/1 outsiders could have swung the judges (not that they're supposed to take it into account).
Post track Jimmy nips out for a cigarette: "I feel pretty good now. I didn't realise how nervous I was.
"It's a different kind of show, just all these eyes staring.
"It's an hour and a half until we find out who the winners and losers are and we get dinner in the meantime. I hope there's a cheese platter."
The result
After a nerve jangling wait (and a cod dinner) the hyped atmosphere is almost at breaking point as host Jools Holland arrives on stage to deliver the result live on BBC2.
Foals, and the 11 other nominees, collectively hold their breath. He opens the small envelop to reveal… The xx.
"Gutted, gutted," says Jimmy leaving the table. "Everyone didn't know what to do with themselves. I was looking over at Mumford's [And Sons'] table and everyone was stone cold still.
"We tried not to get our hopes up at all but then you do, don't you? I thought Paul Weller had got it.
"The xx though - I'm happy. They're doing something unique, they're causing a stir. They're great and they're humble about it."
Late evening
Sat still at their table as The xx are rushed off to be drenched in the media spotlight the band share a reflective moment.
"What happens now? Now, we all get dropped by the label," laughs Jimmy half on his way to the after-show party. "We're looking in Yellow Pages for jobs. No - now I think we all go hang out and have a few drinks."
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On death row in Malawi, Byson Kaula was nearly executed three times - but on each occasion the hangman stopped work before hanging all the prisoners on his list. So he survived… until the country stopped executing people altogether. | By Mary GoodhartBBC News, Malawi
Byson Kaula says jealous neighbours were responsible for him being found guilty of murder. It was 1992 and murder in those days carried a mandatory death sentence.
Brought up in a small village in southern Malawi, Byson had made enough money working in the gas industry in Johannesburg, South Africa, to return home and buy land. He employed five people and grew fruit, wheat, maize, and cassava.
"That is when my sad times began," he says.
Neighbours attacked one of his employees, Byson says, leaving him badly injured. The man couldn't walk without assistance, and while helping him get to the toilet - navigating steps that were slippery after heavy rain - Byson fell and dropped him. The man died later in hospital, and Byson - then in his 40s - was charged with murder.
In court, Byson's neighbours testified against him.
His mother, Lucy, sitting at the back of the courtroom, couldn't hear the sentence being read out and had to ask what was happening. When she was told he had been sentenced to death, "tears rolled from my eyes down my chest," she says.
This was towards the end of the totalitarian government of Hastings Banda, which had controlled the country since 1964. Byson vividly remembers the horror of waiting for his turn at what he calls "the killing machine".
"When I was told: 'You can go now to the condemned section waiting for your time to be hanged' - oh, I felt as if I was already dead."
At that time, there was just one executioner - a South African who travelled between several countries in the region, carrying out hangings. When he arrived in Malawi, once every couple of months, the prisoners on death row knew that time, for some of them, had run out.
One day Byson remembers being told that his name was on the list of 21 people to be hanged within hours. A guard told him that executions would begin at 13:00 and that he should "just start praying".
Find out more
Listen to Life After Death Row, on Assignment, on the BBC World Service, on 21 February
Click here for transmission times, or to listen online
They continued until 15:00, when the executioner stopped work. But he had not reached the end of the list. Three people, including Byson, would have to wait until he returned.
"He was the only one operating that machine. And on that day, I understand he said: 'No it's too much, I'll come again next month,'" Byson says.
The same thing happened twice more, Byson says. The list was drawn up, but the hangman didn't finish it - and each time, by chance, Byson was among those left alive at the end of the day. On the third occasion, all the prisoners on the list were executed except him, he says.
In a way he was lucky, but the experience took its toll on him and he attempted suicide twice - only to survive this too.
After the establishment of multi-party democracy in Malawi in 1994, all executions came to a halt. The death sentence is still given out, even today, but no president has signed a death warrant for 25 years. Prisoners either languish on death row for years or have their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.
In time, Byson was moved from death row to the main part of Zomba Central Prison, and it looked as though he would spend the rest of his life there. He became heavily involved in the prison education programme, both studying and teaching. But he had no hope of ever being released.
Then, in 2007, a historic case changed everything.
A drug user who admitted killing his stepson, but argued that he had been temporarily insane, went to court to challenge the mandatory death sentence for murder. He argued that this breached the right to a fair trial, and the right to protection from "inhuman and degrading treatment" - both guaranteed by Malawi's constitution - and the court agreed. In some cases of murder the perpetrator was more culpable than others, it ruled, and there should therefore be different levels of punishment.
This meant that all mandatory death sentences had to be reviewed.
Of nearly 170 prisoners eligible for resentencing, 139 have so far been released. According to the legal charity Reprieve, many had mental health problems or were intellectually disabled. More than half of those entitled to a new hearing turned out to have no court record at all - it was unclear why they were even in prison.
When lawyers said that they wanted to take Byson back to court he initially resisted, as he had been so terrified by his first experience. But he gave in, and when the judge told him he was free to leave immediately, he was stunned.
"The prison warders said can you get out of the accused box. But I couldn't stand up. I was just shivering, all my body was so weak… It was just as if I was dreaming. I could not believe what the judge had said."
Byson wasn't the only person whose life had been changed by his sentence.
His mother Lucy had visited every year during his incarceration. She would save her earnings from a year's work farming cotton to make the journey to the prison in Zomba, bringing Byson as many provisions as she could carry.
On the day of Byson's resentencing in 2015, she wasn't there, but her younger son was. When he rang to tell her the news, she took a while to believe what he was saying. Then, she says, she "jumped around like a lamb - a young lamb… my heart was filled with joy".
Byson was taken to a halfway house to help him learn new skills and make the transition back to normal life after 23 years in prison. Already in his 60s, he was the oldest person they'd ever had there.
He now goes back as a volunteer at weekends, to advise other ex-prisoners who are going through the same experience.
The land Byson used to farm is now overgrown. His wife died during the long years he was in prison and his six children have grown up and moved away.
He lives alone, but takes good care of his mother, now in her 80s.
"During my imprisonment, all I was worrying about was my mother… Being her first-born, I would do everything possible for her. Now that I'm back, I don't let her go farming or do hard jobs. I have got other people to do the jobs for her. She doesn't go to the field. I do it myself."
His next project is to build her a new brick house.
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Just over a year ago, Greek pilot Vasileios Vasileiou checked into a luxury hilltop hotel in Kabul. The Intercontinental was popular with foreign visitors - which is why, on 20 January, Taliban gunmen stormed it, killing at least 40 people. Vasileios explains how he survived.
Read: 'The bed that saved me from the Taliban'
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The ancestors of modern Britons saw something special in certain parts of the land and deemed them more sacred than others. Neil Oliver explains why they are so special. | The rich and varied landscape of Britain inspired our ancestors to express their beliefs.
In the flint mines of Norfolk, Stone Age miners carried their religion deep underground and at Flag Fen near Peterborough a vast ancient causeway was built across the fens with sacred objects placed among its timbers.
People are still drawn back to these places today and the belief and ritual that surround them.
So what places did our ancestors deem more sacred than others and why are they so special?
1. Goat's Hole Cave, Paviland, Gower Peninsula
In a sea cave near the base of a cliff on the Gower Peninsula, known locally as Yellow Top (on account of the lichen that grows on its face) a 19th Century archaeologist named William Buckland found an ancient human burial. Noticing at once that the bones were stained with red ochre and the grave also contained items of ivory "jewellery", he assumed it to be the remains of a woman. The find was known thereafter as The Red Lady of Paviland and Victorian minds assumed "she" had been a woman of easy virtue, buried far from polite society in a grave in a cave.
In fact, the Red Lady was a man and recent radiocarbon dates obtained from the remains reveal he lived and died around 33,000 years ago, when the last Ice Age was beginning to exert its grip on northern Europe. He was buried close by the skull of a mammoth and modern archaeologists have imagined he may have died while hunting the beast and his companions saw fit to bury hunter and prey together. Whatever the truth of his life and death, his send-off was marked with great imagination and perhaps even love. I am always touched by evidence that, however much we are separated from our ancestors by great voids of time, in so many ways they were exactly like us. Only their circumstances were different.
2. Creswell Crags/ChurchHole and Robin Hood's Cave
Near Sheffield is a truly awe-inspiring set of caves at the bases of cliffs facing each other across a wide gorge. Archaeological evidence shows they were used for shelter not just by our modern human ancestors but also by our Neanderthal cousins who occupied northern Europe and Britain before the coming of the last Ice Age more than 30,000 years ago. One of the caves, known as Church Hole, has become famous as the location for the most northerly Palaeolithic cave art found so far.
The work of hunters who penetrated the British peninsula of northern Europe as the Ice Age waxed and waned around 13,000 years ago, they are wonders to behold. Animals like bison and ibex, as well as birds like the ibis, and other abstract forms were etched into the limestone walls of the cave by an artist (or artists) living within a few miles of the nose of the glacier itself. It was a world unimaginably different from ours, and much colder and tougher, and yet some of the hunters travelling in pursuit of the reindeer herds upon which their lives depended set aside time to make works of art. In another of the caves, the one known as Robin Hood's Cave, archaeologists found a sliver of horse bone on to which had been etched an exquisite rendering of a horse's head.
The caves, and the gorge itself, clearly mattered to fully modern people - homo sapiens like us - living in that part of the world as much as 13,000 years ago. Woven into their daily lives of hunting and foraging was the need to express some connection they felt to the animals they saw around them, or that their parents and grandparents had told them about.
3. Goldcliff, near Newport in south Wales
On the mudflats of the Severn Estuary, at Goldcliff near Newport in south Wales, the tides are revealing footprints made by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers perhaps 8,000 years ago. Trails of prints, made by men, women and children as well as by animals and birds, were preserved by chance and for millennia beneath layers of mud, silt and peat. Now being exposed once more, thanks to more recent changes in the route of River Severn, they are the most ephemeral traces of humanity imaginable. They are not fossils - the mud is still mud and has not been turned to stone - they are exactly as they would have looked when those long ago hunters made them. However slight they are, each print is nonetheless the proof of a life. While not perhaps "sacred" in the way that a burial chamber might seem, or a stone circle or a church, the sight and feel of those footprints affected me deeply. The fact I could place my own hand into the still-soft print left in silt by a Mesolithic hunter - his partner or his child - made me feel like I was eaves-dropping on a moment in time.
4. Ness of Brodgar, Orkney
Two of the most famous Neolithic stone circles in Britain, Orkney's Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar, are within easy walking distance of each other. Along with the great burial mound of Maes Howe they sit within a natural amphitheatre, a flattened bowl of low-lying land surrounded by hills. The walk between the two circles is across a narrow finger of land between two lochs - Harray and Stenness - and the isthmus itself is dominated by a whaleback shaped ridge that rises several metres above the water level.
Until very recently the ridge was assumed to be natural, a product of geology. But survey and excavation have revealed the whaleback shape is the result of layer upon layer of ancient building work. For centuries during the Neolithic period, around 5,000 years ago, the community expended huge amounts of effort and imagination creating what archaeologists are calling a temple complex. Two huge walls were built across the isthmus, cutting off a huge area of land. Between the walls - several football pitches worth of ground - the people built all manner of stone structures. Most appear like houses to the untrained eye but in fact it seems unlikely they were lived in. Rather they were the setting for rituals and practices associated with some or other ancient religion.
For generation after generation the community built, used and then demolished the structures and over time the layers built up to create the ridge. The religious use of the site seems to have culminated in the demolition of all the separate buildings and then the construction of one, solitary and huge temple. Its walls were several metres thick and supported a roof of great stone slabs. It must have been stunning. Sometime relatively soon after its completion, that building too was demolished and the whole site abandoned forever.
5. Avebury Stone Circle, Wiltshire
The great stone circle of Avebury, perhaps the most impressive monument of its kind anywhere in the world, is a place to strike wonder into every heart and mind. Built during the third millennium BC it is technically a henge monument - a circular area of ground contained by a bank and ditch - containing three stone circles. The great ditch that encircles the whole is itself more than 10m deep and the towering outer bank created from the digging of the ditch would have concealed all activity within from prying eyes. The sheer effort involved in creating the monument - digging the ditch by hand, moving and raising the giant sarsen stones that form the circles - all but beggars belief. That many generations of a community worked so hard for so long to make a reality of their vision makes us shake our heads as we wonder what belief or thought motivated such labour. Even the sober and scientific archaeologists who study the site today will usually admit to being dumbstruck with admiration about such a work of creativity and imagination.
6. West Kennet longbarrow, Wiltshire
One of the most famous early Neolithic tombs, West Kennet long barrow, is a giant of its kind. The mound that encloses the internal, stone-built passage and chambers is well over 100m long and dominates the ridge of high ground upon which it sits.
The passage within is tall enough to let a person stand upright, while the chambers offer more of a crouched space. No more than 40 or so individuals, or the skeletal remains of those individuals, were placed inside the chambers. At some point in ancient times a decision was taken to close the tomb, to put it out of use. This was achieved by hauling into position and then erecting a facade of huge sarsen "blocking stones" that ceremonially barred entrance to the interior. Archaeologists believe tombs like West Kennet were built by the early farmers as part of a means of laying claim to the land.
By being able to point to the tomb and say "my father's bones are in there and those of my father's father and my father's father's father", the community could feel entitled to defend their territory.
7. St Nectan's Glen, Cornwall
Until the making of Sacred Wonders, I had never heard of St Nectan's Glen in Cornwall. It is an astonishingly beautiful, even magical spot, like a fairy glen made real. The glen has been cut by water and erosion during who knows how many millennia. What greets the visitor now is a waterfall that drops around 20m into a natural bowl and then emerges through a circular hole cut by the endless stream. Moss and lichen cloak the sheer sides, along with precariously perched trees, so the whole place has a mysterious, otherworldly atmosphere. Once revered by pre-Roman Celts, who venerated the spirit of the water, and later associated with the 6th Century Saint Nectan, it is still visited today by thousands of people from all over the world. The Arthur myth too has been bolted on and folk thereabouts believe the king and his knights came to the glen to be blessed, before heading out in search of the Holy Grail. Christians, Buddhists, pagans and curious visitors with no religious beliefs of any kind are drawn to the place to this day. Many leave little souvenirs of their visit - single coins wedged into tree trunks, old train tickets from the journey, photos and keepsakes of loved ones.
8. Iona, to the west of Mull, Scotland
St Columba, the man credited with converting the Scottish Gaels to Christianity, fled or was driven out of Ireland in 563 AD. He was likely a high-born son of the O'Neill clan and so able to use his status to befriend the great and the good of western Scotland.
He attended the inauguration of King Aedan mac Gabhrain in 574 and for his efforts was awarded the island of Iona. It was there that he and his followers established a Christian community, which in time became one of the brightest beacons of European Christianity. As well as the faith, Columba and his ilk brought literacy to the tribes. The community on Iona brought stability to much of the west of Scotland and the life of the saint was made immortal by the hand of Adomnan, a later abbot of Iona who wrote, The Life of Saint Columba.
A visit to Iona nowadays is all it takes to make a person understand why the place might have appealed to those early Christians. The island is undoubtedly a place of quiet peace. Whatever the weather the landscape is beautiful and restful to eye and heart both. Religious belief is not required, Iona simply has the magic.
9. Glastonbury Tor, Somerset
Archaeologists and historians are usually people with a scientific approach to their chosen subject. Facts matter and any and all claims and statements ought to be backed up with proof. That being said, who can resist the entertainment provided by a good legend? Glastonbury Tor sits at the heart of one of the best of the bunch. The Tor itself is captivating, rising abruptly from a level plain much given, in ancient times at least, to seasonal inundation by the sea. It was for this reason that adherents of the Arthur legend allowed themselves to see the Tor as Avalon, the island to which the king was carried so that he might recover from wounds suffered while fighting Mordred. Other folk myths have Joseph of Arimathea arrive at Glastonbury with the Holy Grail. His staff is supposed to have taken root as the Glastonbury thorn - that flowers at Christmas time - and the grail itself is said to be buried nearby. In 1191, monks at Glastonbury Abbey claimed to have found the graves of Arthur and his queen Guinevere and the site became a place of pilgrimage for ever after. In short, it is all there. Sacred or not, anyone in search of pleasing legend will find plenty to be going on with at Glastonbury.
10. Canterbury Cathedral, Kent
One of the oldest Christian structures in England - and perhaps the most famous - Canterbury Cathedral is undoubtedly one of Britain's sacred wonders.
The first church there was founded by Saint Augustine, sent by Pope Gregory the Great to convert the Anglo Saxons to Christianity towards the end of the 6th Century. It has been a focal point for Christians ever since but earned a special notoriety following the murder, in 1170, of Archbishop Thomas Becket, apparently on the orders of King Henry II. The grisly act of butchery horrified the Christian world. Soon after there were reports of miracles and Becket's grave became the foremost destination for pilgrims seeking help for whatever ailed them. For those approaching on horseback it was deemed unseemly to travel too quickly.
Rather than gallop towards the shrine, riders adopted the Canterbury Pace, or Canterbury Trot. This has been remembered as "cantering" - a suitably respectful speed.
Sacred Wonders of Britain is broadcast on BBC Two at 20:30 GMT on Monday 30 December, or catch up with iPlayer
On a tablet? Read 10 of the best Magazine stories from 2013.
Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook
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Land for one of the UK's largest NHS specialist heart and lung hospitals has been bought on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. | Work on the new Papworth Hospital is now expected to begin early in 2015.
Seven acres (2.83 hectares) have been bought ready for the move from Papworth Everard, 13 miles (20km) west of Cambridge.
The 310-bed cardiothoracic hospital is expected to become operational in 2018.
The move will cost £165m, partly paid through a 30-year Private Finance Initiative (PFI) deal, and partly through the public sector.
In 1979, the UK's first successful heart transplant was carried out at Papworth and the current hospital has 276 beds.
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News that the US government's national security agency has been allegedly tapping into the phone records of Verizon customers quickly escalated into reports that it also had backdoor access to the major technology companies, including Apple, Google and Facebook. | By Jane WakefieldTechnology reporter
The so-called Prism programme tapped into the servers of nine internet firms, according to leaked documents obtained by the Washington Post.
The leaked documents, supposedly supplied by a discontented spy, claim that the project gives the NSA access to email, chat logs, any stored data, voice traffic, file transfers and social networking data.
While it was primarily aimed at counter-terrorism, the scale of it meant huge swathes of citizen data were also sucked up, according to the Washington Post.
The newspaper claimed that the NSA can even conduct live surveillance of someone doing a Google search.
The companies were very quick to deny that they offered "direct access" to their servers, leading many commentators to ask whether that actually meant that they offered indirect access or whether the NSA was perhaps filtering traffic independently.
For digital forensics expert Prof Peter Sommer, the seeming clash between what the leaked documents suggest and the denials of the firms indicate the access was limited in scale.
"It may be more of a catflap than a backdoor," he said.
"The spooks may be allowed to use these firms' servers but only in respect of a named target. Or they may get a court order and the firm will provide them with material on a hard-drive or similar."
The idea that the authorities acted independently is unlikely, he thinks.
"They can't just put a magic box over the internet wire," he said. "Gmail and Facebook traffic is encrypted to thwart the cyber-crooks and in order to get hold of material they would need the co-operation of the firms."
Even if the intelligence service had access to a piece of software that could automatically filter traffic and identify the bad guys, it would throw up hundreds of false positives.
"We don't even understand how a domestic terrorist born in this country to a middle-class family becomes a radical. How can we expect a piece of software to know that?" he said.
Traffic cameras
For security expert Prof Alan Woodward, the idea that the authorities can routinely snoop on internet traffic is nothing new.
"The security services have a mandate to intercept foreign communications and signals to look for intelligence and analysis about threats to the security of the country. They have been doing it for years." he said.
"Lots of internet traffic is routed through Europe and the US so it is not altogether surprising that they are taking the opportunity to look at this traffic."
What is important to note, he said, is that the authorities are interested in communications from foreigners rather than the emails of its own citizens - something backed up by a statement from the US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
"There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect [citizen data] but not wittingly," he said in congressional testimony.
General analysis of traffic on the networks is not necessarily a privacy scandal, thinks Prof Woodward.
"It is no different from the cameras routinely looking at the traffic road network. If you see a problem, for example an accident, you may want to zoom in but you need to get a court order in order to access the registration of a particular vehicle," he said.
Weaken security
Governments around the world are keen to increase the access that the police, as well as the intelligence services, have to internet communications.
New laws are needed as internet communication changes, they argue.
But getting the wording of such legislation right can be a minefield.
In the UK, the draft Communications Data Bill was recently dropped because the Liberal Democrats considered it far too wide in scope, and similar legislation in the US is facing controversy.
Security expert Brue Schneier notes in his blog that the ongoing push from the authorities to increase the amount of information to which they have access has a downside.
"It's impossible to build a communications system that allows the FBI surreptitious access but doesn't allow similar access by others," he said. "When it comes to security, we have two options: We can build our systems to be as secure as possible from eavesdropping, or we can deliberately weaken their security. We have to choose one or the other."
Privacy v Security
And while the authorities may have a bird's eye view of internet traffic, they may not be as clever as we think, points out Prof Woodward.
Military-grade encryption is now routinely available rendering emails unreadable. And steganography, the method of hiding information within other information, is also giving the authorities a real headache.
"There are big concerns about how much is being sent using this method. Because it hides itself we don't even know if it is being widely used," he said.
"People may have got their knickers in a twist about something that is not as dark or devious as they think."
He also has niggling doubts that Prism is even genuine.
"For something of that level of security to be leaked is highly unusual. I have never seen that before and that seems a bit odd to me," he said.
Whether Prism turns out to be a bit of a sideshow or the biggest data collection scandal of its time remains to be seen. But before the privacy witch-hunt begins, people need to decide their priorities, thinks Prof Sommer.
"If something goes wrong everyone will ask why didn't the spooks do something to stop it," he said. "But on the other hand there is a belief that society is based on an element of privacy so that the spooks can only do things under correct judicial process. That clash has been with us for a long time and is difficult to reconcile."
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It is a centuries-old art form and a unique part of Hong Kong's identity but many people fear that Cantonese opera could die out if it doesn't reinvent itself. The BBC's Helier Cheung delves into a dramatic world of make-up, martial arts and vocal acrobatics. | Mitchie Choi expected to learn martial arts and operatic singing, but not how to act like a man, when she decided to commit to Cantonese opera. The 22-year-old had just finished a linguistics degree .
"When I started learning Chinese opera, obviously I wanted to [play] a female role."
But her tutors told her she was more suited to playing male roles because of her height and deep voice.
Now, she says, she loves performing as a male character, and can't imagine doing anything differently. But the training is tough and the future rewards of this career path are unclear.
"We have to be on our feet most of the time, we're working 9-6 every day, [on] acrobatics, combat movements. We have to do the splits...and singing lessons as well," she says.
Cantonese Opera, a type of Xiqu (Chinese Opera) developed in southern China, is loved by many in Hong Kong - especially the elderly. Yet many fear it could become endangered as it struggles to engage younger audiences.
Although there are more than 1,000 Cantonese opera performances in Hong Kong each year, "you can argue that the majority of the audience are old or retired people", says Leung Bo Wah, a professor of Cultural and Creative Arts at the Hong Kong Institute of Education.
Attracting new performers is difficult because in a practical, almost utilitarian society such as Hong Kong's, young people think this is a hard way to earn a living.
But, Mr Leung says, it is one of the art forms that best represent local Hong Kong culture, almost part of its very identity. People "feel this is our own kind of art form" because it uses Cantonese, the language spoken in southern China.
A quick guide to Cantonese opera
Ms Choi readily admits she is in a minority, she knows the art form is considered "very old and boring" by people her age.
Her fellow student Ho Jun Hei, a 20-year-old training as a flautist in Cantonese opera, says that part of the problem is that many young people simply aren't exposed to Cantonese opera any more.
The pair are among very few studying for a bachelor of fine arts in Cantonese opera, a degree programme launched in 2013 at the Academy of Performing Arts as part of efforts to preserve the art form.
It has been billed by the academy as the first Cantonese opera degree in Hong Kong, and possibly the world.
There are those who passionately argue for the beauty of the art form.
"Cantonese opera is really a treasure, a beautiful Chinese heritage [that is] very special in Hong Kong," says Frederic Mao, a theatre director who chairs the Chinese Opera school.
He points out that unlike other forms of Chinese opera, it has been able to develop uninterrupted for decades.
During the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution in mainland China, most forms of art and entertainment were banned, including traditional Beijing opera, and performances of Western films.
However, Cantonese opera was able to continue in Hong Kong, which was a British colony at the time, and has been "preserved and performed until today".
The art form got a boost in 2009, when it was recognised by the UN's arts body as an "intangible cultural heritage".
In its listing, Unesco said the art form had developed "a rich repertoire of stories", and also "provides a cultural bond among Cantonese speakers in [China] and abroad".
Hong Kong's government is also attempting to boost Cantonese opera in Hong Kong, building a large Xiqu theatre in a huge arts hub set to open in 2017.
The last Sunday of each November has also been designated Cantonese Opera Day by authorities in Guangdong, Macau and Hong Kong.
But ultimately, the future of Cantonese opera will depend less on official efforts, and more on the ability of the performers to adapt the art for younger generations.
"Aside from telling people how precious it is... we have to produce the type of work that audiences will appreciate, and be interested in by themselves," Mr Mao says.
For example, the percussion in many traditional Cantonese opera performances is loud - something younger audiences find off-putting - so some theatre groups have started to adjust the sound levels.
"It's not easy to preserve Cantonese opera. On the other hand, it's exciting to bring it up to date. The art form is old, but hopefully... we can bring in some new ideas."
Ms Choi and Ho Jun Hei are young and committed to rejuvenating the art. Their enthusiasm, undoubtedly, would be music to the ears of many who love Cantonese opera.
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Legal challenges to the ending of VAT relief on goods imported into the UK from Guernsey and Jersey are expected to take two-and-a-half days.
| The UK Treasury announced in November it would end Low Value Consignment Relief for the islands from 1 April.
Each island has launched its own action on the grounds of discrimination, as the move applies only to the two Channel Island jurisdictions.
A judicial review set for Tuesday is predicted to end on Thursday.
A spokesperson for Jersey's Economic Development Department said an oral judgement could be delivered as early as Thursday.
However a written judgement may be published instead.
In this instance, the spokesperson said the "urgency of this case" would mean it was "likely to be released very quickly".
The department said it anticipated an announcement between 15 and 22 March.
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A man who murdered a mother and her young daughter in Lincoln 28 years ago has gone missing from prison. | Mark Edmonds was serving a life sentence at HMP Sudbury, in Derbyshire, where he failed to return on Wednesday.
Edmonds, now 52, stabbed Cecily Browne and her five-year-old daughter Khardine on 18 September 1984, at their home in Stainton Gardens.
He is described as white, 5ft 9ins tall, of average build, with short brown shaved hair and brown eyes.
He was sentenced at Nottingham Crown Court in May 1985, and his last address was in Norwich.
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When the state pension was introduced in 1909, the maximum payment was five shillings (25p) a week - the equivalent of about £20 today. | By Kevin PeacheyPersonal finance reporter, BBC News
Just over 500,000 old and poor people queued up to receive it. They had to be at least 70 years old, have an income of less than 12 shillings a week and not have too much furniture, which was judged as a sign of wealth.
An overhaul of the state pension system will see a single-tier pension - of £155 a week - being paid to some new pensioners from April 2016. Others will get less, and those who qualified for a pension before April 2016 will remain on the old system.
So how will this change the current system and how will it affect you?
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A recent Constitutional Court ruling in South Africa has confirmed that schools cannot expel students for becoming pregnant, but the BBC's Pumza Fihlani reports that the country is still struggling to cope with the issue, which affects some 180,000 girls each year. | Shrill wails fill the maternity ward of Durban's King Dinuzulu public hospital.
One scream, followed by another, then another - a disturbing chorus of tormented cries and laboured breathing. Three teenagers are about to give birth.
The youngest girl in the ward is 14 years old. Overwhelmed by labour pains, she struggles to even speak.
In the next room Phumla Tshabalala, 16, is holding her tiny baby, a one-day-old girl.
Phumla is a first-time mother and says she is worried about the possibility of being a single parent.
"I haven't seen my boyfriend for a long time and he hasn't even been here to see me and the baby," she says anxiously.
"I told him that I've given birth but no-one from his family has come. I'm not even sure if he told his parents about the baby."
She is from a modest home, her father is the sole breadwinner. She is the youngest of three daughters and the first to have a child - something her mother and father are struggling to come to terms with.
"My parents are disappointed in me - they worked hard to educate me and they say I've thrown all of their hard work away. I hope that they can forgive me one day," she says.
Phumla plans to return to school in time for the end-of-year tests, but is worried about how she will juggle being a student and a mother.
She tells me that in retrospect, she wishes she had waited until she was older. But she and her baby are both healthy so she considers herself lucky.
There is a real risk in giving birth at a young age, doctors say.
The mortality rate is much higher for teenage mothers - they account for 36% of maternal deaths every year, despite only accounting for 8% of births, according to the Human Sciences Research Council.
"Their pelvises are not yet developed and in many case they struggle to deliver naturally because their pelvises are still small," says Dr Jay-Anne Devjee, head of the Obstetrics and Gynaecology ward at King Dinuzulu hospital.
"We are often forced to deliver the babies via Caesarean section, which increases the risks of haemorrhaging and puts their lives at risk."
In another hospital room, a new mother is battling with hypertension.
She has been hooked on an intravenous drip for several days. She is on medication to stabilise her blood pressure - but this is not an elderly woman, she is just 19.
The doctors tell me that if she had not received treatment when she did, it could have been fatal.
'Outcasts'
Many young mothers are forced to leave school in order to take care of their children and many of them never return, studies suggest.
In Intshisekelo High School outside Durban, more than 20 schoolgirls became pregnant in just the first half of the school year, officials say.
One teacher said that pregnancy is one of the main reasons, along with poverty, why only about half of all students finish their schooling.
By law, the school authorities cannot reveal which students are pregnant and say some girls go to great lengths to hide their protruding bellies, including wearing oversized tops and always carrying their rucksacks at the front.
The South African Schools Act of 1996 says students cannot be expelled because they are pregnant, but schools say they are forced to do so because they are not trained how to provide support to expectant mothers.
"Teachers are confronted with situations where learners are stigmatised by other students, where the pregnant pupil becomes emotionally ostracised and your call of duty now extends to that of being a nurse, a social worker. It places pressure on teachers, not to mention the workload," says Mugwena Maluleke, spokesperson for the South African Democratic Teachers Union.
Inside the classroom, students say they are sometimes ridiculed by their teachers for becoming pregnant.
"You just become an outcast. Sometimes you are labelled as a loose girl and everyone makes fun of you," says a girl whose friend and schoolmate became pregnant at 17. She refused to give her name.
Local education chief Senzo Mchunu says he is extremely worried about the high levels of teenage pregnancy in KwaZulu-Natal Province, which includes Durban.
"In many instances a girl's future is destroyed, she has no hope of ever returning to school," he says.
While the official line is that no pupil should be denied an education, regardless of the circumstances, provincial governments and school governing bodies have the prerogative to decide what to do with pregnant teenagers.
And so it is not uncommon to hear of schools, especially in rural areas, where students are expelled as soon as the school becomes aware of their pregnancy.
Few bother to go to court because many are not aware of their rights and they also have other things to worry about, such as how to feed their children.
For years government departments have been going back and forth about who has responsibility for this issue.
Is it a health problem, a social problem or simply a problem for the education department?
There are still no clear answers but these departments in KwaZulu-Natal have begun working together in a bid to get a handle on the problem.
They have been holding awareness campaigns across the province about the risks of teenage pregnancy and HIV/Aids.
Some three million people are HIV-positive in KwaZulu-Natal - more than in any other part of South Africa, the country with the highest number of people living with the Aids virus in the world.
Many pregnant teenagers admit to regularly having unprotected sex, sometimes with multiple partners, officials say.
These "reckless sexual activities" could undermine the strides made in the fight against Aids, they say.
"We are faced with a problem that is threatening to take on monstrous proportions and we cannot sit back and do nothing. We are doing everything we can to encourage our young people to be responsible," says Mr Mchunu.
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A hospital trust will start postponing some planned operations due to a sharp rise in patients with coronavirus, a chief executive said. | Alex Whitfield said the "difficult decision" was made due to Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust being "under increasing pressure".
She said people impacted would be contacted and those not contacted should attend appointments.
The move is in line with other NHS trusts across the country.
The trust's hospitals include Andover War Memorial Hospital, Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital and Royal Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester.
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I was at my wedding in July 2012 when I learned that the DJ and TV presenter Jimmy Savile was to be unmasked as a sexual predator in an upcoming ITV documentary. | By Louis TherouxBBC
At that time, I imagined I knew Savile reasonably well. I'd made my own documentary about him in 2000, filming with him for about two weeks at his various homes around Britain.
I'd stayed in contact for several years after the film went out, making occasional trips up to Leeds. There was always a professional pretext - a DVD commentary to record, a new series to promote - but the visits also had a social dimension.
They usually involved a meal at a local restaurant and sometimes an overnight stay at his penthouse overlooking Roundhay Park. We had a friendly relationship.
The Jimmy Savile I knew then was a contradictory figure. In some respects, he was enigmatic and slightly remote, hiding behind his show-business patter and anecdotes.
There was scant sign of any sort of love life. He was insular. Social events were on his terms - he had to be the centre of attention. He was also prone to dropping the occasional dark hint of unconventional interests - he'd make tantalising references to his connection with Myra Hindley, or joke about his visits to Broadmoor and his conversations with Peter Sutcliffe.
But Savile could also come across - and it's not easy to write this now - as a rather likeable person, good-humoured, knowledgeable, "un-starry" in his manner of life and in his friendships with local Leeds characters. His self-centredness had the effect of making him undemanding company - he was relaxing to be around.
Find out more
Louis Theroux's documentary on Jimmy Savile is broadcast on Sunday 2 October at 21:00 on BBC Two - catch up on BBC iPlayer
One of my reasons for keeping in touch was that I was aware I hadn't quite figured him out. For a while I kept notes for a book I thought I might write one day that would try to unravel who he was.
Sometimes he mentioned girlfriends coming to visit, but I was never quite sure how much of that to believe. In 2001, a year after my documentary went out, I met two women, then in their forties, who told me they'd been girlfriends of his decades earlier.
One of them had been 15 at the beginning of the relationship. I mentioned it to colleagues at work - but to be honest, I didn't think a great deal of it, seeing it as symptomatic of a different time.
I'd last seen him in 2006. When he died, five years later, I wrote a blog post, expressing a sense of guilt about not having visited him towards the end. "He was a complete one-off," I wrote. "Wrestler, charity fundraiser, deejay, fixer, prankster, and professional enigma."
We are still, as a society, attempting to recover from the reverberations begun by that ITV documentary, and the tsunami of revelations that followed from it.
The accounts of the victims are written up in a collection of reports issued by the BBC, various police forces, and several NHS hospitals. They number in the hundreds, and include multiple instances of rape and child molestation.
Those revelations, in turn, have sparked a wave of investigations into other well-known figures, some of whom have also been found guilty of sex crimes - Max Clifford, Rolf Harris, Chris Denning and Gary Glitter.
Meanwhile, those people who were friendly with Savile have had to come to terms with the role he played in their lives.
For my own part, that has involved a process of taking stock - attempting to piece together what I knew of the man and how it fits with the accounts of the victims.
Late last year, I began doing this in a more concerted way as part of a follow-up TV documentary. I interviewed victims. I also spoke to other people who knew him - friends and colleagues, some of whom worked alongside him for decades.
In the process I tried to form a picture of who Jimmy Savile was and how someone known to millions for his programmes and his charity work had, over several decades, got away with a catalogue of crimes.
Behind all of this there was a more personal mission - to figure out my own role in the affair and whether I was, in some way, "played"?
Now, after the revelations, any effort to tackle Jimmy Savile has to have at its heart the experience of the victims.
For years they were invisible - finally they have a voice.
Just the act of approaching them felt fraught. In the usual way of making documentaries, it's fairly normal to interview someone and then not use the interview in the finished film.
Here we were aware that the act of "going public" and then having the interview dropped could be traumatic.
My director, Arthur Cary, and his assistant producer, Rachel Lob-Levyt, made contact with the lawyer handling the victims' claims of compensation.
Through her, we quickly got the sense that among the many victims there were some willing to share their stories - indeed, having been unheard for so long, they were pleased to have an opportunity to speak out.
We ended up using interviews with four victims in our finished documentary, all of them on camera and identifiable.
Speaking to them was, for me, a delicate and slightly nerve-wracking experience.
In my work, I've tended to focus on the perpetrators of violence and abuse. I felt more pressure handling those on the receiving end of assault. I wasn't sure how difficult it would be for them to open up about their experiences.
I was also aware they might see me as yet another person who failed them, by not doing more to expose Jimmy Savile while he was alive.
In fact, it ended up being both personally cathartic and also highly revealing.
Each of them had a dignity and a quiet courage, speaking with total candour about what she'd been through - the abuse followed by the long years of knowing that a predator was lodged prominently in British public life.
Savile's victims came from all walks of life, all ages, male and female. But there were certain patterns to his offending.
More than anything he had an uncanny instinct for vulnerability. Two of the women I spoke to had already been abused by family members by the time they encountered Savile.
As one of them put it to me, she viewed the assaults as just "what men do".
His ability to target the defenceless - teenagers in care, patients recovering in hospital, children from troubled homes - helps explain why he wasn't caught.
They were the least likely to resist; they were also least likely to be listened to.
The youngest of the victims I spoke to had been abused by her grandfather from her earliest childhood before being molested by Savile on multiple occasions in the chapel at Stoke Mandeville.
"I never said to him 'Don't'," she told me, "because I knew he could."
What also came across was the brazenness of his assaults. One of the women described how she'd been delivering a new pair of spectacles to his house.
He exposed himself to her and stuck his tongue in her mouth. Moments later, he'd asked if she'd like to do an interview for his radio show, Savile's Travels, before driving her home in an open-topped car.
Jimmy Savile seems to have understood that by sheer gall - and by being utterly shameless - he could project a sense of permission. The message to his victims was: I'm a star, this is normal, I can do whatever I want.
Perhaps most heartbreakingly, several victims expressed regret over a self-perceived (and wholly unjustified) sense of failure to speak out. They thought it was just them. If only they'd known there were others, they said, they would have done something to stop him.
With all the victims, there was the slightly uncomfortable moment of soliciting their opinions on my original documentary.
It was oddly bracing to feel the force of their unvarnished feedback. "I remember thinking 'Poor Louis'," said one. She said she felt I'd been "hoodwinked" by him. Another remarked on how "silly" I seemed, being pushed around by a puffed-up celebrity.
It is fair comment. At the time, I'd done my best to be tough with him. I knew he was weird and, with all his mannerisms, rather irritating - I had no interest in making a soft piece about Jimmy the Charity Fundraiser.
The dark rumours - of sexual deviance, of being unemotional, of having a morbid interest in corpses - were one of the reasons I'd taken him on as a subject.
I wanted to get the goods on Savile. The trouble was, I had no clear sense of what those goods were.
The first couple of days of filming had been a torrent of Jimmy Savile blather:
"Is that the Spice Girls?"
"You're better looking than me, you can't come in."
"I am like a butcher's dog… there's nothing fitter or stronger."
He'd given me free range of his penthouse. I pulled random letters and memorabilia off his desk. I tried to break up his spiel - I brought up a recent article in the Daily Mail, entitled "Jim Fixed Me", in which his long-time personal assistant talked about the pain of being summarily fired.
He tolerated my questions and interjections with relatively good grace until, several hours in, he showed signs of losing his patience: "It's a lot easier to make negative programmes than positive ones," he said.
I explained that we weren't trying to make a positive programme so much as a truthful one. "Right. Make it as negative as you like. That's all right. See you in court. Take a few quid off you same as I take a few quid off anybody. Money has no conscience."
My most resolute attempt to figure out his secret came on a visit to the seafront flat he shared with his mother, The Duchess. He'd shown me some personal effects of hers that he still kept in a wardrobe, including the clothes he got dry-cleaned once a year.
As I leafed through a collection of old photographs, some showing him with his arms around various girls, I attempted to nail him down on the subject of his sexual interests.
Why, in the whole time he'd been in the public eye, had he never been linked with anyone in the papers? I asked.
"I think it's because I've never been linked to anybody," he said. Had he never had a girlfriend? "Friends that are girls, eight million," he replied. "Friends that are girls. But girlfriend in the sense of today, i.e. you are together, you don't bother with anybody else, etc? No. Never."
He seemed to be presenting a rather improbable scenario of himself as an itinerant Don Juan with paramours all over Britain, all of them somehow flattered by the attention of an aged DJ in a tracksuit. It didn't add up.
On one of our last days of filming, we discussed the rumours of paedophilia. I had asked him why he always said in interviews that he didn't like children.
"We live in a very funny world," he said. "And it's easier for me, as a single man, to say 'I don't like children', because that puts a lot of salacious tabloid people off the hunt."
"Is that basically so the tabloids don't pursue this whole is he or isn't he a paedophile line?" I asked.
"Oh, aye," he said. "How do they know whether I am not? How does anybody know whether I am? Nobody knows whether I am or not. I know I'm not… That's my policy and it's worked a dream."
At the time, it hadn't struck me as a particularly revealing exchange.
And yet, with hindsight, it's also interesting now much Jimmy Savile told us about himself. One of his constant themes was his view of women as "brain damage".
He said he didn't have a cooker in his Leeds penthouse because cookers attract women and women "equal brain damage…No cooker, babe, no brain damage."
It was passed off as a bit of banter but there was also an underlying truth. In Savile's view, women were overly emotional and illogical. He wasn't interested in the give-and-take that relationships entail. What he left out was his solution - to take what he wanted, without consent and with impunity.
Savile's relationships, with men and women, were conducted on his terms. He expected loyalty, but did not like being at the beck and call of others.
Travelling between his houses, living in his caravan, going on his cruises, he led a vagabond existence, a little like the wild animals he sometimes compared himself to.
He would also make constant references to his friends in high places - the Royal Family, in particular - while also advertising his absolute discretion. "Omerta", he said, when I asked about his relations with the powerful. "When you're not a grass, you're not a grass."
But this code of secrecy and loyalty pervaded his relationships in general. He described himself as being like a mafia boss. "The Godfather… il capo di tutti capi." There were references to "friends with strong Sicilian accents".
Again, it came off sounding faintly ludicrous - it was a bit of comic schtick. Or was it?
Late one night, in an unguarded moment after I'd gone to bed, he reminisced to my director Will Yapp about his days running nightclubs in the north. He wouldn't stand for any nonsense, he said.
Anyone who gave him trouble, he'd lock them in his "boiler house". They'd be there all night "pleading to get out". The police had questioned him, but he'd talked his way out of it: "I never got nicked, and I've never altered."
Even allowing for bravado, there was a ruthlessness and a sangfroid which was startling. And it couldn't but call to mind the one time we know of when, in the late 2000s, the Surrey police questioned him about historical sex offences but failed to pin him down.
Savile's personal assistant once said that he didn't have many close friends. "He found friends an encumbrance."
Nor of course did he have a family of his own.
A self-described expert on human psychology, he liked to say that, through his mental strength and his ability to live without normal human relationships, he had created for himself a life of "total freedom".
But Jimmy Savile did have many people with whom he had friendly relations. They were people from all walks of life. Some would qualify as the great and the good - hospital heads, surgeons, top TV producers.
Others, the ones he saw more regularly, were down-to-earth types, uncomplicated Leeds men: a hairdresser, a chemist, a policeman. We'd featured a few of these in my first documentary.
When the time came to try to speak to them again I discovered, perhaps not surprisingly, that many of them felt too confused and embattled to go public.
Their association with Savile had been a source of pride while he was alive. Now it had become a source of embarrassment and fear.
Investigating Jimmy Savile: A brief timeline
Those who did speak to us were all in different ways grappling with the aftershocks of the revelation of what Savile did.
A BBC producer told me that in all the years she worked alongside him at Clunk Clink, Jim'll Fix It and Top of the Pops, she never saw anything that caused her concern.
I asked if she'd read the reports. No, she said. "Because I don't know what I'd do with it".
She'd had no real sense of his private life, though looking back little clues stood out.
"Part of his persona was the fact that he would tread very close to the line in hindsight."
And she mentioned, when I asked if he'd never shown anything other than a professional interest in her, that she would have been too "walnuttish" for him - a word she'd heard him use. She was then in her mid-20s.
Dame Janet Smith's report into Jimmy Savile at the BBC was delivered in February 2016
These are some of the key findings:
A colleague at Stoke Mandeville had a trove of memorabilia, including pictures, an over-sized last birthday card that was never given to him, and a larger-than-life Jimmy Savile bust made out of Lego, which she kept in the shed.
She'd spent the greater part of her working life raising money for Stoke Mandeville's Spinal Injury Unit. All that work was now tarnished and rendered suspect. She spoke of the upset of feeling that her life's memories were at risk of being lost.
And then there was Jimmy Savile's personal assistant, the one he'd jettisoned so unceremoniously. She had worked as Savile's diary-keeper and factotum for more than two decades.
By her own account, she organised events, cooked for him, and covered for him when necessary. When he'd felt lonely on a round-the-world cruise because it was full of Americans, none of whom recognised him, she'd spoken to him on the ship's phone every day to keep his spirits up.
Then, without explanation, he'd sacked her, saying simply: "She's out."
Her view of Jimmy Savile had been that he was "asexual".
She had read the reports, she told me. But she viewed the incidents described as either trivial ("a pat on the bum" as she put it) or simply made up.
Like the colleague at Stoke Mandeville, her life work had been tainted from its association with Jimmy Savile. Her way of dealing with it was simply to refuse to acknowledge the truth.
Re-entering the world of Savile was like travelling across a landscape ravaged by a hurricane. The survivors were making sense of what happened in different ways, but no one was untouched by what they had lived through.
Among those I reached out to were the two girlfriends I'd met in 2001.
At the time of the revelations, they'd come forward to say that they too had been abused by Savile. It was troubling to realise that I'd spoken to two victims while he was still alive. I wondered whether, if I'd handled the encounter differently, they might have been able to say more.
Those two women still didn't wish to talk publicly about what they had been through but they agreed to have a private meeting with me.
They spoke about the rumours of his connections to the underworld. They said that, as much as they wished he could have faced justice, they would have been too afraid to go to the police while he was alive.
For many, the easiest shorthand explanation of Jimmy Savile has been that "he hid in plain sight".
This was true in one sense. Savile had played up to an image as a white-haired playboy bachelor. "Feared in every girl's school in the country," he used to joke.
His sartorial style - tracksuits, jewellery, weird hair - was a statement of a kind of perpetual agelessness. He looked a little creepy. He wrote about borderline criminal sexual shenanigans in his autobiography, As It Happens, including a night he spent with a girl who was a runaway from a remand centre.
But a big part of his life was a kind of double bluff. Referring to himself as a "pirate" or a "con man", as he often did, served to reassure those around him that he couldn't really be those things - or at least, not in a way that we should worry about.
His need to be seen to have secrets suggested perhaps his secrets weren't worth knowing - that it was simply another bid for attention.
"His big secret was that he had no secret," was one of the comments in the days after he died.
If only.
In fact, Jimmy Savile's offending took place both in plain view and also out of sight - and it was his blurring the lines that was part of the MO.
Victims who'd been groped and complained were told, that's just Jimmy. Some who were groped with other people near at hand felt unable to protest. They wondered if this was, somehow, permitted.
Reading the reports of the assaults, it was clear Savile had an ability to work a room, almost like a stage hypnotist working an audience.
Many of his assaults involved him testing the limits of what he could get away with. He would push the boundaries, starting off in a grey area so that sexual assaults weren't immediately recognised as such.
Still others were assaulted away from prying eyes - at his flat, in his caravan. Some took the understandable decision that to report the assault would lead to a process that would in its own way be traumatic.
Others tried to raise the alarm but weren't listened to - by colleagues, friends, parents or those in charge.
The impact of the Savile case on child abuse allegations
In hindsight, it's tempting to see clues everywhere.
In a random comment on a recce tape - when our production first sent an assistant producer to interview him he referred to his bed as an altar, because that's where the "sacrifices" happen, he said.
Or in the overly physical way he embraced two women at Leeds's Flying Pizza restaurant one evening, which I only noticed looking back at the rushes.
Or in his comment to me on one occasion that "a psychologist will tell you" that there was something in all women "that wants to be a prostitute".
But given what we've lived though, what is most difficult to explain is that most of the time Jimmy Savile behaved something like a plausible, albeit odd, person.
This may seem a rather banal point to make but it is also arguably the most frightening one. By making Savile a figure of almost supernatural evil - someone who was self-evidently repulsive and dangerous - we risk failing to see him clearly as a human being.
One day another Jimmy Savile may come along and he too may appear plausible - right up until the moment he is unmasked.
A human being did Savile's crimes - one who charmed princes, prime ministers, leading religious figures and celebrities, not to mention the millions of people who listened to him on the radio and watched him on television.
A human being who was intelligent, sometimes amusing, and likeable, and who, by being those things, was able to fool a nation.
Information and help for those affected by child abuse
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A woman has been charged with grievous bodily harm as police investigate a murder at a Stoke-on-Trent house. | Nicola Bray, 45, was found dead at her home on Scrivener Road in the Cliffe Vale area of the city on Thursday.
Sheila Pickerill, 48, of Steel Street, Hartshill, was later arrested on suspicion of murder but has since been charged with the lesser offence.
Police said it was still a murder enquiry, but did not say if it was looking for anyone else.
Ms Pickerill is due to appear before magistrates at the North Staffordshire Justice Centre later.
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In Nebraska, which has some of the worst racial disparities when it comes to Covid-19 cases in the country, the state's sole Latino lawmaker tried to strengthen protections for meatpacking workers, all while confronting his own personal tragedy. It was a battle against time that revealed much about race, politics and workers' rights in the pandemic. | By Jessica LussenhopBBC News, Nebraska
On the afternoon of 29 July, in the main chamber of Nebraska's shining state capitol building, in the midst of one of the strangest legislative sessions in state history, a young senator stepped to a microphone.
Tony Vargas was dressed in a trim blue suit, dark hair neatly parted to one side, a pair of trendy thick frame glasses perched on his nose over a green cloth face mask. The 35-year-old lawmaker stood out amongst his mostly greyer colleagues, but also because, along with two black and one Native American member of the legislature, he was one of only a few people of colour in the chamber. He is the state's only Latino senator.
"I would like to thank you all in advance for hearing me out on this," he began.
Vargas - a first term Democrat in a Republican state, representing a diverse urban district that straddles downtown and South Omaha - was about to make a big ask of his colleagues, and hoped he could rely on the Nebraska legislature's reputation (perceived or real) for being more collegial than others. It is the nation's only unicameral, nonpartisan legislature, with just a single body of 49 senators.
Like many state governments, the Nebraska legislature abruptly shut down in March in order to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Now, after four months, the senators agreed to reconvene to finish the session in 16 days over the course of four weeks.
Many lawmakers continued to shake hands, others refused to wear masks, despite the fact that one of their own, Senator Mike Moser, had only recently recovered from a serious case of the virus. Nebraska is one of a handful of states that never had a shelter-in-place order nor a mask mandate.
Nevertheless, Vargas was attempting to persuade his colleagues to allow him to introduce a new bill to enact protections from Covid-19 in the meatpacking industry, an issue he'd been working on for months. It was an action which required special permission to "suspend" the rules of the senate - a Hail Mary in a legislative session that had only 10 days left in it. But after weeks of other attempts, he had run out of options.
"Over the last several months I've been working closely with workers at meatpacking plants across the state," he said. "What is happening in these plants - not only how workers are being treated, safety and health measures that need significant follow-through, and misinformation spread that everything is fine - is what brought us here today. Is what brought me here today."
He led with the data. Of the state's 25,000 Covid-19 cases, one in five of them was a meatpacking worker. Of those, 221 workers were hospitalised and 21 of them died. According to the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, Nebraska ranks second in the nation in Covid-19 related deaths among meatpacking workers.
On top of that, 60% of the state's confirmed cases were in Hispanics, while they make up just 11% of the overall population. (Since August that percentage has dropped to 40%, but it may still be the worst racial disparity for Hispanics for Covid cases in the country.)
The vast majority of Nebraska's meatpacking workers fall in this demographic, and the state's biggest hotspots flared in counties that contained factories. Many of the rest of the workers are immigrants and refugees from countries like Ethiopia, Somalia, Myanmar and Bhutan. For months, Vargas' office had been receiving distraught emails, calls and Facebook messages from workers and their family members, pleading for more oversight.
Currently, safety measures in plants recommended by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration are classified as "guidance", and though dozens of meatpacking plants have experienced outbreaks, inspectors have issued only three modest fines related to Covid.
"I am asking you to help me to try to fully understand what's happening in these meatpacking plants," Vargas continued. "If you don't see the urgency and why this situation demands all of us to act now, then I am at a loss."
The vote that day was merely to allow introduction of the bill. The bill itself, if passed, would require the state to enforce Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines in the plants such as social distancing, free and readily available PPE such as masks, and require that management inform workers in writing if someone they came into contact with tested positive, among other measures.
For a full hour, the senators argued. A few spoke in support of the motion. Others fretted that new regulations would throw sand in the gears of the nation's food supply chain. Still others denied that there was a problem at all, or blamed the workers' living conditions for the spread.
"Twenty-one deaths - but when was the last one?" one senator asked. "This issue has already been addressed."
When Vargas took the microphone back just before the motion went to a vote, there was an extra edge in his voice.
"I am pleading with you," he said. "We can save more lives."
A dull bell clanged to signal the start of the vote, and a board listing each senators' surname lit up in green and red lights.
The final tally: 28 yays and 10 nays. Eleven senators declined to vote.
"The threshold was 30 to suspend the rules," the senate president said from the dais. "The rules are not suspended."
Later that evening, in his basement office in the capitol, Vargas was in a dismal mood. It wasn't easy, one of his legislative aides explained, to feel like the "de facto advocate for all Latino residents in the state".
What really stung was that Vargas had done something in service of the motion that, up until that point, he'd tried to avoid - he'd spoken to his colleagues about his father.
In March, the coronavirus swept through the Vargas family, sickening his 71-year-old mother, his oldest brother and his 22-year-old nephew. And then, on 29 April, Vargas' father Virgilio - an otherwise healthy 72-year-old who still worked full-time as a machinist - died of Covid-19.
His senator son had hoped that hearing some of the harrowing details of the 29-day battle with the virus might persuade his colleagues to prioritise meatpacking workers' health above business concerns. But he was wrong.
"When I share that with my colleagues, and it just rolls off some of their backs, like, 'Well, that doesn't impact me, so we're not going to allow you to do this' - it pains me," he said. "It took everything out of me when I'm thinking that I'm the only one in this body that actually lost somebody to this virus."
Only nine days of the session remained.
Vargas remembers the first phone call like this.
It was early April. The caller was a young woman, just out of college. Both her father and her uncle worked at a meatpacking plant in rural Nebraska, where rumours were spreading that there were positive Covid cases among the employees.
"I don't know what to do," he recalled her saying. "I'm trying to convince them not to work. I'm trying to convince them to take it seriously."
Her father and uncle both needed the money. They were essential workers - but it seemed too dangerous. What should she do?
"I didn't have an answer for her," Vargas said.
Just a few weeks earlier, he had the same conversation with his parents - his 71-year-old mother Lidia was continuing to go to work at a bank, his 72-year-old father Virgilio continued on as a machinist. Both could have retired long ago - after immigrating as a teenage newlyweds to New York City from Peru in the 1970s, his father spent over 50 years working all sorts of jobs to keep his young family afloat, on factory assembly lines, as a courier, a handyman, as a sidewalk peanut vendor.
They could have retired at any time, but the couple decided "just one more year".
On the same day that the Nebraska legislature announced it would be shutting down, Lidia Vargas told her son she wasn't feeling well. By Saturday, when Virgilio tried to go into his shop, he found he couldn't breathe properly.
"I just had this terrible feeling in my gut," Vargas recalled.
At the same time, Vargas was working to head off the virus' spread in Nebraska. It had always been clear to worker and immigrant rights organisations around the state that meatpacking plant employees were uniquely vulnerable in the pandemic.
The plants are enormous, with thousands of workers entering and leaving the plants at the same time, sharing locker rooms and cafeterias, and standing less than a foot apart on the production line. Because they needed their pay cheque, they were unlikely to walk away from these jobs even if conditions were dangerous, and because many did not speak English as a first language, they wouldn't know how to advocate for themselves.
On 25 March, a coalition of organisations including Vargas penned a letter directly to meat packing plants, appealing for social distancing, additional sanitising measures and more generous leave policies for at-risk workers.
"Together, we can limit the spread of this virus while we keep the food supply chain safe and consistent!" it read.
Vargas said he heard nothing back.
On the same day that the letter went out, across the country in Long Island, Lidia and Virgilio Vargas sat in line at a drive-through Covid testing site. Three days later, they found out they were both positive for Covid-19.
Vargas spent the weekend calling his parents every three hours, jotting their symptoms down in a notebook. When he heard his father's increasingly booming cough and shallow breathing, he made an appointment for a chest X-ray.
On the way home from the appointment, Virgilio swerved off the road. He was having so much trouble breathing he couldn't drive. Vargas' mother picked him up and brought him back to the hospital. Early the next morning, while Vargas was on the phone with the attending physician, his father went into cardiac arrest. Twenty agonising minutes later, the doctor called back to say that Virgilio had stabilised, but was on a ventilator - where he would remain for 29 days.
On 9 April, Vargas and his wife Lauren sat in front of a laptop and recorded a Facebook message for his constituents.
"About two weeks ago after showing symptoms of coronavirus, both of my parents tested positive. Less than two days later, my dad's symptoms got much worse and he was admitted into the hospital," Vargas said into the camera. "My dad is really struggling and he's fighting this virus and we're hoping he will get better soon.
"I'm hoping that hearing from somebody that you know may bring some urgency to the situation that we're all dealing with now," he continued. "I don't want any other families to go through this.
If there's anything my family, I or my office can do to help you during this time, please don't hesitate to reach out."
Not long after he posted the video to Facebook, he was contacted by the first daughter of a plant worker. She was far from the last.
"Every time it was a son or daughter, or niece or nephew, of an older father or mother or uncle or aunt that's working in the plant. They're like younger kids, either high school to my age, that feel helpless and don't know what to do," he said. "All of them were Latino."
Not long after came the outbreaks.
A Tyson plant in Dakota City reported a total of 786 cases. A Smithfield plant in Crete racked up 330 cases related to either workers or their close contacts. In Grand Island, 260 positive cases were recorded among the workforce at JBS Beef Plant. According to reporting from the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, Nebraska leads the nation in Covid cases among meatpacking plant workers.
Read more stories by Jessica Lussenhop
While fielding calls from distraught factory employees, and strategising with a coalition of workers and immigrants' rights organisations on what to do next, Vargas was constantly on the phone to doctors at his father's hospital.
It was Vargas who had to approve the doctors to make small incisions in his father's lungs to try to relieve some of the pressure. It was Vargas who would get the good news in the morning that his father's CO2 levels had improved and then by night find out things had got worse again.
He arranged Zoom calls between his mother and brothers, and the nurses who would hold the phone up to their father's emaciated face, hoping that behind all the wires and tubes he could hear them.
On 13 April, Vargas' oldest brother Gene - the son closest to their father - woke and found that he could barely move. His temperature was 103.4 degrees and he was soon diagnosed with Covid as well.
On 18 April, the first meatpacking plant worker in Nebraska died.
A few days later, Vargas got the call from his father's doctors.
"They said they'd never seen anybody with carbon dioxide in their lungs and their blood this high," he recalled. "They said, 'We think that this might be the end for him.'"
They offered Vargas and his family a rare opportunity. At a time when most Covid patients were dying alone, the hospital was allowing some exceptions. If the Vargas' wanted to come say goodbye, they would allow it.
At the height of the pandemic in New York and against his mother's wishes, Vargas boarded a plane.
"I knew that there are so many people that did not get to say goodbye," he said. That included Gene, the favourite son, who because of his symptoms was not allowed in.
For two nights, in a negative pressure room, wearing an N95 mask, a face shield, two gowns and a heavy plastic smock, Vargas sat, holding his mother's rosary in his father's hand.
At 4:17am, 29 April, Virgilio Antonio Vargas - a 72-year-old machinist, shop steward, the man his family called "Silverfox", the tough-love dad, the penny pincher, who loved soccer and the Jets and telenovelas but also terrible American sitcoms like Two Broke Girls, who was just learning how to enjoy the fruits of his labour, who just two months earlier was cliff diving in Peru - died alone after his exhausted son had gone home for the night.
When Vargas remembers his father now, just three short months after his death, his mind goes back to election night in 2016.
Growing up, the Vargas family did not talk politics. They talked about work, and work was something you did with your hands.
When his youngest son announced to his family that he was running for the Nebraska state senate at 31 years old, with no prior experience in public office aside from three years on the Omaha school board, his father gave him a blunt assessment.
"'You're not gonna win because the people that win are usually white. They're usually rich or wealthy or have influence,'" Vargas recalled. "He said it with love, but he said it to me."
He tried to convince his father that this was different - his district was almost half Latino, many living below the poverty line, yet had never had a senator who looked like them. He could talk to them about healthcare access, job access, school improvement and housing equality - and he could do it in Spanish.
When the weekend before election night came, Virgilio and Lidia flew to Omaha and spent 12 hour days canvassing for their son. One night, Virgilio went so long and so hard that his phone died, he got lost and had to be rescued. His sons were shocked by his enthusiasm.
"My dad wasn't that kind of person," remembered Gene Vargas. "We were all taken aback by that."
Vargas remembers his father on election night- a contest that saw the Latino vote in the 7th district increase by two-and-a-half times. Virgilio stood in the front row of the victory party, holding hands with his mother and pumping his fist in the air.
"For the first time really ever, my father believed that what I was doing, and that the position I was in, actually can help move the needle and help people," Vargas recalled.
The memory of his father's late-life political awakening both inspired and haunted Vargas, particularly as he struggled to figure out a way to help the meatpacking workers. In the weeks immediately following his death he arranged Zoom calls between senators and meatpacking workers to try to build support in the legislature for new regulations.
In June, he penned a letter to Republican Governor Pete Ricketts, imploring him to "define and mandate a policy to protect Nebraskans working in meatpacking and poultry plants across the state", hoping a campaign of public pressure might inspire action. It was signed by 23 fellow senators, five of whom were Republicans.
Instead, the governor announced that meatpacking plants no longer had to publicly disclose their positive case numbers (his office did not respond to multiple messages seeking comment).
So Vargas started work on a bill he knew was almost certain to fail. He didn't feel he had a choice.
"That's what I told my dad I was going to do. That's why he believed in it. He didn't believe it was a bunch of bullshit," he said. "If I don't do it, who is going to do it?"
On a punishingly hot day in Lincoln, a young man in a black baseball cap and face mask sat outside the Nebraska state capitol in a socially distanced line that stretched all the way inside, snaking through the hallways to Hearing Room 1525. He held in his arms a large, ornate framed photograph of a smiling, bearded man in a suit coat, to whom he bore a striking resemblance.
Christian Muñoz had taken the day off of work and driven two-and-a-half hours from his home in South Sioux City, Nebraska, to testify before state lawmakers about his father, Rogelio Calderon Munoz, who died of Covid-19 at 53 years old.
Both father and son had worked side by side at the Tyson meat processing plant in Dakota County, Nebraska, which saw one of the worst Covid-19 spikes per capita in the state. Both father and son contracted the virus. While 23-year-old Muñoz stayed asymptomatic, his father rapidly declined just days after telling his son he was feeling weak.
Muñoz tried to go back to work at Tyson, where he deboned huge slabs of beef at a rate of 50 seconds per carcass. But then he passed his father's former post and saw someone else standing there. He never went back.
Some of his friends warned him not to go to Lincoln. They said it might affect his current job, that he might even get sued by his powerful ex-employer.
But Munoz had already made up his mind.
"He wasn't just a worker at a plant, you know?" he said. "He deserves justice. It deserves to be recognized. That's why I'm here."
Although Muñoz had never met Vargas, they shared remarkably similar, terrible experiences.
Like Vargas' father, the elder Munoz spent weeks on a ventilator. Like Vargas, Christian Muñoz made the difficult medical decisions on behalf of his father and his family. Like Vargas, Muñoz had talked cheerfully to his grey-faced father through a Zoom call, hoping his voice would do some good.
Like Vargas, Muñoz was allowed the rare opportunity to sit at the bedside after doctors told him there was nothing more to be done.
"I played his favourite songs," he said. "It just was very sad. He looked like he was just suffering at that point."
While Muñoz waited in the beating sun outside with dozens of others, Senator Vargas was inside introducing the hearing.
The fact that it was happening at all was a small miracle. When the motion to introduce his new bill failed the week prior, Vargas pulled a new manoeuvre - he added the same language in the bill as an amendment to an existing bill that had nothing to do with meatpacking workers. Then he went to the chair of the committee the bill was in and pleaded for a hearing.
According to the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, 39,000 meatpacking plant workers across 40 US states have contracted the virus and 185 have died. Of the top 50 hotspots in the US, most are prisons and jails, but the rest - save for the naval ship the USS Theodore Roosevelt - are meatpacking plants. Worker safety in the plants became a cause championed by former presidential candidate and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. But to date, no public hearings of any kind had occurred on the subject.
Vargas' would be the first.
"I'm really hoping you take this to heart and it also changes what you believe is possible," Vargas told the seven-member committee in his opening. "We're the only body who can do something about this."
And then, one by one, for the next four hours, the speakers came.
The committee heard - at times through a translator - about how, while conditions had improved in some of the plants since the spring, implementation of safety precautions was inconsistent from plant to plant. They heard about how workers' masks - once soaked with animal blood and sweat - were not replaced. How the conveyor belts proceeded at their usual speeds even when three or four people were gone, leading employees to work at frantic and dangerous rates.
A plant worker and union steward told them that when federal inspectors from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration had come to her job at a JBS plant, management took them to a carefully cleaned section of the factory instead of showing them the real conditions on the line.
(In response, a spokeswoman for JBS wrote that "OSHA investigators direct the tour of the facility". OSHA confirmed there are four open inspections at the JBS Beef Plant in Grand Island which they have six months to complete, and said no further information is available until that time. "The Department is committed to protecting America's workers during the pandemic, and OSHA has been working around the clock to that end," the spokeswoman wrote.)
A representative of the East African Development Center of Nebraska said that his members, many of whom are Somali, were so scared to miss work while sick that they were taking Ibuprofen in the morning to bring down their temperatures.
Eric Reeder, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 293, wearily ticked off a list of stories he'd heard from his members - everything from workers being written up for asking about positive cases to bathroom breaks being denied on understaffed lines - before he sighed and tossed his notes aside.
"The truth of the matter is that the employers are telling you that they're giving out plenty of masks and they are giving them masks, but they're not replacing them as needed. The distancing is nonexistent on the lines," he said. "The employers, as long as they're not mandated to do something, aren't going to do it."
A former meatpacking worker named Gabriela Pedroza told the committee that while she was thankful and proud of her old job, her friends and family still working in the plants were suffering.
"It has gone from smiling and laughing when we see each other to tears of fear - fear of getting sick, missing work and fear of speaking up to request safety," she said, her voice quavering.
In all, 34 people spoke in favour of the amendment. No one representing the meat industry came, instead mailing in their letters of opposition.
When the BBC asked about the safety concerns raised at the hearing, representatives from JBS and Tyson responded that workers are provided as many masks as needed throughout the day.
"They are not punished for asking questions related to COVID-19, they are allowed to take bathroom breaks and line speeds have been reduced due to our social distancing efforts," wrote a spokeswoman for JBS.
"We've implemented social distancing measures, such as installing workstation dividers, providing more breakroom space, erecting outdoor tents for additional space for breaks where possible, and staggered start times to avoid large gatherings as team members enter the facility," the Tyson representative wrote, adding that there are "very few active cases" in Dakota City.
"The cost of… COVID-19 related measures has been enormous, totaling over $500 million to date," wrote a spokesman for Smithfield. "Our level of active cases among our domestic employees remains a fraction of one percent. These figures clearly demonstrate the robustness of our COVID-19 response. The numbers don't lie."
None of the three companies provided an up-to-date coronavirus case count for their Nebraska facilities.
When Muñoz entered the hearing room carrying his father's portrait, the committee chair told him props were not allowed.
"I'll just set it right here," he said, placing the frame upright in a chair, facing the committee.
There was a lot Muñoz wanted to say. He wanted the committee to know that his father had been a talented singer, that he'd been in the middle of recording a new album. He wanted them to know that he was so beloved by the music community in South Sioux City that they'd posthumously given him first place in a talent show. He wanted them to know how excited his father had been when Muñoz told him his girlfriend was pregnant, how they'd sat together after work talking about baby names.
He wanted them to know that his father had died without ever meeting his grandson, Christian Gael, who was born five days later.
But he only had five minutes.
Instead he told them that his father was a US citizen, that he lived alone and so it was doubtful he contracted the virus elsewhere. He told them about the delays in getting PPE and how when they asked their supervisors about the virus, they were laughed off or told the contagion started at a Somali housing complex. He told them how his father continued going to work, even though he was scared.
"I'm here to honour my father because the company never did," he said into the microphone. "Our family never received any condolences, even though earlier in April we were repeatedly told to be proud because we were feeding America... There are times when I think my father would still be alive if proper precautions were taken early on."
He paused slightly.
"My father's name was Rogelio Muñoz. He was only 53 years old. He didn't drink, he didn't smoke, and he was a loyal Tyson worker since 1993. Thank you."
(In response to a BBC inquiry about Christian Muñoz's testimony, a Tyson spokeswoman wrote, "We are saddened by the loss of any Tyson team member and sympathize with the family at this difficult time.")
Four days in the session remained.
The final day of the Nebraska legislature's 106th session started out with a bit of the feeling of a college graduation. Senators who were leaving office due to term limits stood at the dais waxing nostalgic about their first day on the job, their foibles and triumphs.
Senator Vargas listened from his seat with a vague feeling of trepidation. Several outgoing senators he regarded as political allies and he wondered who would be replacing them. But his thoughts also wandered to what had occurred in the chamber two days prior.
Three days of session passed before the Business and Labor Committee took a vote on his meatpacking amendment. It passed - four yay votes to two nay. But because of the calendar, it was essentially dead on arrival. To move forward to an actual vote would have required three debates, and only two days of the session remained.
On the day it passed out of committee, Vargas spoke one last time about the bill. He reminded the lawmakers that while his time had run out, the governor of Nebraska and the state's Department of Labor had the power to act at any time.
"I don't know what else I can do," he said. "I'm imploring those that can do something, to act urgently to act with compassion and to act with humanity."
Then he withdrew the amendment and the effort officially died.
Sitting in his office on the final day of the session, an untouched lunch in front of him, Vargas wondered if he had been too naive, wasted too much time believing that a campaign of public pressure would be enough to move the governor or his senate colleagues. He wondered what would have happened if he had gotten those two votes on the motion to suspend - could he have squeaked the bill through?
Still, he was proud to have held a hearing, the first of its kind in the country, where worker testimony was heard.
"Their words are on the record and senators can't hide from it," he said. "We have workers testifying. We also have plants not testifying. And we have a committee of elected senators, that majority voted and said, 'This deserved debate.' So when I bring this next year, it's going to get its time again."
Next year meant January, four months in which health experts warned of a potential second wave. Four months in which the 2020 election would dominate headlines, and the plight of the meatpacking workers would likely fall further and further from the minds of the public. The session, he admitted, had been hard. It had changed him. Before he had faith that if it was a matter of life and death, if he had data and stories, including his own, that he could win the support of his ideological opponents. But he'd experienced something uglier that summer.
"I am the only Latino… it's inherently a lonely place," he said. "It is hard bearing that and being vulnerable in front of my colleagues about that. Because it is something that we don't share."
Back out on the floor, where the only real business was final reading and passage of bills, a senator named Steve Erdman, from a rural district on the opposite side of the state, rose to speak. He began railing against masks. He espoused the effectiveness of the unproven hydroxychloroquine treatment championed by Donald Trump. He cast doubt on there ever being a vaccine, saying herd immunity was the only way to beat the virus.
"Take your masks off. Go out and live your life because what's happened here is we're so afraid of dying we have forgotten how to live," he said. "If you have the illusion that that mask is going to screen something out and save you, you are wrong."
Then a senator, a Democrat named Justin Wayne, took the mic. "I can't let that go unchecked," he said. "When people on this floor's family members have passed. When individuals who are on this floor may have contracted it... I don't want anybody watching to say that's not important." Another Democrat also used his time to chastise Erdman. Yet a third Democrat opined that some didn't care about Covid deaths because "it wasn't the right people". An audibly angry Vargas took the mic, too.
"If you still think this is a joke, please come and talk to me," he said "I am more than happy to talk to you about exactly every single minute that I was waiting to get a call from the doctor on whether or not my dad was going to get better. And when his CO2 levels dropped or when his lung collapsed - I am more than happy to tell you if that's going to help you get to a place where you actually understand and take this seriously."
And then Senator Mike Moser stepped to his microphone. He paused. "I'm having trouble getting my breath, sorry about that," he said. Moser, a Republican, contracted coronavirus in May and spent five weeks in the hospital. In interviews with the local news, he admitted that he had not been wearing a mask prior to falling ill, and that he'd gone shopping and eaten indoors.
"To take something that you saw on the internet that happens to agree with your contrary personality or your politics and then to represent that as fact, when you don't know whether it's fact or not, is irresponsible," he said. " You need to… "
His voice broke off, and the sound of his laboured breath through his face mask was audible over the speakers. "You need to have lived through it to understand the helplessness that you feel. There were times I couldn't even roll over in bed. They had to come in and flip you over, you know? How low are you at that point?" he said, choking up. "Having lived through this, I can tell you this is nothing to mess with."
Then he told the body that, when lying in his hospital bed one day, his breathing became so strained that he asked a nurse to see if something was obstructing his nasal canal. The nurse took a forceps and removed a blood clot "the size of a little smoky sausage".
"So you go jam a little smoky sausage up your nose and see how you breathe, and then complain about wearing a mask," Moser concluded, his voices rising. "Come on, you guys."
The chamber erupted in applause.
Hours later, after the final gavel had fallen, after the Governor had come to the dais to praise the legislators for passing an abortion method ban and a property tax relief bill, Vargas arrived downstairs in his office. The remarks made by Senator Erdman had obviously angered him. But something else had happened too - as Erdman spoke, Vargas' phone had lit up with messages of support and concern from the other senators, from all sides of the political spectrum, asking if he was alright and apologising that he had to listen to it. (Senator Erdman did not respond to multiple messages from the BBC.)
He was particularly gratified to hear from Senator Moser, who'd never spoken in such graphic detail about his fight with the virus before.
"He was angry with what Erdman said," said Vargas. "He's friends with him, from his own party and he's just like, 'People that haven't been personally affected by this, it's so easy for them to then just disassociate from it.'"
It was a nice show of support but wasn't what Vargas wanted - it wasn't votes, it wasn't action on behalf of his community.
"One-hundred and fifty-thousand lives have been lost to this because there's still people who believe that this is a level of collateral damage that is okay. And unfortunately it takes, from some of these individuals, their own loved one to get hurt, or to fall ill or to die. And it should never be that way. You know?" he said. "Anyway, that's just been like one of the hardest reflections from today."
Then he went into his office and sent his legislative aide home. For the next several hours, he sat alone. He ate his cold lunch. He slowly packed up his things and sealed the office. It was well after dark when he finally walked down the marble hallways and out the door, the last person to leave the shining state capitol building.
And with that, the 106th session of the Nebraska legislature - for Senator Vargas - came to a close.
Postscript: In the weeks after the end of session, representatives from both the Crete Smithfield and the Lincoln Premium Poultry plants invited Senator Vargas to tour their facilities. He plans to lead a group of fellow senators there later this year. Meanwhile, Nebraska's governor has moved to reopen most of the state, easing nearly all Covid-19 restrictions.
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A new member of the Isle of Man's House of Keys has been sworn in at a special ceremony in Tynwald. | Chris Robertshaw was elected to represent Douglas East in a by-election on 27 May.
The former managing director of the Sefton Hotel stood as an independent candidate and won the seat with 388 votes.
The seat was made vacant when Phil Braidwood was elected to the Legislative Council.
House of Keys speaker Steve Rodan said he expected Mr Robertshaw's "own particular experience of commercial and public life in the Isle of Man" to benefit the House and his constituents.
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Each year hundreds of people around the world are opting for long, often painful surgery to extend their legs in a bid to make themselves a few inches taller. But the complex procedure isn't without risk and health experts say some are being left with long-term problems. | By Tom BradaBBC News
Sam Becker was the tallest kid at his middle school, but by the end of high school his peers had left him behind. "When I went to college, I noticed that I was shorter than a lot of the guys and even the girls," he says. "It does affect your life. Honestly, women generally don't date guys that are shorter than them. The hardest thing was sometimes feeling like I won't be able to find a wife."
Sam, now 30, from New York, hoped that he might still grow, though in his heart he knew he had reached his full adult height. "I always thought that being tall and being successful were linked. I had to come up with my own solution."
Will I be able to walk?
Sam researched his options, but was unconvinced by temporary fixes like shoe lifts and stretching exercises. When he came across leg-lengthening, a fascination took root. Following a frank conversation with his mother and weighing up the various risks, he decided the answer to his problems lay on the operating table. He underwent surgery in 2015, going from 5ft 4ins (162cm) to 5ft 7ins (170cm).
"At my first consultation the doctor made it very clear how difficult the surgery was going to be. I was concerned about what I would be able to do after getting those three inches. Will I still be able to walk? Will I still be able to run?
"After I had the operation I was in physical therapy maybe three or four times a week for a few hours each day. I did that for probably six months. It was a very humbling experience. It is kind of crazy… breaking both of your legs and learning to walk again. It's seen as a cosmetic surgery, but I did it a lot more personally for my mental health."
Leg-lengthening surgery is available in more than a dozen countries, with some patients able to increase their height by up to five inches (13cm). And while it's hard to say exactly how many people undergo it each year, clinics say it is gaining in popularity. The BBC has spoken to clinics around the world about the frequency with which they perform the operation and the numbers vary.
At leading centres in the US, Germany and South Korea the procedure is carried out between 100 and 200 times a year. Others - including in Spain, India, Turkey and Italy - perform between 20 and 40 operations a year. In the UK the figure is slightly lower - about 15 times a year. Almost every clinic the BBC spoke to noted an increase year-on-year.
In the UK, it's available at a handful of private clinics regulated by the Care Quality Commission. They charge up to £50,000, while in the US the price ranges from £56,000 up to £210,000 ($75,000 - $280,000).
The surgery is long, expensive and painful. The technique was pioneered by Gavril Ilizarov, a Soviet doctor treating injured soldiers returning from World War Two. And while the surgery has evolved over the last 70 years, many of the principles remain the same.
A hole is drilled into the leg bones - which are then broken in two. A metal rod is surgically fitted inside and held in place by a number of screws. The rod is then slowly lengthened by up to 1mm each day, extending until the patient reaches the desired height and their bones can heal back together.
The patient then requires several months of daily rehabilitation to build up mobility. The process is fraught with the risk of complications, from nerve injuries and blood clots to the possibility of the bones not fusing back together.
I had a three-inch gap
Someone who understands that all too well is Barny. He had the surgery in Italy in 2015, gaining three inches in height - going from 5ft 6in (167cm) to 5ft 9in (175cm). After being diagnosed with a condition that required his legs to be straightened, he opted to have leg lengthening at the same time.
He had been reassured that the procedures could be done together and wouldn't affect his recovery time. But he's been dealing with the consequences ever since. "If I was 16 years old, perhaps it wouldn't have been a problem. But when I had the operation I was 46," he says. "My legs were being pulled apart, but my bones never caught up. I had a three inch gap…just two sticks of bone and a metal bar in between."
Barny recalls the physical discomfort he endured during the lengthening process itself. "It's like every nerve in your legs are being stretched," he says. "There are times when you can't escape anywhere in your head from the pain. It is excruciating."
In spite of the alarming gap between his bones, the weight-bearing rod holding his bones together meant Barny was still able to walk. But the gravity of his situation was clear. "There was a moment of realisation of 'I'm stuck. I'm absolutely stuck'. I was fortunate, my family and employer were amazing. But it can spiral very quickly and you do need a support network. When things go wrong, it goes catastrophically wrong."
Cosmetic limb-lengthening is limited to private clinics and as such there is little concrete data around the number of patients who go on to experience complications. But Professor Hamish Simpson, of the British Orthopaedic Association, reiterated the potential hazards.
"The techniques and technology have improved substantially over the past couple of decades, making it a safer procedure. However, as well as growing more bone - more muscle, nerve, blood vessels and skin have to be grown and the procedure remains an extremely complex process, with a high complication rate."
Dr David Goodier, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon in the UK, said some of the people he has come across who wanted leg lengthening surgery "have psychological problems", including body dysmorphia. He says as more people opt for the procedure, there is a concern patients will prioritise cost over welfare.
"When faced with the choice of going somewhere with very experienced limb reconstruction surgical expertise versus getting it done on the cheap, I don't think people are necessarily made aware of all the things that can and often do go wrong," he warns. "What happens if you go somewhere, have the surgery done and then return to the UK with complications? The answer is you get sent up to see me on the NHS and we pick up the pieces."
Done and dusted
As for Barny, the day after we met he was having the final metal rod removed from his femur, five years after the original surgery. Despite the pain, the cost and the many years of rehabilitation, he has few regrets. "That will be me, done and dusted," he says.
"Regret is a funny one. There are a lot of people who the surgery has gone right for and you'll never hear from them again… they quietly get on with their lives. I still have a long way to go to recover, but for me the operation was worth it. It has given me the opportunity to recreate my life, free from the prejudice that short people experience."
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A schoolgirl's murder has gone unsolved since she was brutally killed more than 70 years ago. Police had been hopeful forensic evidence - thought to be among the oldest such specimens in the world - may finally prove who killed her. But the mystery still remains. | By Gwyneth Rees & Jordan DaviesBBC News
Twelve-year-old Muriel Drinkwater was singing as she walked along the mile-long path to her home after getting off a school bus.
Her mother Margaret watched from the house as the youngest of her four daughters went among the trees and disappeared from sight.
It was the last time her mother saw her alive.
The next day the child's body was found. Muriel had been brutally raped, battered around the head and shot twice, with her killing dubbed the Little Red Riding Hood murder by the national press.
Thousands of men were questioned over the shocking death of Muriel, a schoolgirl at Penllergaer Grammar School on the outskirts of Swansea.
Posters featuring the weapon used and a description of a man wanted for questioning were circulated widely but yielded no results.
Despite the effort and resources ploughed into finding the killer, the inquiry remained unsolved.
It had been hoped a vital piece of forensic evidence might finally lead police to the identity of Muriel's killer.
A semen stain found on her coat is thought to be one of the oldest pieces of crime scene evidence in the world.
It was discovered during a 2003 case review, and was used to rule out a boy who passed Muriel before she was attacked as a suspect.
South Wales Police were looking into whether Harold Jones, who murdered two young girls in a town about 45 miles away, also killed Muriel.
But after re-examining the forensic evidence and considering theories that Jones was responsible, they have confirmed he was not the killer.
Detective Chief Inspector Mark Lewis, head of the South Wales Police's Specialist Crime Review Unit said: "The results of the forensic examination categorically confirm that Jones was not responsible for the murder of Muriel Drinkwater.
"Due to advances in forensic technology, we have been able to look again at evidence from the murder in 1946 and I am now able to rule out Harold Jones completely as a suspect in this case.
"I have spoken to Muriel's family to bring them up to date with the latest details of this investigation."
The news will be a blow to historian Neil Milkins, who has spent 12 years researching Muriel's murder and took his theory to the police.
Speaking before the results of the DNA sample were known, he said: "Harold was a convicted double child murderer - suspected of being one of Britain's most notorious serial killers.
"He would have had no problem committing this murder."
Growing up in Abertillery in a poor family, Jones left school in his early teens and began work as a shop assistant.
But in February 1921, aged just 15, he lured eight-year-old Freda Burnell to a seed store behind the shop and killed her in a vicious attack.
He hid her body and dumped it in an alley during the night.
As the last person to see her alive, Jones was arrested and put on trial at Monmouth Assizes.
But local people believed he was "fitted up" by the London detectives and campaigned for his release.
After being found not guilty and released, he was paraded through the town shoulder high by his supporters and presented with a gold watch.
Yet within days of his acquittal, he struck again.
This time it was Freda's friend, 11-year old Florence Little.
He lured her to his home, slit her throat, then hid her body in the attic.
Upon the discovery of her remains, Jones admitted both murders and was jailed for 20 years.
When he was released in 1941, he joined the army, serving in Libya before his military service ended in February 1946.
Muriel was murdered four months after he left the forces, leading Mr Milkins to suspect it may be him.
Mr Milkins said: "Just before he was released from prison, he told authorities he didn't want to lose the desire to kill and rape.
"So it seems to me, and also psychologists, he may have gone on to kill many more times.
"He was a psychopath, so calm and cool.
"It seemed he could kill someone, walk away, and talk to people with no nerves at all."
There is a school of thought that Jones was also Jack the Stripper, a notorious killer who strangled six women in London in the 1960s.
Jones lived in the area at the time of the killings, and a 2018 investigation led by criminologist Prof David Wilson, named him as the prime suspect.
Jones later went on to have a daughter, who knew nothing of his crimes, and he led an "unassuming life" until his death from cancer in 1971.
As for the unsolved murder of Muriel, the re-opening of the cold case involved examining very old DNA was something that was highly unusual, according to one expert.
Speaking before the DNA results were known, Dr Jane Monckton Smith, a forensic criminologist who grew up near Muriel's home town, said: "Personally, I don't know anyone using a sample so old.
"It's amazing that we have come so far that we can extract a profile from it.
"From what I know, Harold Jones was a sexual sadist and from my limited knowledge, I think it's highly likely he is a good suspect in a number of murders."
For Muriel's niece, Margaret, she is back at square one, still waiting for an answer to who killer Muriel.
She said: "Muriel was my aunt, and my mum and her had a very happy childhood on the farm.
"The murder of her little sister had a massive effect on my mother and family.
"Ideally, I would like to put it to rest, because it's an open case.
"We still need justice for Muriel."
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US President Donald Trump says "100%" of the Islamic State group's territory has now been taken over, even though local commanders with the US allies, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), maintain total victory will be declared within a week.
As the battle draws to a close, the BBC's Quentin Sommerville met some of those leaving the group's last stronghold, Baghuz. | By Quentin SommervilleDeir al-Zour, Syria
Hamza Jasim al-Ali's world is small and terrible. He hasn't moved far in life, living always along the same 40km (25 mile) stretch on the banks of the Euphrates.
His journey, still without end, took him from al-Qaim in Iraq, across the border to Syria and into the dark centre of what was the Islamic State group's nightmare caliphate. He has seen more of life and death than any child of 12 should.
Now he is far from his river, sitting on the desert floor in a wind-whipped tent, alone - apart from an elderly woman who barely knows him. His leg is broken, but healing, and he smiles as I ask him questions.
I asked him what life was like inside.
"It was good," he says, smiling again. "Less food and water and a lot of fighting. It was heavy fighting."
Does he still like IS? "No. Why would I like them after all they have done?" he answers.
Hamza is an IS orphan. His father joined the group and took the whole family with him. He died five months ago, along with Hamza's mother and brothers and sisters in an air strike that was part of the battle to drive the group from its last toehold of territory in Syria.
IS's victims number millions - they displaced and terrorised people across Iraq, Syria and Libya. Their treatment of the Yazidis was genocidal, according to the United Nations. But they also brutalised and corrupted not just their enemies, but their own children, too.
As part of a ceasefire deal, more than 6,000 women and children have left IS territory, along with injured male fighters. The Islamic State group's dreams of a sprawling caliphate have been reduced to a pathetic encampment around the village of Baghuz. Their first stop when they get out is the desert, where thousands are processed in the open. The air is acrid and filthy; many of them are sick. They defecate out in the open.
Most are then moved on to an overwhelmed internment camp near the city of Hassaka, in the village of al-Hol. As Hamza and I speak, there's a lull outside - the day's IS refugees have yet to arrive, and last night's have already been put on to cattle trucks for the long journey across desert roads to al-Hol.
They are searched individually, by Kurdish women fighters, but it is not known if they are finger-printed or photographed. The injured men's pictures and other biometric data are taken before they are sent to detention. But there are limits to the investigations that can be carried out into the crimes of which they are suspected. It is not clear how long the Kurdish authorities can hold them. Some of the men said they expected to be freed in a few months' time.
One man, who said he was from Aleppo, claimed he was a caretaker. At the edge of the processing area, he told me: "I'll do the supposed detention time and then go live with my parents and leave everything behind me. I'll go live with my mum. That'll be best."
Another, Abu Bakr al-Ansari, showed little regret. "All Muslims will be sad it's gone because they wanted their own state," he says. "They won't live free to practise their religion in other Muslim countries."
Both were then taken away to Kurdish detention.
Across the desert plain, I find discarded belongings: mobile phones that have been smashed or burned in camp fires, USB drives snapped in two.
There are photographs in the dirt, too - one of four young girl scouts, another of a girl wearing a headscarf. Was one of them now on her way to al-Hol camp?
Amid the soiled nappies and empty tinned cans of food, a family ration card. It belongs to a Kosovan family. The father had a senior position within IS. But that's another story.
In this mess of abandonment, there is purpose and care. A computer hard drive has been stamped on and covered in human excrement.
Many of the women left IS not because they wanted to, but because they were ordered to. Plenty still carried their husbands' worn military backpacks.
It appears that they want their enemies - the Kurds and the Western coalition - to have little clue to who they are. I met women from Turkey, Iraq, Chechnya, Russia and Dagestan. Some expected to be reunited with their husbands who are still inside Baghuz, waiting for the final battle. Many are still fanatics.
A Tunisian-Canadian woman, her niqab streaked with stains under purple-framed glasses, gave her name as Umm Yousef. Her husband, a Moroccan, had been killed, but she may have married another who was still inside. She said she had no regrets and had learned much from IS.
"So Allah, he made this to test us," she told me. "Without food, without money and without houses, but now I'm happy, because maybe some time, in two hours' I will see that I have water to drink."
Britain and other coalition countries are maintaining pressure on the Kurds to keep the dispossessed of IS locked up. But after the misery the extremists brought here, the Kurds want them gone.
At night more women arrived. Some of their children cried, but others stood silent and still, numb to everything around them. When they were asked a question, in the glare of television camera lights, they turned their dust-covered faces down to the ground and said nothing.
A group that showed almost no mercy, now pleads for it.
An Iraqi woman, standing in the dark, with around 200 other women and children, said to me: "Do you not see the children here before you? Can you not feel their pain? The pain of old men and the women who got shredded by the bombs? The children who died in air strikes? You're human. We're human as well. Do you not feel my pain, brother?"
At the edge of the throng, there is a medical station, run by a charity, the Free Burma Rangers. Paul Brady, a Californian, is one of their medics. He says the injuries have changed as more people have arrived from IS.
"About 10 days ago we saw quite a few with what looked like bullet wounds," he told me.
"They said they were shot because they were escaping. But now we haven't been seeing as many of those. It feels like most of these injuries are a little older, mostly from air strikes and mortars.
"You walk around this triage spot and it smells really bad because these wounds have been festering for a long time," he said.
The flow of people will eventually dry up, and then the final battle for Baghuz is expected. Those we spoke to in the desert said there were still thousands of fighters still inside.
Hamza was injured five weeks ago when he stepped on a landmine, but he says his broken leg is much better now. As I'm about to leave, he looks up at me, his smile finally disappearing from his face and he asks, "What will happen to me?"
There's no clear answer. And I couldn't tell him that Iraq may not take him back. He would probably be taken to al-Hol camp like everyone else.
I left him something to drink, some chocolate and bananas, in the care of the medics and the Kurdish forces.
When I returned to the desert the next day, he was gone, his place on the floor taken by more sick and injured from the last of the so-called caliphate.
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The engineering firm Dyson says it has made £1bn ($1.58bn, 1.19bn euros) turnover for the first time and will create 300 skilled jobs, around 8% of its workforce. | The firm, best known for its bagless vacuum cleaners, said sales rose by a quarter in 2011, with some markets growing by 30%.
The company's new chief executive, Max Conze, said 200 of the new jobs would be engineering positions.
At least 150 will go to graduates.
The Wiltshire-based group, founded by Sir James Dyson, employs 3,600 staff worldwide.
It was founded in 1992 and now sells machines, including hand dryers, in more than 50 markets.
Dyson designs its products in the UK but after initially making them in the UK, moved much of the manufacturing to Malaysia to cut costs.
It did not reveal its profit figure for the year. In 2010, the business made a profit of £210m on turnover of £887m.
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The UK is about to pass legislation committing it to ringfencing 0.7% of gross national income for international development spending. Prof Henrietta Moore, director of the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London offers a personal perspective on the way forward. | By Prof Henrietta MooreUniversity College London
What has been agreed?
The International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill is on the cusp of becoming law.
It means that 0.7% of the UK's gross national income (GNI) will be ringfenced for international aid spending. The target will be legally binding on future governments.
This makes Britain the first nation in the G7 to honour a commitment agreed by the United Nations as far back as 1970.
In cash terms, it will mean spending around £12bn of taxpayers' money on development assistance in the current year.
The bill has had a rocky ride through both Houses of Parliament.
Proposed as a private member's bill by Liberal Democrat MP and former Scottish Secretary Michael Moore, some backbench Conservative MPs and Lords have been strongly opposed to the legal commitment.
However, their proposed amendments were defeated in votes.
The bill should receive Royal Assent in the coming days.
Is the current system flawed?
But while aid is certainly necessary in our deeply unequal world, not everything done in the name of aid is pure altruism.
There is an undoubted connection between the UK's aid budget and the promotion of British 'soft power'.
International Development Secretary Justine Greening has said herself that UK aid helps to fight the root causes of terrorism and it surely can't be coincidence that the single biggest recipient of UK aid is Pakistan.
And there is a commercial angle to the aid we give, as it is often delivered via partner companies that profit as a result.
In 2011-12, the Department for International Development (DFID) awarded 135 contracts to 58 contractors, worth almost £500m.
Beneficiaries included big-name firms such as PwC, Mott MacDonald and Adam Smith International.
And DFID's Food Retail Industry Challenge Fund (FRICH) has seen £1.9m in grants given to UK businesses including the supermarkets Waitrose and Sainsbury's to help get more African produce on to shop shelves.
So from the developing world's perspective, aid can sometimes seem like a way of cementing the established relationships between the rich 'global north' and the poor 'global south' - with a transfer of cash from the former to the latter, but within power structures that favour the former.
We also need to look at the wider context of aid. Often, the mainly agricultural economies of the 'global south' are struggling because of the inability to sell their products competitively to the rich world.
This situation is maintained through the colossal subsidy regimes maintained by wealthy nations to protect their own farmers: the European Union spends around €59bn a year on farm subsidies through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), with the US spending just over $30bn.
These subsidies, combined with trade tariffs, serve to block out competition from developing nations.
What should be the aim?
While aid will certainly be necessary for the foreseeable future to alleviate the extreme poverty that still sees one billion people globally having to survive on less than $1.25 a day, we should be looking to move to a point where it is no longer needed.
To do this, we need to radically rethink our economic, social and political models to create a sustainable, prosperous future for everyone on the planet.
These models will be different for different places, because there will be varying factors negatively impacting on people's individual and collective prosperity.
In a developed urban environment like London, for example, access to affordable housing might be the biggest pressure, while in rural Kenya it will be more basic things like access to clean and reliable water and electricity supplies.
But these models will be united by a fundamental re-evaluation of the concept of growth.
The continuous notching up of GDPs based on ever-rising consumption and carbon emissions across the globe simply isn't sustainable in a world with finite resources - especially when the UN predicts that we're hurtling towards a global population of 9.6 billion by 2050, while we're consuming resources at a rate that would need 1.5 earths to support.
Case study: Cogen for Africa:
New models of alternative pathways to sustainable development are already emerging.
Take the Cogen for Africa project - a successful example of so-called 'south to south co-operation' - helping food processing firms benefit from a big expansion of eco-friendly biomass energy in East Africa.
The technical expertise is being provided by the island nation of Mauritius, where over half of electricity is already generated by combined heat and power (CHP) plants.
Mauritius established a system of feed-in-tariffs to enable firms to sell back surplus electricity to the national grid.
The scheme has seen power plants set up in Kenya and Uganda which not only provide electricity to meet the needs of individual factories, but also enable owners to sell back green energy to the grid, replacing dirtier fossil fuel technologies.
Feed-in-tariffs have now been developed in Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda, and Ethiopia is also considering implementing a similar model.
What needs to be done?
These new models will mean learning lessons from around the world - many of which will come from communities on the front line in the fight against climate change.
Rich nations need to think beyond aid. They need to look at how the global trade system rigged in their favour is preventing poorer countries from lifting themselves out of poverty.
It's clear that developing nations regard this as key. Following the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, for example, the Thai government made pleas to the EU and the US to reduce punitive tariffs on Thai shrimp exports, with the Thai prime minister saying this would make a bigger difference to his country's rebuilding efforts than aid money.
It also means involving business in rethinking its role in positive change. Ultimately, it is enterprise that will spread prosperity in the developing world and we need to foster the right conditions for firms to create social and environmental value.
Business has a responsibility to act sustainably - as many UK companies already do - but this will mean developing new models that recognise that simply replicating the old growth path of the rich world will only compound the pressure on resources and hasten climate catastrophe.
Listen to Prof Moore on the BBC programme Analysis.
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Groups posing as under-age girls online to expose suspected paedophiles - commonly referred to as 'paedophile hunters' - say they gain quicker results than police. But is their work undermining official investigations? | By Fiona TrottBBC News
In a bedsit in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, two men are using a laptop and smartphone to monitor the online conversations they have with adults they suspect to be paedophiles.
They form part of the group Dark Justice. It certainly isn't a technical crime unit, bustling with specialist investigators, but they say they are "actively fighting for change".
One of them calls himself Scott. It's not his real name, but he says he has to protect his identity because he has previously received threats.
"We want change and if it takes getting up at 7am in the morning and talking to these people until 10pm at night then that's what we'll have to do," he explains.
"When they're targeting a child, that child has to live with this for the rest of their life. If we can stop even one child from being abused, then surely that's worth it."
The men expose groomers by setting up profiles as young women on online friendship and dating sites. Once a suspect has contacted them, Dark Justice respond and say they are 13 years old.
Generally, they say, the younger age doesn't deter the adult men, but instead attracts more interest. One current message reads: "I will be ok with ur young sexxxy age if you are OK with mine?"
Watch Victoria Derbyshire weekdays from 09:15-11:00 BST on BBC Two and BBC News Channel, for original stories, in-depth interviews and the issues at the heart of public debate.
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The story was also featured on 5 Live Breakfast
Eventually, Dark Justice arrange a meeting with suspects - as the 13-year-old girl - in a public environment. Once they have identified and filmed the suspect, they call the police and hand over the evidence, including screen snapshots of the messages they have received online.
This evidence can be used in court, which is how Dark Justice exposed a 36-year-old in their latest sting. Kenneth Walker from Nottingham pleaded guilty to attempting to meet a girl following sexual grooming and is due to be sentenced at Newcastle Crown Court today.
But this form of evidence gathering can cause complications over whether the proof has been collected through entrapment.
Ian Kelcey, a defence solicitor and former chair of the Law Society's criminal law committee, has defended two clients in the past year who were exposed by members of the public.
"It may not fall into entrapment if [groups like Dark Justice] are just in a chat room and are waiting for somebody to contact them," he explains.
"The problem is, when they start to entice somebody with [paedophilic] tendencies, then that becomes an entrapment, so it's a very grey area."
Entrapment isn't a criminal offence, although it can form part of the defence made by a suspect's lawyer.
The fact that it's legal, however, means groups like Dark Justice are free to set up as many profiles as they want.
Child sex abuse statistics
Woman's Hour discussion on vigilantes
One particular area of frustration for such groups is the fact they are referred to as "vigilantes" by police - a term that can be synonymous with unlawfulness.
"If you're walking down the street and you see someone smash a car window and give a statement to the police does that make you a vigilante? These people come to us," a member of the group Letzgo Hunting tells me. They prefer to be called "covert private investigators".
"We don't just gather evidence, we investigate someone, on behalf of private clients," he adds. "Our private clients are every single parent in this country."
Stinson Hunter is another campaigner who exposes suspect groomers.
"Using the word 'vigilante' discredits what I do," he claims. "I take evidence, put videos online and get people talking. I'd be doing police work if I was investigating for the police."
In 2013, Mr Hunter confronted a man who killed himself days after being questioned by detectives. More recently, he was knocked over by a car after confronting a man in public.
Risk 'is too great'
Det Supt Andrew Stokes is head of the public protection unit at Derbyshire Police. His unit has previously received information from Stinson Hunter and LetzGo Hunting.
"I think these groups and individuals should stop, and that's the view of most of my colleagues across the country," he explains. "The risks associated with the things they do on the internet are too great."
He believes this kind of activity is gathering momentum and has concerns about the evidence being obtained.
"It may not stand up to the scrutiny that's required in court," he says. "It may be that we're already targeting that person and any work that a vigilante does can undermine that."
"There's also the risk that a person who thinks they've been [exposed] as some sort of paedophile will go off as a missing person and we'll have a huge drain on resources trying to find them.
"We have had cases nationally where people have committed suicide. Let us, the police, do the investigations."
But it's unlikely that groups like Dark Justice will leave it to the police. They're driven by quick results.
They say they can expose suspects more quickly than forces in England and Wales who are "bound by red tape" and working with 16,000 fewer officers than they had five years ago.
Det Supt Stokes says conversations are already taking place nationally about using volunteers or additional special constables to help target online groomers.
However, these people would be vetted, and lawyers argue that this is the crucial difference with the civilian groups that exist today. They're self-appointed, they say, and nobody really knows their agenda.
Watch Victoria Derbyshire on weekdays from 09:15-11:00 BST on BBC Two and BBC News Channel. Follow the programme on Facebook and Twitter, and find all our content online.
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Twenty-five years ago 35 people were killed and 500 people injured when three trains collided in Clapham, south London. BBC producer Clifford Thompson, who at that time worked as a firefighter and was on duty, says he will never forget what he saw. This is his story. | By Clifford ThompsonBBC London
The teleprinter furiously spat out messages printed on to a roll of paper.
It was Monday, 12 December 1988 - a bright but fiercely cold day - just after 08:00.
The London Fire Brigade's Green Watch firefighters were coming to the end of their 48-hour shift.
I stood in the watch room at Stratford fire station in east London - I'd been a firefighter for three years and was one of the Red Watch crews preparing to relieve our colleagues.
We crowded around the teleprinter as messages were relayed from Spencer Park in Clapham.
"This is a major incident - initiate major incident procedure," followed by: "two commuter trains in collision, five carriages involved, approximately 150 casualties, unknown number of people trapped, efforts being made to release".
A train travelling from Poole, Dorset, had passed a "clear" signal just outside Clapham Junction Station and hit the back of a train from Basingstoke, ripping open carriages. Some de-railed carriages were pushed into the path of a third train travelling away from London.
Fifteen fire engines from closer stations headed straight to the crash site, along with a number of specialist rescue firefighters and police, ambulance and hospital surgical teams.
At that point - being 12 miles away and a 45-minute drive from Clapham - I thought there was little chance of our crew getting called there.
Then at 10:25 the officer in charge of the incident sent the radio message: "request 18 pump relief... as soon as possible... rendezvous at junction of Windmill Road and Spencer Park."
A few minutes later the teleprinter bell sounded at Stratford and our engine was despatched to the crash.
I was struck by the scale of what met us - there were dozens of emergency service vehicles and also TV crews.
It was a surreal sight, like a massive film set.
We were told to go down to the crash site and assist with the remaining victims.
In the eerie quiet, it was clear that of those remaining, none was alive.
I walked down the steep embankment - at the bottom was a ledge with a vertical drop about 15ft (4.5m) into the cutting - and saw the jumbled mess of iron and steel.
Ladders and ropes were used to help us get down there.
'Quiet determination'
A man's body was pulled from the wreckage, followed by a woman who had suffered multiple injuries.
We removed another body, leaving only one in place: a man thrown from one of the first two carriages on the Poole train.
At 15:52 another radio message was sent: "All bodies now removed from remaining coaches - British Rail heavy cutting and lifting units in operation. Brigade crews now standing by."
I played a very small part in the rescue operation: one of about 250 firefighters who attended the incident.
I could not imagine what the scene was like for the very first crews to arrive confronted by hundreds of injured people. But we worked with quiet determination to make sure that the final bodies were recovered with as much dignity as possible.
It took more than a year for the 250-page report by Anthony Hidden QC to be published.
It found that faulty wiring had caused an incorrect signal to be displayed to the driver of the Poole train, who was driving into a blind bend and had no chance of stopping.
This crash was by far the largest incident I had attended at that point in my firefighting career.
Of course, I had attended other incidents where people had died. But none of them were on this scale - even 25 years ago, it remains difficult to take in.
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Filth - the latest film adaptation of an Irvine Welsh novel - stars James McAvoy as a bigoted, drug-addicted police officer. The star of the 18 certificate film, which has been 15 years in development, is braced for strong reactions. | By Steven BrocklehurstBBC Scotland news website
Sexist, racist, homophobic, drug-addicted and corrupt, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson's behaviour is not acceptable in any way.
And yet Scottish actor McAvoy says the reaction to the character has been surprising.
He says: "People have been coming out and saying 'I felt something for this guy and I did laugh and I'm kind of slightly angry with myself'."
McAvoy, who previous films include Last King of Scotland and Atonement, says: "I don't think we either ask the audience to forgive him or try to justify it but we do try to explain it."
The 34-year-old actor says that the film differs from Welsh's 1998 book in that it concentrates on the mental deterioration of the character.
Robertson is not just a bad guy doing terrible things, says McAvoy, he is a man who has made bad decisions and dug himself into a hole from which he cannot escape.
The character, compared by the Glasgow-born actor to Iago in Shakespeare's Othello or Machiavelli's Prince, manipulates and hallucinates himself into a web of deceit which takes its toll on his sanity.
McAvoy is keen to stress that his portrayal of Robertson's mental illness is not a "naturalistic representation", it is much more "heightened and energetic".
He says: "My experience of mental illness has been more vibrant than I usually see portrayed and it can be hilarious.
"Of course, it can be depressing but there is a high energy and also a huge imagination which can be thrilling to be around as well as quite terrifying at times."
McAvoy says that while TV drama has become more adventurous, films have become safer, with even the quality end of the market tending but be a bit too "worthy".
He says Filth was a chance to make a film that was "bold and dangerous and potentially controversial", something which nobody in the film industry wants to do at the moment.
"You want to create a conflict in an audience," he says.
"Audiences can't just have it easy all the time. They've got to be made to feel things that they didn't expect or did not want to, or be surprised as well as entertained."
McAvoy says: "We want to inspire strong reactions, be they positive or negative, because everything else is just grey."
That is not a colour which would usually be applied to an Irvine Welsh novel.
The Edinburgh author's most famous book - Trainspotting - was made into a 1996 film by director Danny Boyle.
It launched the careers of Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Kevin McKidd, Kelly Macdonald and Johnny Lee Miller, not to mention Boyle himself.
On the back of the success of Trainspotting, there was much interest in making a film of Welsh's novel Filth, another dark comedy containing morally questionable characters.
However, it has taken 15 years to reach the big screen due to what Welsh describes as a "chequered history".
Welsh says he sold the rights to a major Hollywood studio in 1998 but then its UK arm split in two, leading to years of wrangling over who owned the rights.
When Welsh got the rights back there was still interest in the project but he said the directors who were attached to the film wanted to write their own screenplays and "they weren't up to scratch".
Hallucinations and fantasising
The problems adapting Filth are understandable.
It is a book whose narrative is driven by a talking tapeworm, that is often told by an interior monologue and which is prone to confusing hallucinations and fantasising from the main character.
However, Welsh says that despite the difficulties getting the movie made he never thought it was "unfilmable" as some people claimed and says that Trainspotting "had no story" but that did not hinder its success.
Director and producer Jon S Baird, who is also a Scot, from Aberdeenshire, wrote the final screenplay for the film.
He took on the project five years ago and managed to pull together funding from about 30 different partners in countries such as Belgium, Germany, Sweden as well as America and the UK.
It was Baird who brought in McAvoy, who Welsh describes as a "talent magnet" who inspires a "genuine reverence" from his fellow actors.
The film's cast also includes Jamie Bell, Jim Broadbent, Eddie Marsan, and Imogen Poots.
Welsh says it was "ballsy" of McAvoy to take on such a role as he was already a big Hollywood star, famous for roles in blockbusters such as X Men, as well as appearing with Angelina Jolie in Wanted.
The author says: "It was not like Ewan (McGregor) doing Trainspotting. It was not a breakout role for him. He's already there and it is risky for him to take on something as dark and culty and out there as this."
Baird, whose previous films include Cass about an orphaned Jamaican baby in London, says Filth was regarded as a "dead project" when he got involved.
"It's an old book and very challenging material and people had tried to adapt it before and failed," he says.
For Baird it needed "a very special actor" to play Robertson and McAvoy is one of the few who could achieve the balance between dark madness and humour.
He says: "I think this will prove to everyone just how good he is. James McAvoy is the key to this movie working."
Filth opens in Scotland on 27 September and the rest of the UK on 4 October
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The mood in the White House overnight was tense. | By Tara McKelveyBBC White House reporter
The president's staffers and campaign officials stayed there through much of the night - their boss's job was on the line, and all they could do was wait and drink alcohol. Lots of it.
On Tuesday morning, women in the West Wing had showed up for work in festive attire: Republican-red sweaters, skirts and stilettos, looking as if they had texted each other to agree the dress code. Throughout the day and into the night, they watched election returns and wondered what would happen.
Then the president pulled ahead of his Democratic rival Joe Biden in Florida. The mood brightened. A table in the office of Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany was littered with wine bottles and bags of crisps.
Still the mood was edgy. One staffer cradled a beer bottle in his arm, the label partly peeled off. These occupants of the West Wing - the heart of any White House administration - were nervous, though they tried to project strength and confidence.
"We're feeling very good," one told me. She talked about the returns from Florida that showed the president in the lead. "We're very optimistic."
She smiled, cautiously.
Behind her, the volume on a TV screen was turned up, blaring updates. A newscaster warned of "socialist anarchy", making a dire prediction of what would happen if the Democrats won.
A copy of the the New York Post newspaper lay on a bookshelf, and the room smelled of "Cosy Cashmere" - a pink scented candle. In a nearby office, a White House staffer patted his colleague's shoulder, trying to calm his nerves.
Elsewhere in the building, the president's re-election party was getting under way. Hundreds had been invited, and some of the guests, draped in red silk, walked under a sky so clear you could see the stars, as they made their way to the event.
The party was a break with tradition. There is no law that forbids the president from hosting a celebration at the White House on election night. But no other president has organised a gathering like this one.
Mr Trump's predecessors, whether Republican or Democrat, tried to maintain some distance between campaigning and governing. To be sure, the line between the two activities sometimes got blurry.
Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama both used rooms at the White House as a backdrop for their political campaigns. Still they tried to make a distinction between campaign activities and their work as president. On election night in the Trump White House, that line seemed to have been obliterated.
Many recoiled at his choice of venue for the party.
One of them, Gordon Adams, a professor emeritus at American University, was a senior White House official for national security budgets in 1996. He spent election night that year with President Bill Clinton in Arkansas. Afterwards Adams flew back to Washington with his colleagues, and a charter bus dropped them off at the White House.
"It was eerily quiet," he says. "There was nobody there, celebrating."
When he heard about the election night party Trump had planned for the White House, Adams was not pleased.
"It rankles," he said.
The party in the East Room was just one of the ways the president broke with tradition on election night.
His campaign officials worked in an office on the White House grounds, a "war room" that was established in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next door to the West Wing. Critics of the president say these kinds of political activities should not be conducted within the White House compound.
In response to the criticism, Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Trump's campaign, said that the campaign room violated no rules. "There is no expense whatsoever to American taxpayers," he said in a statement.
Murtaugh and the president's supporters love the way their man has shaken things up in Washington and broken with tradition. His unconventional approach may be exactly what helps him get re-elected.
At the party itself, Trump appeared at a podium and gave a speech. Standing before his supporters, he made the false claim that he had won the election.
"As far as I'm concerned, we already have won this," he said. People in the room cheered.
In fact, millions of votes have not yet been counted, and many people who heard his remarks on TV were stunned. For them, the speech was a disturbing end to an unprecedented election night, one that was like the president himself - full of shocking surprises.
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NHS Tayside has closed wards at two hospitals in Dundee following suspected outbreaks of norovirus, commonly known as winter vomiting disease.
| Ward 4 at the Royal Victoria Hospital and Ward 18 at Ninewells Hospital have been closed to new admissions following several cases of vomiting and diarrhoea.
The health board said infection control measures have been put in place.
It follows three ward closures at hospitals in Tayside on Friday.
Health officials said the wards had been closed to new patients as a precautionary measure to prevent the spread of the virus.
NHS Tayside asked anyone who might be feeling unwell or experiencing vomiting and diarrhoea not to visit friends and family members in hospital for at least 48 hours after they are free of all symptoms.
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On Saturday Ivo Pitanguy, the world-renowned Brazilian plastic surgeon and pioneer of the "Brazilian butt lift" died at the age of 90 - just a day after carrying the Olympic flame through Rio . | His legacy has inspired plastic surgeons around the world. And techniques like the "butt lift" have become increasingly popular with patients.
The American Society of Plastic Surgery dubbed 2015 another "year of the rear" as, it says, "procedures focusing on the derriere dominated surgical growth".
So what is behind this phenomenon? And does it hurt?
What is a 'butt lift' or buttock augmentation?
There are several types of procedures. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons a buttock augmentation changes the size and shape of the patient's buttocks by transferring and injecting fat, or by surgically placing silicon implants into the buttock.
The "Brazilian butt lift" specifically involves fat grafting or injection. The patient undergoes liposuction to remove fat from their abdomen, hips and thighs which is then processed and re-implanted into the buttocks.
Conversely a regular buttock lift reduces the volume of the buttocks by removing excess skin and fat from the region. The procedure is commonly performed on people who have lost a significant amount of weight.
Who was Dr Pitanguy?
According to Dr Marc Pacifico, British plastic surgeon and spokesperson for the British Association for Aesthetic and Plastic Surgeons, Dr Pitanguy's contribution to the field was immense.
"I think just to mention that he was the creator of the butt lift trivialises his contribution to plastic surgery.
"His contribution is so wide reaching. He singularly advanced techniques in reconstructive and aesthetic surgery like breast reconstructions and rhinoplasty. He helped us understand how we tailor face lifts, or how we do body contour surgery and tummy tucks.
"It is very unusual in the modern world that he managed to a have a profound impact in so many areas because doctors usually specialise in one thing."
Dr Pitanguy is also renowned for making plastic surgery available to the poor to fix deformities or bodily abnormalities. On the website of his clinic he wrote:
"An individual's suffering is not proportional to his deformity, but to the perturbation caused to his harmony by living with his image."
How did buttock augmentation become popular?
Nearly 320,000 buttock augmentation or buttock lift procedures were performed globally in 2015, according to the International Society of Aesthetic and Cosmetic Surgery, a 30% increase in the number of procedures since 2014.
The American Society of Plastic Surgeons also reported a marked increase in the amount of "Brazilian butt lift" procedures performed over the past several years.
Dr Pacifico says media coverage of the generous behinds of celebrities like Kim Kardashian or Nicki Minaj may partially explain the procedure's rise in popularity, as admirers seek to emulate such figures by artificial means.
He also says people who live in hot climates where more of the body is exposed are more likely to get butt lifts.
The backside holds a special place in Brazilian culture and since the 1970s some celebrities have traded on having the perfect derriere.
Bottoms have featured in Brazilian music and poetry throughout the 20th Century. In 2011, the country started the "Miss Bumbum" competition which judges women's bottoms and annually crowns a "Miss Butt".
Is it safe?
Dr Pacifico says butt lifts using fat-grafting, where fat taken from other areas of the body is injected into the buttock, are generally safe.
"The worst case is fat necrosis where the [re-injected] fat dies and can be become lumpy and infected. I don't perform butt lifts with implants because I think this procedure can cause more problems. There is a greater risk of the implants flipping or moving which can put pressure on nerves which run into the legs and thighs."
Although there are risks associated with all surgery, Dr Pacifico emphasised the importance of using a reputable and qualified surgeon.
The most dangerous procedure associated with butt lifts is the injection of silicone (silicone shots) into the buttocks. This practice was outlawed in most countries as the procedure can cause severe infection or blockage, which may lead to death.
The procedure involves injecting liquid or gel silicone into the buttocks without a protective membrane, allowing the substance to travel throughout the body. The US Food and Drug Administration says that silicone is not approved to augment tissue anywhere in the body.
The Miami Herald has reported on several injuries and deaths after women were illegally injected with silicone or were treated by disreputable surgeons and clinics.
How long is the recovery process after surgery?
"If you have injected fat into your buttocks, I advise my patients not to sit down for up to six weeks. The fat must 'survive' in its new home. When you sit you put pressure on your buttocks which reduces the blood flow to the area.
"Without a constant blood supply, the new fat might not survive."
Patients must sleep on their stomachs or side while recovering. For those who can't sleep on their stomachs, inflatable mattresses and chairs with cleverly placed holes are available so patients can sit and lie on their backs without putting pressure on the their bottoms.
What's the cost?
Buttock augmentation procedures vary in price, depending on the country and the surgeon - but costs run into the thousands of pounds.
An alternative to surgery is butt padding, like a push-up bra for your buttocks, or bum lifting jeans, popularised in Colombia as "levanta cola jeans". Both types of items can be purchased for less than £100 ($130).
That sounds a lot less painful.
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The last of 19 memorials created to commemorate each of the men from a village who died in World War One has been unveiled. | Carmarthen Art College students designed and created the 19 panels that include photographs and the history of each soldier from Llansteffan.
Over four years a service has been held 100 years to the day each soldier was killed.
On Sunday, Gunner William Howells who died on 4 November 1918 was remembered.
He died a week before the armistice was signed.
The panels, created in partnership with the British Legion and Llansteffan Memorial Hall, will remain on the walls of the hall as a lasting tribute to those killed.
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Former Aberdeen Labour councillor Willie Young has become a Deputy Lieutenant of the city. | Mr Young, the city's former finance convener, lost his seat at the local government elections back in May.
He was commissioned by the Lord-Lieutenant, Lord Provost Barney Crockett.
Also joining the team of Deputy Lieutenants at Tuesday's commissioning ceremony was Isabel McIntyre, former head teacher at St Machar Academy.
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A hot air balloon which strayed into the airspace of Gatwick Airport led to the suspension of flights for ten minutes while it drifted away.
| Five planes were held on the runway just after 09:00 BST until the balloon had cleared the West Sussex airport's airspace.
A spokeswoman for Gatwick Airport said it was unusual but the flights were delayed for only ten minutes.
Arrivals were unaffected and running on time, she added.
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Four women from North Yorkshire are about to set off on a rowing race across the Atlantic which will see them spend Christmas Day away from their families, battling waves and surviving on basic rations. If successful, the friends, whose ages range from 44 to 51, will become the oldest all-woman crew to row any ocean.
BBC reporter Jayne McCubbin caught up with the quartet as they arrived in Tenerife to register for the 3,000-mile race which starts on 15 December. | Walking across San Sebastian marina with the Yorkshire Rows foursome, they spot Phillip and Daley from the American team Beyond and jump at the chance to ask for some advice.
''She says we can only take two pairs of knickers," says mother-of-two Niki Doeg, pointing to her fellow rower Janette Benaddi.
"One to wear and one to wash - plenty. What do you think?" asks Mrs Benaddi of the American Phillip Theodor.
Straight-faced, he replies: "Well, I'm not wearing any."
The women fall about laughing.
The women behind Yorkshire Rows
Janette Benaddi, 51, clinical researcher, mum of two. Duty - skipper
Frances Davies, 47, solicitor, mum of two. Duty - chief navigator
Helen Butters, 45, NHS communications expert, mum of two. Duty - making drinking water
Niki Doeg, 44, business owner, mum of two. Duty - in charge of electronics on the boat
They never seem to stop laughing. You'd easily forget that they are just about to embark on what is billed the world's toughest row and won't see their families or another human being until they hit Antigua in mid-February at the earliest.
At registration a white board lists all of the 26 teams about to take part in the Talisker Atlantic Challenge. Team Beyond are up at the top. The name Yorkshire Rows is scribbled at the bottom. The underdogs? They couldn't care less.
Team Beyond are super wealthy, super athletic, extreme sport enthusiasts. They've got 15 ultra-marathons, 12 marathons and 10 triathlons under their belts.
When the Yorkshire women signed up they didn't even have a 5k fun run under theirs.
As team Beyond prepare their ocean crossing boat, Mr Theodore tells me: ''We have the ambition, the drive, the determination to finish first."
Yorkshire Rows' attitude is somewhat different.
Mrs Butters says: "To be honest, we just want to finish friends. If that means going slower to stop and eat together once a day as a group, that's what we'll do. Oh, and it would also be good if we could time the finish with the school holidays, get back in time to see the kids."
Ever practical Yorkshire mums, this they hope will give them an unlikely edge over the men. Of course it means saying goodbye to their children.
Mother-of-two Frances Davies tells me she doesn't want her children to wave her off at the start line.
"I don't want to be rowing away from them. I want to be rowing back to them," she says.
Drinking oil
Friend Mrs Doeg agrees. She's batch-cooked three months worth of meals and stocked the family freezer to make sure her two boys and husband all eat well while she's away, something team Beyond didn't think of doing.
Ten days into the challenge and Christmas Day will be marked with a tin of tuna, pineapple chunks and a small bottle of homemade mango gin.
But speed is everything and speed needs a light boat. Team Beyond tell me they're swapping carbohydrates for oil rich calories so will be drinking olive oil instead of eating pasta because it weighs less.
Yorkshire Rows laugh at the amount of crystals, charms, holy water and St Christophers that are weighing their boat down. All donated by well wishers, one of whom told them in a broad Yorkshire accent: "I hope you don't come t'harm love."
The women, who are raising money for charity, didn't look anything like other teams on the quayside as they registered for the race, but they have just as much determination and self belief.
While others will row across the Atlantic powered by muscles and brawn, they'll be powered by laughter.
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Ann Clwyd says medical staff at the University Hospital of Wales (UHW) in Cardiff treated her husband Owen Roberts with arrogance and indifference in his final days.
| David CornockParliamentary correspondent, Wales
The Labour MP for Cynon Valley talked to me about her complaint over her late husband's care.
Mr Roberts, a former head of news and current affairs for BBC Cymru Wales and an ITV executive, had been treated for multiple sclerosis before his death in October.
UHW says it would like to discuss Ms Clwyd's complaints with her, while the Welsh government said it recognised that more work needed to be done to ensure that all patients receive high quality care.
MP breaks down over 'cold' nurses
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