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Two teenage girls, an 18-year-old woman and an 18-year-old man have been arrested on suspicion of murder after a suspected hit-and-run in Lancashire.
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Police were called to Freckleton Street, Kirkham at about 16:15 BST.
The victim named locally as Andrew Dean, 46 and from Wesham, is thought to have been hit by a car that drove off. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Officers stopped a Nissan Micra between junctions 6 and 5 of the M61 a short time later and arrested its occupants.
A police spokesman said two girls, aged 16 and 17, the man and the woman, all from Manchester, were arrested and remain in custody.
Related Internet Links
Lancashire Police
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Workers on a North Sea platform were exposed to a hazardous gas, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has said.
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The HSE said Total failed to prevent the exposure on Alwyn North in the East Shetland basin in June.
It involved hydrogen sulphide gas, the level of which could cause eye damage.
Total said the incident happened during work to prepare a well for drilling, and that there were "no injuries or harm to the health of those working on the area".
The company said in a statement: "Total is working closely with the HSE to understand the causes of this incident and we will continue to co-operate with them in every way to prevent a recurrence."
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When she was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND), Emma Moss was given a 50/50 chance of surviving for two years. Now she writes a blog and runs a support group - and is determined to live to see her daughter's first day at school.
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By Charlie JonesBBC News
Emma still remembers the day she realised she had MND.
Having experienced twitching in her legs in 2017, she went to her doctor, who thought it was due to a vitamin D deficiency.
But when she started having trouble with her grip, further investigations revealed the true cause in May 2018.
"The doctor asked 'have you had any trouble swallowing?' and my world shifted. Suddenly everything fitted into place," she says.
"I just screamed and screamed. MND wasn't even mentioned but I just knew."
Emma, from Northampton, is now in a wheelchair and relies on life support ventilation 24 hours a day. The disease is "horrific beyond belief", she says.
"I'm slowly watching my body fail and it's unthinkable that I could still swim, dress myself, feed myself, cook and look after my child such a short time ago."
However, she says it is a life still "absolutely worth living".
Emma has set herself the goal of living to see her daughter Veryan start school next September.
"It's so important to me to stay positive. I will do everything I can to fight this and be there for that milestone," she says.
What is motor neurone disease?
Source: MNDA
Emma was forced to leave her job as deputy head of a school after her diagnosis. Her husband Terry gave up his personal training business to become her full-time carer, leaving them with no income.
She says she feels "incredibly guilty" she had no life insurance in place.
"It was a huge mistake. I'm urging other people to get life insurance, especially if they have dependants or a partner they want to protect. This could happen to anyone," she says.
A fundraising page has raised more than £30,000, helping them pay for medical equipment and house adaptations.
MND kills more than half of people within two years of diagnosis. But Emma says Terry constantly reminds her that about 10% survive for 10 years or more and he "refuses to accept any other option".
Emma turned 40 on Boxing Day - a major milestone that she had her eye on when first diagnosed.
"It was in the back of my mind that perhaps I wouldn't make it to 40, so that is pretty amazing," she says.
Emma's doctor has agreed to give her a tracheotomy in the future, which is likely to extend her life, but is rarely offered in the UK.
"Although living with a tracheotomy can be a challenging life, I believe everyone should have the choice to take that step," she says.
Shortly after she was diagnosed, she began a Facebook blog, 'Mummy with MND', which now has 22,000 followers.
"I was in a pit of despair when I was diagnosed. I went on these forums and they were full of remembrance posts," she says.
"I was looking for another person with MND who was young and I came across someone called Chris Rimmer.
"Chris took me under his wing and changed my life. He showed me the other road - doing everything you can to live rather than just accepting you are going to die."
Together they started the Facebook support group 'MND Warriors United', which has 1,200 members, most of whom have the disease.
It is a place for "striving to live" and "helping each other stay positive" and Emma says the friends she has made have kept her going.
You might also be interested in:
There is a lot of cause for hope in the MND community, she says. Scientists believe a breakthrough could be imminent and it could ultimately be cured in the future.
But Emma says progress is being hindered by a lack of funding.
"This is not just a mother's hope, this could really happen in the next few years. We have the most brilliant minds working on this in the UK. We just need more funding."
Emma's daughter Veryan turns four in January and Emma describes her as the light of her life and the "funniest, chattiest, nature-loving little girl".
"We had IVF and it took us seven years to have her. Veryan is amazing, she is all we have ever wanted and is our whole world," she says.
"She knows my legs and diaphragm aren't working and she just completely accepts me for who I am."
Coronavirus has had a profound effect on the family. It has made their world smaller, at a time when they want to make more memories.
Emma dreams of taking Veryan back to Disneyland Paris and is desperate to get the Covid-19 vaccine in the hope of making that possible.
Her next main goal is to be there to watch Veryan walk through the gates on her first day at school.
"It is a huge milestone. Some days I feel really close to it and think 'Yes, of course I will see this.' Then reality sets in and I know things can happen quickly.
"I just try not to dwell on those negative thoughts. I do a lot of visualisation, in which we are all together as a family on that day and far beyond."
Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email [email protected]
Related Internet Links
Mummy with MND - Facebook
MND Association - Fighting motor neurone disease
United to End MND
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This week the boss of one of southern Italy's most powerful mafia dynasties sensationally handed himself in to police after three years on the run - and now faces 16 years in jail. The BBC was inside the police station when it happened.
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By Elena CosentinoBBC News, Rosarno
At 4:15pm local time on Wednesday, 'Ndrangheta boss Giuseppe "Peppe" Pesce walked into the Carabinieri station in his native Rosarno like a man who had come to pay a parking ticket.
Freshly shaven and smiling incongruously, the mafioso - one of Calabria's most-wanted - was only a quarter of an hour late for the deadline he had set for his own surrender to the authorities.
The special Carabinieri team who had been hunting him obsessively for nearly three years looked resentful. Being denied the chance to capture him themselves seemed to have temporarily blinded them to the enormous symbolism of this criminal's public gesture.
Mafia bosses never normally turn themselves in. In extreme circumstances, if faced with certain death at the hands of their rivals or when too old or ill to survive in hiding, they may strike secret "face-saving" deals where authorities pretend to have captured them against their will.
Instead, there he was, healthy 33-year-old Peppe Pesce. The undisputed scion of one of the supreme clans of the 'Ndrangheta, Italy's little-known but most powerful mafia organisation, amenably holding out his hands - palms up - for the black ink to be rolled over them ahead of old-fashioned fingerprinting.
The authorities had been so incredulous Pesce would turn up - as his lawyers had secretly told them he would - that no other journalists had been forewarned, in case news leaked and made him change his mind.
I was lucky to be the only one there, on a follow up trip to a BBC This World documentary on the 'Ndrangheta I had recently made with historian John Dickie. As the Pesces featured prominently in it I knew this was to be an extraordinary day in Calabria.
Empire
This was no family of mafia quitters. The Pesce are a criminal dynasty. Peppe Pesce inherited the baton of "regent" of the clan after his older brother Francesco "Ciccio" Pesce was captured in an underground bunker in 2011. Ciccio had taken the boss's mantle over from their father Antonio, as Antonio had from grandfather Don Peppino.
Over half a century they had built a family empire worth at least £200m through drug trafficking across Europe, as well as extortion, violence and corruption in their own ravaged Calabrian backyard. This is the way of the 'Ndrangheta which, unlike the Sicilian Mafia, favours bloodline over merit.
From the mafioso perspective, I assumed he would be bringing the ultimate disgrace to himself and his own family. But I was wrong. As news of Peppe's appearance spread in Rosarno, the Carabinieri station turned into a pilgrimage site.
In pairs, small groups, leaning on walking sticks or carried in push-chairs, dozens and dozens of relatives and well-wishers from six months old to 90, came to pay their respects to the fallen boss.
The Carabinieri were faced with a difficult decision. Whether or not to show magnanimity to a man who had not seen his family in three years and most likely will not for many more.
Grandmother Giuseppa, fully clad in black from head to toe, was among the first to be allowed in the room where her grandchild was sitting. Covering the last tooth left in her mouth with a hand, she wept.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Come on, grandma. To prison, of course," he said.
"I will never see you again," she said.
"Don't worry," he said and laughed dismissively. "I'll hurry up. I have done nothing wrong. I am in the goat business."
The second, younger-looking grandmother chimed in. "Your innocence will be proved, just as Christ was resurrected," she said.
One after the other, aunts, cousins, in-laws streamed in, hugged him and kissed him. Some cried, most were jovial, a few were quick and deferential.
As Peppe became increasingly relaxed in his chair, the exercise began to look like a presidential audience of sort.
But plainclothes Carabinieri were paying close attention to each and every visitor as they filled out the gaps in their mental map of the clan. Their magnanimity suddenly made a lot more sense.
Peppe's mother and younger sister came in last. As they bawled, they were holding his three-year-old daughter. She had hardly ever seen her fugitive father and turned away from his outstretched arms.
"Is it true you don't eat much, my baby?" he asked.
"Yes," she said.
"Listen to daddy - if you don't eat, you'll never grow up," he said.
"I want to stay small," the three-year-old replied. Peppe Pesce went quiet. In a corner of the room, I had a knot in my stomach.
Nearly all of the visitors were women. Most men in the Pesce family are now behind bars.
House arrest
Only two weeks ago, in one of the most significant anti-'Ndrangheta trials to date, 42 members of the Pesce clan received a total of 500 years in jail. Peppe Pesce was sentenced to 16 years for Mafia association in absentia, which he will now begin to serve, in a high-security jail.
The net had been closing around Peppe Pesce for months as, one by one, his accomplices had been arrested. Only two weeks ago his wife, who is seven months pregnant, was put under house arrest for passing her husband's orders around.
"This is a major success for the authority of the state. But don't be fooled," said Alessandra Cerreti, who led the investigation and prosecution against the clan.
"These are never individual decisions. Usually they are clan strategies. By sacrificing one they hope to relieve the pressure we are putting on the whole organisation. But it won't work."
As Peppe Pesce was led to a car be taken to jail, the crowds had lined up along the road. He smiled and waved to his family's cheers and claps.
As the first ever 'Ndrangheta boss to surrender to the state was driven away, an old aunt cupped her hand around her mouth and yelled: "Make sure you eat well."
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Some 130 balloons are taking part in this year's Bristol International Balloon Fiesta.
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A mass ascent began at 06:00 BST where weather conditions were ideal for the balloonists who took part.
The four-day event at Ashton Court attracts 500,000 every year and is in its 39th year.
Other popular events in the fiesta include the evening night glow displays where the tethered balloons glow in time with the music.
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The failure of the Congress party in Uttar Pradesh which sends the largest number of MPs to parliament could not have come at a worse time for the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, Rahul Gandhi, and the party.
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By Bharat BhushanAnalyst
The sole clear victory of the Congress in Manipur and its pyrrhic victory in Uttarakhand would mean nothing in the days to come as these two states are not game changers at the national level. Nor are Goa and Punjab where the Congress has lost.
The failure of Brand Rahul in Uttar Pradesh is a body blow to the Congress party because this is where the fourth-generation power aspirant from the Nehru-Gandhi family staked his future. Unless the party revives its fortunes in UP in the next two years, the prospects of a Congress-led government in 2014 are bleak.
Despite the media hype, the voters did not buy into Rahul Gandhi's public display of anger about the state of affairs in Uttar Pradesh.
His political stature, therefore, has not grown as a mass leader. He was seen as a babe in political woods and that image will continue to haunt him.
Complications
The morale in the party will sink to a new low as the electoral defeat is blamed on everyone else but the scion of the first family of the party - although he has taken responsibility for the defeat.
There are other complications for the future of the Congress party.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is already pushing 80 and will be 82 by the time the next general election takes place in 2014.
The matriarch of the Congress, Sonia Gandhi keeps indifferent health - indeed despite her frequent visits abroad for health check-ups, no-one knows what she suffers from. If it is a disease of a serious nature, then she might be out of the election campaign in 2014.
The party then will have no option but to fall back on a Rahul Gandhi, seen as being defeated in Uttar Pradesh not once but twice - in 2007 and again in 2012 - to lead it in the general election.
Had Rahul Gandhi delivered a reasonably good performance in Uttar Pradesh, he might have had some time on hand to address the revival of the party in bigger states like Gujarat, Karnataka and Maharashtra.
Now the ghost of the defeat will sit heavily on him as he tries to rejuvenate the party elsewhere in India. However, he is unlikely to be taken seriously even by the local Congress leaders.
The rise of one more regional party in Uttar Pradesh will also add to the problems of governance at the centre.
As it is, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government does not have an easy relationship with the bigger states like West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Gujarat. To this list, one might now have to add the state of Uttar Pradesh.
If one then looks at the map of India, large swathes of the country seem ranged against the centre. Never before has there been such a centre-state confrontation on a wide range of issues.
The central government and the states have been at loggerheads over the former's attempt to impose a public ombudsman on the states through the Lokayukta (Public Ombudsman) Bill.
Delhi's unilateral decision to set up a National Counter Terrorism Centre was perceived to be curtailing the rights of the states to deal with law and order.
And, there has been opposition to the Land Acquisition Bill and the attempt to dictate how the states should implement the provisions of the proposed Food Security Bill.
Belligerence
This crisis is likely to worsen as more states are governed either by regional parties or parties inimical to the Congress like the Bharatiya Janata Party. They will needle the central government on all issues which impinge on the federal relationship.
The regional parties are also likely to act in concert to take on the government on economic reforms and push it in a populist direction to continue with subsidies and sops.
And where the credit for the sops is likely to go only to the centre - as in the Food Security Bill - they will show intransigence and bargain hard to extract maximum benefits for the states.
This belligerence is likely to resurface in the presidential elections this June, forcing the Congress to either choose a compromise candidate acceptable to the bigger states like Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal or face an electoral defeat once again.
There is also a possibility that if regional parties feel a weakening of the centre, they might join hands to force a mid-term election to parliament.
This would suit the Samajwadi Party which has swept Uttar Pradesh, Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress in West Bengal and Jayalalitha's AIADMK party in Tamil Nadu.
All of them can hope to improve their tally in parliament if elections are held sooner than later. Even Nitish Kumar (Janata Dal - United) in Bihar and Naveen Patnaik (Bjiu Janata Dal) in Orissa may not be averse to an early parliamentary election as it might make one of them a prime ministerial candidate of a non-Congress and non-BJP front.
The aftershocks of the Uttar Pradesh election results, therefore, will continue to mould political events in the run up to the next parliamentary election.
Bharat Bhushan is a Delhi-based journalist
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In some villages in India's western state of Gujarat, locals live cheek by jowl with mugger crocodiles, which are considered extremely dangerous. Janaki Lenin visited the area to investigate an unusual coexistence.
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"The crocodiles will come out only around 10:00," the woman advised me as she hung up her laundry on a recent winter morning.
I was not on a wildlife safari. I was in the courtyard of her house in Malataj village, scanning the surface of the pond beyond her front door.
It looked like any other pond. But lurking among the fuchsia blossoms and green pads of water lilies were mugger crocodiles, one of India's three crocodilian species. And villagers - such as the housewife speaking to me - know the reptiles' habits from generations of coexisting with them.
In most places, the sight of even a single crocodile would be enough to send locals scurrying in fear. But not in Charotar - a 4,000-sq-km (1,544-sq-mile) area bracketed by the Sabarmati and Mahi rivers in Gujarat.
There are at least 200 resident mugger crocodiles in some 30 villages in Charotar, according to surveys by the Voluntary Nature Conservancy, a local non-profit group. The region also packs around 600 people per sq km.
Every pond in the area sports a sign warning of mugger crocodiles. But these pools are central to the daily life of villagers. So residents ignore the signs and wade in to swim, bathe, do their laundry, wash their cattle and grow water chestnuts.
The crocodiles, meanwhile, drift in the same ponds, gobbling fish and raising their young. They clamber onto the banks, bask in the sun, sleep and crawl through grass along the same paths where cattle graze and people, including children, walk.
Every day, humans and muggers go about their business without disturbing or even worrying about each other.
What do we know about mugger crocodiles?
Charotar, which means "pot of gold" in the local language, is named for the bounty that its farmers reap. Fields of tobacco stretch for miles in every direction with no sign of any refuge for wildlife. So, where did the crocodiles come from?
Some say they have always inhabited Charotar. Others claim that the rulers of the Gaekwad dynasty - which ruled the area from the early 18th Century until India's independence in 1947 - released the crocodiles in to these ponds so they could hunt them, but there is no historical evidence that supports this theory. One thing is certain though: the muggers are not recent migrants.
But the behaviour of Charator's muggers is very unusual. Muggers are the third most dangerous crocodile species, killing 18 people around the world in 2018, according to CrocBITE, a global database of crocodile attacks. About 40km (25 miles) from Charotar, for instance, muggers in the Vishwamitri river are reported to have injured eight people and killed two others in 2011 and 2012, writes reptile expert Raju Vyas.
The recent decision to move 300 to 500 crocodiles out of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada river to make way for a seaplane terminal for instance, has worried experts. They say that relocated crocodiles don't stay put where they are released. They will try to return to their homes, endangering the lives of unsuspecting people they encounter along the way and aggravating the already hostile relationship between people and crocodiles in these areas.
But in Charotar, the Voluntary Nature Conservancy has documented only 26 attacks in 30 years. In eight of these incidents, humans escaped with minor injuries and in 2009, a nine-year-old girl died from an attack. The other 17 incidents involved livestock.
In Malataj, the forest department has built an enclosure close to the bank so people can use the water while staying safe from crocodiles. But the reptiles are harmless, scoff villagers who did not want the structure and refuse to maintain it.
Several gaps in the fencing could easily allow a stealthy predator to grab an arm or leg. But the muggers ignore the many opportunities every day. Instead, they seem to live up to their human neighbours' expectations and leave them alone.
Locals regularly make excuses for the reptiles.
In the village of Petli for instance, a family living on the edge of a pond lost a goat to muggers. Accepting the loss in his stride, an elderly man said: "It must have belonged to the crocodile. So it took it."
Read more wildlife stories from India
Tunnels dug by the reptiles riddled the bank beside his hut. The crocodiles escape the summer heat in these deep burrows. These excavations sometimes extend beneath roads putting them at risk of collapse. These burrows also pose a threat to houses along the banks - the floor of a house in Malataj recently gave way. Luckily, no-one was injured.
Despite these inconveniences, the Charotaris are proud of their muggers.
Although the village of Deva has the highest number of the reptiles in the area, Malataj insists on branding itself the "village of crocodiles".
Residents have conducted a funeral for a dead mugger and built a shrine to goddess Khodiyar - a local deity who is depicted standing beside a bejewelled crocodile- behind the now defunct enclosure. Colourful images of her grace the doorways of many houses in Malataj.
To assume the goddess is the reason for the charming amiability between people and reptiles in these parts would be simplistic. In surveys, many residents profess to liking the animals. Durgeshbhai Patel, the village chief, even said they plan to excavate another pond so the muggers have more space.
As the sun burnt through the morning chill, the crocodiles hauled themselves out of the water to bask. I counted a dozen, but there were many more I could spot in the distance.
Passers-by crowded around a vendor of hot fenugreek bhajiyas, a batter-fried snack, on a bridge outside Malataj. Below, in a dry overgrown canal, a mugger crocodile lay half-way out of its tunnel, absorbing the sun's rays.
Nobody reacted. It was just another day in their lives.
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Kynren, a "live action night show which showcases 2,000 years of English history on a spectacular scale", claims to be the UK's biggest open-air performance event since the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.
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Played out on a purpose-built site the size of the golf course which was previously there, it sees around 1,000 volunteer performers and crew members gallop through two millennia in around 90 minutes, stopping off for set pieces involving William Shakespeare, William the Conqueror and Sir Winston Churchill.
But the scale of the show is nothing compared to the ambition behind it - to reinvigorate the town of Bishop Auckland, which gazes down the flood plain upon which Kynren stands.
Nestled in the heart of County Durham, the town peaked during the Victorian era, but the decline of coal mining has left it and the villages that surround it lacking both employment and funds.
Kynren, the name of which is derived from the Saxon for family, is based on Puy du Fou, an attraction near Nantes in France's western Loire region which in the past 40 years has entertained almost 30 million visitors with historical shows, bringing additional prosperity to the surrounding region.
It is philanthropist Jonathan Ruffer's attempt to change the local community's fortunes.
Ruffer has used the wealth he accumulated during a career in investment management to take a significant stake in Bishop Auckland, planning galleries and museums, taking over the town's castle and purchasing the land on the banks of the River Wear where Kynren is based.
He says his interest in the castle "was the mouth, but Kynren is the trousers".
"This is the thing that's going to do it.
"What I want to see is people energised into a single community. I saw that in Puy du Fou and I thought what they were doing there would work well here."
Puy du Fou's president Nicolas de Villiers has served as Kynren's artistic director, bringing his team of French creatives with him to produce the event.
He says the show will definitely improve prospects in County Durham, just as his attraction has in the Loire region.
"When someone spends one euro in Puy de Fou, they will spend between two and three euros outside.
"So it's economically very profitable for a lot of people - for hotels, restaurants and all the tourism jobs which are linked to our activity."
The event, which will run annually, is being run by Ruffer's charitable trust, Eleven Arches - named after the viaduct that towers over the Kynren site.
A spokeswoman for the charity says Ruffer's plans are "brave, radical and transformational", and will give those living in the area "what they badly need - opportunity".
The charity predicts the show will bring £4.75m a year into the local economy, a figure which Ruffer says is "not at all pie in the sky".
"I'm used to analysing figures and they are very robust.
"Simply in terms of the show, it will employ over 200 people - and the multiplier in terms of bed and breakfast, hotels, meals in France is five times that, so we're looking at some really big numbers."
English pride
The show's own profitability is tied to that cast of 1,000 volunteers.
Vanessa Pearson, a locally-based credit controller, is one of those who has given her time free of charge to be part of the show.
She says she is glad to be taking part "in something that's going to bring excitement, joy and life back to Bishop Auckland".
"There's loads of negativity that's going on and people are like 'is this going to work?' But it will.
"Yes, we're not being paid to do it, but we see the vision and it's going to be an amazing project."
Analysis by BBC arts and entertainment reporter Chris Long
Spectacular and idiosyncratic, Kynren is an often thrilling romp through English history, delivered at a breathless pace.
It is an England told through a prism of the North East and comes with more than a passing nod to Jonathan Ruffer's evangelical Christian beliefs.
The story sees a bishop guide a young boy through an individualistic choice of English and North-Eastern highlights - the Battle of Stamford Bridge gets equal billing with the one at Hastings, St Cuthbert follows on the heels of Joseph of Arimathea and the pits replace the usually-seen mills of the Industrial Revolution.
Brought to life by hundreds of talented volunteers and a supporting cast of horses, sheep, goats and geese, it is a vibrant spectacle that will leave an Englishman's head dizzy from the historical whirlwind.
Fellow performer Carl Howe, who plays the Viking chief King Harald Hardrada, agrees it can only be good for the area.
He also says it has given the people of Bishop Auckland the chance to try out their performing skills.
"I drive buses for a living so this is the polar opposite of it.
"I sit down all day and on a weekend, I get to dress up like a Viking and run around with a big axe.
"I've done bands, I was a wrestler for a while, and this is just the next thing."
He says he had no idea what to expect when he volunteered to take part, but is impressed with the result.
"I'm supposed to be a big scary Viking, but at the end, after the finale, I just can't get the smile off my face.
"From start to finish, it flies by."
The "epic tale of England" has been put together by de Villiers' French team, a move that might seem odd, given the nature of the content.
The Puy du Fou president does not see it as a problem.
"We are French and we are proud of being French - we know that we are not English.
"But we have put all our hearts and all our energy into making a great English show, so that people will be proud of being English when they leave the show.
"That's the main purpose."
Ruffer is firm on what he wants the result to be for the locals.
"We have over 1,000 volunteers - why are they doing it? They're not doing it for me or for Bishop Auckland - they're doing it because they're having a great time in meeting with one another.
"It's bringing people together, that's the very heart of the regenerative spirit.
"It's a truism but people are the investment of a region.
"This is a game-changer for the area and it's marvellous to see that we're on the eve of something wonderful."
Kynren's first season opens in Bishop Auckland on 2 July and runs until 17 September.
Those interviewed were speaking to BBC Breakfast and BBC Look North.
Related Internet Links
Eleven Arches presents Kynren
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Lembit Opik has said he suffered "a kind of depression" after losing the parliamentary seat of Montgomeryshire five years ago.
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The former Liberal Democrat MP said he did not recover from the defeat until two to three years afterwards.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4, Mr Opik said he lost his confidence and eventually hit an "all-time low".
He urged people experiencing similar feelings following a job loss to seek professional help.
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The Menai Bridge is one of 10 iconic UK river crossings to feature on the latest set of first class stamps.
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The 176.5m-long suspension bridge, which links Anglesey to mainland Wales, was completed in 1826 to Thomas Telford's design.
Royal Mail said the stamps demonstrate "leaps in engineering" by progressive architects.
Others featured include Pulteney Bridge in Bath and Middlesbrough's Tees Transporter Bridge.
Royal Mail will also issue a special postmark to mark the stamps release.
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Rescue workers are intensifying efforts to reach thousands of people stranded in the mountains of Uttarakhand in northern India after last week's devastating floods. But bad weather is hampering the rescue and relief effort. As the BBC's Sanjoy Majumder finds, time is running out.
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Outside the air base in Dehradun, the capital of Uttarakhand state, hundreds of people are milling around, their faces creased with worry.
Clutching photographs in their hands, they scan lists of names placed outside the gate, looking for their relatives, missing for more than a week after the floods hit this state.
"I haven't heard from my 14-year-old sister [or] my uncle and aunt for seven days," one man tells me.
Like thousands of others, they were on a Hindu pilgrimage to the temple town of Kedarnath which has been the worst hit.
"Every time someone comes out of those gates, I hope it's them.
"I just want some news, any news - please," he says breaking down, tears streaming down his face.
It is a sentiment echoed by many others gathered here, unable to come to terms with a tragedy that no-one had anticipated.
Hundreds of sorties
But most of the roads leading to the mountains have either been damaged or washed away.
So the only way to get to the survivors is by helicopter.
The Indian air force has made hundreds of sorties to evacuate people. But their task is hampered by the terrain and the weather.
"Some of the valleys are so deep that there is no way we can land there," says Air Commodore Rajesh Issar, who heads Operation Rahat (Relief).
"So we have to winch special forces personnel down to get to the survivors, some of whom are perched on ledges and slopes and are at the end of their strength."
Squadron Leader Sandeep Pradhan is an air force helicopter pilot who says he has lost count of the number of sorties he has made in the past week.
"The hardest thing is leaving people behind. I can only carry 35-40 people on each flight and there are so many who want to get on."
I join him on his latest sortie, along with a unit of Special Forces brought in to try and reach those survivors in remote areas, who remain out of reach.
After a delay because of bad weather, we take off in a Russian-built Mi-17 helicopter.
Air Vice Marshal S Nair, a senior air force officer, traces our route on a map as we follow the Ganges river.
"We always follow the river - it's the best navigational aid, especially in this terrain."
Below us, the landscape unfolds - vast stretches of land where houses have been washed away and the river flows through at a rapid pace.
Fifteen minutes into the flight, the helicopter banks sharply.
"We're turning back," the pilot announces. The weather has worsened and soon after we land, the rain comes down.
There is nothing to do but wait. At the base, the pilots and technicians take a break sipping cups of tea.
"It's frustrating," one of the members of the Special Forces tells me.
"We need to get out there urgently but we can't."
Around us, boxes of supplies lie waiting to be loaded - dry rations, medicines, including intravenous fluids and insulin - all meant for the flood victims.
It is going to be a while before they can be taken across.
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Breweries, racing pigeon shops, fisheries and chippies once littered the landscape of Leeds. Photographer Peter Mitchell went about photographing these "goners" before the bulldozers removed every trace of them.
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By Samantha JaggerBBC News
Peter was working as a lorry driver when he decided to document the city's deteriorating shop fronts and businesses before they disappeared altogether.
A 29-year-old art college graduate, he had an eye for a shot and armed with his medium-format camera and a stepladder, he looked to the sky above and the ground below to frame the picture.
During his shifts, he hunted for haunts on the verge of collapse and would revisit them on his days off to capture them on film.
But it was 1972 - he didn't earn much and couldn't afford to get all of the rolls developed.
"Film wasn't, and still isn't, a cheap process and I was doing it all off my own back," said Peter, who moved from Manchester to London, then Chapeltown.
"Leeds was such a strange world when I moved, the buildings always looked so vulnerable. People would ask me why I didn't shoot beautiful buildings, but it just felt right at the time."
The few rolls he did develop he intended to screen-print on to silk scarves, but Leeds Art Gallery took an interest in the images and gave him his first photography exhibition in 1975.
It led to a job at the gallery and his hobby becoming a career, but he continued taking pictures throughout the 1980s and 1990s of the buildings whose days were numbered.
"I used to hear, 'if Mitchell photographs them, they're goners'," said Peter. "But they weren't taken for nostalgic reasons, I enjoyed it from an architectural perspective.
"They're cheerful things really - the houses maybe all look like piles of bricks but [taking the pictures means] the memories continue."
Last year, Peter began looking through the negatives stored in trunks in his home - some of which had been untouched for almost 50 years.
He is putting together a new exhibition and currently has 500 shots to choose from of buildings he hasn't seen since he looked through the lens.
One picture shows the Racing Pigeon Shop in Blake Grove, taken in the 1990s, which the BBC showed it to its former owner, John Murray.
"What happened there was that I was upstairs and my colleagues said to me, 'there's this chap who wants to take pictures'.
"They said, 'come down and get in the photograph."
John, who still runs a racing pigeon business, remembers "great times" on the street and often passes by his former shop, which closed in 2010.
"Shops weren't allowed to trade on Sundays, but we'd open our doors for a few hours to let the pigeon boys come in," said the 60-year-old.
"I remember we had to unload 20 tonnes of pigeon corn into the shop by hand - it was unbelievable.
"I have fantastic memories there, but also some sad - especially when we had to close due to the financial crisis. We really had a niche market so it was so sad to see it go, but like I said, great times."
Many of the previously unseen images are also being developed into a book as an ode to the city's lost landscape and Peter posts some of the photos on his Instagram account, Strangely Familiar.
He still takes shots around Leeds with the same medium format camera and was awarded an honorary degree for his work by Leeds Arts University in June.
"It was a total surprise as I keep to myself in my Yorkshire cave - I'm a hermit of the north really," says the 76-year-old, who still lives in the same house in Chapeltown.
"I still don't believe how this has all come about, but I think my mum would have been quite pleased with me."
The Lost Leeds exhibition will run next year.
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A man has been charged after residents were evacuated and the Army bomb squad was called to a "suspicious" item found at a house.
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Kubilay Bostanli, 22, of Anzio Road, Devizes, has been charged with possession of an explosive substance for an unlawful purpose, Wiltshire Police said.
Twelve homes in the road were evacuated on Wednesday following the discovery.
Mr Bostanli appeared at Swindon Magistrates' Court on Friday.
He has also been charged with possessing a knife or sharp-pointed article in a public place, possessing a Class B drug and harassment without violence.
He was remanded in custody and is due back at the same court on 1 November.
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Standardised assessments for P1 pupils are at the centre of a political row in Scotland, with opposition parties pressing a vote on whether they should be axed. But what are they actually like?
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By Philip SimBBC Scotland News
More basic questions have pupils simply identify a word, compared with other symbols
Many of the questions are multiple-choice
Some slightly more difficult questions see pupils analyse short sentences
Some numeracy questions involve basic addition and subtraction as well as on-screen counting
Some tests involve telling the time on digital and analogue clocks
A report on how each pupil performed is immediately generated
The sample pupil in this report has scored above the average of her class and school, and is at the top level nationally
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MPs have begun to vote on Theresa May's Brexit deal for leaving the European Union.
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The so-called "meaningful vote" comes at the end of five days of debate over the plan.
Mrs May called for politicians to back her deal or risk "letting the British people down".
But with many of her own MPs expected to join opposition parties to vote against the deal, it is widely expected to be defeated.
Labour, the SNP and Conservative MP Sir Edward Leigh all pulled the amendments that they had proposed to the deal before they came to a vote.
Tory MP John Baron insisted MPs vote on his - which would have given the UK the right to terminate the Northern Ireland backstop without the agreement of the EU - but it was defeated by 600 votes to 24.
Closing the debate on her deal, Mrs May said the responsibility of MPs was "profound" and that her deal "delivers on the core tenets of Brexit... in a way that protects jobs, ensures our security and honours the integrity of our United Kingdom".
But Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said backing the "botched and damaging" deal would be a "reckless leap in the dark" for the UK.
The prime minister addressed her cabinet on Tuesday morning before heading to the Commons for the start of the debate on her deal - which includes both the withdrawal agreement on the terms on which the UK leaves the EU and a political declaration for the future relationship.
She had spent the lead up to the vote trying to reassure MPs from all sides of the House over the controversial Northern Irish "backstop" - the fallback plan to avoid any return to physical border checks between the country and Ireland - having received new written assurances from the EU that it would be temporary and, if triggered, would last for "the shortest possible period".
Speaking at the close of the debate, Mrs May added: "If we leave with the deal I am proposing, I believe we can lay the foundations for which to build a better Britain.
"And as prime minister I would not stand at this dispatch box and recommended a course of action that I do not believe is in the best interests of our country and our future."
With fancy dress, lurid floats and colourful banners, there has been something approaching a carnival atmosphere opposite Parliament, as pro and anti-Brexit demonstrators make their voices heard ahead of the MPs' vote.
A rally by supporters of the People's Vote campaign for another referendum is currently taking place in nearby Parliament Square.
Opening the final day of the debate earlier, Attorney General Geoffrey Cox gave an impassioned speech to the Commons with the prime minister by his side, saying that voting for the deal was "the first of two keys that will unlock our future with the European Union", allowing the government to focus on the future relationship.
He said that MPs could not underestimate the complexity of Brexit and that the deal offered an "orderly, predictable and legally certain" way of leaving the bloc, without "thousands" of legal issues arising for citizens and businesses.
"If you found yourself suddenly with the rug pulled from under you, not knowing what your legal obligations would be, you would say to this House, 'What are you playing at? What are you doing?'
"You are not children in the playground, you are legislators, and it is your job. We are playing with people's lives," he said.
But many remain opposed to the deal, with about 100 Conservative MPs and the DUP's 10 MPs expected to join Labour and the other opposition parties in voting it down.
Mr Corbyn told the Commons: "The prime minister has treated Brexit as a matter for the Conservative Party rather than for the good of the country. But she has failed to even win over her own party.
"This deal is a bad deal for our economy, a bad deal for our democracy, and a bad deal for this country."
Former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab said that Brexiteers like him could back a deal if aspects such as the backstop were dealt with.
But he told the Today programme the EU had played "a smart game of hard ball" and said it was time for the UK to do the same.
Democratic Unionist Party leader Arlene Foster said the backstop "was something that we could not accept" and said her party's MPs would be voting against the deal.
"It (the backstop) does violence to the union - it separates us from the rest of the United Kingdom in a very very obvious way," she said, calling for Mrs May to "get rid" of the backstop.
And speaking during the Commons debate, the leader of the SNP at Westminster, Ian Blackford, reiterated his belief that there was "no such thing as a good Brexit" and his party would continue to fight against leaving.
"There is no way that the Scottish National Party and the people of Scotland are going to be sitting in that bus as the prime minister drives us off the cliff," he said.
EU preparations
BBC Brussels correspondent, Adam Fleming, said the European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker will be returning to the city later to deal with "Brexit-related business", fuelling speculation Mrs May will make an emergency visit on Wednesday if her deal is voted down.
When asked by the BBC for a message to MPs ahead of the vote, he said: "I would like them to behave in a responsible way."
The EU's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, also appealed for MPs to "keep calm" when voting later.
He will be holding talks with the European Parliament's Brexit steering group later tonight in Strasbourg before a debate on Wednesday morning about the result of the meaningful vote.
The deal suffered a heavy defeat in the House of Lords on Monday night, as peers backed a Labour motion by 321 votes to 152.
While the Lords vote carries no real weight, as peers accepted MPs should have the final say, the motion - which also rejected a "no deal" scenario - expressed "regret" that Mrs May's deal would "damage the future economic prosperity, internal security and global influence" of the UK.
However, five Conservative Brexiteer MPs who have been critics of the withdrawal agreement have now said they will support the government, along with three Labour backbenchers and independent Frank Field.
Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay said it showed there had been "progress" but admitted to the BBC's Politics Live that gaining support was "challenging".
Speaking to his own backbenchers on Monday night, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn again condemned the deal and repeated his call for a general election if it was voted down by Parliament. He also promised Labour would call a no-confidence vote in the government "soon".
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Your guide to Brexit jargon
What happens next?
If the deal is rejected by MPs, Mrs May has three sitting days to return to Parliament with a "Plan B".
Some have suggested she would head to Brussels on Wednesday to try to get further concessions from the EU, before returning to the Commons to give a statement about her new proposal by Monday. This could then be put to a vote by MPs.
If this also fails, there is a proposal put forward by senior Conservative backbenchers Nick Boles, Sir Oliver Letwin and Nicky Morgan for a "European Union Withdrawal Number 2 Bill". This would give ministers another three weeks to come up with another plan and get it through Parliament.
If this doesn't work either, they propose giving the responsibility of coming up with a compromise deal to the Liaison Committee - which is made up of the chairmen and chairwomen of all the Commons select committees, drawn from opposition parties as well as the Conservatives.
This proposal in turn would have to be voted through by MPs.
New referendum proposal
In another development, a cross-party group of anti-Brexit politicians has published proposed legislation to bring about another referendum to ask the public whether they want to remain in the EU or leave under the prime minister's deal.
The MPs behind the draft legislation point out that Article 50 - the two-year process by which an EU member can leave the bloc - would have to be extended in order for another referendum to take place, meaning the UK would remain a member beyond 29 March.
But, unless new legislation is introduced, the default position will be that the UK leaves the EU on that date with no deal.
Quick guide: What is a no-deal Brexit?
A "no-deal" Brexit is where the UK would cut ties with the European Union overnight without a transition period.
Theresa May's government, and many others, believe this would be hugely damaging and want a more gradual withdrawal. But if Parliament can't agree on that, and nothing else takes its place, the UK could still leave without a deal.
This would mean the UK would not have to obey EU rules. Instead, it would need to follow World Trade Organization terms on trade. Many businesses would see new taxes on imports, exports and services, which are likely to increase their operating costs. That means the prices of some goods in UK shops could go up.
The UK would also lose the trade agreements it had with other countries as a member of the EU, all of which would need to be renegotiated alongside the new agreement with the EU itself.
Manufacturers in the UK expect to face delays in components coming across the border.
The UK would be free to set its own immigration controls. However some UK professionals working in the EU and UK expats could face uncertainty.
Some countries, such as Spain, Germany and the Netherlands, have given temporary guarantees about residency status and rights, but there is not yet an agreed policy for UK citizens across the EU in the event of a no-deal Brexit.
The situation for holidays and business trips is a little clearer, as the European Commission has said that even in a no-deal scenario, UK travellers won't need a visa for short visits of up to 90 days.
The border between Northern Ireland and the Irish republic would become an external frontier for the EU with customs and immigration controls, though how and where any checks would be made is not clear.
Some Leave supporters think that leaving without a deal would be positive if the right preparations were made. They say criticism is scaremongering and any short term pain would be for long term gain.
But critics - including both Brexit supporters and opponents - say that leaving without a deal would be a disaster for the UK: driving up food prices, leading to shortages of goods and gridlock on some roads in the South East resulting from extra border checks.
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Dog walkers are being warned to keep their pets away from a white substance that has washed up in Devon.
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The substance, believed to be palm oil, has been discovered on three beaches in the Salcombe Estuary, South Hams District Council said.
Clean-up teams were to clear up the waxy substance from North and South Sands beaches by hand on Friday morning, the council said.
The substance is thought to have washed up in storms on Wednesday night.
In October, a dog that ate palm oil that had washed up on a beach in Cornwall died and several others became sick.
The Environment Agency confirmed the substance around Salcombe was similar to that oil.
Health officials said there was no risk to humans.
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"Farah" was born in Britain but grew up in Syria. Last year, she was arrested by the Syrian government security forces, who accused her of being an opposition activist. She blames Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for the torture that followed, and sees him as a bigger menace than Islamic State.
Warning: Some readers will find Farah's story disturbing
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By Secunder Kermani BBC Newsnight
"My best friend was detained one year before me, so she told me all about it, but it was much worse than what she said.
"The first thing I saw… there were all men hanged up, some of them were really bleeding from their backs and from their legs. They were just shouting, it was really scary."
She was kept in a squalid, dark and cold room with about 12 other women.
During interrogations, she was beaten.
"They hit you and they ask you the question, if you don't answer they hit you more. You get to that stage when you're numbed - they can see that you're not in pain - so they'll take you, put water on you - and then they'll do it another time."
Find out more
You can listen to Secunder Kermani's radio report on the Today programme on Saturday 5 December from 07:00, or catch up afterwards on iPlayer.
On one occasion she was tortured with electrodes.
"I fainted - so I didn't feel the pain like when they used to hit me," she says. But she remembers clearly "the fear" before the event.
One of the other girls in the same cell as her said she was raped. Farah didn't see this, but was threatened with rape herself.
"Not just rape, but gang rape," she says.
Farah believes that she was spared even worse treatment because she was a dual UK-Syrian national - the guards nicknamed her "British" even when they were insulting her. But they tortured her psychologically as well as physically.
Sometimes they threatened to bring Farah's young son to the detention centre. "I used to go crazy when they used to say that. That was the hardest thing… Inside they know who are your closest people - they know everything."
One incident, when a guard tortured an elderly man in her presence, sticks out in her mind.
"He was just in front of me and they put him under electrocution. I had to see. I'm sure the man died. He just fell on the floor, and they carried him and threw him out of the room," Farah says.
"One time they hanged a man from his legs and hands. I tried not to see, but sometimes they hold your face to see. They were pulling the ropes… They split him. Until now I remember his voice shouting, and then suddenly I couldn't hear anything."
Amnesty International wrote in a report last month that "torture" and "extrajudicial execution" are "rampant" in detention centres. The Syria Network for Human Rights also estimates that 65,000 people, mostly civilians, were forcibly "disappeared" by the government between March 2011 and August 2015, and remain missing. The Syrian government rejects allegations of abuses.
Prison staff weren't always brutal, Farah says.
"When the detective is there no-one can help you. But after (the interrogation) they will give you medication or feed you."
One night a guard started a conversation with Farah.
"I told him, 'how can a normal person do what you're doing to us?' He opened a drawer and got some pills out and told me because of these - these help me… He started telling me, 'You're in prison? I'm in prison. I've been here for four years hitting people.'"
Farah was released after 36 days although she's still not sure why. She left Syria and came to the UK.
She holds Syrian President Bashar al-Assad responsible for what happened to her.
The UK recently began airstrikes against so-called Islamic State in Syria, but Farah says the priority should be the Assad regime not IS.
Her views echo those of many Syrians caught between Assad and IS.
"When we say we want to get rid of Assad it doesn't mean we want ISIS - or we are happy with ISIS. In a way they are both the same, just with different ways of killing," Farah says.
"Assad is the one who brought ISIS to Syria with all his death and destruction. We have to get rid of Assad and then we can get rid of ISIS."
More from the Magazine
When Islamic State seized Palmyra in Syria in May, one of the first things it did was blow up the Tadmur prison - the country's most notorious jail, where for decades, political dissidents were detained and tortured. "Jailers were given an open licence to do anything, even to kill. Your life was simply worth nothing," says Palestinian writer Salameh Kaileh, who spent two years there, from 1998 to 2000.
Inside Tadmur: The worst prison in the world?
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Nobody knows how many people have lost their lives so far in the latest war for Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia's president said recently that 5,000 people had died - soldiers and civilians. These are the stories of some the men who died fighting on both sides.
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By Rayhan DemytrieBBC South Caucasus correspondent
"It's hard for me but I am proud that my son's blood was spilled on our soil," says Mushkenaz Haziyeva over the phone from her home in the Azerbaijani town of Kurdamir.
Ziyadhan Aliyev, 24, studied computer programming and loved reading history books. He was in no hurry to get married. He was waiting a few more weeks for his military service to end but died on 1 October, days after the conflict began.
Ziyadhan was killed in the battle to recapture the village of Talish.
His family came originally from a village called Soltanli, further south in the Jabrayil region. They and hundreds of thousands of other ethnic Azerbaijanis were forced to abandon their homes when the territory fell to the Armenians in the 1990s.
Ziyadhan's father fought in that first Karabakh war. A ceasefire was declared at the end of it but no peace treaty was signed.
The Nagorno-Karabakh region is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan, but it is controlled by ethnic Armenians.
"If you mix water with soil, you get dirt. If you mix soil with blood, you get the Motherland," his mother says.
The Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict flared up on 27 September.
Azerbaijan does not give details of its losses, but there have been many reported funerals and pictures of fresh graves at military cemeteries.
Officially, more than 1,100 Armenian servicemen are known to have been killed. The majority of Armenian soldiers killed in action have been young recruits, born after 2000.
More than 130 civilians have been killed on both sides.
Soltanli is among more than 100 villages recently recaptured by the Azerbaijan army and Mushkenaz Haziyeva believes military action is the only way to get the territory back.
"We will go back there, we will build homes and schools, grow our gardens. On the one hand my heart is bleeding because I have lost my son, but on the other I am full of joy because finally we won't have to be the refugees anymore."
This conflict is going on while the coronavirus pandemic rages in both countries.
But we know that Armenia is going through many more funerals for fallen soldiers than for victims of Covid-19.
For a small nation of three million people, the human cost of this conflict has been immense.
Sargis Hakopyan, 19, was a promising young artist who learned to draw from an early age. His cousin, Sed, remembers how he painted his first fish when he was three.
In July 2019, Sargis was drafted into the Armenian army. Soon afterwards he lost his mother, to whom he was deeply attached.
His family was informed about his death on 17 October. They have yet to receive his body.
Sargis was a creative soul, his cousin remembers. He was good at singing and poetry, had lots of female friends and was loved by everyone wherever he went, he says.
"Sargis dreamt of entering the Yerevan Academy of Fine Arts," says his childhood friend Anush Khachatryan. "No-one can fill his place in my heart. Never."
Both nations are gripped with the pain of loss, but Azerbaijan's military advance has boosted public morale at home and there appears to be overwhelming support for continuing the war.
Aziza Gasanova, 27, is mourning her husband Fariz Gasanov.
"I last saw him on 10 October. He came home to have a quick shower but didn't even eat. He just took three pieces of chocolate, said he was in a rush and kissed our children," she recalls.
Fariz, 34, was reserved but kind, his wife says. He joined the army when he was 19 and was dedicated to the Karabakh issue. Often he would say that they had inherited the problem from their fathers, but it was up to his generation to ensure Azerbaijan returned its lost territories, she says.
His phone calls stopped on 11 October. A few days later Aziza learned that he was killed in a battle for the town of Fizuli, which the Azerbaijani army had recaptured. He was buried five days later.
"My daughter says that dad has become an angel and is looking at us from heaven. She repeats my words. The children don't understand it yet that he is no longer with us, " says Aziza.
The family always kept an Azerbaijani flag in the house and Aziza now hopes her four-year-old son Ruslan will one day join the army and become a general.
"I will be teaching my children to hate Armenians because they killed our sons. So many women became widows, mothers lost their children. But this is our land. Everybody knows it's Azerbaijani territory."
For more on the Karabakh conflict:
Ethnic Armenians see Karabakh, which they call Artsakh, as their "Motherland" too - the last outpost of their ancient Christian kingdom. And many are ready to sacrifice their lives for it.
Davit Hovhannisyan, 25, wanted to pursue a military career from a young age. In his childhood he would dress up in military uniform and pose for photographs.
He was killed on 10 October in the south-eastern part of Nagorno-Karabakh.
His cousin, Nellie Petrosyan, remembers a man who was good at singing patriotic songs and liked to crack jokes with his family.
"I last saw him in September; we went to visit a 10th-Century monastery in our village of Shatin. Davit collected hawthorn branches for his sister. He really loved nature. It was a happy day and I could never have imagined it would be our last.
"I want the Armenians and the world to remember Davit as a real hero, and a real patriot."
The war over Nagorno-Karabakh is now in its fifth week, and there is no sign of easing in the fighting from either side.
Three ceasefires have come and gone and Azerbaijan continues its military advance. It has recaptured a substantial amount of territory previously under Armenian control and Armenia's prime minister has vowed to "fight for every last stone, centimetre and every millimetre" of land in Karabakh.
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Media in India hail the decision by the new PM-elect Narendra Modi to invite the leaders of the country's neighbours to his swearing-in ceremony later on Monday as the beginning of a "big and bold" foreign policy.
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They focus most of their attention on one guest, Pakistan's premier Nawaz Sharif, and express hope that the traditionally tense relations between Delhi and Islamabad can improve. The two countries have fought three wars in the past 60 years.
"By reaching out to Pakistan, Modi has made a remarkable initiative. Nawaz Sharif, by accepting the invite has responded admirably. Astute and sagacious leadership and statecraft now calls for building and deepening this opening," urges Wajahat Qazi in an article on the Firstpost website.
He argues that the two leaders should use the opportunity to discuss the disputed region of Kashmir. "This calls for delicate diplomacy between the two nations and a well crafted strategy to win over and convince the hardliners on both sides of the divide for a salubrious relationship between the two estranged neighbours," advises Qazi.
The Times of India is also hoping for improved relations with Islamabad. "While there are enormous difficulties in the India-Pakistan relationship - of which the attack on the Indian consulate in Herat is only the latest instance - personal rapport between leaders can help tide them over," the paper says.
It sees the move as an indication that "Modi is passionate about resetting Indian foreign policy" in general and points to the fact that he has invited to his swearing-in ceremony leaders from the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). "Let the unconventional invite to neighbours herald a big and bold foreign policy," writes the paper.
"It is with the other neighbours that Modi has the opportunity to transact much economic and political business in his five-year tenure as prime minister of India," C Raja Mohan points out in The Indian Express.
He doubts the prospect of better relations with Islamabad, warning that "major breakthroughs are unlikely amid the current political flux within Pakistan and Sharif's deteriorating relations with the all-powerful army".
"There have been doubts in India's diplomatic establishment of Sharif's ability to deliver on his promise of peace in the face of resistance from the country's military," writes The New Indian Express.
'Minimum government'
The BJP is likely to have less number of ministers compared to the outgoing United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, reports say.
On the eve of the swearing-in ceremony, Mr Modi's secretariat released a note saying his cabinet will be guided by the principle of "minimum government and maximum governance", announces Hindustan Times.
"Lean is in. The Modi government will be almost half the size of the United Progressive Alliance-2 with ministries bunched and 45-50 'bright, focused and clean' leaders making up the council of ministers, averaging 55 years of age," says another report in Hindustan Times.
Newspapers, however, highlight the challenges ahead for Mr Modi's team.
"The economic legacy handed down to him by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government is a troubled one and Mr Modi may find himself diverting all his energies to first steady the ship before he attempts to change its course," columnist Raghuvir Srinivasan writes in The Hindu.
He points out that the new government must "slay the inflation monster" and resume stalled infrastructure projects.
The Tribune agrees that Mr Modi's government will have to improve the economy.
"Mr Modi will have with him a hand-picked team, and together they face daunting challenges. Primary among them will be to improve the economy, which has picked up from the time his victory was announced," the paper says.
And finally, a 13-year-old Indian girl has become the youngest to climb the world's highest peak, the Mount Everest, the Indian Express reports. Malavath Poorna was accompanied by 16-year-old Anand Sharma in the climb, the paper says.
"Poorna and Anand were selected out of a group of 110 students from 300 welfare schools to be sent to the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute by the state government under a social welfare department scheme called 'Op-Everest'," the daily adds.
BBC Monitoring reports and analyses news from TV, radio, web and print media around the world. For more reports from BBC Monitoring, click here. You can follow BBC Monitoring on Twitter and Facebook.
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If the UK leaves the EU without any withdrawal agreement, EU rules and regulations will, very abruptly, stop applying to the UK after 29 March next year. So what would that mean in terms of planes being able to take off and land?
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By Chris MorrisReality Check correspondent, BBC News
Well, the UK would no longer be part of the EU's single aviation market, which is the basis for flights in and out of the country at the moment, not just to the EU itself, but to other countries with which the EU has a deal - such as the United States and Canada.
In all, the EU governs direct UK aviation access to 44 other countries.
Of course, you can always negotiate new agreements, but access would start at a pretty low level and negotiations take time.
That's why a sudden no-deal scenario is so alarming to the industry, a point that was recognised back in October 2017 by Chancellor Philip Hammond.
"It is theoretically conceivable in a no-deal scenario that there will be no air traffic moving between the UK and EU on 29 March 2019," he said.
"But I don't think anybody seriously believes that is where we will get to."
As always, the devil would be in the detail.
The UK would no longer be governed by the regulations of the European Aviation Safety Agency, which deal with all sorts of things like maintenance and common standards.
The UK Civil Aviation Authority could, in theory, take on all the same rules, and hire lots of new staff to implement and oversee them, but it would also have to convince other international regulators to recognise it - another time-consuming process.
And if you're following EU aviation rules in full, you basically have to accept a role for EU courts like the European Court of Justice as well.
Of course, plenty of "third countries" have their own separate deals with the EU and given time, the UK could do the same. But we keep coming back to that ticking clock.
'Ultimate worry'
All of which makes it difficult for airlines that are already selling tickets for flights after Brexit.
"Right now we will continue to sell in the hope and belief that when a conclusion comes to the Brexit scenario, common sense will prevail and people will realise the need for intra-Europe travel," said Roy Kinnear, the chief commercial officer of FlyBe.
"The biggest fear has to be if at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute there is a complete cessation and breakdown, and a shutdown of air travel between the UK and Europe. That is the ultimate worry."
And airlines, just like many other industries, are having to make contingency plans to prepare for the worst.
From September, when many people will start booking Easter and summer holidays in 2019, RyanAir will add a "Brexit clause" to all tickets sold for travel after 29 March .
It will warn customers that their tickets may not be valid if aviation regulation is disrupted in the event of "no deal".
If flights don't take place, the cost would be refunded.
In a statement, RyanAir said it hoped a 21-month transition agreement after Brexit would be implemented as part of a withdrawal agreement, to give airlines more time to prepare for a transition to a new relationship.
But it said: "We believe that the risk of a hard (no-deal) Brexit is being underestimated."
IAG, the parent company of British Airways, was unable to confirm whether BA was planning to introduce similar measures to those being implemented by RyanAir.
Instead, an IAG statement said: "we are confident that a comprehensive air transport agreement between the EU and UK will be reached."
One of the reasons for the continuing uncertainty is the nature of the aviation industry.
In other areas of the UK's trade relationship, if it leaves with no deal, it will fall back on the basic rules of the World Trade Organization.
But in aviation, there is no fall-back position. Either you have a deal or you don't.
So if negotiations with the EU fail, and neither side wants that to happen, there would have to be a scramble for an interim solution to keep planes in the air.
The most obvious one would be some kind of stopgap agreement to roll over current rules for a short time.
But that would mean the UK's current commitments to the EU - such as legal and budget commitments - would have to continue as well. It would be extended membership in all but name.
Project Complexity?
It is worth emphasising that it would be in no-one's interest to ground aircraft. Everyone would be looking for a fix.
Again, this is a point that was emphasised by Philip Hammond.
"It's very clear," he said, "that mutual self-interest means that even if talks break down, even if there is no deal, there will be a very strong compulsion on both sides to reach agreement on an air traffic services arrangement."
But the suggestion that everything would automatically be fine for aviation in the event of no deal is highly misleading.
A deal would need to be done, to deal with the consequences of "no deal".
And this isn't about Project Fear - this is Project Complexity.
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The death of a woman at a seaside hotel is no longer being treated as suspicious, police have said.
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The body of the 39-year-old woman was discovered at the Links Hotel in Drummond Road, Skegness, on Tuesday evening.
A 43-year-old man arrested on suspicion of murder has been released without further action.
Following the results of a post-mortem examination the matter will now be passed to the coroner, police said.
Follow BBC East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire on Facebook on Twitter, and Instagram. Send your story ideas to [email protected].
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What is most striking about George Osborne's Chinese tour is he is doubling his political and economic bet on the world's number two economy at a time when that economy is looking its most fragile for 30 years.
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Robert PestonEconomics editor
His calculation is that China's economy will slow in a relatively contained way to a more sustainable rate - perhaps 4% or 5% a year compared with the official target of 7% - without a devastating crash that would damage a large number of client economies and engender social unrest in China itself (in employing the great Goldman bull of China Jim O'Neill as his commercial minister, Osborne could hardly wager otherwise).
Today's manifestation of the China bet is confirmation of a long-trailed loan guarantee - initially worth £2bn but likely to rise substantially - to bind in Chinese and French nuclear giants to their promised massive £24.5bn investment in the Hinkley Point C new nuclear plant.
This is certainly long-term strategic planning for more power security by Osborne and the government (well they would say). With oil fluctuating at between $40 and $50 a barrel, Hinkley's prospective electricity looks scarily expensive.
And there is a paradox about how pricey the nuclear megawatts look right now - because one of the big causes of the oil price collapse is the Chinese slowdown that has savaged demand for energy.
'Pure expression'
But Osborne views Hinkley as a bloated sprat to catch a ginormous mackerel: a Chinese-designed nuclear power plant in Essex is hoped to be in the offing (according to the energy secretary Amber Rudd in today's FT); a wagonload of construction investment in the chancellor's cherished "Northern Powerhouse" is chuntering down the track, according to leaders of north-of-England city council leaders out here with him.
China represents perhaps the purest expression of Osborne's realpolitik approach to promoting prosperity in Britain.
He is blowing a raspberry at human rights campaigners by going to Urumqi, where the indigenous Uighur population complain of economic and cultural discrimination by Han Chinese, to win business for British companies in President Xi's "One Belt, One Road" global transport-infrastructure "grand projet" (a Silk Road for a globalised age).
And Osborne is also politely ignoring Washington, which is increasingly uneasy about what it sees as the Treasury's disloyal Beijing tilt (the White House was unamused, Beijing smug, when the UK became the first western member of the Chinese-sponsored Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank).
The chancellor's calculation is that the Chinese will remember who stuck by them when the going got tougher.
And he is also presuming that as the returns from investing in China itself diminish, Chinese institutions - many of them still loaded - will increasingly think owning a bit of Britain isn't such a crazy idea after all.
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A 16-year-old boy has been charged with the murder of a man who was stabbed to death in a fight in West Yorkshire.
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The teenager is accused of killing Bradley Gledhill, 20, from Heckmondwike, who died after the fight in Park Croft, Batley, on 21 June.
The boy, from Dewsbury, has also been charged with attempted murder and joint enterprise.
He was due to appear before Leeds magistrates on Saturday.
More stories from around Yorkshire
An 18-year-old man also arrested has been released on police bail.
Four other males have previously been charged with murder. Anyone with information is urged to contact police.
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A council is reviewing CCTV footage after reports that a large section of pavement was stolen from a village in West Sussex.
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Dozens of paving slabs were found to be missing in Storrington on Tuesday.
A picture of the scene received more than 1,000 comments after being posted on Reddit with the caption: "An entire pavement in my village was stolen last night".
Horsham District Council said it had reported the theft to Sussex Police.
Storrington resident Alan Stainer said whoever had taken the slabs had "made a right old mess".
Horsham District Council said it believed that "the paving slabs may have been stolen overnight," adding that it was taking steps to make "the area safe for car park users".
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Horsham District Council
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The Qatari authorities say they are working to improve living and working conditions for the tens of thousands of migrant workers. But many labourers, mainly from South Asia, find their dream of coming to this rich nation to improve the lives of their families is more of a nightmare.
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By Leana HoseaBBC Middle East Business Reporter, Doha
The Qatari authorities say they have increased inspection of accommodation, but I visited four so-called labour camps in Doha and they were all squalid.
Some were better than others, but they were all overcrowded with around six to eight men to a room.
Twenty and sometimes up to 40 men have to share a kitchen, which is often just a few cooking hobs hooked up to gas canisters and nothing more.
The toilet and washing facilities are so basic and dirty that some men use buckets of water to wash.
One Bangladeshi man said that raw sewage had been leaking into the camp from a broken pipe.
The Qatari authorities say: "There are very many developments for new workers' accommodation in Qatar at various stages of planning and construction, including at Al-Baraha (25,000 beds); and the Barwa Recreation City facility at Al Khor, which will accommodate a further 6,000 workers, and recreational facilities.
"Further private sector developments will create a further 70,000 beds for workers; while enforcement and inspections should help raise the standards of existing accommodation."
'21st Century slave state'
The 2022 World Cup has kicked off a multibillion-dollar construction boom in Qatar, and roads and hotels are being built to accommodate the fans and businesses that will flock to the emirate.
But though Doha, the capital, looks uber-modern, with glittering skyscrapers and innovative architecture, its labour system is less forward-looking.
Human rights groups and trade unions say migrant workers are subject to a labour system that enables trafficking and forced labour.
Last year, 185 Nepalese workers died, many from heart failure, and 450 Indian workers have died since 2012. Figures of deaths from other nationalities have not been published.
Indian and Qatari authorities say the death rates are normal.
However, Human Rights Watch called the figures "horrendous" and the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, Sharan Burrow, says it is "an exceptionally high mortality rate".
She says if this trend continues some 4,000 workers will die before the first World Cup football kick-off.
Qatar, she says, has refused to give workers a collective voice or the right to form trade unions, describing the emirate as "a 21st Century slave state".
'People hate us'
Most workers were reluctant to be interviewed, saying they feared getting into trouble with the authorities.
Qatar is a monarchy with restrictions on freedom of speech. But some workers agreed.
In a ramshackle, cockroach-infested camp, 22-year-old Anil Lamichhane told me he regrets coming to Qatar and wants to go home to Nepal.
"My company doesn't care about us. When we complain to our seniors they say, 'We will see, we will see'. But when will they see us? We don't get safety shoes in time, we don't get helmets, we don't get good gloves, we don't get good accommodation, we don't get good food. We don't get good salaries - only $9 per day - and we work six days per week.
"No-one respects our feelings, we are just labour, all people hate us."
At another camp, Santos Tharu from Nepal told me how he is trapped in Qatar without his passport or any money.
He says he injured his back at work carrying heavy loads, but his employer refused to pay his medical bills.
"I became so unwell I couldn't get out of bed for a week, so they sacked me. They said they would send me home to Nepal, as my contract says. I waited and waited, but it's been two months now.
"I don't have anything, no wages and no food allowance. I have to rely on my friends," he said.
His employer did not respond to my request for an interview. According to Amnesty International, the majority of migrant workers have their passports held by employers.
Workers' charter
The organisers of the 2022 World Cup issued a "workers' charter" last month in an attempt to improve workers' rights.
But it only applies to those working directly on the World Cup buildings.
According to the Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee for Legacy and Delivery, this currently only applies to 38 workers.
There are more than a million migrant labourers toiling on the infrastructure for the World Cup, building hotels and roads to accommodate the fans and businesses that will flock to Qatar because of the football.
The Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs states: "Where any liability is found to rest with employers, the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and Qatari law authorities will pursue these cases through the relevant legal channels.
"Many companies have been sanctioned for labour law violations. This includes 2,000 in the past year, and 500 in January 2014 alone. Ultimately, companies that are sanctioned are stopped from hiring workers or renewing visas."
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In the 1980s the global TV hit Knight Rider not only made a star of David Hasselhoff, it also made the idea of a car driven and controlled by a robot part of popular culture. Now the concept is moving from the TV screen onto the roads of Silicon Valley.
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By Theo LeggettBusiness reporter, BBC News
"The steering is entirely drive-by-wire, it's computer controlled," says Holly as we hurtle around the campus of Stanford University in a weird and wonderful contraption which would not seem out of place in a Mad Max movie.
"It's all electronic - there's no mechanical connection so we can programme it to do pretty much what we want."
Holly works at Stanford's Center for Automotive Research, based in Palo Alto, in the heart of California's Silicon Valley.
The machine she's driving is known as the X1. It looks like a cross between a car and a beach buggy, with half an electronics laboratory thrown in.
There's no bodywork, just a frame made out of metal tubes. We sit in bucket seats, held in by race harnesses.
In front, you can see every twitch of the chunky red suspension springs as the large alloy wheels bounce over Stanford's many potholes.
The whole thing is festooned with wiring, switches and important-looking electronic gadgets.
Driverless cars
The X1 is a test-bed for the kind of technology which might seem exotic today, but which may eventually be commonplace.
It's one of a number of vehicles created by the organisation which is on the front line of research into electronic systems that are designed initially to help human drivers, but may ultimately replace them altogether.
Many of our cars are increasingly driven by artificial intelligence - they have engine management systems, computers which are designed to make sure the engine runs as efficiently as possible.
ABS detects when a driver has used the brakes too violently and prevents the wheels from locking up, and traction control can stop the wheels from spinning uselessly when the driver accelerates in slippery conditions.
For the moment, the driver remains in charge, but research into driverless cars or "vehicle autonomy" as it's known in the industry, is already well advanced.
Internet giant Google has actually been operating a fleet of self-driving cars on the streets of California for some time, but other multinationals such as Volkswagen, Bosch, General Motors and Mercedes are also working on autonomous systems.
As a result, Silicon Valley is increasingly becoming a new hub for automotive engineering.
Safety first
In February, Japanese carmaker Nissan became the latest manufacturer to set up a research office in the region, specifically to focus on developing self-driving technologies.
But why do we actually need driverless cars? According to the executive director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford, Sven Beiker, a key aspect is safety.
"We're very interested in what the driver is good at, and what the computer is better at doing, and we're working on the handover between the driver and the vehicle," he says.
"So what we're looking at is when the driver gets him or herself into trouble, as often happens when driving too fast, the vehicle could take over."
But safety is just one aspect. Driverless vehicles could also become a vital tool for cutting congestion.
"If you look at a highway, even at rush hour times, only about 20-25% of the surface area is actually occupied by vehicles," says Mr Beiker.
"We need a lot of space around the car in order to manoeuvre but if you have a lot of top-notch sensors and control systems, you can probably get those vehicles much closer together."
If those cars could communicate with one another as well they would also be able to identify traffic hotspots and avoid them.
But there is another way in which self-driving vehicles could cut congestion. That would be to make it easier for people to rent vehicles when they really need them - rather than owning a car they seldom use.
'Waste of space'
"Privately owned cars are a big problem," says Prof Kent Larson, head of the Future Cities programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston.
"Most cars in cities aren't being used 90% of the time," he says. "The rest of the time, they're parked up and wasting valuable space. But if we can move to a shared model, we can increase the use of a single vehicle by at least five times."
That's where driverless cars come in.
"The Holy Grail is a vehicle that can drive itself and park itself and charge itself autonomously," says Prof Larson.
"At that point, wherever you are in the city, you can call for a vehicle. It can come to where you are and you drive off.
"When you reach your destination, you get out of the car, put it into autonomy mode and the car goes back to wherever it needs to be, ready for the next trip."
The idea is that such a system would make borrowing a car as convenient as owning one, but without any of the drawbacks, such as needing to find somewhere to park it.
New solutions, new problems
But the existence of driverless cars creates new problems.
Who would be legally responsible in the event of an accident, for example?
Even if the evidence suggests computers drive better, would people actually accept being at the mercy of a box of electronics?
And if cars are designed to communicate with one another, what is there to stop the system being targeted by cybercriminals?
Some answers are already being found.
In the Media Lab at MIT sits a model car known as Aevita. She has striking blue eyes - or rather, her headlights are surrounded by flashing blue optical fibres and they follow you as you move around the room.
She can also speak to you in a rather pleasant English accent.
The idea is simple. If future cars do not have drivers they are likely to make pedestrians nervous.
After all, how will you know whether it's safe to cross the road, if you can't look the driver in the eye?
Well, with Aevita, you can. Prof Larson thinks MIT's Media Lab has solved a problem that does not even exist yet.
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The return of rail services to the Scottish Borders has come a step closer with the publication of the timetable for services between Tweedbank and Edinburgh.
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ScotRail has published the document which allows passengers to plan journeys from 6 September.
The timetable offers half-hourly services and a 55-minute journey time between the capital and the Borders.
Tickets for the new railway can be purchased up to 12 weeks in advance.
The full timetable can be viewed online.
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Ululations, song and dance erupted in a packed hall in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, as South Sudan's President Salva Kirr and rebel leader Riek Machar signed what they called the "final final" peace deal.
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By Emmanuel IgunzaBBC Africa, Addis Ababa
The two hugged and smiled as they exchanged the signed documents at an extraordinary summit of regional leaders, who have been pushing for the former enemies to end a brutal five-year civil war that has killed tens of thousands of people and forced four million people from their homes.
It has taken 15 long months of shuttling between the region's capitals to negotiate this latest attempt to bring peace to the world's youngest nation.
"As we witness this historic milestone, we remember and grieve for the victims of the violence and hope this agreement closes that dark chapter in South Sudan," Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said after the signing.
And it has been a dark and shameful period for the country - with both sides accused of horrendous atrocities. The UN has documented horrific accounts of gang rape, throats being slit and mass shootings.
Amid hyperinflation, aid agencies have warned again that the humanitarian situation in the oil-rich country continues to worsen, with millions facing starvation.
Will the killing stop?
Speaking to the BBC after the ceremony, negotiators from both sides said they realised the task ahead in bring lasting peace for their people.
"Our people are right to doubt us, because we have let them down so many times," opposition negotiator Stephen Par Kuol said.
"But this time around, we are telling the people of South Sudan to count on us to implement this agreement fully."
Martin Lomuro, South Sudan's cabinet affairs minister, agreed that the "severity of the war" had dented confidence.
"But this is much more of an agreement that is designed to lay a foundation for a new country and this is why I feel so good about it because before we haven't had a chance to build a proper nation," he said.
Realistically both sides have reached a stalemate - and run out of money. Plus pressure from South Sudan's neighbours, who are hosting many of those who have fled, has led to a more sober reconciliation.
What are the stumbling blocks?
Despite the optimism, diplomats at the ceremony - many of whom witnessed a similar scene three years ago - expressed concerns about the ability of each side to honour their commitments.
After all, the 2015 power-sharing deal collapsed spectacularly in July 2016, forcing Mr Machar, the rebel leader who had recently been re-appointed vice-president, to flee for his life on foot to the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has not been back to the capital, Juba, since then.
South Sudan crisis in numbers:
Sources: Igad, UN, Sudan Tribune, Economist, Reuters
"The greatest challenges are yet to come - and the key ingredient still lacking is trust," said David Shearer, head of the UN Mission in South Sudan.
"The personalities signing the agreement have in the past been former friends and foes and from my discussions with all parties, suspicions still remains widespread," he said.
Similar concerns were made by the UK, US and Norway, which have all been instrumental in funding the peace process and the failed transitional government.
UK envoy Chris Trott said a significant change in approach was needed.
"This must include, but not be limited to, an end to violence and full humanitarian access and a real commitment to effective and accountable implementation, demonstrated by robust and enforcement mechanisms."
Is the deal different from the one signed in 2015?
Not really. It is all about power sharing between the two main rivals in a transitional government to be established in the next eight months.
It will then last for three years, after which general elections will be held.
The expanded government will have Mr Kiir remaining as president while Mr Machar will take up one of the five new posts of vice-president.
Other armed groups, political parties and interested entities like civil society groups and religious leaders will also have a place in the expanded government and the reconstituted parliament.
Unlike the previous deal, the country will have a unified army with the president as the commander-in-chief.
The last one fell apart when the two rival armies fought in Juba. This agreement sets out a timeframe for demobilisation and eventual reintegration.
Will this new agreement hold?
The next few days and weeks will be crucial for the warring parties as they need to cease all fighting in line with the preliminary agreements reached over the last few months.
Reports of fighting came within hours of Mr Kiir and Mr Machar signing one such deal in August.
How fast Mr Machar returns to Juba will also be key - he has been in exile for two years.
His team says he will go back as soon as he is assured of his safety on the ground - and that is not at all clear.
A 4,000-strong Regional Protection Force (RPF) was promised two years ago - with a boosted mandate to guarantee security in the capital. According to the UN, 60% of these troops have been deployed to help the nearly 8,000 UN soldiers already in South Sudan.
However, Mr Shearer warns that there's no further funding for the remaining troops and so it is highly unlikely that there will be more boots on the ground in coming weeks and months.
But the negotiators say the leaders will be able to overcome their mistrust of each other once they actually start the task of rebuilding the crippled nation together.
"Confidence comes with working together and interacting together and reconciling - and even giving up something," says Mr Lomuro.
"So whatever grievances you have if we discuss things in an honest manner, we will develop that confidence."
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The Treneere estate in Penzance is one of the most deprived areas of England. It has suffered a slow decline since it was built in the 1930s to provide social housing and a better life for many. Four members of the same family describe what life is like on an estate where such labels are rejected by many who live there.
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By Johanna CarrBBC News
Amanda
Amanda Coram has lived on the Treneere estate for 32 years. When she arrived, she was 18 and pregnant.
"I've been accepted the whole way through," she says. "[One of my previous relationships] was quite violent and people on the estate would come through my door if they heard any noises and come and save me.
"Your family is what makes your life down here."
The 49-year-old has four children and 12 grandchildren, all living on the estate. She and husband Mike, two of her daughters and one of her granddaughters live in a housing association property, which she says they are lucky to have.
Amanda previously worked as a chef but is now unemployed. Mike works, but their low incomes means they rarely go out.
"We're a middle-aged couple, we should be out having a meal. We can't do that, we can't afford to do that."
Amanda has PTSD as a result of the domestic violence. She believes a lot of the problems in the area are down to poor mental health and there should be better care.
"I was offered two different types of therapy at least two years ago, I have never seen anyone," she says.
"Some people are just really vulnerable and even if they are taking drugs, why? Why are they drinking, why are they taking drugs? When is the mental health system going to stand up and take responsibility for people?"
Amanda says the majority of children on the estate will work jobs in the town but they lack confidence and "don't dream as big" as they could.
"The parents get stuck - you just have to go to work and survive, so [you're] not pushing the children. I would absolutely love to be able to hand my children the money and say 'there you go' but you can't do that, you're not going to earn the wages down here.
"So they have to have a work ethic, but the work ethic is being smashed because they just aren't getting the wages. So they feel, I don't know, just let down I suppose."
The mother of four worries about the opportunities available to her children.
"My kids - I think - are quite happy. Two of them will stay here until Doomsday and two of them want to go. [One] could really do well for herself. She's a really good chef and she's been offered some work in Australia and if she's got any sense she will take it and go."
Lucy
Lucy Coram is Amanda's youngest child. She's described as "different" from the rest of her family.
"I'm the only one out of all of us that's not had children," says the 19-year-old. "I want to experience my life because I want to get up and I want to go out, I want to say I did something with my life."
Lucy struggled in school and dropped out of college but then took an apprenticeship working as a chef in a local restaurant. She sees it as her way out.
"Some people just didn't choose to work and chose to do other things, whereas some of us actually wanted to get up and do something, go to work and do something with our lives instead of just sitting around taking drugs and drinking."
Lucy says Penzance is a "very beautiful place, but Treneere has a reputation".
"You go anywhere and mention Treneere and no-one quite likes it - everybody has heard about Treneere. I'm a bit different. I keep myself to myself. I go to work, I come home, stay in my bedroom, don't do anything."
Lucy wants to travel and one of her tutors has offered to put her in touch with job opportunities in Australia. But she has concerns about leaving her close-knit family.
"I love my mum, I love my dad and I love my whole family but if I want to do something, they will always be supportive of me. If there is ever a down day where I say 'no, I don't want to do it, no I don't want to leave' they are always like, 'you have got to do it'."
Lucy wants to make sure she is ready "in herself" before taking the Australia opportunity or travelling elsewhere.
"I'm going to take what I can right now in Penzance and then go."
Treneere
Nicholas
Amanda's son Nicholas Metcalfe went to the local secondary school then a pupil referral unit in Year 8. He moved out of the family home at 16 and left college with qualifications in hairdressing, construction, gardening and media studies but struggled to find a job.
Nicholas worked at KFC before working at a nearby hotel but left when his premature son died.
"That was pretty destroying, so I lost myself for a bit in that," he said. "I ended up quitting my job, throwing it all in and ended up going to the drug side of things. I was hanging around with the wrong people. Lost really."
Nicholas started smoking cannabis when he was 11, before progressing to taking cocaine, then smoking crack after the loss of his son. He says the drug problem in Penzance is "huge".
"I ended up falling into a bit of a hole, it's been quite hard to pull myself out of all of it. I'm not going to say that I've passed it yet because there are relapses, but these are rhythms I need to get out of."
Nicholas is working with drug charity Addaction, going in for drug tests every three days, and also with the employment charity, Who Dares Works. He is hoping to be able to take up an opportunity to work at Jamie Oliver's Fifteen restaurant.
"I've got friends who aren't even looking to work that still live with their old dears but most of that is because their opportunities for work are very, very slim. Every time they have tried they have had no success and that obviously [dents] their confidence.
"The only thing that is helping now is Who Dares Works. They are doing really well at the minute, they are pulling in people from all over, building up confidence and stuff like that to help prepare them for when they get back into work."
You might also be interested in:
Mike
Amanda's husband Mike Coram works nights as a security dog handler. At 56, he has been doing the job, which pays minimum wage, for 20 years.
"It is what it is," he says. "There are no jobs down here that are perfect with the perfect wage. It's hard because I'd rather be at home getting into bed with the wife."
He says he gets stuck in a cycle of rarely making ends meet.
"If it's Monday and I'm already £92 overdrawn in the bank with a £100 overdraft and I have got the rest of the week to go, you scrimp and you borrow and you take a bit from here, borrow from a friend or borrow from a daughter.
"[Then you] pay it back on Friday and then start the next week back where you started."
Mike says they managed a holiday to Greece this year because he took some of his pension, not realising it would impact his tax credits.
"We might, if we are really lucky, be able to get three cappuccinos during the week from McDonald's. We don't go out. We don't go anywhere."
Mike, who met Amanda 13 years ago on a blind date, is proud of providing for his family and says despite their low income, he is happy.
"You have a family and that is your job in life. That was my dad's job in life and his dad's before that. It is our job to supply for our family. As long as there's food in the cupboard, there's a roof over their heads, then I have done my job.
"It's not going to make it any different by me moping around, if I wanted to better myself then yeah, I could pack my stuff I could leave the family. I could go up the country, live by myself and I could probably better myself, but I have got everything I want.
"I've got my family, I've got my kids, I've got my grandchildren just down the road. I'm still breathing, I'm still walking, just. What more do you want? I don't need anymore."
This article is part of a special series from Penzance, Cornwall. BBC News is exploring the challenges and the opportunities for communities in Coastal Britain.
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A young cowboy from Texas who joined the elite US Navy Seals became the most deadly sniper in American history. In a book published this month he provides an unusual insight into the psychology of a soldier who waits, watches and kills.
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By Stephanie HegartyBBC World Service
As US forces surged into Iraq in 2003, Chris Kyle was handed a sniper rifle and told to watch as a marine battalion entered an Iraqi town.
A crowd had come out to greet them. Through the scope he saw a woman, with a child close by, approaching his troops. She had a grenade ready to detonate in her hand.
"This was the first time I was going to have to kill someone. I didn't know whether I was going to be able to do it, man, woman or whatever," he says.
"You're running everything through your mind. This is a woman, first of all. Second of all, am I clear to do this, is this right, is it justified? And after I do this, am I going to be fried back home? Are the lawyers going to come after me saying, 'You killed a woman, you're going to prison'?"
But he didn't have much time to debate these questions.
"She made the decision for me, it was either my fellow Americans die or I take her out."
He pulled the trigger.
Kyle remained in Iraq until 2009. According to official Pentagon figures, he killed 160 people, the most career sniper kills in the history of the US military. His own estimate is much higher, at 255 kills.
According to army intelligence, he was christened "The Devil" by Iraqi insurgents, who put a $20,000 (£13,000) bounty on his head.
Married with two children, he has now retired from the military and has published a book in which he claims to have no regrets, referring to the people he killed as "savages".
Job satisfaction
But a study into snipers in Israel has shown that snipers are much less likely than other soldiers to dehumanise their enemy in this way.
Part of the reason for this may be that snipers can see their targets with great clarity and sometimes must observe them for hours or even days.
"It's killing that is very distant but also very personal," says anthropologist Neta Bar. "I would even say intimate."
She studied attitudes to killing among 30 Israeli snipers who served in the Palestinian territories from 2000 to 2003, to examine whether killing is unnatural or traumatic for human beings.
She chose snipers in particular because, unlike pilots or tank drivers who shoot at big targets like buildings, the sniper picks off individual people.
What she found was that while many Israeli soldiers would refer to Palestinian militants as "terrorists", snipers generally referred to them as human beings.
"The Hebrew word for human being is Son of Adam and this was the word they used by far more than any other when they talked about the people that they killed," she says.
Snipers almost never referred to the men they killed as targets, or used animal or machine metaphors. Some interviewees even said that their victims were legitimate warriors.
"Here is someone whose friends love him and I am sure he is a good person because he does this out of ideology," said one sniper who watched through his scope as a family mourned the man he had just shot. "But we from our side have prevented the killing of innocents, so we are not sorry about it."
This justification - which was supported by friends, family and wider Israeli society - could be one reason why the snipers didn't report any trauma after killing, she suggests.
"Being prepared for all those things that might crack their conviction, actually enabled them to kill without suffering too much."
She also noted that the snipers she studied were rational and intelligent young men.
In most military forces, snipers are subject to rigorous testing and training and are chosen for aptitude. In the UK, they complete a three-month training course, with a pass rate of only one in four.
The US marine sniper course is one of the hardest training courses in the military, with a failure rate of more than 60% and a long list of prerequisites for recruits, including "a high degree of maturity, equanimity and common sense".
Research in Canada has also found that snipers tend to score lower on tests for post-traumatic stress and higher on tests for job satisfaction than the average soldier.
"By and large, they are very healthy, well-adjusted young men," says Peter Bradley at the Royal Military College of Canada, who is studying 150 snipers in Afghanistan. "When you meet them you're taken by how sensible and level-headed they are."
Don't tell your wife
But both the Israeli and the Canadian studies only spoke to snipers who were still on active duty. Neta Bar suspects many of them could experience problems in years to come, after they return to normal society.
When former Soviet sniper Ilya Abishev fought in Afghanistan in 1988 he was immersed in Soviet propaganda and was convinced what he was doing was right.
Regret came much later. "We believed we were defending the Afghan people," he says. "Now I am not proud, I am ashamed of my behaviour."
For police snipers, who operate within normal society rather than a war zone, doubts, or even trauma, can arise much sooner.
Brian Sain, a sniper and deputy at the sheriff's department in Texas, says many police and army snipers struggle with having killed in such an intimate way.
"It's not something you can tell your wife, it's not something you can tell your pastor," says Mr Sain, a member of Spotter, an American association that supports traumatised snipers. "Only another sniper understands how that feels."
But for the US's deadliest sniper, remorse does not seem to be an issue.
"It is a weird feeling," he admits. "Seeing an actual dead body... knowing that you're the one that caused it now to no longer move."
But that is as far as he goes.
"Every person I killed I strongly believe that they were bad," he says. "When I do go face God there is going to be lots of things I will have to account for but killing any of those people is not one of them."
Chris Kyle was interviewed by Outlook for the BBC World Service. Listen to the interview here.
Chris Kyle's book is called American Sniper.
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Sweden's armed forces say they have abandoned their search for what they believed was a submarine, spotted not far from Stockholm more than a week ago.
The hunt was described as Sweden's biggest mobilisation since the Cold War. Speculation had centred on Russia, but the Russians scoffed at the claims.
Was there a sub after all?
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By Paul KirbyBBC News
We may never know for sure. Initially, the Swedish military was careful not to state for certain what it was looking for, preferring to describe the mysterious submerged object as belonging to a "foreign power". But as the search went on, the Swedes were explicit: they were hunting a submarine.
Despite Russia's protestations, its navy was singled out as most likely. It has large submarines - 60m (197ft) or 70m class - as well as small. And the feeling was this one was probably small. There are two Russian mini-submarines that could fit the bill: the Piranha - seen as a diving submarine - and the Triton, used for research purposes.
Where was it spotted?
That is the great mystery. There were reported sightings in the southern Stockholm archipelago. But there are so many islands that defence officials said searching the area successfully was almost impossible.
The first photo appearing to show the submarine went viral and the armed forces asked for further help in finding it.
But they did not help matters when they deliberately gave out false information so as not to help a "foreign power".
When did it first show up?
Much of the detail is unconfirmed, but Swedish media say the first emergency signal was heard on 16 October, leading to reports of a damaged submarine
Was the search that big ?
Apparently it was Sweden's largest mobilisation since the Cold War. So many naval vessels were used that the scale of the night-and-day search had to be reduced because of exhaustion.
All manner of boats were used, including an M74 minesweeper, HMS Kullen, a stealth corvette, HMS Visby, and fast-assault craft. The Visby is equipped with sonar, a 57mm gun, and two ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) - one for underwater mine-hunting and the other for mine-disposal.
On Tuesday, Dagens Nyheter newspaper reported that an underwater ROV was being used in the search in Ingaro Bay.
Is any of this Cold War stuff plausible?
Russians have treated the allegations with disdain, even suggesting it might be a Dutch submarine. But the Ukraine crisis has revived many of the trappings of the Cold War. In the space of a couple of months
Sweden, like Finland, is not part of Nato but both have tightened their ties with the alliance. So the submarine hunt was seen in the context of a pact signed by Sweden and Finland on 5 September which enables joint training exercises and assistance from Nato troops in emergencies.
Many Swedes remember when a Russian sub loaded with nuclear torpedoes ran aground near a Swedish naval base in 1981.
What are the Russians doing about it?
Their initial response was a flat denial. "There have been no extraordinary, let alone emergency situations, involving Russian military vessels," the defence ministry in Moscow said on Sunday.
Some analysts in Moscow have queried whether the hunt is more about Swedish politics than Russian, and the Swedish military's need to justify higher military funding with the arrival of Prime Minister Stefan Lofven's centre-left government.
And it will not have gone unnoticed in Moscow that the day before the search was cancelled, the new government announced a larger than expected increase in Sweden's defence budget, focusing in particular on developing a new Gripen fighter plane. But the 3.1% increase for 2015 was less than the 4.3% rise given by the previous government for this year.
However, the Russian response could just have as well have been a bluff.
Why, for example, was a Russian-owned oil ship, NS Concord, circling just outside Swedish waters for hours on end? It is unclear, although the Swedish coastguard said its movements were not inconsistent with an oil tanker.
Then there was the involvement of another Russian ship, Professor Logachev, described as a research vessel specialising in studies on the ocean floor. Swedish media said it was seen heading towards the Swedish Baltic island of Gotland late on Tuesday night.
The reality is this mystery may never be solved.
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Two arrests have been made after a man's death on a footpath along the River Avon in Bath.
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A spokesman for Avon and Somerset Police said "the incident happened" off Brassmill Lane at about 15:15 BST.
The two arrested men are in police custody.
"We've launched an investigation following the sudden death of a man in Bath," said the spokesman, who added a cordon remained in place at the scene.
No details have been released about how the man died.
Related Internet Links
Avon and Somerset Police
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Work on a £2.6m hydro-electric scheme to harness the power of the River Taff in Cardiff and generate renewable energy will start next month.
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The Radyr Weir scheme will channel water through two turbines and use it to generate energy that can be fed into the electricity grid.
It should be able to provide enough energy to power 550 homes and raise £140,000 a year for Cardiff council.
Construction work on the project is scheduled be completed by March 2016.
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It's been a bad year for universities.
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Sean CoughlanEducation correspondent
The row over vice-chancellors' pay has been a long, drawn-out box set of disasters for universities, with the highest-paid leader, the head of the University of Bath, stepping down, in a moment that was both unprecedented and deeply symbolic.
Tuition fees have been frozen and an imminent major review of student funding has cast a cloud of financial uncertainty.
From Monday, a new higher education regulator comes into force, with the Office for Students charged with ensuring value for money.
Instead of being seen as undisputed forces for public good, universities have faced accusations of looking out of touch and self-serving.
It's a very unfamiliar and uncomfortable position for universities. And one that they will want to escape in 2018.
So how will universities reverse out of the swamp?
Tuition fee review
An early crunch point will be the forthcoming review of university funding.
This was promised after Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party revived the student vote with a promise to scrap tuition fees, with swings to Labour of over 20% in some university seats.
It's a political response from the government but it will be universities that will be watching nervously.
There might be a strong push for the prime minister to make a popular appeal to young voters rather than listen to universities defending the intricacies of their funding mechanisms.
And after the board of the Social Mobility Commission walked out in protest over a lack of progress, the government will want to show it's serious about removing barriers.
The level of fees, interest rates, the sale of student debt, the return of maintenance grants, the length of repayments could all be under scrutiny.
There will be warnings that changes to fees could mean reintroducing limits on student numbers and questions about attracting more mature and part-time students.
There will also be calls for more substantial changes, such as switching from fees and loans entirely to a graduate tax or some kind of graduate contribution scheme.
But universities have made something of a Faustian pact with tuition fees.
They craved the reliable income. But they thought that they could completely change their funding but not really change much else.
They didn't really see themselves having to become consumer-friendly businesses with millions of young customers who are keenly aware of how their money is being spent.
At the beginning of the year, universities were pushing for fees to increase every year with inflation, which would soon have seen annual fees passing £10,000.
They thought they were getting on to a financial launchpad. But it turned out that they were crowding on to a trapdoor.
Instead of getting financial independence, the next fee increase was cancelled and their future funding was seen to be entirely dependent on the shifting political sands.
The head of Oxford University attacked "tawdry politicians" for linking vice-chancellors' pay with increases in tuition fees.
But the Universities Minister, Jo Johnson, now seems to be the universities' best hope for protecting their fees.
This political slow-burner, an increasingly confident figure, seems committed to defending the core architecture of the tuition fees system.
But the future of tuition fees is now as unpredictable as the politics of a minority government.
Pay scandals
The dispute over vice-chancellors' pay was toxic for universities.
And with stories about big bonuses, housekeepers, chauffeurs and grace-and-favour residences, it was difficult for universities to be taken seriously over other concerns, whether it was research funding or worries about losing European staff and students after Brexit.
But a deal on senior pay seems to have been reached, with a new fair pay code to be introduced in the new year. University heads have moved to put their own house in order before a new regulator, the Office for Students, could apply more direct pressure.
There could be further difficult stories about pay and perks - but assuming there is some rigour to the new rules, at least university leaders can claim to have listened.
Financial independence
Many of the biggest pitfalls for universities are around the lack of reliable, long-term funding - and one of the most quietly significant moves in 2017 was Oxford University's raising of £750m from a bond issue.
This was about major UK universities' desire to have financial security of the kind taken for granted by their big US counterparts.
While Oxford haggles over fees set by the government, Harvard University can rely on an income from an endowment standing at $37bn (£28bn).
Expect to see more UK universities trying to find ways to get money that is not reliant on fees or politicians.
Value for money
This year's survey of student attitudes, carried out by the Higher Education Policy Institute, showed only 32% of students in England thought their courses were good value for money.
This is something that universities will really need to address - including questions about how many hours students are taught, the quality of teaching and whether there are facilities that were promised.
For the first time this year, a number of universities were warned by the advertising watchdog that they had made claims that could be misleading.
And Central St Martins refunded students their fees after complaints about how their course was delivered.
Offering customer service, while maintaining academic rigour, will be a tricky balancing act.
And a first-class education can't just mean everyone getting a first-class degree.
Or will other universities follow Surrey, which was revealed this year to have given first-class degrees to more than 40% of students?
Free speech
Universities can get irritated by claims they're not doing enough to protect free speech, a theme picked up recently by the universities minister. They say that legal requirements are already in place and until recently they were being accused of allowing too much free speech, in the form of campus extremism.
But there are really thorny issues around how controversial ideas and beliefs are debated at universities and how some student politics seems to be about shutting down some opposing voices in favour of "safe spaces" and "no-platforming" policies.
Much of this is about the rise of the identity politics of race, gender and sexuality, as much as university governance. It's about who controls the conversation.
Expect more shadow boxing over symbols, statues and language. But universities are going to have to find a middle way through such headline-grabbing, polarising disputes.
Finding an identity
Universities remain an aspiration for families, a priority for a modern economy and a major export business.
But somewhere along the way they seem to have suffered some kind of identity crisis. What are they for? Who are they meant to serve? And who should pay for them?
Maybe their biggest challenge is to find a renewed sense of purpose and to make a new contract with the public about how they can support one another.
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Generations of South Korean prisoners of war are being used as slave labour in North Korean coal mines to generate money for the regime and its weapons programme, according to a report released by a human rights organisation. The BBC has taken a closer look at the allegations.
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By Laura BickerBBC News, Seoul
"When I see slaves shackled and dragged on TV, I see myself," Choi Ki-sun told me. He was one of an estimated 50,000 prisoners seized by North Korea at the end of the Korean War in 1953.
"When we were dragged to labour camps, we were at gun point, lined up with armed guards around. What else could this be if not slave labour?"
Mr Choi (not his real name) said he continued to work in a mine in North Hamgyeong province alongside around 670 other prisoners of war (POWs) until his escape, 40 years later.
It is not easy to get stories out of the mines. Those who survive, like Mr Choi, tell stories of fatal explosions and mass executions. They reveal how they existed on minimal rations while being encouraged to get married and have children who - like Mr Choi's - would later have no choice but to follow them into the mines.
"Generations of people are born, live and die in the mining zones and experience the worst type of persecution and discrimination throughout their lifetime," explains Joanna Hosaniak, one of the authors of a new report, Blood Coal Export from North Korea, from the Citizens' Alliance for North Korea Human Rights (NKHR).
The report outlines the inner workings of the state's coal mines and alleges that criminal gangs, including the Japanese Yakuza, have helped Pyongyang smuggle goods out of the country earning untold sums of money - one report estimates the figure at hundreds of millions of dollars - which is thought to be used to prop up the secretive state's weapons programme.
The report is based on the accounts of 15 people who have first-hand knowledge of North Korea's coal mines. The BBC interviewed one of the contributors and we have independently heard from four others who claim to have suffered and escaped from North Korea's coal mines. All but one person asked us to protect their identity to keep their remaining families in North Korea safe.
Pyongyang consistently denies allegations of human rights abuses and refuses to comment on them. It insists all POW's were returned according to the armistice terms, with a government official previously saying that any who remained wished "to remain in the bosom of the republic".
But Mr Choi says this is not true. He told us that he lived inside a fenced-off camp guarded by armed troops.
At first he was told that if he worked hard enough he would be allowed to go home. But eventually all hope of returning to the South faded.
Workers as young as seven
The current system of forced labour in North Korean coal mines appears to have been set up after the Korean War. The report by the NKHR described it as "inherited slavery".
South Koreans were taken to major coal, magnesite, zinc and lead mines mostly in North and South Hamgyeong Provinces, according to the human rights group investigation.
But not everyone who ends up in the mines is a prisoner of war.
Kim Hye-sook was told by guards that her grandfather went South during the war and that is why she was sent to work in the coal mine with her family as a teenager.
Her fate was determined by her "songbun" - or class, a judgement made on how loyal a family has been to the regime and how many are members of the Worker's Party of Korea.
Connections to South Korea automatically puts a person in the lowest class.
Ms Kim was just 16 when she started work in the mine. The NKHR report has accounts from survivors who said they started part-time work in the mine from age seven.
"When I first got assigned there were 23 people in my unit," she recalled. "But the mines would collapse and the wires that pulled the mine trolley would snap and kill the people behind it.
"People would die from explosions while digging the mines. There are different layers, in the mines, but sometimes a layer of water would burst and people could drown. So in the end only six remained alive of the initial 23."
'Death is a good ending'
But your "songbun" doesn't just determine your fate in the mines - it can also determine whether you live or die, according to a former member of the Ministry of State Security (MSS) quoted in the NKHR investigation.
"You try to let loyal class people live. You try to kill off people from a lower class."
But he said any executions - mainly of "South Korean spies" - were done according to "North Korean laws".
"You need the data analysis to show it's very justifiable to kill this person. Even if they've committed the same crime, if your class is good they will let you live. They don't send you to the political prison camp. You go to an ordinary prison or a correctional labour camp.
"You don't kill them because death is a good ending. You can't die, you have to work under orders until you die."
The interviewee described a "shooting gallery" at the back of the MSS interrogation room where some prisoners were killed. He said some were publicly executed while others were killed quietly.
The BBC has been unable to independently corroborate this account. But we did hear from Ms Lee who remembers the moment her father and brother were executed.
"They tied them to stakes, calling them traitors of the nation, spies and reactionaries," she told my colleagues from BBC Korean in an interview.
Her father was a former South Korean prisoner of war and that meant she too was forced to work in the mines.
Ms Lee's father had praised his South Korean hometown, Pohang and her brother had repeated that claim to his workmates. Ms Lee said that for that, teams of three executioners shot both of them dead.
'We were always hungry'
North Korean officials appear to have allowed the prisoners of war some aspects of normal life within the mining camps. They gave the miners citizenship in 1956. For most, that was the moment they knew they were not going home.
All of our interviewees were allowed and even encouraged to get married and have children. But Ms Kim believes this too had a purpose.
"They would tell us to have a lot of children. They needed to maintain the mines but people died every day. There are accidents every day. So they would tell us to have a lot of children. But there's not enough food and no diapers etc - so even if you do give birth to a child it was hard to raise them successfully."
Ms Kim was released from the prison camp in 2001 as part of a country-wide amnesty, and eventually escaped from North Korea by crossing a river near the border with China.
She decided to sketch illustrations of her 28 years in the mine, saying it helped her deal with some of her nightmares, and show others what she'd been through.
Hunger was a constant problem for all our interviewees and is documented in the NKHR report.
"A day didn't pass without going hungry. We were always hungry. One meal a day, we didn't know other people ate three times a day. We were given long grain rice, which continues swelling soaked in water," Ms Kim told us.
One former prisoner of war told us that even if they were sick they needed to go to work.
"If you missed a working day, then your meal ticket could be taken away," he said.
Miners were given quotas to fulfil, he told me, estimated at around three tonnes of anthracite (a form of hard coal) a day by the NKHR report. Not meeting it could mean no meal ticket which meant going hungry.
'Slavery' funding weapons programme
The United Nations Security Council banned North Korean coal exports in a bid to choke off funding for its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.
But two years later, a report by independent sanctions monitors said that Pyongyang had earned hundreds of millions of dollars "through illicit maritime exports of commodities, notably coal and sand".
In December, the United States said North Korea continued "to circumvent the UN prohibition on the exportation of coal, a key revenue generator that helps fund its weapons of mass destruction programs".
The NKHR report also claims that the mines are continuing to expand.
Deputy Director Joanna Hosaniak called on the UN to fully investigate North Korea's dependence on slavery and forced labour including "the full extent of the extraction and illegal export of coal and other products, and the international supply chain linked to these exports".
"This should also be enforced through a clear warning system for the businesses and consumers."
In the South, the administration has focused on engagement with Pyongyang and even discussed the possibility of a peace economy with the North. Seoul has argued that taking a more aggressive approach on human rights would see Pyongyang storming away from the negotiating table and could also lead to an increase in hostilities.
But a report by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Seoul said it was time to "integrate human rights into the peace and denuclearisation talks" which should also involve input from North Korean defectors.
Many still suffering
For two former prisoners of war who were forced to work in the mines there has been some hope, however. They won a landmark legal victory after Seoul Central District Court ordered North Korea and its leader, Kim Jong-un, to pay them $17,600 (£12,400) in damages for holding them against their will and forcing them to work in the mines.
This was the first time a court in the South recognised the suffering of prisoners of war held in the North.
Mr Choi was one of them.
"I am not sure I will see the money before I die but winning is more important than money," he told me at his apartment south of Seoul.
But his mind always returns to those left toiling in the mines as he serves me a plate of fruit which would once have been an unthinkable luxury. He tells me he's trying to send his family in the North some money.
"I think of how much they must be suffering while now I am happy," he sighed.
Illustration by Kim Hye-sook.
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As Sir Paul McCartney prepares to release his first solo album in six years he tells of how his happiness with his wife Nancy Shevell has inspired his writing, how he struggles not to repeat the past and how his wedding DJ ended up as a producer on the album New.
Is New a joyful album?
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By Frances CroninBBC News entertainment reporter
This is a happy period in my life, having a new woman - so you get new songs when you get a new woman. But in actual fact there is a lot of sadness mixed in on the record - the more you listen to it you'll find pain getting changed to laughter - there is quite an undercurrent of that. But generally I'm having a good time so I hope that's made it onto the record.
Why did you chose the four producers for this album?
Mark Ronson DJ'd at our wedding. He's a really good DJ and we like to dance and a lot of our friends do - so we had a little dance floor and there was kind of disco situation at the reception. He was DJing and putting on great music and it just kept us all going and I knew I liked him. I'd also met him on and off because he's friends with Sean Lennon.
I've known Giles Martin (son of Beatles producer George Martin) since he was a little kid. Ethan Johns (Ryan Adams and Kings of Leon) was the son of Glyn Johns one of my Beatles and Wing's producers. Paul Epworth (Adele, Florence and the Machine) I didn't really know but I knew his work.
But I was mainly really looking at their work and if you look at any of those producers they've all done great work recently. It's not just something they did in the past and that's what I was looking for. I just really enjoyed working with each one of them, but in a different way every time.
Could they say no to you?
I always make it one of the first things we talk about when we're sitting down and just settling in and I say OK lets get this straight everyone in this room has got an opinion and don't be frightened to tell me, particularly the producer because that's his job.
I say 'tell me if you don't like it or I'm doing it lousy' and I will refer to them and say 'was that any good?' So they do have a voice and I encourage the voice. I say 'please don't be frightened just because I've done that or I've done that, don't worry about it let's just start fresh and you tell me'.
But can they challenge you as much as John Lennon did?
No. We were just kids that had grown up together, so any of the guys in the Beatles just could tell each other 'I don't like that' and then it meant it had to go.
Do you wish you could release this album without people knowing your past work?
In an impossible world it would be nice if no-one knew what I had done - and there are a lot of young people who don't know what I've done. But mainly people are looking at what I'm doing now as a continuation of all the other stuff.
But I don't really worry about it. The main thing I try and do is not copy what I've done in the past. I've found myself once or twice, picking up a guitar and thinking I'm going to write a new Eleanor Rigby - I have to stop myself trying to do that.
There is the past but I don't see it as a burden, I see it as something I'm very lucky to have. But when you do a show - you can't just do new songs, if I don't do Hey Jude I've missed an opportunity. In Las Vegas (performing at the iHeartRadio music festival) we were mainly doing our new songs and it was going down well, but man when we got to Live and Let Die the audience responded - we basically blew them up and they loved that.
Are you trying to make a statement with the track Early Days?
When I write songs I don't always think I'm going to make a statement. On the day (I wrote the track Early Days) I was thinking about the past, particularly me and John in Liverpool in the early days so I just ran with that. I started to get images of us in the record shop listening to early rock and roll and looking at the posters and the joy that that gave me remembering all those moments.
So that song just evolved around that and then I found that one of the things that came was - you can't take it away from me, even though you can say 'hey this is what happened in Liverpool in the late 1950s but I'm going to say 'were you there or did you just read about it?' Because I was there and I was walking down that street - so it's that kind of song. It gets a bit of a dig at people who say they know what it was all about but they weren't there - but mainly it's just fond memories for me.
Are you going to open the World Cup in Brazil, as has been rumoured?
That's just a rumour - there's no truth to it. I know somebody asked me to be involved in the (Rio) Olympics. Every time these great occasions come up it's great that they think about me, I love it and I'm very flattered, but you can't just be the guy on all of them. It's going to get boring for the audience 'oh no not him again here we go again na na na na, nananana'.
Are you cool?
I never feel cool. I'm just me. I recently went to Las Vegas to do iHeartRadio (music festival) and there's a lot of cool people on that and so because they're in Las Vegas they all walk around with their entourage and their security and everyone's very serious about how cool they are.
And course there's me and I'm going 'Hi Miley' and I think 'oh god what am I doing I sound like a fan, I should try to be cool'. But they didn't even notice me. Actually, the security noticed me and they doubled back and she came and said hello.
New is released on 14 October (15 in US)
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A government minister in the Central African Republic, Gaston Makouzemba, has warned there is a risk of a genocide as communities fight each other on religious and ethnic lines. All communities have been affected by the violence and now many Muslims are fleeing the country, afraid for their lives. One imam in the capital Bangui shared his fears with the BBC's Newsday programme:
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This spate of violence against Muslims started in December - they have been killing us with machetes and firearms. All the Muslims have taken refuge in one neighbourhood, known as Kilometre 5.
Muslims from other countries have already fled - take a look at my list: The Chadians have gone; the Cameroonians have gone; the Senegalese; the Nigeriens from Niger have gone; the Nigerians; the Malians have gone. Those that have been left behind are us, the Central Africans.
I was born and bred in Bangui - my father was a Central African, my mother was a Central African.
My family came to the capital in 1946, it was my parents' generation that cleared the bush in Kilometre 5 and turned it into an urban dwelling area.
The anti-balaka vigilantes have been targeting us. They've burned most of the mosques in the capital, only a handful of mosques remain untouched in our neighbourhood.
I don't want to leave Bangui, I want to be the last Central African Muslim to leave the country or at least the last Muslim to be buried here. This country is the last resting place of both my father and mother.
'Too dangerous'
It's fine if you are called John, Peter, Mary or Martin but things get ugly when you first name is Mohammed, Ousmane or Ibrahim - chances are you will end up in a hit list. This violence is waged by thugs calling themselves anti-balaka.
Bangui is losing its business community which is made up largely of Muslims - they've been ransacking Muslim shops.
Commodity prices have gone up, a bunch of salad will cost you 200 CFA Francs (40 cents; 25p) - twice as much as a little while ago. A bar of soap is worth 100 CFA Francs (20 cents; 13p), again twice as much as before.
Buying meat? Don't even think about it, there is none. The Fulani and nomadic Chadians that used to drive their cattle to Bangui have decided to head for Cameroon because there's too much violence here.
My wife and my children have left the country, it's too dangerous for them to stay with me. Only the male members of the Muslim communities have decided to stay and protect their possessions.
We Muslims of the Central African Republic cannot leave our country. If they want to kill us in Kilometre 5, our neighbourhood, so be it - we have no weapons but are ready to accept our fate because we believe in God and we are confident that God will protect us.
We watch [the French troops] patrolling along the main streets of the city but they will not come into our neighbourhood to protect us. We are alive only by the grace of God.
The imam has not been named in order to protect his personal security.
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The internet and high speed broadband have transformed a wide range of consumer led businesses in the last two decades. Think banking, travel agencies, film distribution, book-selling and food retailing. Could healthcare be on the verge of a similar revolution over the next 20 years or so?
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Hugh PymHealth editor@bbcHughPymon Twitter
It's a question being asked frequently in Silicon Valley.
American health technology entrepreneurs are looking at the potential for centralised health systems like the NHS to lead the way on behalf of all patients in society rather than just those who can afford it.
Ensuring that people currently without smartphones or laptops can benefit from developments in personalised medicine will be the major challenge.
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt touched on this issue in delivering the annual Health Service Journal lecture.
He pointed to an "inescapable, irreversible shift to patient power that is about to change the face of modern medicine beyond recognition".
Technology and the use of data, he argued, were driving changes which would benefit both patients and clinicians.
'The patient will see you now'
The internet has empowered patients and allowed them to carry out exhaustive research about their symptoms and conditions. Traditional assumptions about the doctor knowing best are outdated.
Mr Hunt quoted the thoughts of the US cardiologist, and expert in digital health, Prof Eric Topol.
He has written a book called 'The Patient Will See You Now', and talks of the death of medical paternalism and big changes in the relationship between doctor and patient.
The most radical thinkers in this field argue there could come a time when people will never need to go to a doctor for diagnosis.
If a single drop of blood contains 300,000 biomarkers which can be analysed by a computer, they argue, a patient's chances of developing medical conditions can be assessed before they happen.
Throw in personalised genetic sequencing and an individual's health prospects can be mapped as never before.
Technology, so the argument goes, will deliver both predictive power and detailed monitoring of an individual's state of health.
Smartphone apps covering fitness are commonplace and new innovation with diagnostics is seen to have immense potential.
Those familiar with this field, including David Wood whose career included stints at Psion and Symbian, believe that mobile telephony will help patients manage their own health.
Smartphone apps under development or already available outside the UK include a low-cost blood testing system, a microscope attachment for mobile phones, a breath test facility which can help detect diseases and an add-on facility to monitor heart rhythm disturbances.
These allow patients to gather their own data and images remotely which can then be assessed by a doctor. A straightforward condition might be diagnosed and dealt with using an e-prescription without the patient ever needing to go to a surgery.
Pie in the sky?
This blue skies thinking excites leading figures in the NHS. But they are aware of the potential pitfalls.
The Talk Talk saga has highlighted the dangers of data being stolen online by hackers.
The theft of sensitive patient data could destroy public confidence overnight in the health technology agenda.
The Department of Health has asked the American health IT expert Prof Bob Wachter to report on the digital security issues which need to be addressed.
Some might argue this is all pie in the sky. At a time when the NHS is facing unprecedented patient demand for day to day healthcare, the idea that smartphones can take the strain might seem fanciful.
What counts for patients now is seeing their GP or getting a hospital appointment and ensuring they get the best possible care.
The internet entrepreneur Baroness Martha Lane Fox is carrying out a review on digital health innovation for the government.
Her report is due out by the end of this year. It will address the challenge of ensuring that the most vulnerable patients, many unable to afford sophisticated mobile phones, can benefit from the march of technology.
Tim Kelsey, Patients and Information Director at NHS England, believes the Lane Fox review will kick-start the wider debate about digital healthcare.
There is a widespread acknowledgement that if people are better enabled to manage their own health and conditions at home rather in a clinic or hospital the NHS will be more sustainable in the long term.
At a time of intense pressure on the health service, technology could offer some answers.
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On 27 September 1968 the curtain fell on centuries of theatre censorship. Hours later, a cast of long-haired young actors took to the stage in a show depicting drug-taking, anti-war protests and shocking nudity. London's West End was never the same again.
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By Sarah LeeBBC News
Hair was a musical that placed the 1960s counterculture on stage. It thrust bisexuality, interracial relationships and the rejection of monogamy in front of audiences who had previously been "protected" from such taboo subjects.
In a theatre first, one scene featured the cast appearing from behind a sheet, fully naked and chanting the words "beads, flowers, freedom, and happiness".
Despite lasting just seconds, it was considered scandalous and resulted in many audience members walking out of the Shaftesbury Theatre, dinner jackets in hand.
Prior to the autumn of 1968, any reference to homosexuality, bisexuality and nude performances would have been considered too outrageous to be shown on a British stage.
Even something as seemingly harmless as a reference to Walt Whitman's poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, in John Osborne's play Personal Enemy, was banned because it was seen as a codified reference to homosexuality.
But as the Lord Chamberlain's powers of censorship - which dated back to 1737 - came to an end, the cast of Hair began preparing for its opening night.
The risqué show, written by out-of-work actors Gerome Ragni and James Rado, had already proven a hit in New York the year before.
A young David Bowie auditioned for a part - four times in total - but was never invited to join the London cast (he later attended a performance but reportedly came away "unimpressed").
The musical told the story of the "tribe", a group of politically active hippies living a bohemian existence in New York City.
Its main protagonist Claude, played by 23-year-old Paul Nicholas, lived a life characterised by the pursuit of love, peace and sexual revolution - but faced a battle with his family who wanted him to fight in Vietnam.
The hippies' long hair - and the title of the show - was a symbol of their defiance.
"You would have had to have your hair cut when going into the military and therefore the name Hair is highly symbolic," says Geoffrey Marsh, director of the V&A's Department of Theatre and Performance.
Nicholas, who along with Elaine Page and Oliver Tobias subsequently became a household name, still remembers the outrage the nude scene provoked.
"Fifty years ago there was no nudity in commercial theatre - so it was a big change," he said.
"But looking back, the 'shocking' nude scene which was widely spoke about wasn't even that bad - it was nicely done. It wasn't salacious or anything like that.
"But some people walked out of the theatre, you know, in disgust."
Annabel Leventon played Sheila in the original cast on the London stage.
"On the first night, and it never happened anywhere else in the world - as far as I know - the cast of Hair went out into the auditorium," she told BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour.
"We danced in the aisles, sat on the audiences' laps, frightened them, and at the very end of the show we all ran out singing Let the Sun Shine In and went back on stage and the whole audience followed us [back on stage].
"That's when we realised the show made a greater change in Britain than anywhere else.
"Hair really shocked and changed the world of theatre forever."
Hair continued to strike a chord with audiences for the next five years.
This was despite opening to decidedly mixed reviews. WA Darlington, of the Daily Telegraph, had insisted he "tried hard" but found the evening "a complete bore".
However, the predominantly middle-aged white male critics were not the show's intended audience and it went on to run for 1,997 performances until 1973.
Simon Sladen, of the V&A Museum, said the show soon had an impact on the rest of the West End.
Once censorship was revoked, some playwrights and producers would "binge" on things that had previously been forbidden.
"The youth movement could finally come alive in the theatre - full of energy and vitality," he said.
"Hair was like a festival on the stage - an anarchic explosion of all things anti-establishment."
Nicholas, who met his future wife Linzi while working on the show, agrees.
"Everyone wanted to do a nude scene, or have the cast swear on stage," he said.
"It's as if they were getting it out of their system because we'd been suppressed for so long."
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Gritting crews in Cornwall have been out across the county to reduce the risk of ice.
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Temperatures dropped to -3C (27F) in east Cornwall on Sunday night, BBC Weather said.
On Monday morning, snow was settling in some areas west of Truro, but was likely to clear later, it added.
The Met Office has issued a yellow warning of ice for South West England which it said is in place until 23:55 GMT on Tuesday.
On Friday, snow was reported on Bodmin Moor and in Liskeard.
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It was a tragedy that reached across oceans.
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By Jessica Murphy & Robin Levinson-KingBBC News, Toronto
In southern Tunisia, Aboubaker Thabti's parents could not understand how their son was taken from them in a shooting in a Quebec City mosque.
When he left his home country for Canada with his wife and two children some six years ago, he saw it as a new beginning, not an end.
Instead, he became one of six men who died on Sunday night in Quebec while they were saying prayers.
Sabeur Thabti, a family member who called Aboubaker "uncle", said when he first heard of the shooting from his home in the UK, he had not dwelt much on it.
"You hear these things in Syria and Paris and all around the world and… you kind of forget how real it is, until it impacts you in such a close way."
Then the personal connection became clear.
"These are real people, these are not just numbers," he said. "Six people died, but thousands of people are emotionally destroyed by what happened."
Now he is "senseless" with grief.
On Monday, Canadian police charged student Alexandre Bissonnette with six counts of first-degree murder and five counts of attempted murder in connection with the attack.
Another 19 people were injured.
Thousands of people, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard, braved the cold at a vigil near the mosque to lay flowers and candles in the snow.
Quebec City residents called for unity among Quebecers.
It was a balm for the community, which has sometimes felt it bears the brunt of political rhetoric in the province.
Quebec has welcomed thousands of immigrants from Arab countries and other nations but has also struggled with how to accommodate those newcomers into the broader culture.
The predominantly French-speaking province fiercely protects its linguistic identity and state secularism, and there has been a longstanding debate over "reasonable accommodation" of immigrants and religious minorities.
The six victims came to build a better life in Canada, hailing from Guinea, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
At the suburban home of victim Khaled Belkacemi, a professor at Laval University, family and friends gathered to offer comfort after learning of his death.
His friend Arab Boussaid described the professor as "humble" and "wise" and said he hoped that "his sacrifice was not in vain" and helped bring Quebecers together.
"We are from this country," he said. "We adopted them and they adopted us."
He said it also served as warning to never "banalise" minor acts of intolerance.
"There are early warning signs, a certain xenophobia, intolerance," he said, that can lead to "irreparable" acts.
Khalil Belabbas was sitting in his car outside the Assalam halal butcher shop owned by one of the victims, Azzedine Soufiane.
Someone had left a lone bouquet of flowers at the door of the shop, which was closed, the lights out on a Monday mid-afternoon.
Mr Belabbas had come to confirm the news that his friend, a man he prayed with, had been killed in the attack.
Soufiane and his wife were well known and liked in the community, he said, a fact confirmed by a small but steady stream of people coming to the store to confirm the terrible news they had heard was true.
The meat shop owner was also known as an ambassador for the mosque.
Mr Belabbas said that there was "a certain distance" between Quebec Muslims and the broader community.
"Islam has become a mark of terrorism," he said. "We understand, but we try to be open, to have community days at the mosque, to be open with people."
He touched on an incident last June, when someone left a severed pig's head outside the mosque's entrance during the month of Ramadan.
Though police did not link it with the shooting, Mr Belabbas said the community felt that message.
But still - "we never, ever thought that there would be an [attack] like this".
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During an era when African-Americans continued to be treated as second-class citizens, and those living in southern states were subject to an ugly and often brutal system of racial apartheid, few did more to nurture black pride than Muhammad Ali.
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By Nick BryantBBC News, New York
The Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr may have been the untitled leader of the civil rights movement, winning the Nobel Peace Prize and delivering the finest oration that Americans had heard since the Gettysburg Address, but many young blacks especially did not consider him anywhere near radical enough.
In 1963, Sidney Poitier had become the first black actor to win an Oscar, an important racial first, but that meant little if you were unemployed in Detroit or summoning up the bravery to register to vote in Mississippi.
Ali, after knocking out Charles "Sonny" Liston in February 1964, to become the heavyweight champion of the world, arguably commanded the respect and awe of a larger black constituency.
"I am the greatest," Clay had declared. From a black man, in the midst of one of America's most tumultuous decades, it was not just a boast, but also a statement of immense authority. Ali exuded power at a time when many black Americans looked upon themselves as being powerless.
"To my generation he made it real," said the civil rights leader Al Sharpton, who became a close friend of Ali.
"Here was a guy that we all wanted to be like that was standing for something. I remember as a kid I didn't want be like an old preacher in a suit and tie going to jail.
"You wanted to be Muhammad Ali. You wanted to float like a butterfly sting like a bee. You wanted to be the one that all the girls wanted. You wanted to be the one that could pack arenas. He made it exciting to be part of the movement."
Ali was by no means the first black athlete to hammer at the walls of prejudice.
Jesse Owens had dealt a mighty blow to the idea of white supremacy at the Berlin Olympics - a timely one, too, given that Hitler had intended the games to showcase Aryan pre-eminence.
And in the 1950s, Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers star who became the first African-American to play major league baseball in the modern era, had broken the sport's colour bar. But what set the boxer apart was the way he fused his distinctive voice and outsized personality to the protest movement.
That voice was never anything other than loud, eloquent, highly entertaining and controversial. For much of the 1960s, it was also outside the mainstream civil rights movement.
By changing his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali just two days after claiming the world heavyweight crown, and by embracing the separatist teachings of the Nation of Islam, the boxer placed himself on the radical fringe of the struggle for black equality.
The Nation of Islam, under its leader Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, viewed white men as devils. But even mainstream civil rights figures came to believe that his religious conversion and outspoken advocacy had an energising effect on the freedom movement as a whole.
"The act of joining was not something many of us particularly liked," recalled Julian Bond, who was then a student activist. "But the notion he'd do it, that he'd jump out there, join this group that was so despised by mainstream America, and be proud of it, sent a little thrill through you."
Al Sharpton believes that that Ali was a unifying figure, in spite of his separatist ideology. "Malcolm X would openly attack Dr King, Ali would openly embrace physically Dr King," he said.
"He became a unifying force - that is why I think we made a lot of progress."
Everything on the line
It was not just the struggle for black equality that made Ali such a prominent political figure outside of the ring. His decision in 1967 to refuse to serve in Vietnam made him the country's most high profile anti-war protester.
"I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong," he said, citing his religious beliefs. After all, the Vietcong had never racially vilified him.
Rejecting his claim to be a conscientious objector, a court sentenced Ali to five years in prison. He was stripped of his boxing titles. Though he did not end up going to jail, he did not fight for three and a half years. In 1971, the US Supreme Court unanimously overturned his conviction.
At a time when there was still widespread support for the Vietnam War, it was a bold stand to make. It was particularly brave, said Al Sharpton, because Ali risked losing everything.
"For the heavyweight champion of the world, who had achieved the highest level of athletic celebrity, to put all of that on the line - the money, the ability to get endorsements - to sacrifice all of that for a cause, gave a whole sense of legitimacy to the movement and the causes with young people that nothing else could have done," he said.
"Even those who were assassinated, certainly lost their lives, but they didn't voluntarily do that," Rev Sharpton added. "He knew he was going to jail and did it anyway.
"That's another level of leadership and sacrifice."
Tony Gittens, a student leader at the time at the mainly African-American Howard University, where Ali once came to speak, said: "It was amazing to see someone of his stature being ready and willing to give up everything on principle.
"A lot of people decided that they were going to be with him. They burned their drafts cards and they took a stand."
In his later years, Ali's views softened.
He rejected the racial separatism promoted by the Nation of Islam. The American establishment, rather than fearing him, came to love him. But, by then, he had already made a matchless contribution to American history as an athlete who changed his sport, and as an activist who changed his country.
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A day after another mass rally in Yemen calling for President Ali Abdullah Saleh to quit, a senior minister and ally says agreement is close in negotiations for him to leave power - an outcome many now see as inevitable. This report is by a BBC correspondent in Yemen who is not named because of security concerns.
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The Yemeni opposition dubbed it the Friday of Departure. President Saleh called it the Friday of Forgiveness. But it was a student activist in Sanaa who came up with what proved to be the most accurate description: the Friday of Uncertainty.
The day started early with thousands of Yemenis marching in two different directions.
By noon, the crowd by the Sanaa University stretched to the horizon. It was by far the biggest demonstration against President Saleh.
It was hard to imagine that this massive rally was born out of a tiny sit-in organised by a handful of young students inspired by the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings.
Five weeks on, their protest has spilled out from the square and into the surrounding streets. Tents stretch for miles as thousands spend their nights in the streets, waiting for Mr Saleh to resign.
On Friday some wept as they remembered those who died only a week earlier when snipers fired from the roofs, killing more than 50 people.
"I came because I want to show Ali Abdullah Saleh that he will not scare me away," said one woman who brought her three-year-old son to the rally. "He can shoot as much as he wants, but we will keep coming."
Concessions, defiance
But Mr Saleh did not have to shoot to remind his opponents that he is a formidable opponent. Instead he stole their show by staging a massive rival rally.
Throughout this crisis Mr Saleh has remained calm, looking relaxed and confident as ground shifted from beneath his feet as some of his closest allies - high ranking military and tribal leaders, including the powerful General Ali Mohsen - turned against him after last week's shooting.
But just as it looked like he was about to fall - Mr Saleh brought thousands out into the street in a powerful show of force.
"The best thing is that nobody asked you to come here," he told the cheering crowds in a nod to widespread rumours that Mr Saleh supporters are paid to attend demonstrations.
The rest of the speech was a clever combination of concessions and defiance. He told supporters that he would go, but only on his own terms. He said he had to leave power in safe hands, and not in the hands of the opposition coalition which included, he said, Al Qaeda, rebels and arm dealers.
He dismissed the opposition but was much kinder to the youth saying that he would listen to their demands, an attempt perhaps to exploit a reportedly growing rift between student and opposition party activists.
Resignation talks
But while some elements within the opposition may be willing to negotiate with Mr Saleh, there is only one thing that students want - his resignation.
"Liar, liar!" young people shouted as Mr Saleh came up on TV in their tent city in the square.
Its not clear whether Mr Saleh's demonstration was his attempt to hang onto power or to strengthen his position in negotiating his exit.
Many in Sanaa think it's the latter.
The view that Mr Saleh's resignation is a matter of "when" rather then "if", was confirmed on Saturday when Foreign Minister Abubakr al-Qirbi said that Mr Saleh was negotiating actual terms of his resignation with the opposition.
It was the first confirmation of the resignation talks by a government official, who is a close ally of the president.
But it's not clear whether the sides will agree on the actual structure of the power takeover.
Another big issue is the future of Mr Saleh's relatives, many of whom hold powerful government posts.
Two particularly unpopular among the opposition are Mr Saleh's son Ahmed, who is in charge of the powerful Republican Guard, and his nephew Yahia Saleh, who heads the security forces. Finding a compromise on their future in the post-Saleh Yemen will be difficult.
And there are threats of instability too - President Saleh has repeatedly warned that his resignation could lead to a civil war, and throw Yemen into the hands of al-Qaeda.
These comments resonate strongly in the West.
The US has given Mr Saleh millions of dollars in counter-terrorism assistance and helped him to train the army.
While some other military units have joined the opposition, the elite US- and British-trained troops, headed by Mr Saleh's son and nephew, remain loyal to the president.
The end of President Saleh's 32 year-long rule may seem imminent, but it's the way he goes that could make all the difference.
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Four sailors have been rescued from their stricken yacht after its sail became unusable and its engine failed.
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They were rescued from the 11ft (3.4m) vessel after getting into difficulty a mile from Douglas at about 20:35 BST on Monday.
Without power, the yacht had drifted three miles away from the island.
The Douglas volunteer RNLI crew towed the yacht back to the Battery Pier where the coastguards were waiting to assist. No-one was injured.
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Wigan's Labour MP Lisa Nandy has told the Commons that some libraries in the town would be forced to close because of a £1.1m reduction in funding. With hundreds of libraries across England earmarked for closure, campaigners fear the humble service may become a soft target for multi-million pound council budget cuts.
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By Clare LissamanBBC News
Joseph Reynolds and his 13-year-old daughter Eve love to read.
The marine engineer pops over the road to his library in the small town of Wiveliscombe, Somerset, about three times a week.
"I can dip into a book and if it isn't really my cup of tea, I can return it and haven't wasted eight or nine quid," he said.
He said his teenage daughter "gets through books faster than me".
"She learnt to read from books at the library. The librarian knows her name and has seen her grow up," he said.
So the Reynolds family were shocked when Somerset County Council begun a consultation over withdrawing funding from Wiveliscombe and 19 other libraries.
The Conservative-controlled council needs to save £75m over three years and has proposed funding only 14 of its most used libraries.
More than 360 libraries and nearly 30 mobile services in England are under threat of closure this year as councils respond to the recession and government funding cuts, according to a collating group, Public Libraries News.
'Jewel in crown'
In Wiveliscombe, support is strong and more than 200 people crammed a hall for a meeting about the plans.
Mr Reynolds said: "Our library is a jewel in the crown of our rural community. We love it.
"We have a lot of young people and children here and to take away our library is like saying 'you're not good enough'."
Joanna Anderson said her nine-year-old daughter became "very dependent" on Wiveliscombe Library when she took more than a year off school through illness.
"It has been a life-saver for us," she said.
She said it would be very difficult for Isabel, who has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome after contracting a virus, to travel to libraries in the larger towns of Taunton or Wellington.
Isabel said she would be "very sad" if her library closed.
She said she had particularly enjoyed borrowing audio tapes and DVDs as well as reading Horrible Histories books and all of Jeremy Strong's children's books.
'Disproportionate' cuts
Despite passionate campaigns in support of libraries around the country, a government report in August suggested the number of adults visiting libraries had fallen steadily over the past five years.
The report, commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS), found 12.8% of adults used their local library once a month. However, figures remained static for children aged 11 to 15, with about 70% being regular users.
Lauren Smith, a qualified librarian from Doncaster, said many libraries - diminished by a lack of funding - were not treated or regarded as valuable resources.
Ms Smith, of Save Doncaster Libraries, is fighting proposals to close 12 of the metropolitan borough's 26 libraries and cut posts.
'Absolutely crucial'
"The unfortunate thing is a lot of local authorities are cutting library services disproportionately," Ms Smith said.
"For example in Doncaster, the council has been asked to make 8.9% savings but we are looking at over 50% cuts to the library budget."
Ms Smith, who works at Leeds University library, said: "Libraries are not just a luxury, they are absolutely crucial for community cohesion and they are vital for life-long learning."
Doncaster Council said it had to make £73m savings over four years. A spokesman for the Labour-run council added no decisions had been made over its library review which would go before its cabinet "in the near future".
Ms Smith said with high levels of unemployment in Doncaster, libraries were a valuable resource for people to use a computer to apply for jobs.
She added: "In isolated places where elderly people have lost partners the librarian may be the only person they speak to that day and they really enjoy that dialogue and conversation."
Councils have a statutory duty to provide library services under the 1964 Public Libraries and Museums Act.
But Ms Smith wants the government to give more and clearer national guidance and take greater responsibility in overseeing this provision.
Last year, Culture Minister Ed Vaizey announced the Future Libraries Programme - an initiative aimed at modernising the service.
He has also said any consultations should take place at "local level first" so councils could make the best choices on behalf of residents.
"I am monitoring very closely what's happening across England," he said.
"I will consider the use of statutory powers on a case-by-case basis. Local authorities have clear legal obligations, but library services must be looked at as a whole, including provision beyond the walls of library buildings."
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Life with a disability can sometimes give rise to unspoken questions and sensitivities, but amid the awkwardness there can be humour. The following is an edited version of a sketch by Fran Aitken who has ADHD, delivered for the BBC at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
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I have always been a space cadet. Someone whose head is in the clouds, constantly late and covered in bruises from bumping into stuff.
Knowing a space cadet has its advantages. I'm fantastic at picking birthday presents and giving them to you two months late, so it's a nice surprise for both of us. And I'll never be mad if you're running late, because chances are, I'm late too.
It doesn't sound like a disability, but there can be problems.
Secondary school was easy, it's structured, with teachers and family pushing you. But I struggled at university where you have to be self-motivated and disciplined, read what you're given and hand things in on time.
Storytelling Live: Going Out
Fran was one of six people with a disability or mental health problem to perform a story about going out as part of BBC Ouch's storytelling event at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe - hosted by Lost Voice Guy.
You can watch the show on iPlayer now.
Here are other stories from the event that you might like:
I'm not disciplined at all. I have no control and I couldn't understand how other students managed it.
I missed all my lectures because I'd stay up watching YouTube. I couldn't hand in essays, because I always forgot my password to upload them. I constantly forgot to wash my clothes, and when I did remember, I forgot to dry them.
The university placed me on academic probation and told me to get my act together.
How could I do that? The other students had gravity to anchor them, but gravity didn't work for me - I just floated away from Earth.
My best friend from school, Anna, came to visit. I hadn't seen her in a while and she looked bright and shiny and clever. I looked terrible.
Anna didn't mention my appearance, bless her. She carefully dodged the dirty clothes on the floor and the pile of pizza boxes. She sat on my bed and we got absolutely trashed.
Did I mention I had an essay due the next morning?
Halfway through our third cider, Anna rummaged in her bag and retrieved some white pills.
"They make you crazy," she said. "You feel like you're flying. You want one?"
Let's make this clear - it is illegal to do this and also very dangerous. But I was in a terrible place - what did I have to lose? I just wanted to forget everything. So, I took one.
We walked down to Boogie Nights, a popular disco nightclub in Wellington, New Zealand.
Space cadets do not generally have good memories, so it's testament to the power of this moment that I remember it.
We danced and had fun and then, suddenly, I landed on Earth.
My mind had been lovingly gathered, alphabetised, and given back to me, and I didn't know what to do with it.
I started to notice so many details. The man wearing running shoes, his tie with little kiwi birds on it. The pores of his nose - it really needed a deep clean.
I looked around. I mean, really looked, and saw this place clearly for the first time. Anna and I had been coming here for years, but now I saw the beer on the floor, the broken lights, the fact everyone was at least 20 years older than me.
The disco ball had three tiles missing. The bartender had a silver tooth. The mural on the ceiling had started to peel. The floor was covered in condom wrappers, the light bulbs had black spray-paint on them, Anna had highlights, there was a hole on the knee of my leggings, a TV played an old Western film reflected in the mirror behind the bar.
I had never noticed so much in my life.
I turned to Anna. "I don't think it's working for me," I said.
"What?"
"I don't think it's working for me," I shouted.
It sucked. There I was, surrounded by drunk people trying to moonwalk, and all I could think about was how the man across from me had a bit of lamb kebab on the collar of his striped shirt. Who the hell notices something like that in a club?
Time had started to go much slower than usual too. My mind wasn't skipping over minutes like it normally did.
I did the unthinkable and broke the space cadet code. I made a sensible decision - I put Anna in a taxi, then I went home.
With my new eyes, I saw the mess of my room in high definition. I put on a load of washing, I threw away the pizza boxes. Then, as the sun rose in the sky, I started, wrote, and completed my essay.
Now that I was down on Earth, it was easy.
I went back to bed and slept. When I woke up, I Googled the name of the drug Anna had given me.
Ritalin - a prescription drug for ADHD.
What I had experienced in Boogie Nights, for the first time ever, was focus.
I went to the doctor, who diagnosed me with type 2 ADHD - that means I'm predominantly inattentive, not hyperactive.
Women are, apparently, under-diagnosed with ADHD, because they appear quiet - often in their own world.
If I'd been diagnosed as a child, university would have been much easier. It's frustrating, but I'm trying to move on from the past.
I'm still a space cadet. I take a pill wrapped in foil once a day - the food of the future - but this time, it's prescription.
For more Disability News, follow BBC Ouch on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to the weekly podcast.
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Now that the charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn have been dropped, expect the blame game to begin in earnest. But the BBC's Laura Trevelyan in New York says some legal analysts believe the case showed the system worked as it should have.
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"How could District Attorney Cyrus Vance have got it so wrong?" the critics will ask.
Mr Strauss-Kahn's allies will doubtless claim that the now infamous shot of him doing the perp walk in handcuffs outside a New York police station cost him his job as IMF director and the chance to stand for president of France.
And yet, a number of legal experts believe that the saga of Nafissatou Diallo versus Dominique Strauss-Kahn shows the system working as it should when faced with the serious accusation of sexual assault.
After all, police did find forensic evidence of a sexual encounter of some kind between the hotel maid and the global financier.
Diametrically opposed backgrounds
It was a case of "she said, he said", where investigators and the prosecution had to unravel the competing accounts.
James Cohen, a professor of law at Fordham University, predicts the prosecution will be accused of failing to investigate properly, bringing down an innocent man in the process.
But he says the district attorney's office acted appropriately.
"The system is supposed to get it right and it did get it right," he said.
"There was a charge made and no reason not to accept it.
"The defence raised the consensual sexual encounter issue, the [district attorney] investigated the background of the victim and found she had credibility issues.
"So it's not a perfect process, but it worked as it's supposed to."
Much has been made of the diametrically opposed backgrounds of Ms Diallo, a hotel maid from Guinea, bringing up her daughter in the Bronx borough of New York, and Mr Strauss-Kahn, the poised, wealthy politician and financier.
The unravelling
Yet after the clash of those two worlds in Manhattan's Sofitel Hotel on 14 May, Ms Diallo's claims of sexual assault were not ignored, even though her lawyer now says the former IMF dierctor's wealth and power intimidated the prosecution into dropping the charges.
Police acted quickly to arrest Mr Strauss-Kahn just hours after the alleged encounter - but they would not have acted in such haste had he not been on a plane bound for France, says Linda Fairstein, the former head of the sex crimes unit in the Manhattan district attorney's office.
"The French are our friends and allies; it shocked me that we had no extradition agreement with them on sexual cases," she said. "Remember Roman Polanski never came back. There was that history."
Then there was Mr Strauss-Kahn's history as a womaniser to consider.
"Mr Strauss-Kahn's reputation of someone who's sexually aggressive with women seemed consistent with someone who could do this," Prof Cohen said.
Once the police had arrested Mr Strauss-Kahn, he was held in the infamous Ryker's Island jail, notorious for gang violence.
The dishevelled, fraught-looking Mr Strauss-Kahn was paraded in front of the cameras, handcuffed, a move New York authorities defended as standard practice.
Based on prosecutors' argument that the former jet-setting IMF boss was a flight risk, the judge set stringent bail conditions, placing Mr Strauss-Kahn under house arrest with an armed guard.
He and his wife rented a townhouse in lower Manhattan after their original plan to move to a posh apartment block on the Upper East Side fell afoul of neighbours horrified by the hordes of camera crews.
'Damning information'
Then, in late June the case began to unravel. The prosecution informed the defence of Ms Diallo's credibility issues - the results of its internal investigation.
Ms Diallo had lied on her asylum application and tax forms, prosecutors said, and changed her account of what happened immediately after the alleged attack in the hotel room.
US media reported that Ms Diallo had spoken to a man in jail about the possible benefits of bringing a case against Mr Strauss Kahn - her lawyers say the conversation in the Fulani language of Guinea was mistranslated.
Subsequently, Mr Strauss-Kahn's bail conditions were lifted.
So how did that happen?
Given that the entire prosecution case would depend on a jury believing Ms Diallo's version of events, her credibility was key.
A feeble, evasive witness would never withstand cross-examination by Mr Strauss-Kahn's crack legal team.
The problems arose when prosecutors began looking at Ms Diallo's background.
"You start to get records from the banks, from the authorities," said Ms Fairstein, the former sex crimes prosecutor.
"You're doing this to support her at the trial. And instead of getting what you expect, you're getting inconsistency."
'Power inequity'
Mr Kluger said that what fatally damaged Ms Diallo's credibility was a recorded phone call in which she appeared to discuss the financial benefits of pursuing a case against Mr Strauss-Kahn with her fiance, who was imprisoned on drug charges.
"The fact that the witness may have some skeletons in her cupboard isn't necessarily unusual," he said.
"It was the fact that there seemed to be a motive - that was the most damning piece of information.
"The credibility of the victim is the most important thing and the [district attorney] has to make a judgment. It's embarrassing for them to have so misjudged."
Although Prof Cohen believes the legal system worked as it's designed to, he notes the case yielded "very unfortunate consequences".
"He lost the managing directorship of the IMF and might have lost the opportunity to be president of France," he said.
Ms Fairstein fears the publicity surrounding the case could prove a setback for legitimate victims of sexual assault.
"If people dismiss the maid and say she did it for the money, it will have a chilling effect on some rape victims," she said.
But Mr Kluger said the case, from start to finish, showed everyone is equal in the eyes of the law.
"Her allegations were taken seriously despite the power inequity between them," he said.
"A system where the prosecutor brings charges, rather than make backroom deals or sweep things under the carpet, and then says I have questions about the case - that's how it's supposed to work."
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Three men have appeared in court charged with conspiracy to commit modern slavery offences.
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The offences are alleged to have taken place between 2016 and 2017 at two car washes in Carlisle and one in Penrith.
Defrim Paci, 39, of Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, Jetmir Paci, 35, of Minimum Terrace, Chesterfield and Sitar Ali, 30, of Adelaide Street, Carlisle, entered no plea.
Magistrates bailed them to appear at Carlisle Crown Court on 7 January.
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"I was really sore. It was really painful. And I felt really drowsy and sick, and just wanted to go back to bed," says Megan, watching a video of her first steps after major spinal surgery.
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By Sarah Bloch-BudzierBBC News
Wearing pyjamas and fluffy slippers, she treads carefully, held up on either side by a Turkish nurse.
Megan flew to Istanbul for private surgery late last year, having been told she faced long delays for an operation to fix the deformation of her spine, which was causing her problems breathing.
When the healthcare trust in Belfast told her parents it would be at least a year before she could have the procedure, they felt they had no choice but to fundraise for treatment.
Through the generosity of strangers, the money was raised - but surgery to insert four metal rods into her spine was painful and expensive, costing about £30,000.
Just a few days after treatment, 14-year-old Megan had to board a plane home to Northern Ireland.
"But I was so happy, because I just wanted it over and done with, and to get back on the road to recovery," she says.
For her mother, Karen Fleming, though, the upset and uncertainty still plays on her mind. And she is angry on behalf of dozens of other children still waiting for similar treatment.
"It's a shambles. It's a mess," she says.
"It's no fault of the surgeons. It's no fault of the nurses. But it's awful. It's just seeing your child in pain every day, knowing that you can't help them. And the only way for a lot of families is to fundraise, or actually to remortgage your house."
In Northern Ireland, targets say most patients should be seen within nine weeks and none should wait over 15 weeks.
Curvature of the spine
Just a few miles away from Megan's home in Carrickfergus, we visit 16-year-old Sophie Tanner in Belfast.
She waited 20 months for the same operation, to correct curvature of the spine, before it was cancelled the day before surgery.
Her parents were delighted when Sophie was then offered the procedure in Stanmore hospital, in Middlesex.
It went well but took 14 hours instead of the eight it was supposed to.
Nevertheless, the operation has taken the pressure off her heart and lungs and she has made a very good recovery.
But Sophie's parents say having to wait as long as she did was unacceptable.
"What most people in Northern Ireland want is the same treatment as the rest of the UK," says her father, Eddie.
"We're part of the UK, so we think that the waiting lists should be similar. We pay taxes. We pay National Insurance. We would expect the powers to be to make sure that places are pretty equal."
Surgeon: 'We have no choice'
Spinal surgeon Niall Eames, in Belfast, says the health service is doing what it can to restructure itself and offer surgery faster. But in the short term he has no choice but to tell many children they need to expect long waits.
"Telling a child that they can't have the operation when they need and want the operation - it's completely inappropriate," he says.
"Obviously it's terrible for the patients. It's awful for them. But equally for the healthcare people involved in the caring, the managers, the nurses, the consultants, the staff - it's awful not being able to offer the treatment we know they require in a timely manner."
New data from the Royal College of Surgeons shows the problem in Northern Ireland is getting worse.
At the end of 2017, there were more than 14,000 patients waiting over a year for treatment, with more than 3,000 waiting over two years.
In Northern Ireland that represents nearly one in 100 people.
By comparison there are about 1,800 people waiting over a year for surgery in England.
The Northern Ireland Health and Social Care Board, which runs the NHS, said: "The system is under huge pressure and the waiting times experienced by many patients continue to be unacceptable.
"There simply isn't either the money or required staffing levels to sustain the current model of care."
But the Department of Health in Northern Ireland said it had announced a £30 million investment in tackling hospital waiting lists in the current year. However, the money has not yet reached the frontline.
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The parents of a seven-year-old boy who died a week after heart surgery at Bristol Royal Hospital for Children in 2012 say they are still looking for answers - as the findings of a review into cardiac care at the hospital are published.
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By Owain ClarkeBBC Wales health correspondent
Luke Jenkins was a happy, lively child.
More often than not, according to his parents, he had the "biggest smile on his face".
"Nothing ever seemed to phase him," his father Stephen Jenkins told me at the family home in St Mellons, Cardiff.
"You wouldn't have believed he had a health condition."
But before he was even born in November 2004 doctors discovered Luke had a life-threatening heart condition.
The family were told he would need three big heart operations to put things right. The first came when he was just three months old.
Luke had been in and out of hospital frequently; so often, in fact, he'd developed a fascination with medicine.
He liked to dress up as a doctor, had his own stethoscope and white coat, and never wanted to miss an episode of Casualty and Holby City on TV.
He considered himself to be best friends with his cardiologist in Cardiff.
In fact his mother, Faye Valentine, tells me he told her Luke had decided he wanted to be a doctor when he grew up so that he could help other children who were ill.
But Luke never got the chance to realise his dream.
A week before Easter 2012, Luke was admitted to Bristol Royal Hospital for Children for his final big heart operation.
The hospital is the specialist centre for heart surgery for children from south Wales and the south west of England.
The operation, his parents tell me, was a success.
But they say they were worried when staff decided to transfer Luke from intensive care to a specialist ward - Ward 32 - less than 24 hours after surgery.
After his previous operations, they say Luke had been kept in intensive care for several days.
Over the coming days Luke's parents were worried about his recovery
He was in a lot of pain, was bleeding from his chest and kept triggering medical alarms
His parents flagged up their worries to staff - and wanted Luke to be re-admitted to intensive care.
That did not happen.
Luke's parents claim part of the problem was that the ward was understaffed, and Luke wasn't being properly monitored.
They also complained of a lack of communication between different medical teams.
By Good Friday, according to Mr Jenkins, his son woke and asked to see his mother, brother and two sisters.
They were staying in accommodation in another part of the hospital
By the time they arrived at his bed-side, Luke was screaming, clutching his chest.
He fell unconscious. And the "crash" resuscitation team rushed in.
His siblings looked on as Luke's chest was opened and the doctors tried to restart his heart. It took 43 minutes.
The memory still haunts the entire family.
Luke never regained consciousness and died in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Ever since, the Jenkins family have sought find out what went wrong.
Several investigations and reviews have been completed, others are ongoing.
The Independent Review into Cardiac Services is just the latest.
It concludes Luke's ward was often "under pressure" - and that "the nursing numbers would have fallen below the recommended levels on a reasonably frequent basis, and that there was a clear risk of harm as a result."
The review endorses work being implemented to ensure safer staffing levels on wards caring for very ill children.
So are Luke's parents satisfied?
Not really. His mother Faye tells me: "It's all a bit wishy-washy and quite disappointing."
The family are pinning their hopes that a forthcoming review by the Parliamentary ombudsman will provide more robust answers. They are also pursuing their own legal action.
What is clear is the Jenkins family feel they have had to and continue to battle against a health system that is on the defensive and reluctant to admit mistakes.
The latest review states the local NHS trusts approach to handling complaints, instead of resolving concerns, had at times led to "deepened suspicions and rifts".
There are recommendations to strengthen complaints procedures.
REVIEW RECOMMENDATIONS WHICH AFFECT WALES
How parents got together after children's deaths
But with each report and review the family say their personal grief comes flooding back - as Stephen Jenkins puts it - "it's like a punch in the stomach all over again".
Robert Woolley, chief executive of University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation, said as the report was published it wanted to "say sorry, particularly to those parents where the review has found our care fell below acceptable standards".
Welsh Health Secretary Vaughan Gething said they would ensure, where appropriate, any relevant recommendations from the review is incorporated into the Welsh heart disease delivery plan.
"I appreciate this may be a difficult time for the Welsh families affected by this report," he said. "I want to reassure those families we will be working closely with the NHS in Wales to ensure any lessons are learnt and shared."
The Welsh Health Specialised Services Committee's medical director Dr Siân Lewis added: "I want to reassure the families that, since we first became aware of the issues that led to this report, we have been working closely with University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust to address the issues raised."
As for the Jenkins family, they say: "We just wanted them [the hospital] to say sorry - we just want to remember the happy times."
The happy times spent in the company of Luke; the little boy who despite his own illness and frailties wanted more than anything to be a doctor, so that he could help others.
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It's not a line you hear very often. MP doesn't want hundreds of new jobs in his constituency. That's true for the Conservative MP for South Leicestershire, Alberto Costa. It's a standpoint he's had to take after consulting the people who matter most to him - those who voted for him at the last election.
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Tony RoePolitical editor, BBC East Midlands
It's all over plans to double the size of the area covered by what is already the biggest distribution centre in Europe.
Magna Park, sited on an old airfield near Lutterworth, is geographically in a very good place for companies like Asda, Argos and parcel distributors DHL in this online age.
Magna is right next to the M1 and A5, that old Roman road which runs up the spine of the country.
It's handy too for the M6 and M69. Plus, there's an international rail hub eight miles down the road in the Daventry district. Some call it the golden triangle.
The expansion plans were revealed before the General Election. And the new Tory candidate, in what is a safe seat, went to visit Magna Park and said at the time that "any development must take into account the views of people living here".
He urged those with an interest to contact him. And those views have indeed shaped his opinion.
It's probably come as a surprise to business leaders. The East Midlands Chamber of Commerce wants to see Magna Park grow and bring with it 700 new jobs.
Chris Hobson, its director of policy, said: "This is a real opportunity for the East Midlands. It will bring new jobs and businesses into the area, making the region a force for growth in the UK".
Stand at any roundabout and road junction near Lutterworth and you'll see one of the things local people object to most about Magna Park. You can already hear the roar of the traffic thundering by on the nearby M1, but it's the lorries heading to the distribution centre which rumble around the town day and night.
People are worried about an increasing number. They worry about the air pollution they bring and the traffic jams which often happen when shifts change at Magna.
Malcolm Stringer has other concerns. He bought his home next to the A5 17 years ago. A place for him to retire.
Sitting in his grounds you can see the white buildings of Magna Park in the far distance. If all the expansion plans are approved by Harborough District Council, the massive warehouses will come right up to the hedge at the bottom of his garden.
He feels he would be trapped if planning permission is given as he'd be unable to sell up if he wanted to move away.
Mr Stringer also questions why such big development of Magna Park is needed when there are already empty units on the existing distribution centre.
The local county councillor, Rosita Page, said she feels economic development is only right if the need for it is established; in other words, if jobs are required, and she doesn't feel the case has been made to approve the plans.
These are all the views Alberto Costa has been listening to and why he's taken the decision to object to the doubling of Magna Park.
"It might be good for the nation as a whole, this development, but for my particular constituency there's a real risk that it will increase traffic to unacceptable levels," he said.
And as for missing out on the jobs, he said: "Is it not better to put these parks where there is a genuine need for jobs? South Leicestershire has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the whole of the United Kingdom."
The latest unemployment figures bear this out - 423 people on Jobseeker's Allowance, which is less than 1% of the working population.
Like the lorries, this story will rumble along for a while yet and there will be a lot of noise too - expect demonstrations at the planning meetings and arguments to Government level at Westminster if the expansion is approved.
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President Joe Biden has finished his first full day in office.
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He immediately took steps to undo several Trump-era policies with executive actions - including halting funding for the border wall and reversing the travel ban on majority Muslim countries.
We asked Republicans on our voter panel how they feel that fits with the president's call for unity.
Udayan is an engineer and conservative voter who thinks Donald Trump was the best American president ever.
How did you feel about President Biden's first day?
It was just like any other first day of an administration. It would have been much more fun if Trump was in the White House, but I wasn't upset. I take the view that both Trump and Biden are servants of the people - not crowned heads of state - and they do not hold any power over me. Therefore we move on with Biden as president as we moved on with Trump as president.
What was your reaction to the president's executive orders?
The mask mandate is utterly useless and merely forces people who work in federal facilities to wear a mask. Cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline is a bad idea, but it was foreseeable. The repeal of the travel ban was to be expected. I do not support a pathway to citizenship for 11 million illegal immigrants; that is an invitation to break into the country. All these executive orders are nothing unusual. It's one of the easiest ways to start making an impact when you are not sure of your position in the legislature.
Has Biden shown he can unify the nation?
I personally do not think so. The ideology he stands for is a bit too radical and I do not believe it's going to unify the country. I do not have very high expectations for this presidency. The US federal government should not be a "nanny" state. It's not there to love you. Donald Trump was a strong and ardent constitutionalist, and therefore one of the best presidents. He was not in the business of offering a helping hand in tough times because you're supposed to tough it out.
Gabrielle is a Republican college student in Washington DC who refused to vote for Donald Trump. She wants to see both parties work together.
How was the president's first day?
It was painfully normal and kind of refreshing. It was definitely cool to see Mike Pence go to the inauguration. And it was a big deal - two weeks after the Capitol was attacked - to see the peaceful transition of power. Obviously I would love to have a Republican in control, but Biden's win is an opportunity for the Republican Party to look at itself in the mirror.
What about the those executive orders?
I don't think he did anything crazily drastic yesterday. I'm not opposed to the Paris climate agreement, but it's just a piece of paper; it fails to hold leading polluters, China and India, accountable. I have mixed feelings about suspending the Keystone XL pipeline. If we can get to a point where masks are no longer politicised, then a mask mandate is great, but it doesn't really do anything that has not already happened. A lot of the executive orders were just about symbolism.
Can Biden unify the nation?
I think there's potential for bipartisan agreements but one president cannot fix all the internal division that has been metastasising for about a decade. Unity is more about actions than words. After the Trump administration, a lot of people feel like they are not going to be heard anymore and that's something both parties need to address. The Republican Party needs to ask itself how it can show it is the party for blue-collar workers, Middle America and small business. The Democratic Party needs to ask how it has lost those groups and why so many people don't trust them.
Rom is a Marine Corps veteran and Trump supporter who does not want to see his party go back to the way it was before Trump.
How was Biden's first day?
The one thing that stood out in my mind that he said was, "we have to come together and be unified". This is true, but how do you do it? I didn't see or hear him say anything that's going to unify us from the standpoint of a leader. From my perspective, he's pushing an agenda that does not reflect all Americans.
What about those executive orders?
I don't understand how giving a path to citizenship for 11 million illegals in the country is going to unify us. It's allowing people who have broken our laws to stay here and become citizens when they got here illegally. The problem with the Paris climate accord is that it doesn't hold China and India accountable. The WHO is a worthy organisation in general, but it had a major failure with regard to the pandemic, yet we are re-joining it willy-nilly without addressing the problems associated with it.
Can Biden's unify the nation?
Based on the past 24 hours, not at all. I think it's going to be a third Obama administration. If you're on the right, you feel like you have no voice anymore. The biggest thing President Biden could have said was it's not okay for "Big Tech" to shut down voices on the right because freedom of speech is one of this country's most cherished values. That one comment alone could have made people sit up and listen. I'm not one of those fringe people that say he's not my president or he was elected fraudulently. Democrats have the White House and both houses of Congress, and they've got two years to prove themselves. I'm going to sit back and see where the chips may fall.
Eliana is a professional dancer and a big Trump supporter who is taking a step back from politics after his election defeat.
How was Biden's first day?
I was accepting of it. This is our new president, I'm excited for him and I hope he does a good job. I have completely lost all faith in the legitimacy of our elections - but once the Supreme Court pushed away all the cases, around the end of December, I thought it's more about coming together and doing what's best for all of us, rather than continuing to fight. After the Capitol, it made me more disheartened because politics is a show, it's like a theatre.
What about those executive orders?
If you want an honest answer, some of them are terrifying. It's the left's platform, but it is not a liberal platform. He's doing nothing to mend the gap between us. It's all so disappointing and terrifying. I feel like we're about to watch a huge economic collapse.
Can Biden unify the nation?
Not at all. If he hasn't unified the country in the 47 years he has been in politics, how in the world would he unify us now? Personally, I'm taking a step back when it comes to the national level of politics and keeping it local. I felt so isolated from friends I've had for years when they found out I was a Trump supporter. So I'm looking forward to bridging those gaps, but it's sad because politics should never get in the way of friendships.
Reporting by Sam Cabral.
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A man has been injured in a crash involving nine vehicles on the A96 at Huntly in Aberdeenshire.
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Four lorries, three cars and two vans were involved in the collision, between the Glens of Foudland and Colpy on the southbound carriageway.
Most people involved were free from their vehicles by the time emergency services arrived, but a lorry driver was taken to hospital for treatment.
The man's injuries were not thought to be life-threatening.
The road was closed while three of the lorries and a diesel spill are recovered.
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A second man has been arrested on suspicion of murder after a man was found in a burning car in the Malvern Hills.
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Emergency services were called to the blaze in a lay-by on Ankerdine Road in Cotheridge, Worcestershire, on Saturday.
The victim, in his 60s, was pronounced dead at the scene.
A 27-year-old man arrested in connection with the man's death earlier is being held in custody.
A 51-year-old man, arrested on suspicion of murder on Sunday also remains in custody, West Mercia Police said.
Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: [email protected]
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On 9 October 1967, guerrilla leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara was executed in Bolivia. Fifty years on, the BBC's Will Grant takes a motorbike tour of Cuba with the leader's son and asks him about the pressures of living under his father's legacy.
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By Will GrantCuba correspondent, BBC News
At times, the family resemblance is uncanny.
The stubbly beard, the unmistakable nose, the similarity extending down to a smouldering cigar clasped firmly between his forefingers.
Beyond the physical attributes, the youngest son of Latin America's most recognisable revolutionary, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, has inherited another trait from his late father: his love of motorbikes.
"I've always liked mechanics, speed, motorbikes, cars," said 52-year-old Ernesto, named after his father, over a cold drink in a Harley Davidson-themed bar in Havana.
"As a child I was interested in repairing cars and bikes. I suppose it's something I picked up from my old man but wherever it's from, I love it."
Despite the shared passion, the younger Guevara has taken a very different path in life: into tourism.
He runs a motorbike tour company whose only link to Che is in the name, La Poderosa Tours after La Poderosa, the famous Norton 500cc on which his father crossed the Americas in the Motorcycle Diaries.
La Poderosa Tours is a private company using foreign capital and works with several state-run Cuban companies. It is part of the wave of private enterprise permitted under rule changes by President Raul Castro in 2010, and a far cry from Ernesto's training as a lawyer.
When I joined him on a recent tour, we headed out west, towards the tobacco-growing region of Pinar del Río.
Heads turned on the streets of Havana as the fleet of Harley Davidsons swept out of the capital.
The motorbike is proving an increasingly popular way to see the island. The tour group was a broad cross-section of nationalities including riders from the United States, China, Britain and Argentina.
"Americans my age have never been able to come to Cuba and now we can," reflected amateur bike enthusiast Scott Rodgers from Massachusetts when we stopped for coffee.
"I don't know long that is going to last so I thought I had to jump through this window while I could."
Others were directly drawn to the link to Che, including Eduardo Lopez, a fellow Argentine.
"Of course he is part of the attraction," Eduardo said. "Travelling the world by motorbike is my hobby but we specifically came on this tour because Che lived for years in my home town of Córdoba. So we feel a link to this myth, this figure."
Despite the famous surname, Ernesto insists he is very much his own man.
"I always try to not link things. Anything I've achieved I've done as Ernesto Guevara March - as myself, as a human being," said the son from Che's second marriage to Cuban Aleida March.
"I do everything with a sense of responsibility. If it works out, then great. If not, fair enough."
So far, it's a business philosophy that has served him well. Last year saw record numbers of tourists visit Cuba and business at La Poderosa Tours is brisk.
He knows he has his critics though, particularly in Miami. It is often pointed out that after being born with such Marxist credentials, the younger Guevara has made a capitalist's career in tourism.
It's not a charge that worries him, however.
"It has nothing to do with whether it's socialist or capitalist," he argued with a hint of indignation in his voice.
"It makes no sense to focus on that issue. For me, we're doing a good job, one that helps my country."
Our tour carried on to a place synonymous with the darker side of his father's image, the Cabaña Fortress.
It was here that after the revolutionaries took power, Che presided over the revolutionary trials of members of the ousted military government. Dozens were executed in what critics of the Cuban Revolution say was summary justice.
Fifty years after his father's death, Ernesto still leaps to his defence insisting the trials were "normal". I pointed out that such a view will incense some families the other side of the Florida Straits.
"The enemy can say what he likes. The people of Cuba know why it was done, how it was done, and above all in order to bring tranquillity to all Cuban society that they weren't going to pardon murderers of that kind," he said looking out across the bay to Havana.
"So I'm very calm, my soul is at peace, and my father's soul is too."
Ernesto readily admits it wasn't always easy growing up with a famous father - or rather, without one. Che Guevara was executed in Bolivia in 1967 when Ernesto was just two.
"Of course, at school sometimes you'd be pointed out as 'Ernesto Guevara', but generally you were known as 'Ernesto Guevara March', which is the person you are. The son of both your father and your mother."
And as the worldwide fascination with his iconic father shows no signs of slowing down, this has become a point the younger Ernesto is keen to stress.
"Those who love me, love me for the person I am. Not just for the name Guevara."
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St Athan airfield has become a civilian airport after it was taken over by the Welsh Government and Cardiff Airport earlier.
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For more than 80 years, the Vale of Glamorgan site has operated as an RAF base.
It was announced last July that the change of hands would take place.
It is hoped the venture, which includes the running of a business park, will create 2,000 jobs including 750 at a new Aston Martin factory.
The transition is scheduled to take place over 10 years and will see the airfield regulated by the Civil Aviation Authority rather than the Military Aviation Authority of the Ministry of Defence.
Transport Secretary Ken Skates said there were currently no plans to develop St Athan as a passenger airport but freight services might be a possibility.
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India is reeling under a severe second wave of Covid-19 and many states are struggling to cope with the rising numbers. Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, is among the worst affected in the country and its people are suffering even as authorities insist the situation is under control, reports the BBC's Geeta Pandey.
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Kanwal Jeet Singh's 58-year-old father Niranjan Pal Singh died on Friday in an ambulance while being ferried from one hospital to another. They had been turned away by four hospitals for a lack of beds.
"It was a heart-wrenching day for me," he told me on the phone from his home in Kanpur city. "I believe if he had received treatment on time, he would have lived. But no-one helped us, the police, the health authorities or the government."
With a total of 851,620 infections and 9,830 deaths since the pandemic began last year, Uttar Pradesh had not done too badly during the first wave that ravaged many other states. But the second wave has brought it to the brink.
Authorities say the situation is under control. But disturbing images of overcrowded testing centres, hospitals turning away patients and funeral pyres burning round the clock at cremation grounds in the state capital, Lucknow, and other major cities such as Varanasi, Kanpur and Allahabad have made national headlines.
With 240 million people, Uttar Pradesh is India's most populous state. Home to every sixth Indian, if it was a separate country, it would be the fifth largest by population in the world, just behind China, India, US and Indonesia - and bigger than Pakistan and Brazil.
The state is also politically India's most important - it sends the largest number of MPs - 80 - to parliament, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi who, although from another state, contests from here. However, this political influence has brought it little development.
The state has 191,000 active cases at the moment and thousands of new infections are being reported daily - though numbers are believed to be much higher - and this has put the state's creaky health infrastructure firmly in the spotlight.
Among the sick are the state's Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, several of his cabinet colleagues, dozens of government officials and hundreds of doctors, nurses and other health workers.
Over the past few days, I have spoken to dozens of people from across the state, and heard grim stories.
Videos shared by a local journalist in Kanpur show a sick man lying on the ground in the parking lot of the government-run Lala Lajpat Rai hospital. A little distance away, an elderly man sits on a bench. They are both positive for Covid, but the hospital has no beds to accommodate them.
Outside the government-run Kanshiram hospital, a young woman wept as she said that two hospitals had refused to admit her sick mother.
"They're saying they have run out of beds. If you don't have a bed, put her on the floor, but at least give her some treatment. There are lots of patients like her. I've seen several people like me being turned away.
"The chief minister says there are adequate beds, please show me where they are. Please treat my mother," she said, sobbing inconsolably.
'No-one came'
The situation in the capital, Lucknow, is equally dire.
Sushil Kumar Srivastava was photographed sitting in his car, strapped to an oxygen cylinder while his desperate family drove him from one hospital to another. By the time they found a bed for him, it was too late.
When I called his son Ashish, he said he was too devastated to talk. "You know what's happened. I'm in no condition to talk," he said, his voice breaking.
Retired judge Ramesh Chandra's handwritten note in Hindi, requesting help after the authorities failed to remove his wife's body from their home, was shared by hundreds of people on social media.
"My wife and I are both corona positive. Since yesterday morning, I called the government helpline numbers at least 50 times, but no-one came to deliver any medicines or take us to hospital.
"Because of the administration's laxity," he wrote, "my wife died this morning."
Personally, it's come as no surprise to me that the state is struggling to deal with the coronavirus pandemic as it wreaks havoc on its people.
For years, I have despaired at the poor medical facilities in the state - it's where my ancestral village is located and I know the struggles of finding a doctor or an ambulance even in normal times.
With a raging pandemic, the struggles have become harder.
In the holy city of Varanasi, which is also PM Modi's constituency, long-time resident Vimal Kapoor, whose 70-year-old mother Nirmala Kapoor died from Covid in a hospital last Thursday, described the situation as "bhayavah" - frightening.
"I have seen too many people dying in ambulances. Hospitals are turning away patients because there are no beds, chemists have run out of essential Covid drugs, and oxygen is in short supply."
Mr Kapoor said when he took his mother's body to the cremation ground, he encountered a "lashon ka dher" - a pile of bodies. The cost of wood for the pyre has gone up three times and the wait for a spot for cremation has risen from 15-20 minutes to five-six hours.
"I have never seen anything like that before. Wherever you look, you see ambulances and bodies," he said.
Stories of deaths and families devastated by Covid-19 abound as infections continue to gallop - on Sunday, the state recorded 30,596 new cases, it's highest-ever single-day tally.
Even that, activists and opposition politicians say, does not give a true picture of the infection's spread. They accuse the state of keeping its case and death count low by not testing enough and not including data from private laboratories.
And there seems merit in their claim. Many people I spoke to said either they had failed to get tested or their positive results had not been uploaded on the state government site. From Lucknow, 62-year-old Ajay Singh sent me his wife's positive test report which finds no mention in the state records.
And neither Mr Singh who died in Kanpur, nor Mrs Kapoor's mother who perished in Varanasi, were included in the state's tally of pandemic casualties - their death certificates did not mention coronavirus as the cause of death.
Indian media has also questioned the government data - with reports of a mismatch between the official number of deaths and the bodies at crematoriums in Lucknow and Varanasi.
Anshuman Rai, director of Heritage Hospitals - a private group that runs medical collages and hospitals in the state - describes the situation as "extraordinary".
"The reason why services are cracking is because too many health workers, including doctors, nurses, ward boys and lab technicians are falling sick.
"At a time when we should be working 200%, we are not even able to do 100% because the health sector is totally manpower dependent."
Critics, however, blame the state and the federal government for failing to anticipate the second wave.
They say there was a lull between September and February when the health services and infrastructure could have been augmented, the state could have created oxygen banks and stocked up on medicines, but they squandered the opportunity.
And with the virus spreading rapidly, things are unlikely to get better anytime soon.
Charts and data analysis by Shadab Nazmi
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A £100m seven-year project to build 800 homes in Cardiff has begun.
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The Tirion Group development at the 53 acre (21 hectares) former Arjo Wiggins paper mill site in Ely, is expected to create about 1,000 jobs during construction.
It includes affordable and open-market houses, a village centre, footpaths and cycle ways.
Civil engineering works will take 16 months.
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The troubles just keep on mounting for Tesco.
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By Richard AndersonBusiness reporter, BBC News
Stagnant sales, falling profits, boardroom turmoil, dodgy accounting and now its biggest loss in history.
No wonder shoppers and investors alike are questioning what was, until recently, the undisputed king of UK retailing, revered as much for its gargantuan sales as its continual innovation.
So where did it all go wrong?
Innovation
From humble beginnings selling army surplus food in the aftermath of the First World War, Tesco's stranglehold on the UK's food retailing sector began to tighten in the 1990s.
It was one of the first major retailers to understand the power of loyalty cards - not just in boosting sales through discounts but in using vast amounts of customer data to help tailor individual shopping experiences. Tesco's Clubcard has since proved a blueprint for reward schemes countrywide.
It was a pioneer both in introducing smaller convenience stores in towns and cities under the Express and Metro brands, and in differentiating own-label products with its Value and Finest ranges.
Tesco was also at the forefront of online shopping, understanding the importance of home delivery in the internet age.
In short, it "understood its customers and implemented this understanding on the shop floor," says Neil Saunders at retail research group Conlumino.
"Its marketing was both clear and compelling."
From snapping at the heels of Sainsbury's in the mid-1990s, Tesco's share of the market hit almost a third by 2006, almost twice that of its erstwhile rival. It was opening new stores in the UK at a rapid rate and embarking on a substantial overseas expansion plan that helped it become the world's third largest retailer.
There was, it seemed, no stopping this retail leviathan bent on global domination.
'Startling decline'
And yet things have turned sour remarkably quickly.
Sales have been stagnant for the past four years while hefty profits have turned into significant losses. Last year, market share fell below 30% consistently for the first time in eight years. And despite a rally early this year, Tesco's share price is still down by more than 20% over the past 12 months.
Investors would normally pile in to a blue riband stock after such a startling decline, but as Garry White, chief investment commentator at Charles Stanley stockbrokers, says, some City investors refer to Tesco as a 'value trap' - a bargain stock that fails to perform.
Some reasons for the supermarket's dramatic fall from grace were outside the retailer's control, others less so.
The financial crisis and subsequent recession focused consumers' minds on value and led to the rise of discount chains - primarily Germany's Aldi and Lidl - at the expense of the established UK supermarkets, primarily Tesco.
At the same time, changes in shopping habits meant consumers were less willing to visit large out-of-town hypermarkets - the kind Tesco had invested heavily in - when they could get their groceries delivered at the click of a mouse.
Perhaps more importantly, Tesco became "complacent", according to Mr Saunders.
"It became a bit arrogant about its position, lost its customer focus and stopped innovating."
He also argues the company became too focused on profit and stopped investing in stores and customer service. This lack of investment became all too obvious on the shop floor.
Tesco also lost a lot of money, not to mention management time, on expensive overseas projects such as Fresh and Easy, its failed foray into the lucrative US market.
Finally, the company seems to have lost its way - where once there was a clear vision and identity, now there is indecision and confusion.
As Fraser McKevitt, head of retail and consumer insight at research group Kantar Worldpanel, says: "There has been no big innovation for a long time, while nobody knows what [the company] stands for."
The appointment of marketeer Dave Lewis as chief executive following the short and ultimately unsuccessful reign of Philip Clarke recognised as much.
"Tesco has a major brand problem and Mr Lewis understands brands," says Mr McKevitt.
'Radical solutions'
But what can he do to help Tesco turn the tide in a retail landscape that has changed considerably since the chain's heyday? Not only is the market more fragmented and more competitive, but all grocery retailers have yet to find a way to make good money from online shoppers.
Mr Clarke launched a £1bn turnaround plan that did little to convince investors. His successor will need to do more than throw money at the problem.
"Radical solutions are needed," says Rahul Sharma, retail analyst at Neev Capital.
"Tesco's predicament is similar to other major global retailers such as Walmart and Carrefour - it is wedded to its big stores. There are no easy answers."
These stores are not just a major source of profits, he argues, but they are integral to the distribution of home-delivered goods.
Simply selling off big stores is not, therefore, an easy solution.
But whatever direction Tesco chooses to go, whether it be reinvigorating both the brand and its big stores, or becoming a more streamlined business focusing on smaller outlets, one thing is certain - it is unlikely to return to its former glory.
"Tesco can be turned around, but it will take a few years," says Mr Saunders.
"However it will never get back to where it was."
For those critics of Tesco, who bemoan its role in ousting local retailers and paying farmers unsustainably low prices for their produce, this is perhaps no bad thing.
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Preparatory work for the Aberdeen bypass has got under way.
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The ground investigations, expected to take up to six months, will give potential bidders information needed to submit tenders for the contract.
The 28-mile road was given the green light by Scottish ministers in 2009, but was delayed by legal action. Protesters lost their appeal to the Supreme Court last month.
Previously predicted to cost £347m, that has risen to more than £650m.
Transport Minister Keith Brown said: "We have already informed the construction industry tenders for the main works will be issued in spring next year."
Aberdeen City Council leader Barney Crockett said: "I'm delighted to see that work is getting under way so quickly."
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Eating disorders are complex and can affect anyone.
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By Jayne McCubbinBBC Breakfast
When Eliza Small started seriously restricting her eating two years ago, she was referred for specialist help.
Her family had a history of eating disorders. But she was refused specialist outpatient mental health treatment because her body mass index (BMI) was too high.
''It made me feel like I wasn't good enough at my eating disorder," she said.
"It made me feel like I would have to get better at it.''
Which she did. A family member eventually paid for her to have private treatment and she was diagnosed with atypical anorexia - all the symptoms but not the right weight.
But what is the right weight?
Prof Tim Kendall, England's most senior mental health adviser, says weight shouldn't come into it.
''If you leave an eating disorder until it's got to the point where, say with anorexia, they've lost say a third of their body weight, that has a lot of longer-term consequences which make it very difficult to treat, so it's wrong in my view to leave this until it's got very bad.
"To be told you're not thin enough - it's almost an incitement to get worse. It's like someone going to their GP and being told - you drink one bottle of whisky a day right now? Come back when you drink two.''
Prof Kendall believes patient choice is important and community care has a much better chance of success. It should never be withdrawn, he says, and hospital treatment should be enforced only in the most extreme cases.
Guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) state that on its own, BMI is an unreliable measure of an eating disorder.
BBC Breakfast asked all 62 mental health trusts in England and Wales if they used BMI to decide who would qualify for outpatient eating disorder services.
Of the 44 trusts which responded, one-third said they did.
All said they used it along with other indicators - such as the speed of weight loss. Three trusts, however, said it was a primary measure. They were Derbyshire, Coventry and Kent and Medway.
In some areas, patients might be refused access to services if their BMI was over 14. In others, like Kent and Medway, if it was over 17.5.
Some trusts said they had a minimum threshold under which people might be refused outpatient services.
This is what happened to Claire: ''The first thing they did was weigh me and tell me my BMI was too low.
"I would have to go to hospital. I didn't want to, I'd had a bad experience before and I thought I was making good progress as an outpatient. So I was left to my own devices.
"Everyone's eating-disorder experience is completely different, you can't put everybody in the same box - you have to listen to the person, to how they are feeling."
Sarah Hodge, from Kent and Medway Partnership Trust eating disorder service, said they would rather not use it as a measure at all, but the problem was resources.
''You can have much more success when people have a higher BMI, they're much better able to engage with the therapy. But we just don't have the resources.''
The Department of Health says more funding is on the way: "We are investing £150m to develop community services in every area of the country for children and young people." Eating disorder guidelines from NICE are being redrafted. The hope is some of these concerns will be addressed when new guidelines are published later in the year."
Eliza said: ''You wouldn't tell someone with cancer to come back when their condition had deteriorated, why tell someone with an eating disorder?"
Eating disorders:
Research from the eating disorders charity Beat suggests more than 725,000 people in the UK are affected by an eating disorder.
The National Institute of Health and Care Excellence estimates around 11% of those affected by an eating disorder are male.
The Health and Care Information Centre published figures in February 2014 showing an 8% rise in the number of inpatient hospital admissions in the 12 months to October 2013.
It is estimated that around 40% of people with an eating disorder have bulimia, 10% anorexia, and the rest other conditions, such as binge-eating disorder.
Many eating disorders develop during adolescence, but it is not at all unusual for people to develop eating disorders earlier or later in life.
Source: Beat: Beating eating disorders.
Fit and fat: Is BMI the best way to tell if you're healthy?
Where are you on the global fat scale?
Update 4 August 2016: This story has been amended to remove the Cumbria trust from the list of trusts using BMI as a primary indicator. Although it told the BBC that BMI was a primary indicator, the trust has since stressed that it is one of a number of criteria used after a diagnosis of anorexia.
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The recent behaviour of actor Charlie Sheen has led to some - including US TV doctor Dr Drew Pinsky and a number of bloggers - to suggest he has bipolar disorder.
In this week's Scrubbing Up column, mood disorders expert Dr Paul Keedwell suggests why many commentators tend to condemn or stigmatise celebrities who behave in this way.
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VIEWPOINT By Dr Paul Keedwell, Neuroscience and Mental Health Research Institute at Cardiff University
Charlie Sheen has been flying the flag for the alpha male and the spirit of adventure with more than a little wit and bravura; something that has led to intense speculation about his mental health.
Whether or not Sheen does have a mental illness, the media coverage has told us important things about the way society sees mental health problems.
Articles on Sheen's behaviour have ranged from the judgmental - decrying his hedonistic lifestyle - to the celebratory - he has a right to behave like this and we should stop psychologising.
But there are also compassionate voices emerging: serious attempts to understand his behaviour.
Only a psychiatrist who fully assesses an individual face-to-face and takes a history from all possible sources is well placed to come up with a diagnosis and consider treatment options for mental illness.
Often more than one problem is identified, requiring a complex set of psychological, social and medical interventions.
However, many doctors in the media, and mental health discussion forums, have drawn parallels between Sheen's behaviour and the signs and symptoms of bipolar disorder.
These include increased rate of speech, speeding thoughts, increased sexual drive and reckless sexual behaviour, increased drug or alcohol misuse, profligate spending, irritability, thoughts of being especially powerful or gifted, thoughts rapidly jumping from one subject to another (known as "flight of ideas"), distractibility, paranoia, boundless energy and reduced need for sleep.
'A neat cause'
Discussions around the subject of bipolar disorder have generally been a good thing, highlighting the difficulties inherent in both diagnosing the disorder in the context of a hedonistic culture and drug misuse, and the difficulties in persuading the sufferer to accept treatment when they are feeling so elated and expansive.
However, it is worth considering the less charitable interpretations of Sheen's behaviour.
For example, we might take the line that he has brought his problems on himself by making a bad moral choice.
Drug use can certainly trigger and destabilise an underlying predisposition to mental illness.
However, even if mental illness runs in the family, predicting which of us will become ill is difficult.
To condemn someone with mental illness for using drugs is like condemning the smoker who has lung cancer.
Also, the more considered commentators realise that mental illness can lead to excessive drug misuse, as well as the other way round.
I believe that there are three basic motivations underlying such negative judgements.
Firstly, they provide us with what we think is a neat cause for his mental imbalance - a lifestyle so extreme that we can distance ourselves from it, satisfy ourselves that what he is experiencing would never happen to us.
Secondly, in judging him, we can all feel a bit better about our own transgressions. Finally, because we envy celebrity as much as we covet it, we have a morbid fascination with witnessing the downfall of those who we admired.
Another angle from commentators is that Sheen's behaviour is merely on a spectrum of normality and that he should be free to express himself.
The behaviour of someone with a mental health problem may be infectious and seductive: many of us are naturally attracted to someone who is happy, energetic, expansive and creative.
We can all 'win'
Superficially, behaviours expressed by individuals with a mental illness do not have a clear cut off from more common variation.
Bipolar disorder, for example, merges into cyclothymia - the moody personality.
This "bipolar spectrum" has expressed itself in our great poets, artists, scientists and novelists.
At the sharp end, though, there is a real risk of suicide (over 500 times the average population risk) or death through excessive risk taking, not to mention the long term social consequences of marriage break up, career meltdown or a prison sentence.
I once assessed a man in clinic who had rapidly descended from IT entrepreneur with a loving family to a divorced, unemployed ex-con living in a hostel in a deprived part of London, wondering how he could have been arrested two years earlier in a South London brothel, threatening a prostitute with a replica hand gun.
Mental illness is still treated differently to medical disease, even though at the extremes the disorder it is no less biological, and no more controllable through human will alone.
It can be remedied with a combination of medication, talking therapies and lifestyle changes.
We still cannot speak its name, in the same way as we could not talk about having cancer just a few decades ago.
Like cancer, mental illness is a common part of human life, especially as we get older, and it can affect us all, irrespective of lifestyle or background.
Also like cancer, much mental illness is most effectively treated in its early stages.
As the taboo of mental illness is broken down so people will present for help earlier, and society's burden of illness will come down: at this time we will all be finally "winning".
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A man from Scarborough who died after being swept out to sea has been named locally as Andrew Shaun McGeown.
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Mr McGeown, who was in his 30s, had been walking his dog with a friend.
North Yorkshire Police said he was reported in the sea at South Bay near the Spa at about 18:00 GMT on Sunday.
He was recovered unconscious from the water about 40 minutes later, and taken to Scarborough District Hospital but was pronounced dead.
Police said his friend was also taken to hospital suffering from shock and the effects of the cold, but was later discharged.
The RNLI, Coastguard and air support from RAF Leconfield attended the scene.
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At a Mexican restaurant in Dallas, Texas, half a dozen lawyers are talking about patents. The conversation turns to the activities of the so-called trolls, and they compete for the craziest examples of the patents they use in lawsuits.
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By Rory Cellan-JonesTechnology correspondent
"It is the guy with this scanner patent," says one.
"They claim that anyone who uses a scanner to scan documents, email the documents, owes them a royalty of $1,000 [£645] per employee."
"There are a couple of different trolls who claim that they invented the technology behind wi-fi," says another," and they are suing all kinds of companies, bars, hotels, restaurants. Anyone who offers wi-fi, they are saying you owe them money."
A third lawyer chimes in: "And then there's the peanut jelly sandwich patents..."
These patent lawyers work mostly for defendants, but it is hard to find anyone who thinks America's patent system has not gone just a bit mad in recent years.
Much of the blame is being placed at the doors of what are sometimes known as non-practising entities - or trolls, for those who do not like their work.
"A patent troll is someone who buys patents and then sues people," explains Alan Schoenbaum, general counsel at the cloud computing firm Rackspace, which has been targeted by patent lawsuits.
"Generally they are not inventors, they're entrepreneurs or finance people."
Deep pockets
Once, patent trolls were just a minor irritant for anyone launching a new product - not any more.
"Our research has shown that in just five years the United States patent system has been turned on its head," says the University of California's Prof Robin Feldman, one of the authors of a major study into patent litigation.
"The majority of patent lawsuits today are filed by entities that don't make any products, in other words in your terminology by patent trolls," she says.
"Their business model is based on extracting money from those who do make products."
Although some trolls develop their own patentable inventions in-house, most buy the technologies second-hand.
Innovators and companies are often willing to sell their rights as it guarantees them cash for ideas that might otherwise remain obscure.
It's not just the trolls who are keen - many recent tech takeovers have been driven by the desire to acquire patent libraries, perhaps most notably Google's $12.5bn purchase of Motorola Mobility in 2012.
But the trolls are vilified because of the perception that their legal tactics are more likely to hold back innovation than spur it on.
I set out to try to find some of these trolls and hear their side of the story.
But first, I ask Alan Schoenbaum to describe their tactics.
First step - get yourself equipped with a patent war chest: "The patents that they acquire are generally software patents. And they are very broadly written. They are very difficult to understand and oftentimes inscrutable."
Then find companies to target, threatening them with extremely costly legal action unless they pay a licensing fee.
"Defending a lawsuit is extremely expensive. It can range from as little as several hundred thousand dollars up to $5m or $6m to take it all the way through trial," he says.
"They play on that fear that the defendant is going to spend a lot of money to defend itself and it is simply cheaper to pay them off."
When they do reach a deal with their targets, there is almost always a non-disclosure agreement, and the whole process is so shrouded in secrecy that it is difficult to find out what is going on.
Hide-and-seek
Take the case which has seen a company called Uniloc suing a clutch of games developers, including the company behind the wildly popular Minecraft.
One of the defendants is X-Plane, which makes flight simulation software, and its owner Austin Meyer was vocal in denouncing the lawsuit when it was launched last year.
He wants to talk to me about the case - but explains that the lawyer representing him and other defendants thinks that unwise.
So I decide to drop in on Uniloc's headquarters in a suburb north of Dallas to seek its side of the story.
When I search a database of patent cases, Uniloc's name came up 85 times, so you might expect it to be a substantial business.
That is not how it seems when I pitch up at Suite 380 in a modern office building.
A very polite receptionist comes out of what appears to be a small office to tell me nobody is available.
I fare even worse when I try to visit the global headquarters of Lodsys, a company that has launched dozens of lawsuits and sent letters demanding licence fees to British developers, including at least one teenager.
Like a number of these companies, Lodsys keeps an office in Marshall, the small Texas town which has become a hotspot for patent litigation.
But the Lodsys headquarters is one locked door along a corridor of apparently empty offices. There is a piece of paper on the door asking the postman to leave mail in the foyer, but no other sign of life.
Talking troll
Finally, though, I find someone who is willing to talk.
Erich Spangenberg, has a company called IP Nav, described by Rackspace's Alan Schoenbaum as playing in the big league of trolls. His firm boasts that it has raised more than $700m so far in licensing fees for the patents it holds.
His Dallas headquarters certainly spoke of a substantial business.
The glass doors at reception are etched with the message: IP Nav Full Service Patent Monetization. Inside there are plenty of eager young staff at work, many of them physics graduates, according to Mr Spangenberg.
In our half-hour interview, he is extremely robust in defending the ethics of his work, and combative when I try to suggest that he and his ilk may be harming innovation.
Does it upset him to be called a troll? No, but he says the word has become meaningless: "Anyone who asserts a patent unless you're Google is apparently a troll. So I don't think it's descriptive, the accurate word is patent owner."
He listens to my description of little companies being harassed by owners of bizarre patents with impatient scepticism. "There is anecdotal abuse in every industry," he replies.
He paints himself as the champion of the little guy taking on the mighty corporations: "We don't push companies with less than $100m in revenue - it doesn't make sense economically."
He tells me I have misunderstood what a patent is.
Rather than being a defence for an invention, it is a property right defined in the US constitution - and just because you own one, that does not mean you have to make something with it.
"Much like an architect can design a building but does not build it, a songwriter can compose a song but doesn't have to sing it, an inventor can get granted a patent and ultimately is not forced to practise it," he explains.
As for his tactics, which can involve demanding a licence fee without revealing exactly which patent has been infringed until his target pays up, he is unrepentant.
He cites his recent clashes with Rackspace: "If you send them a letter without requesting the confidentiality, they can immediately file a lawsuit down in San Antonio, which is exactly what they did recently."
Mr Spangenberg is happy to admit that the patent monetisation business has been extremely lucrative for him - his $30m Dallas home is currently on the market.
But even if it is legal, I put it to him, many people see it as unethical.
"I don't understand the argument," he retorted.
"Let's talk about who wants to promote innovation and who doesn't. Do you really believe that what Google wants is to eliminate the patent system to further promote innovation? Sorry, I don't believe it."
And, referring to calls for reform, he goes on: "India and China are celebrating what we are doing to our patent system."
Change may be in the air, as politicians right up to President Obama criticise the current patent system and attack the trolls.
Even Mr Spangenberg concedes there do need to be some reforms - but in the meantime he is getting on with the serious and lucrative business of patent monetisation.
Rory's documentary Patently Absurd will be broadcast at 20:00 BST on 20 August on BBC Radio 4.
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A mosque in east London has closed for all communal prayer. Instead it is serving two purposes - providing funerals and feeding the local community. Michael Buchanan finds a team of volunteers there battling to deal with the pandemic.
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The family shuffled quietly past a crate of milk cartons. They came through the small porch, towards the open coffin. Inside was a woman - a loved one - who died of Covid two days ago. The coffin sat feet away from tins and packets to be distributed by the local food bank. The milk was the latest delivery.
It is impossible to capture the enormous consequences of the pandemic. But last Saturday lunchtime, this tragic image - one of grief and hardship coming together - came close, for me at least.
Covid-19 has made extraordinary demands of so many different people, but what is currently happening at the Masjid Ibrahim and Islamic Centre in east London is truly remarkable. Situated on a busy road, with the noise of ambulance sirens regularly shattering its peaceful interior, the mosque has closed to communal prayer and is open for two other purposes - to provide a funeral service and a food bank to the local community. Both are inundated.
"We've had so many bodies coming in. It's quite shocking. It's one after another after another. We've never had that situation before," says Sofia Bhatti. Alongside her friend, Tabassum Khokhar - known as Tabs - the pair are unheralded heroes. They volunteer to wash the bodies of Covid-positive women prior to burial.
The practice, called Ghusl, is a sacred Islamic ritual and is usually performed by the deceased's relatives, who cleanse and shroud the body. But Covid restrictions mean families are currently denied that religious honour, so volunteers like Sofia and Tabs are taking on what they consider to be a privileged task.
"We actually believe that when we are shrouding here, that God is shrouding the soul at the same time," says Tabs, standing by a coffin. By day, she works as a teaching support worker in a local school, so the PPE that the mosque provides - bodysuit, footwear, two sets of gloves, masks and visors - is crucial for her. "I make sure my PPE is secure because it's not just about me, it's about my family. I have an 81-year-old mother."
The women are seeing first hand - and in graphic detail - the pressure the NHS is under. "Very often we see bodies coming in with a lot of medical equipment still attached to them," says Sofia. "Tubes and pipes and catheters still attached. So it makes our job a little bit harder." One of the women they washed during my visit had died in the ambulance, never actually reaching hospital.
There are far more bodies than during the first peak and there is a larger age range. One day this week, the mosque was handling seven bodies. A few days earlier they said they'd processed 10 funerals, all arranged for free and paid for by donations. Before the pandemic, they'd handled two to three funerals a week. The two local hospital trusts in east London have each had more than 1,000 Covid deaths since the start of the pandemic. More have died at home.
The borough of Newham, where the mosque sits, has suffered a disproportionate number of deaths. Home to the Olympic Park, the 2012 London games were meant to regenerate this area. Yet it retains high levels of poverty and overcrowded housing. Add in a diverse population, rich in south Asian culture, and large numbers of people who can't work from home and the virus has sadly ripped through its residents.
Isfand Aslam said he's shocked by what's going on. His father, Mohammad, died on 3 January, a week after falling ill. His positive Covid test result arrived two days after his death. The 85-year-old was a committee member at the Masjid Ibrahim and despite his age had been in good health. "It took a week between him passing away and getting buried. Initially I was getting a lot of condolences from friends. But by the end of that week I am giving condolences to three friends because their fathers had passed away. It's now got to the stage where everybody we know knows somebody who has passed away."
'I have no money'
The sheer number of deaths is impacting the area's main Muslim cemetery. Normally, the Gardens of Peace buries three to four people each day. They're currently carrying out an average of 15 funerals daily. Overall, they are about 50% busier than usual. They can no longer promise burials within 24 hours, as per Muslim custom.
Despite this, there is still a concerning number of people in the local area who either don't think Covid is real or are resistant to taking a vaccine. There was anger among some community leaders before Christmas when it emerged the Bangladeshi High Commission in London held a cultural evening to celebrate its independence. Photos from the event, on 16 December, showed a group - including the High Commissioner herself - standing close together with no masks or social distancing. The High Commission said performers had been Covid tested and it had issued 10 videos in Bangla urging British-Bangladeshis to adhere to UK government guidance.
To counter disinformation among its members, an imam at the Masjid Ibrahim, Mohammad Ammar, filmed a short video of himself being injected with the vaccine and urged his congregation to follow suit. Imam Ammar has actually been furloughed by the mosque as it focusses all its resources on battling the pandemic, including feeding its local community.
The virus forced the mosque to open a food bank in March. It is still running 10 months on. On Monday night, I watched a steady stream of people gather in the gloom at the rear of the mosque to fill their bags. Most were collecting on behalf of a larger household, and the mosque says they're currently feeding 350 families each week, including students, refugees, people with no access to public funds and those who've lost income.
Among those collecting food on Monday was Mohammad Rahman. A 42-year-old chef, he lost his job in an Indian restaurant three months ago. The married father of two boys - aged eight and six - told me he was already in rent arrears and struggling to pay his energy bills. "My son says 'where is the pizza'? But I have no money. He says '[can I have] chicken and chips'? But I have no money. The shops are open, but no money", he adds, taking his hands from his pockets.
In normal times, the Masjid Ibrahim would attract about 1,100 worshippers over three floors for Friday prayers, and there has been some pressure on the leadership to reopen for communal worship. But Asim Uddin, chairman of the mosque, says now is not the time. "Prayers, yes, it's important. But right now what is the need? The need of the community is they want to be fed and they want a place where they can respectfully bury their loved ones. And the demand is overwhelming. Right now, it's better they stay home, and they can pray at home until the situation goes back to normal."
Read more from Michael
Michael Buchanan is the BBC's social affairs correspondent and has been reporting on the impact of the pandemic on communities in the UK. Last year, he visited the town of Pontypool to find out what impact coronavirus restrictions were having in Wales.
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David Livingstone and Henry Stanley overcame poverty to become Victorian Britain's foremost explorers. Now adventuring seems to be the preserve of the rich and well to do. So are there any British explorers left who aren't posh?
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By Jonathan MorrisBBC News
"Let's face it, most of us don't go on adventures," says the broadcaster Andrew Collins. "The closest most people come is a gap year in a country with only intermittent wi-fi access.
"So it's little wonder that those who slot into the "adventurer" category come from backgrounds where spare time is at less of a premium."
He may have a point. The chief speaker at the Adventure Travel Show in London this weekend is Sir Ranulph Fiennes - also known as the 3rd Baronet of Banbury.
Along with fellow Eton-educated Bear Grylls and former Tatler picture editor Ben Fogle, they are just three of the many posh boys known for doing adventurous things for TV, charity or both.
But is it entirely due to privilege?
"It seems more significant to me that TV adventurers often come from a military background," adds Collins.
"Bruce Parry, Bear Grylls, Ray Mears - it's easy to make the leap from that lifestyle to strapping on some boots and heading off into the unknown.
"Also, it's well known that public schools produce people with an overinflated sense of entitlement and confidence, both of which come in handy up a mountain."
Among adventure sports, nothing has more of a tendency towards toffness than ocean rowing.
Livingstone and Stanley
The figure of the gentleman adventurer is, of course, nothing new.
But for Livingstone and Stanley it was more about having the right stuff than the right accent, says historian Tim Jeal.
Dr Livingstone came from a humble background and began work in a cotton mill aged 10.
Yet, after becoming a missionary and being posted to Africa, he made his name as an explorer of much of the continent.
Stanley, who also explored central Africa and famously found Livingstone there in 1871, grew up in a workhouse.
"Grylls and Fiennes are all remarkable people, very tough and resilient and quite amazing in that way," says Mr Jeal.
"But you can't see these people in the same light as Livingstone and Stanley, largely because Africa was like the back of the moon."
Eton-educated Prince William cheered home his Harrow-educated friend Olly Hicks on his return from his solo crossing of the Atlantic in 2005.
When Fogle rowed the Atlantic with Olympic medallist James Cracknell one year later, the latter dismissed the role poshness played, writing of Fogle: "Do not be fooled by the accent; competitiveness is not class based."
Yet among the latest contenders to cross the Atlantic is another public schoolboy, Tom Rainey, last year's winner of a Young Brits award by "outfitters to the gentry" Jack Wills.
The 23-year-old admits he has used his connections to fund his planned row across the Atlantic in May from New York to Salcombe, in Devon. Mr Rainey, who works in the oil industry, was able to put down a £20,000 deposit for the boat.
He and friend Sam Coombs, 24, aim to be the youngest team to row from mainland USA to mainland UK. The trip will take three months and raise some £250,000 for the Brain Tumour Charity in memory of Mr Rainey's father who died from the disease.
"I wrote hundreds of letters for sponsorship but they never really transpired," he says. "But we have family or friends connections with all our sponsors.
"It is 100% who you know and everyone who has donated has been extremely friendly and generous."
He believes public schools produce a disproportionately large number of adventure sportsmen because they encourage outdoor activities.
"I think that's the difference. I did kayaking and Combined Cadet Force at school and all that stuff taught me how to enjoy being outdoors."
But are there any "normal" folk treading a similar path?
Despite how it might appear, there are.
Edinburgh-based ocean-rowing veteran Leven Brown, 42, had to raise more than £84,000 to fund his first trans-Atlantic expedition.
"I sold my house, car, I even sold my toaster, my DVDs, my Playstation, my furniture and we still didn't have enough money," he said.
"I remember after I bought my boat, sleeping in a park bench in Newcastle because the last train connection had gone.
"I thought it was just part of the journey. If you can't stand the idea of sleeping on a park bench perhaps you shouldn't row an ocean."
Ann Daniels, who went to a comprehensive school in Bradford, was the first woman, along with expedition teammate Caroline Hamilton, to reach the north and south poles as part of all women teams.
Her father was a door-to-door insurance salesman and her mother was a secretary at Marks & Spencer.
"It doesn't matter how rich you were, what education you had, or what your background was when you are surviving from day to day," she says. "Become the 'you' who's normally hidden away behind the veneer of civilised society's rules and regulations."
And for those hard of cash but seeking adventure, the best policy is to look for a bargain.
Serial adventurer Alastair Humphreys, 38, who once dragged a homemade steel cart (filled with 300kg of supplies) for 1,000 miles through the so-called Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula, went to public school but said there was nothing to stop anyone following in his footsteps.
"I spent four years cycling round the world and spent less than £7,000," he says. "I walked across India coast-to-coast and that cost me £500 including the plane ticket, so these things can be cheap.
"Rowing an ocean is expensive and that needs sponsors but you can do good things without much money."
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In the early hours of 8 January, Iran launched attacks on Iraqi bases housing US forces in retaliation for a US drone strike in Baghdad last Friday that killed a top Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani.
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But despite furious warnings from Tehran that the US would pay a significant price for that killing - no-one was hurt by the retaliatory attack, according to US President Donald Trump.
So did Iran intentionally avoid causing casualties?
What did Iran and the US say?
A statement from Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) said "tens of surface-to-surface missiles" were launched early on Wednesday "to crush the occupied air base of terrorist and aggressor army of the US in Al Asad", the hub for American military operations in western Iraq.
Iran's Tasnim news agency, which is close to the IRGC, reported that Fateh-313 and Qiam missiles were used in the attack , and that US forces failed to intercept them because they were equipped with cluster warheads. The warheads also caused "tens of explosions" at Al Asad, it said.
The US defence department said Iran launched more than a dozen ballistic missiles that targeted at least two Iraqi military bases - Al Asad and Irbil, in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region.
Mr Trump said US forces suffered no casualties as a result of the Iranian missile attacks, and that the bases sustained "only minimal damage". In a televised statement, he credited "the precautions taken, the dispersal of forces, and an early warning system that worked very well", and declared: "Iran appears to be standing down."
However, the US's top military officer, Army General Mark Milley, said he believed the attack was meant to be deadly.
He said his "personal assessment" was that Iran "intended to cause structural damage, destroy vehicles and equipment and aircraft, and to kill personnel".
What did the missiles actually hit?
Iraq's military, which also reported no casualties, said the country was hit by 22 missiles between 01:45 and 02:15 on Wednesday (22:45-23:15 GMT on Tuesday). It said 17 missiles were fired towards Al Asad air base.
Satellite photographs taken by the commercial company Planet Labs for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies showed what appeared to be at least five destroyed structures at Al Asad. David Schmerler, an analyst at the Middlebury Institute, told NPR: "Some of the locations struck look like the missiles hit dead centre."
But it was clear that some of the weapons did not hit the bases. Two of the missiles aimed at Al Asad fell in the Hitan area, west of the town of Hit, and did not explode, according to the Iraqi military.
Photos of the remnants of one of those missiles, including three large parts of its fuselage, subsequently emerged on social media.
The Iraqi military said Iran fired five missiles towards Irbil air base, in the northern Kurdistan region. It did not say how many hit the base, but state TV reported that two missiles landed in the village of Sidan, 16km (10 miles) north-west of the city of Irbil, and that a third missile came down in the Bardah Rashsh area, about 47km north-west of Irbil.
Journalists meanwhile photographed security forces retrieving debris from what they believed was the crater caused by the missile that hit Bardah Rashsh.
Did Iran try to avoid US casualties?
US and European government sources told Reuters news agency that they believed the Iranians had deliberately sought to minimise casualties and avoid hitting US facilities in order to prevent the crisis escalating out of control while still signalling their resolve.
CNN journalist Jake Tapper quoted a Pentagon official as saying that Iran "deliberately chose targets that would not result in loss of life".
The Washington Post reported that US officials said they knew by Tuesday afternoon that Iran intended to attack American targets in Iraq, although it was unclear which ones.
An early warning came from intelligence sources as well as communications from Iraq that conveyed Iran's intentions to launch the strike, the paper said.
David Martin, Pentagon correspondent for the BBC's US partner CBS, said a defence official told him the US was warned of the attack "multiple hours" before, giving plenty of time for troops to take shelter in bunkers.
The source said this warning came from a combination of satellites and signals and communications intercepts - the same systems that watch for North Korean tests.
But Mr Martin said he had not found anybody, including one very senior officer, who knew anything about a heads-up from the Iraqi prime minister. This official did not agree with speculation that Iran was aiming to miss.
"Our movements saved American lives," the official told him.
BBC defence correspondent Jonathan Marcus said: "Whether this was by design, or just due to shortcomings with the manufacture and accuracy of their missiles, as yet remains unclear. However, launching long range missiles against US bases is a risky way of making a point."
He added: "Looking at the initial civilian satellite pictures of the impacts of the Iranian missiles at Al Asad air base, they appear to have destroyed several structures, so the lack of casualties could be as much by luck rather than design."
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The head of Northern Ireland's civil service has apologised for "multiple failings" by Stormont in NI's flawed green energy scheme.
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By Jayne McCormack & Conor MacauleyBBC News NI
David Sterling was appearing at the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) inquiry.
The scheme was set up in 2012 to boost uptake of eco-friendly heat systems, but huge subsidies led to a £490m bill for Northern Ireland taxpayers.
When problems with RHI emerged in 2015, Mr Sterling was working in Stormont's finance department.
He was appointed interim head of the civil service in June 2017.
On Thursday, he offered a "profound and unequivocal" apology for the mistakes made, and promised that lessons would be learned to prevent it from ever happening again.
He said any recommendations the inquiry makes will be implemented quickly and fairly.
But the inquiry's chair Sir Patrick Coghlin pointed out that two previous enterprise projects had resulted in similar flaws and that the civil service had a lot of convincing to do.
'Convincing to do'
He said the panel needed to be reassured that "third time round" there would be effective learning.
Mr Sterling said he understood that the public might be "cynical and sceptical" about his apology, but the civil service was "serious" about ensuring there was no repeat.
He said the civil service was already changing in response to what it had learned.
But he added that it was unfair to judge all 23,000 civil servants on the problems generated by one badly handled scheme.
He also said he was sorry to his fellow civil servants for the damage done to their reputation by the scandal.
The change process is being led by the top civil servant in the finance department, Sue Grey, a former Whitehall official with experience in investigating allegations of improper ethics in public life.
Mr Sterling said the Information Commissioner had also been asked for a set of principles to which civil servants should comply, and they were now being circulated to all staff.
He was asked what the most surprising piece of evidence he had heard.
Mr Sterling said it was the amount of knowledge around about the abuse of the scheme which officials had not been alerted to.
But the panel pointed out that they had been told.
'Regret over minutes claim'
Inquiry panellist Keith MacLean said officials had been told about allegations of abuse but had failed to listen.
He said it seemed some people had "their eyes closed and their ears blocked".
Mr Sterling also said he "regrets" telling the inquiry in March that minutes of departmental meetings were frequently not taken in a bid to frustrate Freedom of Information requests, because the two largest political parties - the DUP and Sinn Féin - were sensitive to criticism.
Inquiry counsel David Scoffield said the absence of record-keeping is one of the public's "key concerns" as a result of what the inquiry has uncovered.
But the civil service boss said it was more likely that the bad practice originated due to a concern that "sensitive issues being discussed" by ministers might "find their way into the public domain, whether by leak or other disclosure".
Also on Thursday, Mr Sterling said he did not try to blame a colleague for problems surrounding a green energy scheme, in order to get the top job.
In 2016, when the scandal became public knowledge, he was the finance department's permanent secretary.
His department, and the enterprise department - which set up the scheme - were involved in plans to cut the ill-fated scheme's costs.
Mr Sterling said the suggestion that he had tried to blame the enterprise department's top civil servant, Andrew McCormick, for the mess in 2016 was "grossly unfair".
The following year, both were the only shortlisted candidates for the vacant position of head of the civil service.
Mr Sterling was appointed in June 2017 on an interim basis.
'Grossly unfair'
He rejected a suggestion by former DUP special adviser Timothy Cairns, that in January 2016 moves were afoot to blame the enterprise department, and that there might have been a "connection" to the appointment process.
Mr Sterling said he had known Mr McCormick for 18 years and considered him a "friend and a colleague".
"I would absolutely refute any suggestion that I would do anything to try and pin the blame on him particularly to try and gain some personal advantage in a competition which hadn't even launched.
"There wasn't even a vacancy at that stage."
Mr Sterling said when he wrote to Mr McCormick in January 2016 seeking answers to what had gone wrong with the scheme, he was conscious that he (Mr Sterling) had been the permanent secretary in enterprise when the scheme was designed and implemented.
Because of that, he said he was aware he "bore some responsibility" for what had happened.
He said the letter that had been written would have been sent by any head of finance in similar circumstances.
He said any suggestion that he'd done it to gain an advantage was "grossly unfair".
"It's just not in my nature to do something like that," he said.
Also on Thursday, Mr Sterling said he does not recall a DUP special adviser telling him he had a relative on a controversial green energy scheme.
At that point, the department was being led by DUP minister Arlene Foster, whose special adviser was Andrew Crawford.
The inquiry has discovered that three of Mr Crawford's relatives were claimants and had 11 boilers between them.
Mr Crawford, in his evidence, said he had informed Mr Sterling in 2015 that his brother was on the scheme.
'No formal system'
But the civil service boss said he had no memory of any such conversation, and that he believed he would have recalled it.
He said it would have been prudent for Mr Crawford to record his family connection to the scheme as a potential conflict of interest.
There was no form for him to do that at the time, but Mr Sterling said it would have been possible to record it in some fashion.
He told the inquiry there is still no formal system in place for special advisers to record a conflict of interest.
But Sir Patrick said: "You're still working on this three years later?"
Mr Sterling said it had been included in work going on between the parties during talks processes last year, as part of a paper called transparency, governance and accountability.
"We're working on the basis that seeking agreement with incoming ministers would see such an agreement in place," he added.
Mr Sterling also denied claims he had ever had a row with Mr Crawford and accused him of keeping the scheme open for the benefit of his family.
The inquiry was also told Mr Sterling was not aware that Mr Crawford was making suggestions to a DUP colleague in the enterprise department about plans to introduce cost controls to the scheme in summer 2015.
The colleague was another special adviser, Timothy Cairns.
The enterprise department had set up the scheme, and Mr Cairns was involved in discussions with officials to get its budget under control.
In an email exchange, Mr Crawford made a suggestion that the amount of hours on a higher tariff be doubled and bigger boilers be eligible, so that the poultry industry did not lose out from the scheme changes.
'Throttle the costs'
Poultry farmers made up the majority of claimants on the scheme.
Inquiry panellist Keith MacLean said the effect of the suggestion would have been to undermine plans to "throttle the costs".
The idea was quickly rejected by officials because of its cost implications.
Mr Sterling said he was not aware of the contact and he should have been told, as should Mrs Foster have been.
Sir Patrick said it was "worrying" that neither Mr Sterling, nor the permanent secretary in the enterprise department, Andrew McCormick, were aware of what was taking place.
"Where's the control that flows from the fact that spads (special advisers) are paid public money?" Sir Patrick asked.
Mr Sterling said if special advisers did not inform officials about what they were doing, it was difficult for civil servants to know.
Later, Mr Sterling admitted he knew a DUP adviser removed a reference to the poultry industry being the root cause of the RHI spike from a key government paper.
The term that Andrew Crawford removed was contained in a draft paper to be sent to the then Office of the First and Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM), seeking the ultimate closure of the scheme in February 2016.
The paper referred to the "wholesale uptake" of RHI boilers by poultry farmers and how it had contributed in large part to the pressure on the budget.
Mr Crawford has told the inquiry he accepts he should not have taken it out.
'Let it go'
He said he was concerned about the inference it created and because he believed there were also other industries that had contributed to the huge numbers getting into the scheme.
The spike in applications - about 800 - did the most damage to the public purse in the context of the RHI budget.
Mr Sterling said he did not think it was worth "having a major set-to" with the special adviser to put the reference back in.
It had been put in the paper by the enterprise department, which had set up the scheme.
The finance department had then removed it, on the basis of advice from Mr Crawford.
'Intense period'
Mr Sterling said he was not aware at the time of the significance of the poultry reference and that if Mr Crawford wanted it removed, to "let it go".
He said his priority was ensuring changes were agreed by the executive in order to get the scheme closed.
He admitted with hindsight, it would have been sensible to explore the issue before allowing the removal to go ahead.
Sir Patrick put it to him: "Can we take it he removed it because of the political aspect of being a Spad or because of his personal family connections, you don't remember any reasoning?"
Mr Sterling replied no, that it was an intense period of time and there was a lot going on.
In his written evidence to the inquiry, published on Wednesday, Mr Sterling said there should be a review of the role of Stormont special advisers before any return to devolution.
The inquiry's oral hearings are due to end on Friday, after 111 days of evidence heard by the panel.
Its final witness will be Sir Malcolm McKibbin, David Sterling's predecessor who was head of the NI civil service for seven years.
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A new administration has been unveiled on Scottish Borders Council.
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A coalition of Conservatives and independents is to replace the previous SNP/Lib Dem/independent alliance.
The Tories won most seats last week with 15, ahead of the SNP on nine, eight independents and two Lib Dems.
The administration has to be officially approved by full council on 18 May. It will see newly elected Conservative Shona Haslam take over as leader from independent David Parker.
Conservative group leader Michelle Ballantyne said she was delighted with the proposed coalition.
"We have worked hard to ensure that our administration will use the skills of its members to deliver the best services for the people of the Borders," she said.
"At last week's local elections, the Scottish Borders voted for change and the new administration will bring a fresh approach to providing that change.
"We have a lot of new members and we are not going to be afraid to use their skills from the outset."
Independent group leader Sandy Aitchison said he was also pleased with the outcome.
'New opportunities'
"It is fantastic to have 19 new elected members with fresh thinking and new ideas," he said.
"All of us in the new administration are keen to make the most of the new opportunities and energy of the council."
Ms Ballantyne is set to take up a position as a list MSP in the weeks to come but she has yet to decide whether she will continue in her role as a councillor after taking on that post.
Former leader David Parker will move to the role of convener, with responsibility for health.
Ms Ballantyne said: "We are delighted that David will be appointed to the role of convener, a not insignificant position, that is vital for the smooth and effective running of the council.
"David will play an integral part in assisting the new administration in embracing the challenges ahead."
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A young boy who attempted to rescue his pet cat from a tree had to be saved by fire crews after getting stuck himself.
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North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service said the cat-tastrophe happened in the centre of York on Friday night.
Fire crews rescued both the boy and his pet by a whisker using a 13.5m (44ft) high ladder. Both were unhurt after the unfur-tunate incident.
A spokesperson for the service said the boy was given some advice about the dangers involved.
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The death of a student who was gang-raped on a Delhi bus has prompted anguished soul-searching about the place of women in Indian society. The widespread killing of female foetuses and infants is well-documented, but less well-known is the trafficking of girls across the country to make up for the resulting shortages.
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By Natalia AntelavaBBC World Service, Delhi
Rukhsana was sweeping the floor when police broke into the house.
Wide-eyed and thin, she stood in the middle of a room clutching a broom in her hand. Police officers towered above her, shouting questions: "How old are you? "How did you get here?"
"Fourteen," she replied softly. "I was kidnapped."
But just as she began to say more, an older woman broke through the circle of policemen. "She is lying," she shouted. "She is 18, almost 19. I paid her parents money for her."
As the police pushed the girl towards the exit, the woman asked them to wait. She leaped over towards the girl and reached for her earrings. "These are mine," she said, taking them out.
A year ago, Rukhsana was a 13-year-old living with her parents and two younger siblings in a village near India's border with Bangladesh.
"I used to love going to school and I loved playing with my little sister," she remembers.
Her childhood ended when one day, on the way home from school, three men pushed her into a car.
"They showed me a knife and said they would cut me into pieces if I resisted," she said.
After a terrifying three-day journey in cars, buses and on trains, they reached a house in the northern Indian state of Haryana where Rukhsana was sold to a family of four - a mother and her three sons.
For one year she was not allowed to go outside. She says she was humiliated, beaten and routinely raped by the eldest of the three sons - who called himself her "husband".
"He used to say, 'I bought you, so you do as I tell you.' He and his mother beat me. I thought I would never see my family again. I cried every day," she said.
Tens of thousands of girls disappear in India every year. They are sold into prostitution, domestic slavery and, increasingly, like Rukhsana, into marriage in the northern states of India where the sex ratio between men and women has been skewed by the illegal - but widespread - practice of aborting girl foetuses.
The UN children's agency Unicef says it's a problem of "genocide proportions" and that 50 million women are missing in India because of female foeticide and infanticide - the killing of baby girls. The Indian government disputes this estimate, but the reality of life in Haryana is hard to argue with.
"We don't have enough girls here," the woman who bought Rukhsana cried as she tried to convince the police to let her stay. "There are many girls from Bengal here. I paid money for her," she wailed.
There are no official statistics on how many girls are sold into marriage in the northern states of India, but activists believe the number is on the rise, fuelled both by demand for women in the relatively wealthy north, and poverty in other parts of India.
"Every house in northern India is feeling the pressure, in every house there are young men who cannot find women and who are frustrated," says social activist Rishi Kant, whose organization Shakti Vahini (or Power Brigade) works closely with the police to rescue victims.
In just one area, the Sunderbans in the South 24 Parganas district of West Bengal, the BBC visited five villages all of which had missing children, mostly girls.
According to the latest official data, almost 35,000 children were reported missing in India in 2011 - and over 11,000 of them were from West Bengal. Police estimate that only about 30% of cases are actually reported.
Trafficking peaked in the Sunderbans after a deadly cyclone destroyed rice paddies around the area five years ago.
Local farm worker, Bimal Singh - like thousands of people - was left without income, and so he thought it was good news when a neighbour offered his 16-year-old daughter Bisanti a job in Delhi.
"She went on a train. She told me 'Father, don't worry about me, I will come back with enough money so that you can marry me."
They never heard from her again.
"The police have done nothing for us. They came once and knocked on the door of the trafficker but they didn't arrest him. They don't treat me well when I go to them, so I am afraid to go to the police," Singh says.
In a Calcutta slum we manage to meet a man who sells girls for a living. He doesn't want to give his name, but speaks openly about the trade.
"The demand is rising, and because of this growing demand I have made a lot of money. I now have bought three houses in Delhi.
"I traffic 150 to 200 girls a year, starting from age 10, 11 and older, up to 16, 17," he says.
"I don't go to the source areas, but I have men working for me. We tell parents that we will get them jobs in Delhi, then we transport them to placement agencies. What happens to them after that is not my concern," the man says.
The man says he makes around 55,000 rupees ($1,000; £700) from each girl. Local politicians and police, he says, are crucial to his operation.
"Police are well aware of what we do. I have to tell police when I am transporting a girl and I bribe police in every state - in Calcutta, in Delhi, in Haryana.
"I have had troubles with authorities but I am not afraid - if I go to jail I now have enough money to bribe my way out."
The head of the Criminal Investigation Unit in charge of anti-trafficking in West Bengal, Shankar Chakraborty, describes police corruption as "negligible" and says his unit is "absolutely resolute" in its determination to tackle the problem of trafficking.
"We are organising training camps and awareness campaigns. We have also recovered many girls, from different areas of the country. The fight is on," he says.
The very existence of his unit, he adds, shows the government's resolve and activists agree that police are now more aware of the problem. Every police station in West Bengal now has an anti-trafficking officer. But their caseloads are overwhelming, and resources are scarce.
"Simply changing the police will not give results. When we rescue a child together with the police, then what?" says Rishi Kant from Shakti Vahini.
"What we need is fast rehabilitation. We need social welfare and judiciary systems that work."
Rishi Kant says there is a need for fast-track courts - like the court being used to try the suspects in the latest gang-rape case - to prosecute perpetrators, and make it more difficult for them to get out on bail.
Even greater, some argue, is the need for a change in attitudes.
Two weeks before the notorious Delhi rape case, a group of influential local elders, all of them men, came together in a Haryana village to discuss what they called the most pressing issues their communities face - rape, illegal abortions and marriage laws.
One speaker addressed what he called an "alarming" increase in rape cases. "Have you seen the suggestive ways that girls ride scooters?" he said. "There is no modesty in the way women dress or act any more."
Another man spoke about the roots of female foeticide. "These days the society has become very educated and the girls from this educated society have started eloping. When girls bring shame on their own parents and behave like that - who would want a girl?" he asked.
Rupa, a 25-year-old woman was trafficked to Haryana from Bihar. She was sold as a wife to a man who failed to find one in his own community. The family forced her to have two abortions until she was finally pregnant with a baby boy.
In India, the cycle of abuse carries on.
Natalia Antelava's Assignment airs on 10 January at 09:05, 13:05, 16:05 and 20:05 GMT on BBC World Service. You can also listen via iPlayer or download a podcast.
You can follow the Magazine on Twitter and on Facebook
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A teenager has been charged with stabbing a security guard at a job centre in Liverpool.
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The victim, in his 40s, was stabbed in the back at the Jobcentre Plus in Childwall Valley Road, Belle Vale on Monday.
An 18-year-old from Liverpool has been charged with wounding with intent, assault by beating and possession of an offensive weapon in a public place.
He will appear at Liverpool Adult Remand Court later.
The victim has since been discharged from hospital.
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For many of us, Christmas is a time of hustle and bustle, bright lights, music and over-indulgence. But for Rachel Denton, this Yuletide will be a period of silence and contemplation. Not so different from her everyday life - Sister Rachel is a hermit.
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By Bethan BellBBC News
Forget about the notions of unwashed bearded men living in caves. Her hermitage is a modest end-of-terrace house in rural north Lincolnshire, which she shares with her dog, a Chihuahua-cross called Mr Bingley. And although she lives a quiet, simple life, she does occasionally interact with others.
She has a Twitter account - the biography reads: "Hermit, scribe, printer - tweets are rare, but precious!" - and a website through which she sells her hand-illuminated greetings cards: "There is not much call for rush mats and rosaries these days - the traditional industries of the hermitage."
She rises early, spends hours at prayer, goes to work, tends her garden, walks.
It's a life of self-restraint many would find difficult, but Sister Rachel doesn't conceal her delight at the way she lives.
"I get up, I go to sleep. I'm grateful for being alive. And that's enough. I'm with God every day.
"I really do have a lovely life. It's wonderful. I really do enjoy myself."
Her weekly treat is a brief lie-in on Sunday mornings when she listens to Radio 4's Something Understood - a music, prose and poetry programme with a spiritual theme, broadcast at 06:05.
Every evening she listens to The Archers. Her face lights up as she discusses the machinations of the nefarious Rob, and she was delighted when Helen was found not guilty of his attempted murder.
When not animated by the goings-on in Ambridge, she exudes a sense of quietude and determination. Or as she puts its: "I'm reclusive and stubborn". But she also laughs a lot.
The desire for solitude may have stemmed from childhood - she was deaf when she was young, before an operation restored her hearing, suddenly introducing noise into her life. One of six children, she was brought up in Stockport, where her father was a university lecturer.
She describes the life of hermitage as "one of becoming ever more sensitive to God-in-this-place. Which might involve appreciating the loveliness of a flower, or the dance of the light through a window, or the still-life of a mundane object suddenly striking in its random beauty. Or more likely, the meticulous job of recycling waste items, or weeding the raspberry canes."
She's keen to point out the practicalities - being a hermit is not a romantic lifestyle.
The most important thing for those wanting to embark on eremitical living is self-sufficiency, she says to people who email her asking for tips.
"You need to be able to support yourself. So you need an income. I always say being a cleaner is a very good job for a hermit, because you generally go to homes when the householders are out.
"Part of me would love to live in a cave on a mountain and see nobody ever and not have a Facebook and Twitter account, but the reality is that if I'm to earn my own living, technology enables me to do that."
Raised Catholic, she went to university where she "had boyfriends and all of that", and then entered a convent for a year as a Carmelite nun - something her father thought "was a waste" of her academic potential. She enjoyed the silence and solitude - but found she couldn't bear the communal living.
"I had to have a word with God," she says.
"I said 'you might want me to become a nun, but that's not going to happen'.
"So I took God with me. You know, being a hermit is much harder than being a nun. A nun has a built-in community, somewhere to live."
On leaving the convent, she didn't embark on a solitary life straight away. She trained as a teacher, eventually becoming deputy head of a school in Cambridge where she taught maths and science.
Since taking the leap into her new life in 2001, she has been somewhat feeling her way. At first, she didn't wear anything distinctive, but now she dresses in a scapular - a long garment suspended from the shoulders, a bit like a severe pinafore.
She admits, that although she is guided by her rules of life, there are times when she has to make it up as she goes along. As she embarked on her new path, she sought the blessing of the Most Rev Malcolm McMahon, then the Catholic Bishop of Nottingham.
"He said: 'We don't do hermits.' He didn't know anything about it - although he did grow to like having a hermit in the diocese: it gave him kudos with the other bishops."
For those first five years she was "incognito", but following her Solemn Profession in 2006 - an official commitment to life-long hermitage at a special Mass - there has been interest.
Christmas has its own rituals for the hermit.
"On Christmas Eve I always listen to the Festival of Nine Lessons on the radio, then a period of quiet after that.
"The high point is midnight mass at the local church."
The day itself will be spent "quietly at the hermitage [her house]. Preparing Christmas dinner - although on a less epic scale than most people - reading, listening to carols, probably a walk, a DVD in the evening.
"Very relaxed, no timetable."
Advent is a busier time: "I lay out my crib and decorate the hermitage day-by-day."
She also sees God in secular celebrations.
"There is lots of talk about the "true spirit of Christmas" and a sort of regret that we might be losing that. Of course things can get out of hand on the commercial front, but I do think there is room for lots of the 'peripheral' celebrations.
"Father Christmas and the John Lewis Christmas adverts - God is with us in that stuff too."
So does she ever get lonely?
"Never. My brother said he thought I'd not last two years as a hermit - but it's been 15 years and I still love it."
Loneliness at Christmas
Sister Rachel enjoys her solitude - but she's in the enviable position of choosing to be alone.
Charities warn an increasing number of people are experiencing isolation. Age UK says there are more than a million people who'll be lonely on Christmas Day. The organisation offers a befriending service.
The Mental Health Foundation points out that Christmas only accentuates the isolation some feel.
Which? has a list of groups that can help alleviate loneliness.
She says her family were fine with her choice, if a bit puzzled. After all, they had "already been through the whole nun thing".
At first she had to be quite firm about putting people off coming to visit her in her former council house near Market Rasen (a home she was able to afford to buy thanks to getting on the property ladder in Cambridge at an opportune time).
They didn't understand she wanted to be alone.
Over the past couple of years, she's been forced to accept more company than she's used to - as she needed treatment for cancer, something she found, she says, "fascinating".
"All the scientific bits of the treatment, I was really interested in.
"What I found hard was not being on my own and having to accept help. And what I couldn't bear is the pain. Pain is a terrible thing, and for some people there's no escape from it."
Cancer didn't shake her faith. If anything, the year she was ill - "lost in the radiological mists of time" - was "almost magical. I could indulge in being silent and alone. God was just there".
"It was interesting when I got cancer because you make a bucket list and my bucket list was to spend my life as a hermit."
How will she mark the end of the year and the beginning of the next? As might be expected - "quietly". New Year's Eve night is spent in prayer vigil, a practice common in many monasteries and convents.
"I like to think of folks partying the night away whilst I am praying for them," she says. And she couldn't be happier.
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The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are visiting Northern Ireland on Tuesday for the annual garden party at Hillsborough, County Down.
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Prince William and Catherine are joining about 2,500 guests at the party which is being hosted by the Secretary of State Theresa Villiers.
The visit is only the second time the royal couple have visited Northern Ireland together.
Their previous visit was in March 2011, weeks before their wedding.
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SNP members are to gather in Aberdeen for their Autumn conference, which opens on Sunday afternoon. At a tumultuous moment in UK politics, what are the biggest questions facing Scotland's dominant political party?
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By Philip SimBBC Scotland News
Imminent election
As with the other conferences this season, this gathering is taking place under the shadow of an election. The date has not yet been named, but don't doubt for a second that the parties are in campaign mode.
This might sound very basic, but the big electoral question the SNP is facing is how many people will vote for them.
Rounding up a bit, SNP candidates won half a million votes in 2010, then 1.5 million in 2015, then a million in 2017.
Based on those fairly wild fluctuations, what can party chiefs realistically expect their vote to do this time around? Should it be going up, down, or staying the same?
Perhaps this is why party president Ian Hughton urges members in his conference report to "maximise the conversations we have on the doorsteps in every community" and gather "essential data" in Activate, the party's voter database.
With the SNP still performing strongly in opinion polls, the big challenge is getting people who are minded to vote for them to actually turn up at a polling station and draw a cross in a box.
In terms of actual messages, expect to hear a lot at conference about the two main pillars of the party's platform: Brexit and independence.
The SNP will be keen for a big win to underline Scottish opposition to Brexit, and the nation's desire for a second independence ballot.
Independence - in a while?
Talk of independence is more or less guaranteed at an SNP conference. But there are rather more question marks at the moment over the chosen method of delivering it - indyref2.
As it stands, there is no actual debate on the conference agenda about a new referendum - neither how to secure it, or how to win it.
At the party's last conference, in April, there were spirited exchanges over the party's economic offering in any future referendum. For all that the membership actually inflicted a minor defeat on the leadership, there was a feeling of everyone moving forward together: it was tangible, steps were being taken to strengthen the case for independence and deliver and win indyref2.
This time round, barring a topical or emergency resolution, it seems mentions of indyref2 will be restricted to Nicola Sturgeon's keynote speech, and a panel session where Keith Brown, Kate Forbes and Mhairi Black will discuss "Scotland's future".
This may have been to ward off the efforts of some members who are pressing for a referendum as soon as possible - or, if the standoff with Westminster over holding one continues, a "plan B" for delivering independence.
MP Angus MacNeil and Inverclyde councillor Chris McEleny were very public about their plans to table a motion suggesting that independence could be delivered via a majority win in an election, rather than a referendum. When this motion was rejected, they said they would instead lodge an amendment to some other motion, to include their plan.
They now apparently won't have that chance, as there are no motions about independence to amend. There are reports that the pair may attempt to protest about this by opposing the agenda as a whole.
Questions about the timing of indyref2 and what is being done to deliver it have swirled around SNP conferences since, well, indyref1.
But the party rarely proves itself to be as divided as its opponents hope. Twitter tirades aside, time and again the vast bulk of the membership prove themselves to be firmly behind Nicola Sturgeon.
Still, the leader is taking a tougher line with what rebels there are. Whereas previously she has politely asked for "patience" and urged members to keep the faith, her comments in the build-up to this conference have been stark: there is no shortcut to independence. Forget Plan B.
Or to put it another way, "keep playing with the heid". Get the groundwork done, and we'll have a referendum when we're sure we can win it.
Brexit blockage
The question of indyref2, like everything else in politics right now, is tangled up in the web of Brexit.
The SNP position on Brexit isn't a difficult one to sum up: they're against it. But beyond that, typically for this topic, things get complicated.
If it's a straight choice up against no-deal, the SNP would call off Brexit tomorrow. But they are also in favour of having a new referendum on EU membership, in which they would campaign enthusiastically to Remain.
The question is, where exactly does this rank in their priorities? Would they accept having the so-called "People's Vote" before indyref2, for example? And what would that do to Ms Sturgeon's goal of holding the independence poll before the 2021 Holyrood election?
The leadership's position is that Scotland is entitled to a fresh choice on its future, regardless of what happens with Brexit. But "what happens with Brexit" is still going to be very important.
Basically, in order to offer Scotland a choice, you need to know what the two different options are. Brexit Secretary Mike Russell calls it the "thesis and antithesis"; what exactly are people choosing between?
From the party's position, it's difficult to actually call a referendum on Scotland's membership of the UK while it remains so unclear what the UK would look like on polling day.
After all, Nicola Sturgeon doesn't just want to have a referendum - she wants to win one. Having such a huge uncertainty hanging over the campaign would make that a risky prospect.
Hence why she's happy to roll up her sleeves and get involved in the Brexit debate, using the SNP's weight as the third party at Westminster. The two constitutional questions now go hand in hand - one can't be settled until the other is.
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Appearing before a Stormont committee together in May, just months into heading up Northern Ireland's response to Covid-19, Arlene Foster joked that she and Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill had been seeing so much of each other, they were practically in the same household.
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By Jayne McCormackBBC News NI Political Reporter
It was a light-hearted and unexpected moment from the first minister, given their parties had only agreed to return to government together in January after three years of bitter stalemate.
Sources close to Robin Swann recall that his first-day brief as the new health minister included notes on what his role would be in the event of a pandemic.
Two months later, the executive he sits on imposed an unprecedented lockdown across Northern Ireland while trying to present a united public health message and protect people from coronavirus.
Quite the challenge for a five-party executive only finding its feet again.
Credibility of message 'damaged'?
The first couple of months of lockdown had their bumpy moments, with splits between Sinn Féin and other parties over the timing of school closures, the question of when to lift lockdown measures and calls for an all-island approach to tackling the virus.
However, the general consensus appeared to be that they were staying on message and joint press briefings from Ms O'Neill and Mrs Foster twice a week were watched by many.
Those conferences have been brought to an abrupt halt over the furore regarding the deputy first minister's attendance at the funeral of republican Bobby Storey.
Sinn Féin insists neither its vice-president nor other party members in attendance breached Covid rules, but the DUP leader said she could not stand at a podium next to Ms O'Neill when "credibility of the executive's messaging" had been damaged.
That being said, there is no sense this crisis will lead to an imminent collapse.
Such is the unique set-up of Northern Ireland's political system that the biggest unionist and nationalist parties must share power together in the executive and the DUP has already insisted it will not walk out of Stormont, perhaps mindful that the public might not forgive another stalemate so soon after the last one, especially with a deadly and invisible virus still in our midst.
The stand off and political tensions will likely remain until the outcome of a police investigation and any other potential inquiries.
Some have drawn parallels with the lead-up to the collapse of Stormont in 2017, after the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) scandal led to the late Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness taking Sinn Féin out of the executive he shared with the DUP.
New decade, same approach?
When the parties reached a deal to restore power-sharing six months ago, they pledged that any new administration would operate differently.
A public inquiry into what went wrong with the RHI scheme exposed failings regarding transparency and accountability within Stormont departments, as well as conduct of special advisers and civil servants.
So are things different now?
With the summer months upon us, a theoretical "school report card" for Stormont might show a mixed bag of results for the first term.
When it emerged that funding to continue free school meals for vulnerable children over the summer months had been held up briefly - due to a dispute between the DUP and Sinn Féin over the long-delayed Troubles pension - it appeared to some that old habits were beginning to leak through.
In the wake of the RHI inquiry's findings, a new code of conduct for special advisers (Spads) took effect, but Traditional Unionist Voice leader Jim Allister has been trying to push legislation through Stormont that would put into statute tighter rules on Spads and the ministers who wield them.
However, the head of the civil service, David Sterling, previously told two Stormont committees that the first and deputy first ministers believe the issues dealt with by the bill would be better handled by new non-statutory codes of conduct.
Other challenges on horizon
While the assembly is set to make Paul Kennedy the new Standards Commissioner later this month to oversee the conduct of MLAs, there is no such process under way yet to appoint commissioners to oversee the conduct of executive ministers.
That pledge of a "robust" independent panel was contained in the New Decade New Approach deal, but the Executive Office says it hopes that competition can begin later this year.
Other challenges are dawning at Stormont too, not least Brexit which the DUP and Sinn Féin remain openly at odds on.
During last week's assembly debate on the motion calling for Michelle O'Neill and other Sinn Féin ministers to apologise for attending Mr Storey's funeral, the party's Stormont chief whip John O'Dowd remarked to the DUP benches that it was "as difficult for us to share power with you, as it is for you to share power with us".
Arlene Foster and Michelle O'Neill still share a political household, but right now it seems they are in separate wings of the house.
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It is the last set of elections before Britain leaves the EU - but will Brexit be a factor at local polls in England on 3 May? We looked at the contest in two very different London boroughs.
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By Brian WheelerPolitical reporter
"It is weird to say that problems with bins are more important than the number one challenge of a generation. The party must think people are idiots."
Marx de Morais, pictured above, was once an enthusiastic member of the Conservative Party.
The food designer and writer, who was born in the former East Germany, had been due to stand for the party in Camden, north London, on 3 May, but he says he grew tired of being told to "shut up" about Brexit by local Tory leaders, even when voters asked about it.
"They said don't talk about it. Just talk about the bins, we don't care about Brexit," he says.
"They are completely afraid that they will lose everything in Camden."
What to look out for in May's local elections
At the other end of the Conservative spectrum - and an hour's train ride east - Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell says Tory candidates in Havering will have "no qualms" about mentioning Brexit on the doorstep.
Havering is a bit of an anomaly - it's a London borough but, says Mr Rosindell, it feels like part of Essex and probably has more in common with the Leave supporting towns across that county than Remain-supporting inner-London boroughs like Camden.
"These local elections have nothing to do with Brexit," says the Romford MP.
But, he argues, it would be perverse to confine the conversation to "grass verges and problems with dog mess on the pavements" when the country is going through such a momentous change of direction.
As an ardent Brexiteer - in an area that voted strongly to Leave the EU - he believes the Conservatives have a compelling message for Leave voters from across the political spectrum, who he says are just keen to "get on with it".
Bin collections will undoubtedly be the top priority for many of the millions of voters expected to go to the polls across England on 3 May - or council tax rises and cuts to local services.
These are the things that local councillors can actually do something about.
But local polls are also used by voters to send a message to the government of the day.
The last time these council seats were contested, in 2014, UKIP broke through into local government for the first time, taking more than 150 seats from the Conservatives and Labour.
The party also topped the poll in the European elections that were held on the same day.
It was one of a series of shocks to the political establishment - a "political earthquake" to use the former UKIP leader Nigel Farage's phrase - that convinced David Cameron to hold a referendum.
All of Mr Farage's dreams came true on 23 June 2016 - but the victory all but finished his party off, as its main reason for existence suddenly evaporated.
It has seen an exodus of members, a string of ill-fated and in the most recent example, scandal-hit, leaders, and has only narrowly avoided bankruptcy.
Interim leader Gerard Batten, who took over from the sacked Henry Bolton last month, says the party is now "back in the black" thanks to "generous donations" from local branches.
But it is still very much in recovery mode.
"I was appalled to find there were no plans in place for local elections. I have been trying to pull things together as best I can over the past few weeks.
"I am now trying to get 740 candidates together so we can get a Party Election Broadcast."
He adds: "We are doing everything we possibly can to get back in the battle and to give people a chance to vote for a real exit from the EU."
Keith Darvill, Labour's Remain-supporting leader in Havering says he is "relieved" that the EU is not playing as big on the doorstep as it did in 2014, despite the best efforts of UKIP candidates in the area, who nearly wiped Labour out last time.
"We don't really want it to become an EU local election," he says, and although he will debate the issue with voters if they bring it up - "I am not shy about it, people know my views" - he is focusing his party's campaign on local issues.
In many parts of the country, particularly Remain-supporting outer London boroughs, the biggest noise about Brexit is likely to be coming from the party that wants to reverse it.
The Lib Dems did not exactly set the world alight at last year's general election with their call for another EU referendum.
But leader Sir Vince Cable thinks it will be different this time because "it has become much more clear what is at stake".
The party believe they have a secret weapon that was not available to them at the general election - the votes of EU citizens living in the UK, who are allowed to take part in local elections.
"We are reaching out to them to vote Lib Dem and help us support their rights and ultimately secure an exit from Brexit. Their support could make a vital difference in close council seats," says Sir Vince.
The party has produced social media ads in 17 European languages, fronted by members of the European Parliament from those countries, encouraging EU citizens to register and vote Lib Dem.
The Green Party is also campaigning to protect the rights of EU citizens living in the UK and is calling for a "people's poll" on the final Brexit deal to stop the government "marching us towards a national calamity".
And Labour's London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, has made a direct appeal to the 1.1 million EU citizens living in London to vote Labour to "punish" Theresa May for Brexit "chaos".
Labour hopes the support of EU nationals could swing the poll in their favour in key London battlegrounds like Brent, with an estimated 51,000 EU national residents, and Wandsworth, where 39,000 people from other EU countries live.
But the main campaign group for EU nationals living in the UK, the 3million, has said many are still angry with Labour for voting to trigger Article 50 and may be reluctant to support a party that backs Britain's departure from the EU.
And the recent sacking of frontbencher Owen Smith for saying Labour should campaign to remain in the single market after Brexit and push for a second referendum suggests the party is keen on keeping its Leave-supporting voters on side.
Shadow Brexit Secretary Sir Keir Starmer told The Guardian he was determined not to let Labour "break apart" over Brexit and although he voted Remain and would do so again he did not believe there was a case for a second referendum.
Some Labour members in Camden, where Sir Keir is one of the local MPs and 75% of those that voted in the referendum backed Remain, hold out hopes for a change of heart.
English local elections - 3 May
Lazzarro Pietragnoli, who chairs Camden Labour Party's Brexit working party, says Jeremy Corbyn's recent shift in policy on the customs union has been "very helpful".
Speaking before Owen Smith's sacking, he said: "Now we can say on the doorstep the whole of the Labour Party is in favour of remaining in the customs union.
"It is a clear position - it is not a solution to all of the problems - but we are able to go out on the doorstep with an answer to the many people raising the issue, who were saying the Labour Party is not a clear enough alternative to the Tories on Brexit."
His own view is equally clear: "I think Brexit is wrong and I think Brexit should be stopped."
But, he adds, "that is not the position of the Labour Party" and, he argues, it would be a mistake for the party to campaign for a second referendum at this stage, because those who voted Leave, including some of his Labour colleagues in Camden, had legitimate reasons for doing so and should not be treated as if they were "stupid".
His hope, he says, is that having persuaded Eurosceptic colleagues on the Labour front bench to back a customs union, Sir Keir can now move them to a similar position on the single market.
Mr Pietragnoli, an Italian citizen who has been living in the UK since 2003, argues that Labour's anti-austerity message is intrinsically linked to Brexit, with many of the jobs in the area, in universities and a French school, connected to Europe, not to mention the "physical link" of the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras.
"It has always been a very open, inclusive and mixed borough," he adds, sounding not unlike his one-time Tory rival Marx de Morais.
Mr de Morais has now quit the Conservative Party and joined the cross-party Open Britain campaign, which is opposed to Brexit. He says he would have felt "hypocritical" standing for a party that was in favour of a "hard" Brexit in area where so many of his fellow EU nationals - an estimated 19,000 - live and work.
The pro-European leader of Camden Conservatives, Andrew Marshall, quit the party last February in protest at Theresa May's handling of the Brexit process and has since joined the Lib Dems, although he does not plan to stand on 3 May.
The Conservatives know they are fighting a rearguard action in Camden - they used to run the borough, in coalition with the Lib Dems, but now, they admit privately, their main aim is to prevent it becoming a "one-party-state" like neighbouring, Labour-dominated, Islington.
In the circumstances, there is little mileage in their candidates stirring up debate about Brexit on the doorstep, when they feel they have stronger cards to play.
A Conservative Party spokesman said: "As the prime minister has made clear, EU citizens who have made their lives here have made a huge contribution to our society, we want them to stay and EU citizens living lawfully in the UK today will be able to stay.
"But these local elections aren't about Brexit. They're about your council and bin collections, street cleaning, good local school places and how much you pay in council tax.
"It's Conservative councillors and councils who have a proven record of providing good local services while keeping council tax down."
Labour is focusing all of its national firepower on cuts to local services, with Jeremy Corbyn urging voters to use the local polls to "send an unmistakeable message to this government that enough is enough".
"Austerity is a political choice. So when your children's school is losing teachers and sending begging letters or their youth centre is closed - that's because the Conservative priority is tax breaks for big business," he said at the party's local election launch.
Unlike in 2014, Brexit is likely to be a background hum, at best, at these elections - certainly as far as the two main parties are concerned.
There is too much at stake for Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn - as they try to hold the competing factions in their parties together - for it to be any other way.
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Three Essex hospitals have blocked visitors from seeing or accompanying patients in a bid to stop the spread of coronavirus.
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Southend Hospital, Basildon University Hospital and Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford brought in restrictions to "minimise the impact" of the pandemic.
Exceptions will be made for women in labour, whose partners will be allowed, children, who will be allowed a parent, and end-of-life patients.
The measure was introduced on Tuesday.
The hospitals said they asked "for the public's help in respecting these rules".
As of Tuesday there have been 88 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Essex with eight of those in Southend.
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The National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro is a treasure trove which contains more than 20 million scientific and historical items.
A massive fire spread through the 200-year-old institution on Sunday engulfing almost all of its rooms and gutting large parts of the building.
Most of its priceless collection is thought to have been burnt. BBC News takes a look at some of the museum's most treasured items. It is not yet clear if they are among those destroyed.
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1. Luzia
The museum was home to Luzia, the nickname given to what are thought to be the oldest human remains found in the Americas.
The remains were found in a cave in 1975 in in the state of Minas Gerais, north of Rio, by French archaeologist Annette Laming-Emperaire.
Tests suggest the skull and bones belonged to a woman in her 20s who was just under five feet tall (1.5m). They are estimated to be 11,500 years old.
2. Bendegó
The largest iron meteorite to be found in Brazil. Weighing 5,260kg (11,600lb) it was found by a boy looking for a lost cow in the state of Bahía in north-east Brazil in 1784.
Transporting the meteorite turned out to be a major endeavour. An attempt to move it in 1785 by a cart pulled by 20 pairs of oxen ended in disaster when the cart ran out of control down a hill and landed in the bed of a stream.
The meteorite was not recovered until more than a century later when a retired Brazilian naval officer was put in charge of getting it to Rio.
It finally arrived in the National Museum in 1888 after a long journey by specially built cart, rail and ship.
Partly due to its size and partly to its laborious transportation to Rio, the meteorite became famous beyond Brazil and in 1889 a wood reproduction was exhibited at the Universal Exposition in Paris.
3. Maxakalisaurus
The reconstructed skeleton of a Maxakalisaurus was the biggest dinosaur on display at the National Museum in Rio.
Parts of the skeleton of a Maxakalisaurus were found in Minas Gerais in 1998.
The plant-eating giant lived 80 million years ago in the area now occupied by Brazil. A million people came to see the display, according to museum figures.
The room housing the 13m-long (44ft) skeleton had just re-opened in July after termites ate through the base on which the Maxakalisaurus stood.
The museum had resorted to crowd-funding to repair the damage.
4. Pompeii fresco
A Roman fresco from the ancient city of Pompeii was one of the star exhibits of the museum's Greco-Roman collection.
The fresco had survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79AD.
5. Pre-Columbian artefacts
The archaeological section of the museum held more than 100,000 objects with a priceless collection of Brazilian artefacts dating back to pre-Columbian times.
Funerary urns, Andean mummies, textiles and ceramics from across Latin America were also gathered throughout the 19th Century to be studied and displayed in the museum.
Some of the items on display came from the personal collection of Emperor Pedro II of Brazil.
6. The building itself
The museum is housed in a former palace which during colonial times was the official residence of the Portuguese royal family.
The building in its current form dates back to the early 19th Century when a rich merchant donated it to the Portuguese royal family, which extended the manor house and turned it into the neoclassical São Cristóvão palace.
After Brazil became independent from Portugal, the palace became the residence of Brazil's Emperor Pedro I.
Pedro I's son, Pedro II, was born in the palace in 1825 and grew up there. The imperial family left the country after Brazil became a republic in 1889.
In 1892, the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, itself founded in 1818, moved into the palace.
Millions of people have since visited its vast exhibits on anthropology, archaeology and natural history.
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Rupert Murdoch's witness statement to the Leveson Inquiry has confirmed that News Corporation's Management and Standards Committee (MSC) is "actively" co-operating with US Justice Department's inquiries into "suspected illegality".
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Reports have suggested that the FBI began to investigate News Corporation companies over claims of phone-hacking and illegal payments to officials in the past.
The
written statement
, dated 12 April 2012, was published as Mr Murdoch gave evidence on Wednesday.
The 53 page document states that: "Since July 2011, the MSC, working with a legal team, has actively co-operated with the Metropolitan Police as well as with the United States Department of Justice, turning over evidence of alleged or suspected illegality, and responding to all requests for information."
Mr Murdoch also said that co-operation with the Metropolitan Police regarding UK-based allegations into phone-hacking, is "continuing to date".
The statement goes on to say that while Mr Murdoch did not dictate an editorial stance or interfere with the work of his editors, he "participated actively in discussions about editorial matters and who should receive political endorsements".
Labour has said emails released to the inquiry on Tuesday show Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt fell short in his impartial "quasi-judicial" role in ruling on News Corporation's bid to fully take over broadcaster BSkyB.
On his own dealings with Mr Hunt, Mr Murdoch said in his statement: "To the best of my recollection, I neither sought to discuss nor did I discuss the BSkyB proposal to make an offer with Jeremy Hunt, his junior ministers or political advisers."
Mr Murdoch's statement also shows he discussed with Education Secretary Michael Gove plans for News International to sponsor an academy school in Newham, east London in 2010.
Among other points, Mr Murdoch said:
Mr Murdoch concluded his written statement by saying that his company had been his life's work and expressed his "strong sense of responsibility" for everything it does and has failed to do.
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A search is continuing for a man who went missing in the sea in Pembrokeshire over the weekend.
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Dyfed Powys Police received reports of a man entering the water in Neyland on Sunday afternoon but he has so far not been found.
A woman attempted to assist the man in the water but returned to shore alone.
A large-scale search of the area including police, fire and coastguards was launched just before 16:00 BST on Sunday.
The search was scaled back on Sunday evening to be resumed on Monday.
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This is a full transcript of Getting a fashion fix as a disabled model as first broadcast on 12 December 2019 and presented by Natasha Lipman
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CAITLIN - If I'm just wearing normal, comfy clothes people kind of see me as just a person in a wheelchair, whereas if I'm wearing something really bold or very expressive people definitely then think, oh okay, she seems like a bubbly fun person to talk to.
NATASHA - She's an actual person, yeah. Heaven forbid.
[music]
NATASHA - Hello, and welcome to BBC Ouch. I'm Natasha Lipman. If you listened to our podcast with the amazing Sinead Burke you'd have heard her talking about fashion, inclusive design, and her frustration at having to shop in the children's section where they sell tops that say 'Daddy's little princess'. We're going to be continuing that conversation as we roll down the runway and speak to two disabled models, Caitlin Leigh and Brinston Tchana, who both say that fashion helped them come to terms with their disabilities.
I became a part time wheelchair user nearly two years ago, and the impact that's had on how I viewed fashion and my own personal style was a real surprise to me. I went from being invisibly disabled to visible. Rediscovering my love for vintage style fashion not only helped me to feel more confident, it helped me to feel more like myself when the perception strangers had of me suddenly changed. I started by asking Caitlin about her personal style and what she was wearing when we sat down to record.
NIAMH - Hey, it's Niamh from the Ouch team here. Just to let you know, during the recording Caitlin had a seizure. She told us in advance it might happen because she has one every couple of hours, but once we checked she was okay and happy she wanted to continue with the recording. Now, let's get back to the podcast and find out what Caitlin's wearing.
CAITLIN- I had a really, really bad day of feeling quite down, so my mum was like, "Okay, let's just, you know, go to a few different shops, you might be able to find something that you really like fashion wise, and that might boost your confidence." And I found the trousers that I'm wearing today which are some plaid red trousers, and I can honestly say that they make me feel so incredibly confident, to the point where I've actually gone out and bought it in three different colours I think now. I'm wearing some Timberland shoes. Paired with the trousers they just look quite edgy and cool, so I thought I'd go for it.
NATASHA - What makes you feel so confident about the trousers?
CAITLIN- I think they just balance out my hair. Without being out there it is out there because it is a buzz cut, it's not the norm style for girls to wear. Paired with some bold trousers, it just it looks quite cool.
NATASHA - A bad ass.
CAITLIN- Yeah. I feel cool, and I think that's what's important.
NATASHA - And you look cool. Brinston, can you tell us what you're wearing today?
BRINSTON - I'm wearing this leather jacket. I love jackets because they kind of like cover me a lot, and I like to be well covered, because I have tattoos like all over my body. A lot of people don't take tattoos pretty well so I just like to cover just in case. This one as well, actually it's a brown jacket and it matches my skin colour, and my hair colour as well, and when I saw it I just like completely fell in love with it, basically just because it covers me a lot. Now everyone won't look at my tattoos anymore and be like, oh maybe that's why he's in a wheelchair.
NATASHA - Do you feel that's something that people think when they see your tattoos, that it could be part of the reason that you're in a wheelchair for whatever reason?
BRINSTON - Yes, I've had some people ask me about that. They were like, "Have you been in a gang as well?" I'm like, "No." I grew up in Spain. Most of my life it was just football till the age of 16. I was about to sign a contract with this big club in Spain called Atlético de Madrid, but I just needed me to be 17 to be able to sign it myself. It was so exciting, I was like yeah, the next day I'm going to start playing professional football. Just a month after being 17 I had a car accident.
I was coming back from a nightclub with my friends and we were just walking back home and this guy, he came from behind, like with his car, and he was drunk and he just crashed into us. One of my friends died in the accident straight away, I was left in a wheelchair. Your life changes in just a second. I was down in the road, I didn't know what had happened, blood was everywhere, I was just like so confused. The next minute I went into a coma for a week. After I woke up I just realised that my friend died. It was really hard to accept it.
After that I had to be in the hospital for ten months, just to figure out how your body works, because when you have like spinal damage your body works completely differently. So I was trying to regain strength, mobility, by myself and after those ten months I finally got to go back home.
Going back home where your house is not adapted, my room was upstairs, so I haven't gone back to my room since then. My room was still a mess. My dad hasn't cleaned it up because obviously my dad wasn't expecting me, or my mum wasn't expecting me to be in a wheelchair, so they were like, "When you come back from the hospital you've got to clean up your room."
NATASHA - Do you feel that the style that you have is influenced by the fact that you're in a wheelchair and the perception that people have of you because of your tattoos?
BRINSTON - I would say yes. The style I actually pick right now is because of the wheelchair. If I'm just dressed casual, tracksuit on, and when I go out people just look at me and think I'm homeless or something. The other day actually I went to Birmingham city centre and I think the weather actually had a little bit to do with this, but it was raining, it was cold, so I just had on my tracksuit, I didn't have a big jacket on me, I just had a small jacket on me, so I was like waiting for my friends and stuff.
I just sat on the corner shivering and stuff, so this dude came close to me, he just like gave me five quid. I was like, "Mate, what are you giving me five quid for?" And he was like, "Oh, are you not homeless?" I'm like, "No, I'm just waiting for my friends." And when I'm proper dressed, like have my boots on, have my normal jeans on, jacket on, nobody would actually come close to me and I'd be like, "Oh have you got five quid?" My style means a lot, me being in a wheelchair and stuff. It changed a lot as well.
NATASHA - And it changes the way that people perceive wheelchair users or people with any type of disability I think.
CAITLIN- Yes.
BRINSTON - It definitely does.
NATASHA - I definitely find that people are more likely to talk to me than mention the wheelchair first. They'll be like, "Oh, I love your dress."
CAITLIN- A lot of the time for me I find that people feel that they can approach me more if I'm wearing something unusual, or if my hair's different, because they kind of see that as the talking point and then going on to saying, "Oh, okay so you're in a wheelchair, explain that to me," or, "Oh, you've lost your hair, explain that to me." So it's kind of like a gateway for me to get people talking and to actually then be able to raise awareness of the conditions that I've got.
NATASHA - Yeah, can you tell us a little bit about your conditions?
CAITLIN- So a year ago I started losing my hair. I very quickly realised that that is down to alopecia. A week after, I started having these seizures which were completely unexplained for just under two months. I had lots of different tests and trialled medications and stuff to try and figure out what was going on, and soon found out that I have dissociative seizures, which are basically brought on by mental health and by stress and anxiety.
So the two conditions that I've got are actually linked, and subsequently I'm now in a wheelchair for long distance because my muscles just aren't coping very well with the seizures. And because my seizures are so unpredictable, I never know when I'm going to have one, the wheelchair is just a little bit of a safer option for me.
NATASHA - Before you became a wheelchair user was your fashion sense the same as it is now?
CAITLIN- No, not at all. [laughs]
NATASHA - What was it like?
CAITLIN- I've always enjoyed fashion and always tried to dress differently every day, but I definitely think I'm more confident now to wear bolder patterns and to wear something just a little bit more unusual. For me, fashion is a way of me expressing myself. Before it was my hair, now it's my fashion. It just fills me with confidence. If I look a bit different I feel untouchable.
NATASHA - What was it about your disability that kind of pushed you towards that change of perception around fashion?
CAITLIN- The minute I started losing my hair and I'd decided to go for a buzz cut I just felt like nothing in my wardrobe suited me. I'm still not sure if that is because of the hairstyle that I have or if it's just because of the way that I felt as a person, but over time I slowly started to find my way in fashion, and it's subsequently led to me having the job that I have today.
NATASHA - And Brinston, before you became disabled what was your fashion sense like?
BRINSTON - I was a football player, but I was going to a professional part of it, so I was a kid, it was my mum buying my clothes. I didn't care about anything other than just football. So after having my accident obviously I couldn't play football anymore so I had to find another way of living, so as I said, I was going out just wearing like casual, everyone just looking at me.
So I was like I don't want people to be looking at me that way, just because of the way I dress or just because I'm in a wheelchair, because if I'd actually dressed that way without being in a wheelchair it would be like, oh he's just dressed like that because he's a kid. But being in a wheelchair actually makes a really big difference, and right now the way I dress is my way of expressing myself as well.
Sometimes when I'm at home as I'm feeling calm, I'm feeling safe, sometimes I just go with my pants on, just… I know no one is going to judge me, but when I'm out I feel a little bit I need to like show them that I'm not that vulnerable.
NATASHA - Your fashion's like an armour I think when you have something that makes your disability visible.
BRINSTON - Yeah.
NATASHA - I went from being invisibly disabled to choosing to become visibly disabled when I realised I needed a wheelchair, and overnight my fashion changed. I always loved vintage style pretty dresses, but it was like as soon as I was in the wheelchair people were staring so I wanted to give them something to stare at.
CAITLIN- I feel exactly the same as that.
BRINSTON - That's it. Like before me changing, getting into modelling and everything, what I'll do is that I like to do some cool tricks with my wheelchair. So when I see people staring, like especially kids, just do some quick tricks and show what I can do with my wheelchair. And they'd be like, "Oh I like your style."
NATASHA - Yeah, I think it makes such a huge difference, and especially, I don't know about you guys, but for me I spend 90% of my time in bed, so it's almost like I get to dress up and be outside Natasha, and the rest of the time I'm kind of unwashed in my pyjamas. So I make such a big distinction between being inside and outside. It changes how I feel about myself.
BRINSTON - Definitely, that's just what we're saying. Like when we're in our house we feel safe.
NATASHA - And do you think because you now present yourself in a way that makes you feel confident that has helped you?
CAITLIN- Definitely. If I go out and I look confident and I'm dressed confidently people definitely have more of a confident mannerism towards me. If I'm just wearing normal comfy clothes people kind of see me as just a person in a wheelchair, whereas if I'm wearing something really bold or very expressive people definitely then think oh, okay, she seems like a bubbly fun person to talk to. She's an actual person.
NATASHA - Yeah, heaven forbid.
CAITLIN- Yeah.
NATASHA - And so do you find that there are any negatives for dressing the way that you do? One thing that I definitely find is that I couldn't go out dressed like this to certain doctors because they wouldn't take me seriously and that you can't kind of present in certain situations as being put together, because in some way that invalidates your health condition.
CAITLIN- 100%. Yeah I agree. I totally agree.
BRINSTON - Oh yeah, I was going to say that. Like sometimes when I'm like proper dressed some people asked me like, "Are you even in a wheelchair?" One of my most expensive items of clothing that I bought was Balenciaga. It was like 700 quid for shoes. So I went on a night out with my friends and this guy came up to me, he was like, "Yo my dude, you have Balenciagas on, are you sure you're in a wheelchair, you're not just faking it?" I'm like, "How am I faking it? How I wish I could be like you, just dancing around."
CAITLIN- I think the negative for me is definitely the fact that fashion is worn very differently when you're in a wheelchair. There's so many things that I can't wear because of my wheelchair getting in the way. And I think that's really frustrating and I know that that's all down to the person and their style, but I feel like there should be, or could be, a little bit more of accessible fashion for us to wear.
Because trousers don't even look right when you're sat down in a wheelchair all day. It gets all bunched up, it's not comfortable, so I have to buy clothes that are bigger for me and then they don't look as flattering if I stand up or if I sit a certain way.
I'm a festival goer, I'm like an avid festival goer. Last year at festivals I got so many stares if I wore something glittery or something a little bit shorter, because I think people just think, oh that girl's got some kind of disability, maybe she shouldn't dress like that, that's a prerogative or whatever. But to me that's just my way of expressing myself, I've always dressed like that at festivals. Why can't I, just because I've now got a disability, that shouldn't define who I am or the way that I dress.
I mean, it does take time for you to have the confidence to think about fashion for yourself, rather than making other people feel comfortable. And I think that's one of the biggest things for young people growing up with disabilities, or in general, that they feel that they have to dress for other people, and that is not how fashion should be.
NATASHA - You were talking specifically about the challenges of dressing for a wheelchair. Do you find it easy to go shopping for clothes?
BRINSTON - No.
CAITLIN- Not at all. I really have to think out when I'm going to go shopping because I actually find it harder now buying stuff online because I never know how it's going to look on me. But then with my anxiety and my body confidence at the moment being quite hard, going out shopping is a really hard task for me. I don't see people that look like me, so how am I going to know if that's going to suit me? If that's going to work with my wheelchair, if that's going to look right with my hair.
The fact that disabled models are being shown in the media is great, but I feel like it needs to be the norm, it shouldn't just be, oh, they've got a disabled model on their books, that's really cool. No, it needs to be, oh, there's a disabled model as part of that campaign. That's awesome. But there's also other people.
NATASHA - It shouldn't be a press story.
CAITLIN- No, I don't think so either. It needs to be that people growing up with disabilities or having disabilities later in life and having to slowly come to terms with them, fashion should be accessible for people.
NATASHA - And there are so many different elements to accessibility and fashion, right? It's can I get into the shop? Can I access the website? Can I get in a dressing room? Are the clothes all too close together? The floors, the shelves, everything.
CAITLIN- A lot of the time the disabled or accessible dressing room is often like a storage cupboard as well. How am I meant to get in there if you've got a load of boxes in there or you've got a changing table in there or a rack of clothes? I can't.
NATASHA - It doesn't make you feel welcome.
CAITLIN- No.
NATASHA - And I think the other side of it as well, which was something that I didn't realise as much, is back zips push up against my chair.
BRINSTON - Yeah.
CAITLIN- Oh god, yeah.
NATASHA - Clothes falling in certain places on my body hurts so much more in the chair, and the lengths. And so much of that information isn't online when you're buying items and there's so many different elements that you kind of have to think about.
CAITLIN- The length of skirts is completely different when you're sat down.
NATASHA - Oh god. How many you've destroyed in your chair.
CAITLIN- Oh gosh yeah, it just busts open. [laughs]
BRINSTON - I don't have those problems, I'm cool.
NATASHA - In terms of representation both of you are models. How did you get into it?
CAITLIN- In September last year I was approached through my Instagram page by Zebedee Model Management and they kind of just approached me and were like, "Oh, we're a modelling agency for people with differences, we'd really like to speak to you further." I was obviously completely taken aback by it. It was a massive compliment but I was also very nervous at the thought of it really.
It took a little bit of time for me to come round to the idea of somebody actually wanting me as a model, but within three weeks of me being on Zebedee's books I had my first job with Primark. So I was actually in their spring catalogue and I was in all of their stores. And then worked with Sainsburys on their underwear campaign. You have to have some confidence to do that, but for me it was about representing another type of person and body type in the media and showing people that that is normal.
NATASHA - Do you think you would have had the confidence to do that before?
CAITLIN- Hell no. No way. I was scouted for modelling when I was about 14, 15, but it just never took off and I just never really had the proper confidence to do fashion in the way that I do now. Modelling, it gives me purpose, it gives me something to do, and it shows other people that this is a norm and that fashion is slowly becoming more accessible for people. And it's about showing young people in particular for me that alopecia is an okay thing to live with and you can walk out there without your wig on and feel beautiful. And my seizures, there's just not enough awareness around it so I just wanted to show people that you can still do the things that you love.
NATASHA - That's amazing.
CAITLIN- Thanks.
BRINSTON - That's so cool. Mine was like hell to be honest.
CAITLIN- Really?
BRINSTON - Yeah. I started modelling three years ago, because after my accident I tried to do different stuff. I went to college and I did medical science, because I was trying to understand a little bit about my body and how it works now that I'm in a wheelchair. So I was like… Shall we stop or something?
NIAMH- Yes, we'll just leave it a minute.
CAITLIN- Sorry.
BRINSTON - Welcome back.
NATASHA - It's okay.
CAITLIN- I should have some water. I should have known that was coming because I was hot.
NATASHA - It's okay. Do you need a minute?
CAITLIN- Okay, I'm good, thanks.
NATASHA - Good. The fact that you guys are representing your communities and getting your faces out there is really amazing. What are your ambitions for your futures in fashion?
CAITLIN- I think for me it's about raising awareness of conditions and showing people that it doesn't matter what your disability is you can still look bomb, like you still look amazing. But as far as my personal ambitions I would love to go into London Fashion Week, just because I feel that everyone kind of looks the same. I think if you have somebody that looks a bit different you're going to grab more attention. And why as a designer would you not want to do that? It is really important that people are more represented in fashion.
NATASHA - Awesome. And Brinston?
BRINSTON - My personal ambition is New York Fashion Week. Show them that being in a wheelchair doesn't make us less different, doesn't make us differently able. I don't like the word disabled to be honest. Like when people use the word disabled I'm like, are we not able to do stuff? Because I can still dance in my wheelchair, I'm still involved in everything, but I just do it in a different way. Basically that's what I want to show to people.
NATASHA - Well, I look forward to seeing you both on fashion week runways.
[music]
NATASHA - A huge thank you to Brinston and Caitlin for chatting with me, and to our producer, Beth Rose and studio manager, Niamh Hughes. For more disability content from the BBC you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook @bbcouch, and if you want to get in touch you can send us an email to [email protected]. And don't forget to give us a cheeky little subscribe on your favourite podcast platform.
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MSPs have voted down a members bill which would have resulted in a ban on alcohol advertising within 200 metres (656ft) of schools.
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Richard Simpson also wanted licensed shops in problem areas to mark cans and bottles so they could be traced.
He told MSPs there was a problem with "proxy" purchasing for teenagers.
However, ministers argued that the issue could be better dealt with through the government's alcohol misuse strategy.
When the members bill was scrutinised at committee stage, BMA Scotland expressed concerns about some aspects of it but it supported the section aimed at banning alcohol advertising around schools.
Figures analysed specially for the Scottish government in 2009 estimated that Scotland had the eighth highest level of alcohol consumption in the world.
The World Health Organisation has linked alcohol to more than 60 types of disease, disability and injury.
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Plans for a £70m regeneration of Milford Haven dock which could create up to 600 jobs have moved a step closer.
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Outline planning permission has been granted for a mixed development of retail, leisure and commercial units to complement the docks.
Heritage facilities including trails and the museum will be improved.
It is still the largest fishing port in Wales and along with facilities for the fishing industry will also be improved.
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How controversial can a series of parenthesis marks be?
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By BBC TrendingWhat's popular and why
Over the past few days, Twitter users may have noticed an increase in the number of fellow users who have surrounded their names with ((( ))).
The symbols appear harmless enough but have become controversial after an investigation revealed that they were being used by a small minority of white supremacists to target Jewish writers with anti-Semitic abuse.
The use of ((( ))), also called "an Echo", have now been re-appropriated by the supporters of Jewish writers to show solidarity. The Anti-Defamation League has also added them to its online database of hate symbols.
Journalists receive abuse
The problem was first brought to the public's attention by the deputy Washington editor of the New York Times, Jonathan Weisman, in May 2016.
He received the cryptic tweet "Hello (((Weisman)))" after he shared a link to a recent article he had written about the emergence of fascism in the United States.
The Twitter account which sent this original message has since been deleted but there is an archived version of the exchange.
Weisman found himself deluged with anti-Semitic tweets after receiving this "Echo", and he certainly wasn't the only Jewish journalist targeted.
Writers such as Jeffrey Goldberg and James Fallows from The Atlantic, Max Fisher from the New York Times, and the Boston Globe's Michael Cohen started to notice these symbols appearing around their names in November 2015.
Columnist Julia Ioffe regularly receives photoshopped images of her head superimposed onto Auschwitz detainees, with her name surrounded by ((( ))).
Far Right echoes
The journalists Cooper Fleishman and Anthony Smith traced the first use of the symbol to a group of right-wing social media users called "the alt-right".
White supremacist and far-right podcast programmes which support this movement, describe the "(((echo)))" as a visual representation of the fact that "All Jewish surnames echo throughout history".
Their investigation claimed that this obscure group of white supremacists were using a Google Chrome extension called "Coincidence Detector", to search social media for Jewish users and then compiling a database of people who they could then target for abuse.
Since the Mic.com investigation was published, Google has removed Coincidence Detector from its app store for breaching its terms and conditions on hate speech. Before it was taken down, the extension reportedly had 2,500 users who had generated a list of 8,800 names.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, an American organisation which monitors fascist and far-right groups online, says that the "echo symbol is the online equivalent of tagging a building with anti-Semitic graffiti or taunting someone verbally. Over the past several weeks, the echo symbol has been used by white supremacists and others as part of a pattern of harassment against a group of journalists."
Solidarity and support
Since social media became aware of Coincidence Detector, many Twitter users have changed their name to include parentheses as a way of showing solidarity, and also disrupting to the effectiveness of the Chrome extension.
This call to action was initiated by Yair Rosenberg, a senior writer at the online Jewish magazine the Tablet. "Want to raise awareness about Anti Semitism, harassed Jews and mess with the Twitter Nazis?" he tweeted. "Put ((( ))) around your name". His followers were quick to respond and over the past few days their replies have been shared or liked hundreds of times.
Blog by Hannah Henderson, UGC and Social News
Next When Muhammad Ali took on Superman
You can follow BBC Trending on Twitter @BBCtrending, and find us on Facebook. All our stories are at bbc.com/trending.
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The death of George Floyd in the US sparked a raft of protests across the world. However, it came at a time when millions were in lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, making some people nervous about attending street demonstrations.
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Nineteen-year-old journalism student Malaika Gangooly, from Essex, together with three friends, decided to set up their own local Black Lives Matter protest in Chelmsford rather than risk travelling to London. A month on, she tells us in her own words why she feels it has created a legacy.
'I was the only pupil of colour'
My parents are both from Calcutta in India, but they always moved around - my dad had a shipping business, so they moved to Suffolk. I was born in Ipswich and brought up in Felixstowe and then we moved to Chelmsford when I was 11.
At primary school I was the only person of colour and had a different sounding surname. I think when you are eight or nine, you have such a thick skin and you don't realise you are being discriminated against.
Some of the other kids would try to pinch my nose and cover my mouth - I realised then it was bullying but I didn't know why.
My parents have always supported me and I can tell they are proud of me. My dad has always been very motivated - he has always worked through whatever has come his way and he has fought a lot of battles.
'The truth was on camera'
George Floyd's death shook me up massively and the reason why it has caused one of the biggest civil rights movements is because it was filmed. People know it happens, but they never see it. This was the truth on camera for the entire world to see.
Although I've been to marches before, I have never organised one. I was messaging my friend one night and we were gutted we couldn't go to London because of coronavirus so we decided to organise a socially distanced protest in Chelmsford.
We put out messages on our own social media accounts and had just 10 days to organise it in. We created a Chelmsford for Black Lives Instagram account and got nearly 2,000 followers.
It was a massive challenge as we wanted to keep as safe as possible.
We warned everyone multiple times before and during the event to wear PPE and made it clear they had to keep socially distanced.
People were sent out in small groups of six.
I also made a speech at the start about the heightened coronavirus risk to the black community.
'I am getting a lot of hate online'
The main thing was that it was completely peaceful - we always knew we'd have threats. During the march there were about 15 men outside a pub who started shouting "Go back to Africa" but the police formed a barricade.
Some random men telling me to go back to where I came from - it doesn't affect me. I was born here, I belong here.
I think I am a very passionate person and I want to make a difference - you are never going to please everyone. I try to keep politics out of it - when people say BLM is to do with leftist ideology, I say it's just to do with basic human rights.
The backlash I have received personally has been awful. I was the one doing the interviews and it was my face being seen and I received so much racism. Some of the comments have been ridiculous, but it has just motivated me.
The fact that I am getting a lot of hate online purely for fighting for equality shows why change has to happen.
When people ask 'Why are you doing this and why now?', all I'd have to do is show them the comments I've got on social media.
'We knew we had done the right thing'
I think we were always conscious the march wouldn't be enough. We all did a kneel and a few guys started crying. They were so overwhelmed as they had been waiting for this moment to come in Chelmsford for so long - that's when we knew we had done the right thing.
We really wanted to make sure it wasn't just a fleeting moment - I want it to have had a lasting impact on Essex, so we have many more things planned.
You might also be interested in:
The mission will never be over in Chelmsford and we are hoping to make the protest an annual event.
My biggest ambition is simply for it to have sparked up a conversation across generations of people about black history and racism in general.
It is often so difficult for older generations to understand that they are part of the problem, it is all about acceptance and moving on and fighting for change.
I've been asked to speak at an Amnesty International conference in November on organising the protest and about the Black Lives Matter movement as one of their inspirational speakers.
I am working alongside the mayor of Chelmsford as we are thinking of starting an anti-racism campaign and putting on events to make Chelmsford a really racially inclusive city.
We are also putting together educational resources to hand out in schools - so many teachers from around the country have been DM'ing us. We've also been asked to do a talk at our old sixth form at Moulsham High School and a lot of our teachers came to the protest and had a chat with us and we'll be distributing resources there. It's the nicest feeling.
I am also working on a video project, interviewing owners of black-owned businesses in Chelmsford.
They are so often overlooked and I want people to realise how hard they have to work just to be equal to everyone else.
'Children asked to have their photos taken with us'
Something that really moved me was when at the end of the march all these children started running up to me and the other organisers.
They asked to have their photos taken with us - it was so cute and good to know that we are inspiring the younger generation.
Another thing that has really resonated is that so many of my old teachers have messaged me, saying "you're my hero".
My old English teacher told me I was a role model and said if there had been more voices like mine out there when he was growing up there would be fewer problems now.
As told to Zoe Applegate
Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email [email protected]
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A man has died in hospital after he was stabbed on a Glasgow street.
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The 32-year-old was discovered on Boydstone Road, Pollok, at about 13:25 on Tuesday.
The man, who has not been named, was taken to the city's Queen Elizabeth University Hospital where he was pronounced dead a short time later.
A Police Scotland spokeswoman said inquiries into the incident were ongoing and urged anyone with information to contact officers.
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A 50-year-old man in northern India was killed in a mob lynching on Monday night allegedly over rumours that his family had been storing and consuming beef at home. BBC Hindi's Salman Ravi went to Dadri in the state of Uttar Pradesh to find out more.
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It was around 10.30pm on Monday night and the nine-member Akhlaq family had been preparing to go to bed after dinner.
Mohammad Akhlaq, a farm worker, was already asleep in a room next to his 22-year-old son, Danish, when a frenzied mob, wielding sticks, swords and cheap pistols burst into their home, accusing the family of having slaughtered a cow and consuming it.
"They came from everywhere. Over the walls, through the gate...They just barged into the house, shouting that we had slaughtered a cow," says his 75-year-old mother, Asghari Akhlaq.
"I asked them how can we bring a cow into the house without anyone seeing? We are the only Muslim family in this neighbourhood."
Some meat found in the fridge, that the family insists is mutton, was held to be proof.
Brutal mob
Slaughter of cows is a sensitive issue in India as the animal is considered sacred by Hindus, who comprise 80% of the country's 1.2bn people.
Uttar Pradesh is among a number of Indian states who have tightened laws banning cow slaughter and the sale and consumption of beef.
The family's pleas of innocence fell on deaf ears. The mob was too large. Smashing their way into the house, they began dragging out members of the family, abusing and manhandling even the women.
A group of the attackers made their way into the room where Mr Akhlaq was asleep. They bashed his head with a sewing machine lying nearby and dragged him and Danish out of the house.
From that point the beating became even more brutal. Both Mr Akhlaq and Danish were beaten with bricks, kicked and stabbed repeatedly, his family members told the BBC.
Some of the family's immediate Hindu neighbours had tried to intervene, telling the mob to leave the family alone, but to no avail.
They then tried calling the police, but when they finally got there an hour later, it was too late. Mr Akhlaq was dead and Danish critically injured.
"We were completely taken by surprise. Although it is true that we are the only Muslim family here, we have been living here for four generations and had never faced any issues before," Mr Akhlaq's elder brother, 55-year-old Jameel Ahmed told the BBC.
Temple 'confusion'
"It was only later that we got to know that an announcement that someone had slaughtered and eaten a cow had been made from the Hindu temple," his daughter Sajida told the AFP news agency.
Pankaj Kumar who owns a shop near the temple premises confirmed to the BBC that he had heard the announcement from the temple as he was preparing to eat his dinner.
"By the time I washed my hands, the mob had already converged on the house. There was nothing anyone could do," he said.
While everyone agrees that the announcement came from the temple, there seems to be confusion over who had made it.
Locals told the BBC that some unknown people had jumped into the temple and used the public address system, insisting that temple authorities had been "sick" and were therefore innocent.
The priest of the temple and his assistant have been taken in for questioning by police, and six people have already been arrested based on the testimony of the family. Another four men are absconding.
The arrests sparked further unrest. Protests against the police action soon turned violent with mobs setting fire to vehicles and vandalising shops nearby. Police had to resort to firing in the air to bring the situation under control. One person was injured.
The situation in the area was still tense on Tuesday and additional forces have been deployed from neighbouring areas. Curfew had not been imposed, but streets were deserted and shops remained shut.
"The situation is under control now" senior official Rajesh Kumar Yadav told the BBC. "We have made some arrests and are looking for those who are absconding."
The local political representative of the area Sapbir Gujjar said the attack seemed to be politically motivated with an eye on upcoming state assembly elections.
Mr Gujjar belongs to the regional Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) party led by Dalit leader Mayawati, which is fiercely opposed to the ruling BJP that swept the state in last year's parliamentary elections.
"This has deliberately done by outside forces to polarise the community. There is no other explanation for why this family, who had been living here for so many years would suddenly be targeted. As the 2017 state elections get closer, these types of incidents will only increase," he said.
Meanwhile Mr Akhlaq's family say they no longer want to live in Dadri.
"We are still in shock that people we lived alongside for so long would do this to us. I just want to take my sisters and mother and move away from here," Mr Mohammed's eldest son Sartaj who was in Chennai when the attack took place told the BBC.
"There is no place here for us now", his uncle agrees. "Already they have killed my brother. Who knows what will happen next?"
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A union has called off strikes on the Heathrow Express after a dispute over disciplinary action taken against two employees was resolved.
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The Rail Maritime and Transport union had walked out twice and had scheduled two more strikes for this weekend.
The industrial action had been in protest at the sacking of a driver and action against another worker.
The Heathrow Express rail link runs from the west London airport to Paddington station.
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When US President George HW Bush craved "a smoking gun" in 1992 to politically kneecap his White House challenger Bill Clinton, the British government delved into its files for damaging information. So, did the Bush camp solicit foreign interference to help him win an election - the very allegation that has seen President Trump impeached?
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By Jude SheerinBBC, Washington
"A guy like that doesn't deserve to be president," President Bush told his sister about Clinton.
He viewed the young Arkansas governor, who was the same age as Bush's eldest son, as a scoundrel and felt confident he could roll over him.
But the president sorely underestimated Clinton, a political thaumaturge whose ascent to the White House had been foreseen when he was aged just seven by his school teacher.
To Bush's mystification, his saxophone-tootling challenger's popularity in opinion polls was even defying the gravity of revelations about his draft-dodging past.
The Republican, a decorated World War 2 fighter pilot, dictated to his diary: "I'm tired of this guy lying and ducking on the draft and not coming clean."
Bush had another problem - his campaign was as stale as the recession-sapped US economy.
So he turned for inspiration across the Atlantic to his friend, UK Prime Minister John Major.
The British premier's come-from-behind general election win in April 1992 was being touted by American conservatives as a blueprint for the US president.
Bush had a very special relationship with Major, his brother-in-arms from the 1990-91 Gulf War, as has previously been revealed in transcripts of their private conversations obtained by the BBC.
He once spoke of sending him "a love letter" and assured the British PM "obviously we're rooting for you" to beat Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock.
Major, critics suspected, returned the favour.
Two UK Tory panjandrums - architects of the PM's surprise victory - flew to Washington eight weeks before the US election and advised the Bush team to focus attacks on Clinton's character.
The president's campaign hired an opposition research specialist to dig for dirt in Britain.
What happened next was either a bureaucratic mishap, or an egregious act of political meddling by the UK in the internal politics of a friendly nation.
At some point in early October 1992, the Home Office inspected its immigration nationality section to see whether Clinton had applied for British citizenship while at Oxford University from 1968-70 in order to escape the Vietnam draft.
Briefing reporters on background, the department said its "comprehensive" check was conducted out of "sheer helpfulness" to the media, even though it usually always rebuffed journalists with the stock answer that it did not discuss individual cases.
Nothing compromising on the Democrat was discovered, though it remains an open question how any such political bombshell, had it been excavated, would have been handled by Whitehall.
That same month, a frustrated Bush would dictate to his diary that "we cannot get this smoking gun on Clinton".
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All Major could offer him were well wishes.
The British premier called Bush on Air Force One during a last burst of campaigning two days ahead of November's election.
"I wanted to wish you a great hurrah and all of my best for the home stretch," Major said, according to a transcript of their conversation at the Bush presidential library in Texas.
But he had backed the wrong horse - Clinton trounced Bush.
Returning to the White House a day after he lost, the humiliated one-term president grew emotional, according to biographer Jon Meacham.
Bush dictated to his diary that he was thinking to himself: "How in God's name did this country elect a draft dodger?"
A month later, when the Home Office publicly acknowledged having carried out the file check, the victorious Clinton did not hide his annoyance.
"They should have more pressing business," he said of British officials when asked about the controversy during a morning jog in Little Rock, Arkansas.
That very same day, 6 December 1992, Major wrote a letter of apology to the US president-elect.
According to a copy of the correspondence, declassified only last year by the UK National Archives, the British premier said he was "disturbed by reports which have appeared about enquiries by our Home Office relating back to your time at Oxford".
"I am only sorry," Major added, "that it has been played up now in a mischievous way. I hope the mischief will be short-lived."
There is no indication that Clinton responded.
Later that month, Major flew to Washington on an official working visit. He had hoped to mend fences with the president-elect during the trip.
But Clinton declined to meet him - the Washington Post described it as a snub.
With the so-called special relationship on ice, Labour MPs jeered the prime minister in the House of Commons in February 1993 as he denied taking sides in a US election.
Margaret Beckett, the opposition's deputy leader, was among members of Parliament who shook her head sceptically at Major's explanation.
"No I didn't buy it," the MP for Derby South tells the BBC, remembering that day in the chamber 27 years ago.
"I thought at the very least there must have been a nod and wink [between the US and UK].
"And probably a bit more than a nod and a wink, 'if you can find something, George [HW Bush] might be rather grateful'.
"Because it [the Home Office records search] seemed to me like the kind of thing most civil servants would be fairly wary about doing."
Whosever idea it was, Beckett says, it was "quite a big mistake".
In a statement to the BBC, Major - now a knight of the realm - denied approving the Home Office file search.
His spokeswoman, Dame Arabella Warburton, says: "Sir John did, indeed, have a close working and personal relationship with President George HW Bush.
"However, Sir John neither sanctioned, nor had any knowledge of, Home Office checks being carried out on George Bush's Presidential rival Bill Clinton."
No-one in the Bush camp set any UK official to go rummaging for such skeletons in Clinton's closet, insists Charles Black, who was a senior adviser to the president's re-election bid.
"I'm pretty confident that nobody in the campaign asked for it," he tells the BBC.
"It didn't come up in the meetings I had with the [UK] Conservatives, so maybe somebody in the [US] government did."
The two top Tory apparatchiks who flew to Washington were Sir John Lacy and Mark Fullbrook. Lacy died in 2009 and Fullbrook declined to comment to the BBC.
James Pinkerton, who was deputy assistant to Bush and worked on the campaign, thinks his former boss' hands were clean.
"Bush was an ethical, honest guy," he tells the BBC, "and if you said to him, we're going to do a dirty trick to help you win, he would've said, no."
But despite his reputation for civility and decency, "the last gentleman" - as Bush's admirers call him - did not always measure up to the ideal of noblesse oblige.
In his political life, he was fully prepared to fight dirty to win, as evidenced by the infamously race-baiting attacks he launched in 1988 to tar his then-Democratic challenger, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, as soft on crime.
Bush effectively blamed his rival for the torture and rape of a white couple by a black felon, Willie Horton, who had failed to return to prison after being allowed out on a weekend-release programme.
And as Ronald Reagan's deputy, Bush blatantly lied when insisting he was "out of the loop" on the administration's secret effort to trade arms with Iran for hostages in violation of its own policy.
"I'm one of the few people who know the details," the vice-president had confided to his diary.
George Herbert Walker Bush - who died one year ago, aged 94 - was an intensely competitive man.
In 1980, as his dream of capturing the Republican presidential nomination began to slip away in the wake of defeat to Reagan in New Hampshire, Bush penned a revealing note to himself on a flight.
"I WILL NEVER GIVE UP. NEVER. NEVER," it said in bold scrawl. He gave up three months later.
Sidney Blumenthal, a historian and former Clinton White House aide, tells the BBC that "of course" the Home Office files search was done at the behest of the British government in cahoots with team Bush.
He notes that former Bush chief of staff James Baker - who declined to speak to the BBC for this article - stated in a 1992 memo, cited recently by the New York Times, that the commander-in-chief would not have enlisted the UK to aid his campaign.
"And yet somehow the Home Office went ahead," Blumenthal archly adds. "Hard to believe that they [the British government] would do this entirely unbidden."
The UK action might be dismissed as the suspected rogue meddling of an over-zealous ally, except that it was mirrored by a simultaneous muck-raking exercise within the Bush administration.
Just as the Republican president was making an issue of his rival's past opposition to the Vietnam War, a government warehouse in suburban Maryland was being scoured for damaging information on Clinton, and even his mother.
This scandal came to be known as Passportgate.
A stinging Department of State inspector general report would later implicate two Bush political appointees in having Clinton's documents unsealed. It was a fruitless bid to find out if the Democrat had ever considered renouncing his US citizenship during the Vietnam conflict.
While the watchdog did not establish the White House had directly instigated the invasion of privacy, it found Baker was aware of the "heinous activity", yet did nothing to stop it.
Baker was cleared three years later of any "criminal intent" in the matter by an independent counsel investigation set up under then-and-current US Attorney General William Barr.
Beyond the suspicions, no concrete proof has emerged of collusion between Bush and Major in the US election of '92.
But even if there was, isn't what President Trump allegedly did - brazenly soliciting the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, to harm the election prospects of his potential White House challenger, Joe Biden - worse?
Not under US campaign finance law, according to Ann Ravel, former commissioner of the Federal Election Commission.
It is illegal for anyone to seek or accept anything of value from a foreign national in an American election, she points out.
Ms Ravel, who led the federal regulator in 2015, tells the BBC: "It would be the equivalent of what we're seeing now [with Trump] because obviously it would be a request by the Bush White House for what is something of value to the campaign."
Though so much about the Trump presidency is said to be unprecedented, foreign interference in elections - with the occasional connivance of unscrupulous US office-seekers - is as old as the American republic itself.
As he pursued his own political ambitions, Founding Father Thomas Jefferson enabled outrageous French meddling in US internal affairs.
When President George Washington infuriated Paris by forging a peace treaty with Great Britain in 1794, Jefferson briefed against his commander-in-chief to the French ambassador, who was trying to wreck the accord.
As vice-president to John Adams in 1797, Jefferson was suspected of treason when he undercut his boss by sabotaging Franco-American peace talks, again via diplomatic back channels.
How prescient that a decade earlier Adams had written to a friend in France: "As often as Elections happen, the danger of foreign Influence recurs."
That letter was addressed to Jefferson.
Follow @judesheerin
More on US presidents
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Councillors are being advised to refuse plans for a wind farm in Wigtownshire because of its "significant adverse impact" on the landscape.
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Developer RES wants to construct 11 turbines at Glenchamber between New Luce, Kirkcowan and Glenluce.
The firm said the project could generate enough power to meet the demand of 14,000 homes.
However, planning officers have told the council to turn down the bid due to landscape issues.
There is also concern about the proximity to four designated prehistoric archaeological sites.
As part of the application, RES has proposed setting up an annual fund of £50,000 to invest in the communities near the development.
Planning councillors will discuss the plans later this week.
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Scotland's 32 local authorities will be holding elections on Thursday, 3 May.
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More than 1,200 council seats will be up for grabs for the first time since 2007. Local authorities will use the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system, where electors rank candidates in order of preference.
There will be no overnight counting. Votes will be counted electronically the day after polls close.
Here are some helpful key facts on your local councils.
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The man who first told Chadwick Boseman he would play the role of Black Panther - before Boseman even knew the film would be made - was an Australian bodyguard and comic collector, Charles Carter. It was a story Boseman told more than once, though Carter himself has remained silent until now.
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By Megha MohanGender and identity correspondent
It was September 2014 when Marvel studios called Chadwick Boseman. He was in Zurich promoting Get On Up, a biopic where he played soul legend James Brown. Just the day before Boseman had decided to upgrade his phone plan to include international calls, even though he wasn't expecting one.
But suddenly his agent told him Marvel was looking to speak to him - the production house responsible for producing $100m films based on Marvel Comic characters including Spiderman and Captain America.
Such was the secrecy surrounding the project that the Marvel executive at the end of the line didn't even say the name of the iconic character they wanted Chadwick Boseman to play.
"We want you to play a role and we think you know what the role is. Are you interested?"
Boseman's driver had pulled up outside an antique shop while he took the call. Looking out of the car at the display window of the shop, Boseman saw several panther statues in a line facing him.
The offer was for him to play Black Panther, prince of Wakanda, in Captain America: Civil War and then to star in the film Black Panther itself, this time as the king of the African kingdom.
Boseman recounted this story in 2016 to a gasping audience on Jimmy Kimmel Live, during a press tour ahead of the release of Captain America: Civil War. But there was also another story that the actor wanted to share.
Looking at the audience and then at the television camera, Chadwick Boseman smiled and said, "Charles Carter, you were right. Come out wherever you are!"
Charles Carter first met Chadwick Boseman on the lot of the Fox studio in Sydney, Australia, when the actor was filming Gods of Egypt, a fantasy about ancient Egyptian deities. Carter had been employed in security for over 20 years and was working as the bodyguard of one of the film's leads.
But he instantly hit it off with the actor playing Thoth, the God of Wisdom - it was early 2014 and Chadwick Boseman, then 37, was gaining momentum as someone who could carry big Hollywood roles, like that of African American baseball legend Jackie Robinson in the film 42.
Carter and Boseman bonded over their love of martial arts, kung fu and boxing. Between takes, the two would dissect and analyse the style and technique of boxer Floyd Mayweather. The make-up artists would then reprimand Carter for play-fighting with Boseman.
"You're getting him sweaty," they'd warn.
When the two talked, Boseman mainly spoke about his family and cousins in South Carolina. It was clear to Carter that Boseman's world, and those he trusted, were a tight circle.
"He wasn't 'Hollywood'," says Carter.
"He was friendly and calm, but he didn't have fake familiarity with people.
"He never said it openly, but I don't think he liked people he didn't know calling him 'brother', except for me.
"When he heard people on set that he didn't know so well call him 'brother', he turned around and gave a very subtle, very calm look that said, 'Slow down, we're not this kind of close.'
"He owned himself, he was friendly to everyone, all crew on set."
He also had a regal authority that made people listen to him, Carter says.
"I know the perfect role for you," Carter said to Boseman one day.
It was a story he'd known since the age of 10, when he picked up the first issue of a Black Panther comic.
As a child growing up in Sydney with a multicultural group of friends, the fact that this superhero was black didn't strike him as particularly surprising, but he was fascinated by the technologically advanced fictional African nation of Wakanda, the birthplace of King T'Challa, the Black Panther. He collected comics, sealing them in protective plastic.
Watching Boseman carry himself on set, Carter started wondering.
When he asked Boseman if he'd heard of the Black Panther, the actor replied that while he had heard of the character, he didn't know details or storylines. The conversation ended almost as soon as it started.
But this gave Carter an idea. He went home to fetch his first edition copy of the first Black Panther comic from 1977.
What happened next would be repeated by Chadwick Boseman in media interviews two years later.
In 2016, on the American chat show Live with Kelly and Michael, Boseman said "there were weird signs" that he was going to get the role.
"I got in a conversation with the security on set for this movie Gods of Egypt in Australia," he said. "And we didn't really talk that much about Black Panther but he put the first issue of Black Panther in my trailer, his original issue of Black Panther from when he was a kid, and wrote a note in it to say 'You're going to get this role.'"
"Oh my God," responded the host, Kelly Ripa.
"There was no sign that Marvel was even going to do a Black Panther movie or even bring the Black Panther into the Marvel universe then," Boseman continued, "but it became a thing that built in my head."
The actor would repeat the story to US presenter Jimmy Kimmel, this time turning to the camera and naming Charles Carter as the planter of the seed. Carter was in his car in Sydney when he heard the interview played back on an Australian radio station. He smiled, and recalled one of their last conversations on set.
"If they ever do a Black Panther movie, that comic book will be worth a lot," Boseman had told Carter.
"No, it's a good luck charm to stay with you forever," Carter replied. Then he added jokingly, "Just don't forget me when you're a superstar!"
After filming wrapped up in Australia, there was criticism of Boseman's character in Gods of Egypt, that it was a flattened stereotype of a magical black character.
In an interview with GQ magazine, Boseman said he agreed with the criticism, but added that he had to accept the role because "people don't make $140m movies starring black and brown people".
But the $200m Black Panther movie was already being discussed in Marvel offices. At the Black Panther launch press conference, Marvel producer Kevin Feige said that Chadwick Boseman was their one and only choice for the role.
After it was announced that Black Panther was to be filmed and Boseman publicly acknowledged him, Carter declined interviews.
"I'm obviously not responsible for Chad and Black Panther," he says. "Chad did it. It was all his merit, his skill, his beauty, his amazing talent. He did it all and I didn't want him to think I was trying to take credit just by giving him a gift."
But nine days before the world debut of Black Panther, Boseman messaged Carter.
"I know it's last minute. The tickets are hard to come by for this premiere, even for me. If you happen to be on this side of the pond on the 29th I have one for you."
As it turned out, Carter was that side of the pond, he was working in Las Vegas.
After the film screening at Dolby Theatre, Boseman invited Carter to the afterparty where Carter met Boseman's family and the cast of Black Panther.
"It was a gas," Carter says. "While there was almost everyone you could recognise from a magazine there, it was clear that Chad's attention was on his parents and family. He knew who mattered."
This was the last time Carter saw Boseman.
"At the premiere I thought he was moving a little slow and deliberate," says Carter. "I thought maybe he took a Valium as it was a big event. He was totally lucid talking to people coming up to congratulate him, but now maybe I think he may have been on meds for his cancer at the time.
"He was thinking a lot I thought."
He was smiling a lot too though, relishing the success of the film that would go on to make over $1bn in box offices worldwide, and putting a nail in the myth that black-led films were too niche to be blockbusters.
The film became a cultural touchpoint, and the first Marvel Comic Universe offering to win an Academy Award.
Boseman had been diagnosed with colon cancer two years before the film was released, but it was not something he shared, even with other members of the cast.
Carter had no idea himself, and he is reluctant to give details of the moment he heard the news or the last conversation the two of them had.
But he knows that what Chadwick Boseman did for representation is huge.
"My friend showed that it's possible to have diverse, strong and powerful leads that are box office wins," he says. "And when one person does that, it will give inspiration for many others to follow."
That said, he doesn't want to see anyone else in Boseman's role.
"No-one else can be the Black Panther now. Wakanda can live, but not King T'Challa. Writers should think of developing other leads, strong women, strong people of colour. Not replace Chadwick Boseman, because that is not possible."
You may also be interested in:
The release of Black Panther was a moment of special significance for black comic fans, who had only rarely seen a hero on the page who looked like them, and almost never on screen. In 2018, British graphic illustrator Jacob V Joyce explained the importance of the groundbreaking character.
Black Panther: 'Why black people like me are refusing to be sub-plots'
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After months of rumours and speculation, the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, has formally handed power to his son, Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, as part of an ordered transition that appears to have been many months in the making.
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Michael StephensRoyal United Services Institute, Qatar
In a speech replete with references to empowering the youth of the nation, and the need for change, the emir enacted a transition that will see him leave the stage he has dominated for nearly two decades alongside his Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, who is expected to be stepping down imminently.
In recent weeks, discreet communications were passed to various diplomats and leading businessmen to inform them that change was in the works, and although it was unclear exactly when the process would happen, the widely rumoured "before Ramadan" timeline proved to be true.
'Unfillable gap'
Now that the handover is officially complete, and once two days of meeting and greeting Qatar's well-to-do are over, the 33-year-old emir will need to turn his attention to a growing number of challenges.
And though it would not be fair to describe Sheikh Tamim as a novice in world affairs, he has yet to face complex issues without the support of his father, and the efforts of Khalid al-Atiyya, Qatar's energetic minister of state for foreign affairs. And of course the dominating presence of the PM and Foreign Minister Hamad bin Jassim.
It is widely believed that HBJ, as he is known, will step down as part of the cabinet reshuffle in which a number of new appointees are expected.
His departure will leave an unfillable gap. Hamad bin Jassim is one of the very best diplomats the region has to offer, hard-working, shrewd and full of charisma. He possesses all the tools needed to cajole and persuade.
His are big shoes to fill, and the skill of diplomacy is something that is as much innate to a person's character as it is to experience. Sheikh Tamim has certainly learnt the ropes quickly and may well grow to be a great emir, but with Hamad bin Jassim's departure, Qatar's clout on the foreign stage will undoubtedly suffer, and this at a time when the country is facing increasing criticism.
The region, once friendly and open to Qatar's influence, now views the emirate's intentions with suspicion, fear and even hatred. In the Gulf, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have grown distrustful of Qatar and its alliances and foreign policy initiatives. The UAE in particular has been angered by Qatar's growing relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood and has worked to try to blunt Qatari influence at every turn.
Some in Qatar have expressed hope that Sheikh Tamim will work to reset relations with neighbouring Gulf states, and bring Qatar closer into the fold of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) in the coming years.
In Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, the public mood has turned against Qatar, despite or perhaps because of the billions that Qatar has pumped into those North African countries. In responding to the Arab Spring, Qatar helped enable revolutions that saw three dictators fall, but its continued support for Islamists has angered many.
In Tahrir Square, Egyptians burnt Qatari flags and a leading comedian, Bassam Youssef, has taken several pokes at the Qataris for their involvement in Egyptian political and financial affairs.
Al-Jazeera, Qatar's once shining jewel, has also suffered, losing an estimated five million viewers. It is being criticised for appearing biased and lacking in editorial rigour, in effect becoming an extension of the Qatari government rather than an independent news organisation.
But it is in Syria that the Qataris face their greatest challenge. Where once they were confident that the regime of Bashar al-Assad would crumble in the face of international pressure and arms transfers to rebel forces, the war now looks to be moving in Mr Assad's favour.
Should his forces prevail, the consequences for Qatar, following two years of active support for the opposition and $3bn (£2bn) spent on weapons and humanitarian aid, are potentially devastating. Qatar's position and influence in the region would be irreparably damaged should the rebels it has backed so openly be defeated.
At the same time, Qatar's relationships with the West remain a mixture of engagement and confusion. Qatar needs Western military support, and intelligence co-operation, particularly with regard to the Syrian crisis. But distrust clouds Western interpretations of Qatar's intentions, and its relationships with hardline Islamists in Libya and Syria as well as the country's links with Hamas are troubling Washington and its allies.
Few doubt the ruling family will remain close to Western powers, particularly as it seeks to maintain deterrence vis-a-vis Iran, but Qatar will never be the fully compliant ally the West may wish it to be. And the West will never be entirely at ease with Qatar's Islamist links.
Balancing act
Though there is talk of Sheikh Tamim's conservatism and his fondness for the Muslim Brotherhood, there is no actual evidence for either charge other than the rumour and gossip so often associated with Gulf politics. And regardless of the prince's personal beliefs, it is likely that very little would change under his leadership.
That is because Qatar's main initiatives and policy tracks are more or less set in stone. The 2030 Vision, which outlines the development goals for the country, is already chaired by Sheikh Tamim (with significant input from his mother Sheikha Mozah and his father, the emir) and has a clear modernising social agenda.
Likewise, the football World Cup in 2022 will require social and legal reforms in the country, most notably around workers' rights and the construction of stadiums and new cities for its large expatriate population to live in. Qatar has invested billions of dollars already in realising these visions, and Sheikh Tamim could not turn his back on these gargantuan projects even if he wanted to.
Nevertheless Qataris are a traditional people, and the emir will have to balance his subjects' need for maintaining the traditions of his people with modernising the rapidly growing country.
It is interesting that Sheikh Hamad made explicit mention of his confidence in the younger generation's "loyalty to your Arab and Islamic heritage". It is a delicate balancing act and one Sheikh Tamim must manage with sensitivity if he is to succeed in ensuring the country develops successfully.
Push for reform
However, lost in a story which has consumed the elite in Doha is an issue that will not go away. It concerns the push for constitutional reform and the first ever elections to Qatar's advisory council. The council is an appointed body and its term ends on 30 June 2013, but just before the abdication announcement by the emir, the council's term was extended.
Much criticism has been directed at Qatar calling for change in regions of the Arab world, but not practising what it preaches at home. Granted Qataris - there are just 250,000 - live privileged lifestyles, and the call for democracy comes from a tiny number of activists, but regional states still chafe at this particular inconsistency.
Time will tell if Sheikh Tamim decides to push forward with pluralistic change, but it would greatly assist the young emir in maintaining Qatar's regional aspirations and it would enhance his reputation with Arab youth calling for reform if this process was started in earnest.
Certainly, declaring elections early on in his reign would cement his legacy as an emir committed to the long-term prosperity of his nation.
Sheikh Tamim will be a man who stays close to his father's legacy; after all, Sheikh Hamad would not have felt secure enough to hand over his crown to a man who was not of his ilk.
Inculcated from a young age with the values of hard work, and of keeping an open mind, Sheikh Tamim is unlikely to fall far from the tree. Nevertheless how the new emir deals with an unstable region and a country undergoing significant social change will be fascinating to watch, as will the extent of his commitment to democratic reform.
Michael Stephens is a research analyst for Rusi in Doha (@MStephensgulf)
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More than 70 personnel from RAF Waddington have paraded through Lincoln to exercise their freedom of the city, which was first granted in 1959.
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The march started at Lincoln Cathedral and was accompanied by the Band of the Royal Air Force College, RAF Cranwell.
It last took place in 2010 after last year's parade was cancelled due to operations in Afghanistan and Libya.
A commemoration service to the Battle of Britain was held at the cathedral.
Sq Ldr Liz Brassington, who lead the parade, said: "This is a very special day for RAF Waddington."
She said the march honours "the British and Allied forces that fought and died during the Battle of Britain".
"It also recognises the men and women who continue to serve in the armed forces today."
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Illegal off-road biking is damaging important wildlife habitats in the Lake District, say Cumbria Police.
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They have issued warnings to motorcyclists that their activity is not only illegal and dangerous but causing damage to agricultural land.
Local trail bike groups are backing the warning in order to continue organised events in the area.
A National Park spokesperson said it would "not be tolerated" and they would take action against offenders.
Related Internet Links
Cumbria Constabulary
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Comparisons between the legal troubles of the film director Roman Polanski and Dominique Strauss-Kahn are being made on both sides of the Atlantic. Could the case of Polanski - given sanctuary in France after fleeing sex charges in the US - have any impact on the fate of the IMF chief?
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Prosecutors were among the first to draw parallels between the two cases, arguing in court on Monday that if Dominique Strauss-Kahn were to leave the US, France would be under no obligation to send him back to face trial.
"He would be living openly and notoriously in France, just like Roman Polanski," said chief assistant district attorney Daniel Alonso.
Judge Melissa C Jackson quickly dismissed the idea.
"I will note that Roman Polanski has nothing to do with this," she said. "I am trying to be objective, and I am not going to judge this individual on the basis of what happened with Roman Polanski."
But many commentators, both in France and the US, continue to see the Strauss-Kahn case through the prism of the Polanski saga.
"Prosecutors say, plausibly, that Strauss-Kahn could easily hop on a plane to France and never be extradited and be a whole new… Polanski, over there," wrote Hamilton Nolan on the Gawker website.
Jim Dwyer in the New York Times noted French anger at the television footage of the IMF managing director handcuffed in court - and compared it to Polanski's appearances as a free man at the Cannes film festival.
"Year after year, the director Roman Polanski strolled the red carpet, smiling for the cameras, apparently unworried - and rightly so - that the French authorities would notice that he was a fugitive from justice in Los Angeles, where he had drugged, raped and sodomised a 13-year-old girl," he wrote.
He went on: "Mr Polanski… lowered the odds that Mr Strauss-Kahn... will get bail in New York any time soon."
French gloom
In the same newspaper, Stephen Clarke, author of a book, 1,000 Years of Annoying the French, speculated that if Mr Strauss-Kahn were convicted he would "someday return to France, publish his autobiography (which will, of course, be adapted for the big screen by Mr Polanski) and eventually be made a government minister. Minister of gender equality perhaps?"
French media tend to see the comparison between the two cases as an ominous sign for Mr Strauss-Kahn.
Columnist Hubert Coudurier in Le Telegramme.com asks whether the Americans will "make us pay for the Polanski affair", and a number of newspapers answer Yes.
"Justified or not, the comparison between the two cases could… have repercussions on the continuation of DSK's judicial troubles," wrote Pauline Tissot in L'Express.
Le Point quotes an unnamed French government source saying that the Polanski episode does not work in Mr Strauss-Kahn's favour.
"In the US they don't play around with sex cases, it's very aggressive," the source is quoted as saying.
"It's as though Dominique Strauss-Kahn were a war criminal, they won't let him go."
'Unconscious role'
Le Journal du Dimanche published an article on its website on Wednesday under the headline Polanski's Shadow, noting that a number of Polanski's French ardent defenders - including Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand and the writer Bernard Henri-Levy - had entered the fray in support of Mr Strauss-Kahn.
The article quotes two of Polanski's lawyers, both interviewed on French radio stations.
One, Georges Kiejman, told France Info that the Polanski case was playing an "unconscious role" in the Strauss-Kahn drama.
The other, Herve Temime, told the radio station Europe 1: "One can understand [the parallel] on a factual, intellectual level, but it is unfortunate and very regrettable."
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Apple has announced it is to open its first store in Edinburgh.
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The tech giant's shop is due to open at the east end of Princes Street on Saturday 18 October at 10:00. It will be Apple's 38th store in the UK.
The retail outlet will house the range of Apple products, along with daily workshops, technical advice and support.
The opening will come two days after the tech giant's latest product launch event, rumoured to be a new iPad Air.
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The UK currently spends billions of pounds a year on housing benefit. Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, explains the history of the payments and how government funding for house-building has gradually moved into subsidies for rents, especially to private landlords.
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What is housing benefit?
It's a means-tested benefit paid to people on low incomes. For tenants in council or housing association properties it will usually cover their whole rent if they have no other income. For many of those in the private sector it will not pay the whole rent even if they have no other income. Housing benefit is withdrawn as income rises, but an increasing number of people in work claim at least some housing benefit.
Why do we have it?
We don't have benefits explicitly to pay for any other item of spending - a clothes benefit, or a food benefit for example. But the level of rents is so variable around the country and between households that a special benefit to help pay rents has been in place since at least the 1930s. A form of housing benefit was part of Beveridge's prescription in his famous report. He referred to "the problem of rent".
How expensive is it?
Very. At over £25 billion it is one of the biggest and fastest-growing parts of the welfare bill. That is a huge sum of money: more than we spend on the police, roads and buying military equipment combined. And the amount we spend has been growing very fast over the last three decades as both rents and the number of renters have risen.
I thought the government had cut it
The coalition government did introduce a number of cuts to the generosity of the housing benefit system. The most high profile, but by no means the biggest was the so called "bedroom tax" (properly known as the social sector size criteria) which reduced the amount of benefit social tenants could claim if they lived in a property deemed too big for them given the size of their family. Similar criteria have operated in the private sector for a long time. There was less publicity about the biggest cuts, which were to benefits for tenants in the private sector, essentially limiting the amount of rent in respect of which housing benefit could be paid.
So that's reduced spending?
No. The cuts mean that spending is more than £2 billion less than it would otherwise have been but total spending actually rose over the period after 2010 when the cuts were introduced. That's because rents rose, the number of renters rose, and earnings fell.
Why has spending risen so much over the longer term?
Two big things have happened. First the government has almost stopped building new council houses and has reduced the subsidy on the rents that social tenants pay. Since a lot of council tenants are poor, this has just led to more being spent on housing benefit. Meanwhile in the private sector, rents have risen quickly and a lot more people are renting rather than becoming owner-occupiers. For example, the proportion of people in their twenties who are owner-occupiers has halved in the last 20 years.
Isn't the problem that we pay the rents for people to live in Chelsea? Isn't that just unfair on the rest of us who can't afford to live there?
That's a big dilemma. Yes, you can get housing benefit to help you live in very expensive areas, though the amount you can claim has been cut back recently. And there is still a lot of social housing in some of these very expensive areas. Critics say the problem is that if it was left entirely to the market we could end up with "ghettoization" and parts of the country, and especially parts of our cities, where only the rich or only the poor lived. Many argue that this would make for an unhealthy, socially destructive balance. And in any case there are lots of low-paid jobs that need to be done in expensive areas and if we need the workers perhaps we should be willing to help them live near their work.
So why have rents risen so much?
That's the $6 million question. Of course it's closely related to the big increases in house prices. That in turn has been driven in part by the lack of house building. In the 1950s and 1960s we were building 200,000 or even 300,000 new homes every year. We haven't managed that for 30 years or more now, and only built 125,000 last year. Most of the difference is explained by the collapse in building by the state. Very few new council houses have been built.
It's not just that though. We also have a tax system which encourages owner-occupiers to stay in their current properties even when they no longer need all the bedrooms. This exacerbates our tendency to see housing as an investment as well as a home. And it means that even if we do have enough bedrooms to go round they are effectively being hoarded by those lucky enough to be owner occupiers.
What should we do?
In the end the problem is with the whole of housing policy, not just with the housing benefit system. We urgently need to build more houses, public and private. But we also need a radical overhaul of the way we tax housing and approach housing policy more generally.
Paul Johnson is Director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies. Analysis: What's Housing Benefit for? is on Radio 4 at 20.30 BST on Monday 21 September and 21.30 BST on Sunday 27 September.
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The use of the 11-plus exams for selection in Guernsey's education system will end, the States has confirmed.
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The island's government agreed to end selection at 11 in March, but following the election in April the issue was brought back for another vote.
A move to overthrow that decision was defeated 21-19.
Reports on the future of the education estate are due before the States before the end of 2017.
This will include the potential £64m redevelopment of La Mare de Carteret schools.
More on the decision and other Channel Islands stories
What the States agreed in March
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